Bringing together superhero scholars and key industry figures The Superhero Symbol unmasks how superheroes have become so pervasive in media, culture, and politics. This timely collection explores how these powerful icons are among the entertainment industry's most valuable intellectual properties, yet can be appropriated for everything from activism to cosplay and real-life vigilantism.

This book explores the relationship between multiplicity and representation of non-European and European-American cultures, with a focus on comics and superheroes. The author employs a combination of research methodologies, including close reading of transmedia texts and interviews with transmedia storytellers and audiences, to better understand the way in which diverse cultures are employed as agents of multiplicity in transmedia narratives. The book addresses both commercial franchises such as superhero narratives, as well as smaller indie projects, in an attempt to elucidate the way in which key cultural symbols and concepts are utilized by writers, designers, and producers, and how these narrative choices affect audiences – both those who identify as members of the culture being represented and those who do not. Case studies include fan fiction based on Marvel’s Black Panther (2018), fan fiction and art created for the Moana (2016) and Mulan (2020) films, and creations by both U.S.-based and international indie comics artists and writers. This book will appeal to scholars and students of new media, narrative theory, cultural studies, sociocultural anthropology, folkloristics, English/literary studies, and popular culture, transmedia storytelling researchers, and both creators and fans of superhero comics.

Finding the superhero genre in need of further investigation from philosophical standpoints that value excess as a creative drive, rather than denigrate it as a problem to be resolved, this book opens up discussions that highlight different approaches to ‘the creative excess of being’ as expressed through the genre. While superheroes are an everyday, culturally dominant phenomena, philosophical methods and investigations have a reputation for lofty superiority. Across 13 chapters, this book facilitates a collision between the superhero genre and the discipline of philosophy, resulting in a voyage of exploration where each illuminates the other. The contributions in this book range from new voices to recognized scholars, offering superhero studies a set of critical interventions that are unusual, conceptually diverse, theoretically grounded and varied in practice. These chapters consider ‘excessive’ traits of superheroes against schools of thought that have attempted to conceptualize and understand excess by analysing texts and figures across a variety of mediums, such as The Fantastic Four, Captain America, The Vision, Logan, Black Panther and Super Hero Girls. With its unique approach to the superhero genre, this book will be an invaluable read for students and scholars working on comic studies, transmedia studies, cultural studies, popular culture and superhero studies.

Contributions by Dorian L. Alexander, Janine Coleman, Gabriel Gianola, Mel Gibson, Michael Goodrum, Tim Hanley, Vanessa Hemovich, Christina Knopf, Christopher McGunnigle, Samira Nadkarni, Ryan North, Lisa Perdigao, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Philip Smith, and Maite Ucaregui The explosive popularity of San Diego’s Comic-Con, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Rogue One, and Netflix’s Jessica Jones and Luke Cage all signal the tidal change in superhero narratives and mainstreaming of what were once considered niche interests. Yet just as these areas have become more openly inclusive to an audience beyond heterosexual white men, there has also been an intense backlash, most famously in 2015’s Gamergate controversy, when the tension between feminist bloggers, misogynistic gamers, and internet journalists came to a head. The place for gender in superhero narratives now represents a sort of battleground, with important changes in the industry at stake. These seismic shifts—both in the creation of superhero media and in their critical and reader reception—need reassessment not only of the role of women in comics, but also of how American society conceives of masculinity. Gender and the Superhero Narrative launches ten essays that explore the point where social justice meets the Justice League. Ranging from comics such as Ms. Marvel, Batwoman: Elegy, and Bitch Planet to video games, Netflix, and cosplay, this volume builds a platform for important voices in comics research, engaging with controversy and community to provide deeper insight and thus inspire change.

Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives makes an important and timely contribution both to comics studies and urban studies, offering a decolonisation and reconfiguration of both of these already interdisciplinary fields. With chapter-length discussions of comics from cities such as Cairo, Cape Town, New Orleans, Delhi and Beirut, this book shows how artistic collectives and urban social movements working across the global South are producing some of the most exciting and formally innovative graphic narratives of the contemporary moment. Throughout, the author reads an expansive range of graphic narratives through the vocabulary of urban studies to argue that these formal innovations should be thought of as a kind of infrastructure. This ‘infrastructural form’ allows urban comics to reveal that the built environments of our cities are not static, banal, or depoliticised, but rather highly charged material spaces that allow some forms of social life to exist while also prohibiting others. Built from a formal infrastructure of grids, gutters and panels, and capable of volumetric, multi-scalar perspectives, this book shows how urban comics are able to represent, repair and even rebuild contemporary global cities toward more socially just and sustainable ends. Operating at the intersection of comics studies and urban studies, and offering large global surveys alongside close textual and visual analyses, this book explores and opens up the fascinating relationship between comics and graphic narratives, on the one hand, and cities and urban spaces, on the other.

This title explores the cultural politics of hetero-normative white masculine privilege in the US. Through close readings of texts ranging from the television drama '24' to the Marvel Comics 'The Call of Duty', Carroll argues that the true privilege of white masculinity is to be mobile and mutable.

The blockbuster superhero movie: popular entertainment or capitalist propaganda? This book investigates the 21st-century superhero's underlying political agenda.

Commentators and artists attempting to represent the events of September 11, 2001, struggle to create meaning in the face of such powerful experiences. This collection of essays offers critical insights into the discourses that shape the memory of 9/11 in the narrative genres of comics, literature, film, and theatre. It examines historical, political, cultural, and personal meanings of the disaster and its aftermath through critical discussions of Marvel and New Yorker comics, American and British novels, Hollywood films, and the plays of Anne Nelson.

How, as historians, should we 'read' a film? Histories on Screen answers this and other questions in a crucial volume for any history student keen to master source use. The book begins with a theoretical 'Thinking about Film' section that explores the ways in which films can be analyzed and interrogated as either primary sources, secondary sources or indeed as both. The much larger 'Using Film' segment of the book then offers engaging case studies which put this theory into practice. Topics including gender, class, race, war, propaganda, national identity and memory all receive good coverage in what is an eclectic multi-contributor volume. Documentaries, films and television from Britain and the United States are examined and there is a jargon-free emphasis on the skills and methods needed to analyze films in historical study featuring prominently throughout the text. Histories on Screen is a vital resource for all history students as it enables them to understand film as a source and empowers them with the analytical tools needed to use that knowledge in their own work.

Superhero films are one of the most enduring genres of cinema, and their popularity is only increasing in the 21st century. These ten critical essays explore the phenomenon through the lenses of numerous academic disciplines, and cover topics such as the role of globalization in the formation of superhero narratives, the shifting nature of masculinity and femininity in the superhero world and the state of the genre today. Of particular interest is the way these narratives, however fantastic, abstract, futuristic or simplistic, resonate with specific events in the world and function as starting points for discussion of contemporary sociopolitical conflicts.