Description
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.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1.Introduction
Jamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds
2. Excessive Embodiment and Monstrous Containment in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four
Anna F. Peppard
3. Legion, Fugue and Ontological Excess
Jamie Brassett
4. Captain America, Ronald Reagan, and the Battle for the American Dream of Excess
John McGuire
5. Image Comics: A New Flight of Excess
Lillian Céspedes González
6. ‘You Too Shall Be New’: Synthezoid Phenomenology and Canonical Memory in The Vision
Tiffany Hong
7. Evolve or Die: Logan, Repetition, and the Excesses of Tradition
Geoff Klock and Mitch Montgomery
8. Difference, Repetition, and the Superhero Comic
Scott Jeffery
9. Heroic Skin: Superheroes, Excess and Black Skin as Costume
Lorraine Henry King
10. Too Many Wonder Womans: Constraining and/or in the DC Extended Universe
Joan Ormrod
11. Design Fictions from Beyond: A Pataphysics of Objectile Excess
Derek Hales
12. Superheroes at the Vanishing Point
Richard Reynolds
13. Afterword: Defeated Taxonomies
Jamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds
