Harley Quinn’s Sexuality: A Tale of Three Lusts
Laura Grafton and Andew Deman examine the intersection of Harley Quinn’s three central relationships, with the Joker, Poison Ivy, and her audience.
“But We’re Out of Time”: Queer(ed) Nostalgia and The WB’s Birds of Prey
Thinking through how personal narratives also become mediated narratives that enable queer world-building through the example of The WB’s Birds of Prey.
Epic Disasters: Revisiting Marvel & DC’s 1980s Famine Relief Comics
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.
Digging Up Ghosts: Teen Titans’ Mal Duncan & His Token Power
Using Teen Titans #41 to think through token characters and slavery as a narrative trope.
Colonial Hottie: Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman and Brand Israel
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.
“Am I Black Enough For You?” The Respectability of CW’s Black Lightning
The CW’s Black Lighting represents the split between Black respectability and radical politics in a singular figure.
“Be Glad of Your Many Sisters” – The Insular and the Exceptional in Wonder Woman: The Circle
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.
Striking Back: Black Lightning and Reading Race (part two)
When Black Lightning rejects the Justice League he is rejecting white supremacy.
Striking Back: Black Lightning and Reading Race (part one)
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 Queer Silence of The Killing Joke
The intimacy between Batman and the Joker calls for imagining a different “last Batman story.”
Bumbling: DC Super Hero Girls and the White Racial Imagination
This Girl Power(!) needs to be a little more intersectional in its thinking.
Batman vs. Superman: Whatever Happened to Growing Up?
Putting the “final” Superman and Batman stories in conversation.
Humanity Not Included: DC’s Cyborg and the Mechanization of the Black Body
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?
OMG! OMAC 4 PREZ: Future-Past-Prolepsis
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.
Titans Together! Superhero Sidekicks & The Anxiety of Influence
Understanding of the anxiety of influence is required in order to really understand sidekick superhero comics.
Black Lightning Always Strikes Twice! – Double-Consciousness as a Super-Power.
Jefferson Pierce’s “blackness” is explored in relation to his superheroic identity, but doesn’t get anywhere.
It’s a Wonder, Wonder Woman
More than 40 years later, Wonder Woman still has to deal with the same masculine hostility.
Dial H: I Would Prefer Not To. . .
This issue uses the title’s meta-position as simultaneously within and without the superhero comic genre to comment on depictions of race in comics.
