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Alaniz, José. Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2014. 
Added by: joachim (12/10/14, 12:58 AM)   Last edited by: joachim (5/5/16, 10:40 PM)
Resource type: Book
Language: en: English
ID no. (ISBN etc.): 9781628461176
BibTeX citation key: Alaniz2014
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Categories: General
Keywords: Death, Disability, Superhero, USA
Creators: Alaniz
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi (Jackson)
Views: 67/1807
Attachments   URLs   http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qhmfj
Abstract
The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities—disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies—José Alaniz seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol.
Alaniz traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series—some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar United States as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body’s “imperfection” comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series as The Human Fly, Strikeforce: Morituri, and the landmark graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel, all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments (xi)

1. Introduction: Unmasked at Last! Death, Disability, and the Super-Body (3)
2. Supercrip. Disability, Visuality, and the Silver Age Superhero (26)
3. What Can We Ever Have to Fear from a Blind Man?!! Disability, Daredevil, and Passing (69)
4. Borderline Cases. Gender, Race, and the “Disabled” Superhero (87)
5. Dismodernism and "The World's Strangest Heroes" (116)
6. How Not to Be a Superhero. Narrative Prosthetics and The Human Fly (138)
7. The Dismal Trade. Death, the Market, and Silver Age Superheroes (158)
8. Facing Death in Strikeforce: Morituri (242)
9. Death, Bereavement, and “Funeral for a Friend” (266)
10. Conclusion: Vital Lies, Vital Truths (282)

Notes (299)
Bibliography (336)
Index (352)


Added by: joachim  Last edited by: joachim
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