American Superheroes: Comics, Culture, Space, 5 cr

This course offers an introduction to comics studies through the superhero genre, regarded by many as the quintessential genre of American comics. In the first part of the course, we will examine the beginnings of the genre in figures like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. We will pay special attention to the economic and political contexts within which these figures emerged, notably the Great Depression and the onset of World War II (as well as, later, the Cold War). As many critics have argued, superheroes served important symbolic functions, negotiating social and cultural anxieties by providing compensatory fantasies and upholding various American myths and ideals. At the same time, superheroes were associated with otherness and migration from the beginning, their ‘Americanness’ being complicated by multiple names and secret identities (such as Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman).

Accordingly, the second part of the course turns to a group of artists who have claimed the superhero genre to tell alternative stories of America and create heroes located outside the American mainstream, from black superheroes (Lion Man in the 1947 All-Negro Comics; Marvel’s Black Panther) and Chinese-American superheroes (Gene Luen Yang’s The Shadow Man) to Indigenous superheroes such as Amka Aliyak alias Snowguard, who was co-created by Inuk artist Nyla Innuksuk and appears in Marvel’s Champions series. If superhero fiction is invested in American mythologies, these stories transform the aesthetic and narrative conventions of the genre to mobilise myths and beliefs from a range of cultural traditions, resulting in hybrid cultural spaces and narratives. Throughout the course, we will be attentive to the language of “the sequential art” (Eisner), especially the spatial dimensions of comics as discussed by Thierry Groensteen (The System of Comics) and others; as we will see, the space of the comic book page itself plays a central role in the creation of the complex cultural spaces within which superheroes move.