Dr. Vincent Haddad examines both an issue of the brilliant new The Other History of the DC Universe series and O’Neil and Cowyn’s classic 1980s run on The Question, considering both the limits and promise of revision.
Considering how 1990’s The Flash on CBS was a pivotal development to the television superhero genre through fashion.
Part Two of using DC’s Tyroc to consider the arc of the Black superhero.
Part one in an exploration of how the trajectory of Tyroc’s character provides a blueprint for thinking about the arc of other black superheroes.
Batman: White Knight demonstrates the limitation of the white imaginary regarding a post-police society by simply not being be able to envision one.
Laura Grafton and Andew Deman examine the intersection of Harley Quinn’s three central relationships, with the Joker, Poison Ivy, and her audience.
Thinking through how personal narratives also become mediated narratives that enable queer world-building through the example of The WB’s Birds of Prey.
How well do Marvel and DC’s 1985 comics meant to raise aid for famine relief in Africa tackle the tragic events they are addressing? Short answer? Not well.
Using Teen Titans #41 to think through token characters and slavery as a narrative trope.
A crucial interrogation of how Gal Gadot’s Israeli identity and IDF experience are used to sell her authenticity in the role of Wonder Woman.
The CW’s Black Lighting represents the split between Black respectability and radical politics in a singular figure.
In this guest post, Bruno Savill de Jong explores Simone and the Dodsons re-imagining of Wonder Woman’s origin and its connection to Amazonian notions of womanhood.
When Black Lightning rejects the Justice League he is rejecting white supremacy.
The clumsy way superhero comic books of the post-Civil Rights 1970s explicitly address race can provide a site for imagining productive racial consciousness for black characters, while also highlighting the limits of that kind of resistant reading.
The intimacy between Batman and the Joker calls for imagining a different “last Batman story.”
This Girl Power(!) needs to be a little more intersectional in its thinking.
Putting the “final” Superman and Batman stories in conversation.
Could Cyborg be the comic book superhero representation of white supremacy’s effect on the black body? To have a black person transformed from a metaphorical machine to an actual one?
An examination of a vision of a future from the past is not about its predictive powers, but what that vision tells us about the fears of that era.
Understanding of the anxiety of influence is required in order to really understand sidekick superhero comics.
Jefferson Pierce’s “blackness” is explored in relation to his superheroic identity, but doesn’t get anywhere.
