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.
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.
1.Introduction;
2. Excessive Embodiment and Monstrous Containment in
Stan Lee and Jack Kirbys The Fantastic Four;
3. Legion, Fugue and
Ontological Excess;
4. Captain America, Ronald Reagan, and the Battle for the
American Dream of Excess;
5. Image Comics: A New Flight of Excess;
6. You
Too Shall Be New: Synthezoid Phenomenology and Canonical Memory in The
Vision;
7. Evolve or Die: Logan, Repetition, and the Excesses of Tradition;
8. Difference, Repetition, and the Superhero Comic;
9. Heroic Skin:
Superheroes, Excess and Black Skin as Costume;
10. Too Many Wonder Womans:
Constraining and/or in the DC Extended Universe;
11. Design Fictions from
Beyond: A Pataphysics of Objectile Excess;
12. Superheroes at the Vanishing
Point;
13. Afterword: Defeated Taxonomies
Jamie Brassett is an independent philosopher, futures researcher and innovation consultant. He is Visiting Professor on the international MA Integrated Design at Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau, Germany. He worked at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, from 19952021. A Creative Philosophy of Anticipation (co-edited with John OReilly) was published by Routledge in 2021.
Richard Reynolds is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader, MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries and Joint Head of Academic Support at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has been lecturing and writing about comics, superheroes and other facets of popular culture since 1991. His best-known work is Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (1994).
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