Secret Origins of the American Superhero!: Comic Books as Performance
Danny Devlin
Abstract
Secret Origins of the American Superhero applies the vocabulary of performance studies to one of America’s great pop culture exports: superhero comic books. The paper intersects the run-up to World War II, when the American government had adopted a stance of non-interventionism, despite the atrocities being committed on the European war front by the Nazis, with the sudden explosion in popularity of superhero comic books. These pop culture icons were created by young Jewish artists, and were an important method for disseminating the creators’ frustrations, angers, and fears to scores of Americans – how comic book super heroes were fighting the good fight on the home front. I then consider the “moral outrage” stemming from post-World War II youngsters reading comic books – in particular the popular performances of comic book burnings at many American schools – as championed by Dr. Frederic Wertham, and how this moral outrage sounded the death knell for superhero comic books, until new anxieties began to creep up among members of the American public at the dawn of the era of the atom…necessitating a new generation of superheroes.
Secret Origins of the American Superhero applies the vocabulary of performance studies to one of America’s great pop culture exports: superhero comic books. The paper intersects the run-up to World War II, when the American government had adopted a stance of non-interventionism, despite the atrocities being committed on the European war front by the Nazis, with the sudden explosion in popularity of superhero comic books. These pop culture icons were created by young Jewish artists, and were an important method for disseminating the creators’ frustrations, angers, and fears to scores of Americans – how comic book super heroes were fighting the good fight on the home front. I then consider the “moral outrage” stemming from post-World War II youngsters reading comic books – in particular the popular performances of comic book burnings at many American schools – as championed by Dr. Frederic Wertham, and how this moral outrage sounded the death knell for superhero comic books, until new anxieties began to creep up among members of the American public at the dawn of the era of the atom…necessitating a new generation of superheroes.
| etudessept2015devlin.pdf |
