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Crawford, Joseph. Killer Bodies: The Rise and Fall of “Bad Girl” Comics. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2026. Added by: joachim (21/06/2025, 16:21) Last edited by: joachim (17/01/2026, 23:31) |
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| Resource type: Book Language: en: English DOI: 10.36019/9781978841994 ID no. (ISBN etc.): 9781978841970 BibTeX citation key: Crawford2026 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Gender, Superhero, USA Creators: Crawford Publisher: Rutgers Univ. Press (New Brunswick) |
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Table of Contents.pdf  [0/6]
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| Abstract |
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Killer Bodies offers a history of the single most critically-derided subgenre in American superhero comics: the ‘bad girl’ comics of the 1990s, which chronicled the blood-soaked adventures of barely-dressed and improbably-proportioned action heroines for an audience of adolescent boys. While not in any way attempting to rehabilitate the genre, which for the most part amply deserved its reputation as sexist and borderline pornographic, this book situates it within its original cultural context, as the result of a matrix of influences that included third-wave feminism, neopaganism, ‘girl power’, the rise of the internet, the growing popularity of manga, supermodel beauty ideals, and the mainstreaming of pornography. It explores why and how the figure of the anti-heroic, physically aggressive, sexually objectified heroine arose within American comics culture, and the commercial and ideological factors that led to the genre’s rapid rise and equally rapid decline amidst the crisis-racked comics industry of the mid-1990s.
Added by: joachim Last edited by: joachim |