The Triadic Self: Breaking the Binary in Superhero Character Construction :: James Francis, Jr.

During the life of a superhero or supervillian, the audience is provided background information to inform where he or she came from, how powers were obtained and why the character walks a certain path to supply justice or cause destruction. Depending on the medium (television, film, or literature), we may be afforded flashbacks, dream sequences, in-depth exposition, prequels, and so forth. The establishing of background to stabilize a character results in a perceived binary construction - the good/bad person gone into disguise to heighten or mask his or her nature. Although the creation of a binary existence helps the audience to easily understand or take sides in the battles of good and evil, it removes something vital from the characters created to lead those battles - self as "the other," a blend of past and present, the good and bad working in conjunction with each other.

The title character in Kill Bill: Volume 2 takes great pride explaining the way in which the Clark Kent/Superman dichotomy varies from Peter Parker/Spiderman or Bruce Wayne/Batman. He explains the way in which Superman was born as Superman, and that Clark Kent is his disguise. Unlike Spiderman or Batman, the alter ego exists for Superman the superhero and not Clark Kent the newspaper reporter. Although a good point to be made, the question of how much of Kent can be found within Superman and the reverse, is not examined. In most film adaptations from comic book literature, television series and comics themselves, the superhero almost always endures a period of uncertainty. During this time, he or she makes attempts to live without the super alter, or in the case of Superman, to live without the normal alter. The return to the alter, however, shows the manner in which one creation cannot exist without the other. Whether the character began as super or normal, the alter becomes a part of the original, thereby developing and sustaining existence of "the other."

In tracing this complication of self through literature, television and film, the purpose of this essay is to show the importance of recognizing "the other" in the superhero/supervillian universe. From literature, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, provides a clear base for understanding the way in which an original and alter persona become one. In this work, the hero (Jekyll) and villain (Hyde) fuse together and the battle between good and evil is a war within itself. Through the medium of television, Willow Rosenberg from Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer exemplifies "the other" from her gentle and meek beginnings to her furious development into The Big Bad to a reconciliation of the two personae. Her character displays a good person battling superhuman, evil forces, but a life-altering event jettisons her into the field of dark magic where the heroine becomes the evil force that must be destroyed. The removal of her dark side leaves Willow a blend of good and bad, attempting to balance the two as one force in nature cannot stand alone. Finally, Alex Proyas' Dark City delivers the character of John Murdoch, a man whose gradual memory recovery allows him to unlock the secrets of his past and present, living in a society being controlled by a group called The Strangers. John's recovery awakens the hero locked inside, allowing him to defeat the evil forces with powers he did not know he harbored. His state as an average man who learns to wield powers like The Strangers he conquers solidifies his existence as "the other." These three mediums and characters showcase "the other" in great detail through discussions of isolation, body control, power imbalance, redemption and so forth. From this essay, a working model will be created for identifying this creation of a triadic self.

Bio Note :: Graduate student at Texas A&M University at College Station , TX . Academic Advisor II, Langford Architecture Center A102A
Email :: jamesfrancisjr@yahoo.com

Superman Myth and Nostalgia :: Ian Gordon

What is it about Superman that compels our attention? In 1972 the eminent Italian semiotician, and popular novelist, Umberto Eco described Superman as a mythological virtuous archetype locked in a timeless state and thereby never fully consumed by his audience. That is, Superman offers infinite possibilities for storytelling focused on virtue, but Superman's virtue is limited and its dimensions set by the prevailing social order. Eco's Superman then acts as an instructive tool for what passes as virtue in society and Superman's popularity at any given time is probably in direct relationship to his creators' success in capturing a dominant mood. In effect Superman is a product by which we consume virtue. My paper will examine key moments in the construction of the Superman myth and relate these to the marketing of nostalgia.

It is perhaps self evident that a comic book character that has been in existence for some 60 years owes some of its popularity to nostalgia. Certainly Otto Friedrich in his 1988 Time magazine celebration of Superman's fifty years could find no better reason to explain the resurgence of the character's popularity in the late 1970s. But nostalgia never comes out of nowhere.

In the common sense usage of "nostalgia" many Americans, and indeed others, probably have some wistful memories of Superman be it as a comic book, radio show, comic strip, movie serial, television show, or movie superhero. Some might well have a sentimental yearning for the period in which they first encountered Superman, but few, I venture, would think of themselves as suffering from the disease of homesickness in their thoughts about the character. Labeling the nostalgia for Superman as ideological might suggest a too easy criticism along the lines of the old joke that, Superman standing for truth and justice, on the one hand, and the American way, on the other, was surely an oxymoron. Nonetheless the nostalgia associated with Superman operates at a number of levels that can be usefully explored to understand the operation of nostalgia as ideology.

Bio Note :: Ian Gordon is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. He is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Comic Art;  ImageText; H-AMSTDY; Australasian Journal of American Studies; American Studies – Asia; the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and an international contributing editor to the Journal of American History.  His Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 (1998), was reissued in paperback in 2002. He co-edited Comics & Ideology (2001). For a full cv see: http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/hisilg/cv.htm

Email :: hisilg@nus.edu.sg

America vs Japan: The influence of American comics on manga through the work of Katsura :: Ludovic Graillat

America is very much linked to Japan. Since the Second World War these two countries are at the same time a model, a foe, a friend to each other. When we talk about the manga we often compare them to the comics. As an introduction I will talk about the differences of these two forms of art (the stories; the heroes, the publishing, etc.). Although Japan has its own superheroes (such as Godzilla as the supervillain, Astroboy, Akira, etc.), we can't deny that America influenced the creation of Japanese superheroes. For example an early Japanese TV series adaptation of Spiderman was created in the 50's. But I will concentrate on the work of Masakazu Katsura, a famous mangaka (manga writer) mostly known for his series Video Girl Aï (1989). This Japanese author born in Japan in 1962 is a great fan of Batman (like Tezuka who was fascinated by Disney movies).

In 1992 he created Shadow Lady, a short story that will become a series 3 years later. Shadow Lady is a parody of Batman. It tells the story of a young girl who is not sure of herself. Aimi falls in love with a boy but she is not enough confident to chat him up. Her grand mother will then give her a magical make up which allow her to transform into Shadow Lady. Her clothes are very much like Batman's costume. Then, in 1994, Katsura wrote Zetman, a short story. Jin, a teenager, is developing a game with a superhero. The aim of the game is to define what the justice is. After a bug, Jin becomes his superhero: Zetman. He will have to face what Justice is, means, and takes to be given. Is he going to become a real superhero or a supervillain? Nothing is sure. Here again we can see Katsura's love for Batman but we also see links to Judge Dredd.

At last, we will talk about DNA² that was written in 1994 too. Karine is coming from the future to make sure Junta won't become the "ultimate man" (capable of picking up any girls... one look is enough for any girl to instantly fall deeply in love with him). Because of that super power Junta will make pregnant thousands of women, which will cause an extremely dangerous growth of the population. Karine who is in charge of the DNA regulation of people has to inject Junta some MDA to make sure he won't be able to transform into a superlover. Unfortunately, she won't inject him with the right pill and that will increase his transformation. On a second attempt she will even inject the MDA to the wrong person, Ryuji, who will become a supervillain. This character is somehow very similar to Jin (Zetman) and therefore the bad invisible man in Hollow man or the one in the comics The League of the Extraordinary Gentlemen of (the great) Alan Moore.

Katsura uses teenagers in his stories. The transformation into a superhero is in fact an allegory of becoming an adult. His stories are similar to the German form of literature called Bildungsroman. Through the work of Katsura I will try to define what is a superhero for Japanese culture, where it comes from, how Japanese superheroes are influenced by American superheroes and therefore I will try to explain the links between Japanese culture and American culture mainly due to the consequences of The Second World War.

Bio Note :: Ludovic Graillat is a final year PhD candidate at the University of Toulouse, France. His dissertation title is: "The hybrid form of images: emergence of a new cinema?" and his Masters thesis was on "The efficiency of  the character in Japanese animation". He is in charge of The National Center of Film Resources of Toulouse and specializes in New Technologies. He organized the international symposium "The hybrid form of images" held in Toulouse (France) in Feb. 2004. He has various publications on The Matrix, Miyazaki movies, etc. and he is responsible for Film programming at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse (Film Archive of Toulouse): the latest - in September 2004 - was on Superheroes " (over 30 films during the month!).

Email :: Ludovic Graillat Ludovic.Graillat@ac-toulouse.fr

Enlightenment in a Dark Age: The Yogi as Spiritual Hero :: Gary Hickey

A concept fundamental to Hindu cosmology that became popular in India around the turn of the first millennium CE was that of world ages. According to this belief, we are now living in a cycle of spiritual decline (kali-yuga) that began after the death of Lord Krishna in 3002 BCE. Because we are living in such a Dark Age, which is said to last for 4.32 million years, the type of spiritual leaders needed to maintain a high level of morality must exhibit both discriminative intelligence (buddhi) and moral stamina. Such enlightened beings embody an almost superhuman level of morality and as such are considered spiritual heroes.

A belief demonstrated by the lives of these spiritual 'heroes' is that the highest spiritual belief can be achieved in this bodily existence. Such a belief has informed the spiritual traditions of India wherein the human body is seen as the instrument for the realisation of the enlightened state. This belief was not always part of Indian religious systems because for centuries Indian saints and sages, emphasising the otherworldliness of ultimate reality, practised extreme austerities such as starvation and sexual continence. With the advent of a form of Yoga known as Tantrism this changed and bodily existence was seen as a manifestation of the delightful play (lila) of an all-pervading One Being. In other words the conditional world (samsara) was seen as the unconditional reality (nirvana). Such a down-to-earth philosophy had a formative influence on the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious traditions.

Spiritual life is a process of intensifying one's awareness, a process that involves an inner struggle that can weaken the body. Thus, in order to strengthen the body for such a spiritual struggle, Tantric yogis developed various practices that mastered the life force (prana) of the body. From this idea developed a sophisticated understanding of the body through 'body cultivation' known as kaya sadhana. Out of kaya sadhana developed the physical discipline of Hatha Yoga, whose practitioners are said to date back to the Hindu god Shiva. Out of Shiva's body was formed the spiritual hero Goraksha who is acknowledged as the founder of Hatha Yoga. Through his mastery of the higher stages of yoga he is said to have possessed the magic power or siddhi that enabled him to become atomic, levitate, transform his height, touch the moon, pass through solid objects, control matter, change the nature of material things and control the elements through the force of his will.

Goraksha's followers included many great spiritual heroes and several kings who maintained and evolved this tradition. This philosophy will be explored through the religious iconography of India wherein the lives and exploits of the great spiritual heroes were elaborated. Further, the moral significance of these beliefs will be made apparent through an analysis of meaning encompassed in these sacred images. Finally, the significance of such beliefs to our times and the necessity for modern spiritual heroes will be made apparent.

Bio Note :: Gary Hickey is a lecturer in art history with the School of Art History, Cinema, Classics & Archaeology. His area of specialization is Japanese art.
Email :: ghickey@unimelb.edu.au

Antiquities as Superheroes: (Re)Presenting the Utopian Past in the Athens Olympics :: Louise A. Hitchcock

The opening ceremonies of the XXVIII Olympiad in Athens cast Greek antiquities as central and extraordinary in a parade of pageantry unfolding as a futuristic vision of a timeless, idyllic, and legendary past constructed in the midst of the concrete jungle that forms the alter-ego of Athens' post-modern present.This paper analyzes and deconstructs this parade of iconic works of Greek (and by extension European) art as a totalizing, teleological, exclusionary, evolutionary, progressive, and fictive narrative. This narrative began with an evolution of stone sculpture with a (super) heroic male form bursting from the center of a prehistoric, abstract female effigy, and continued with an unbroken linear progression of artistic styles that was tenuously linked to past and future scientific breakthroughs from celestial mechanics to the recent mapping of the human genome. Within this evolutionary framework, the human assumes mythic and superhuman stature in form (heroic nude male) and idea (revelations of science). Thus, the transformation from ordinary into the extraordinary id(ea)[o]lizes Greek antiquities as symbolic capital to be esteemed, commodified, and consumed on the world stage.

Supernatural superheroes: war and love in the lives of two vampire slayers - Anita and Buffy :: Ingrid Hofmann-Howley

This paper explores the literary and visual construction of two vampire slayers: Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake and Joss Whedon's Buffy Sommers from their respective vampire slayer series. While these characters may appear superficially different, one refuses makeup and the other is an expert in image management, they both share a similar narrative trajectory. They are both dealing with deep metaphysical questions of who they are, why they are here and then uniquely in this genre whether they are monster or still human. Both series achieve this through two key narrative devices that of the fight and that of romance. From a psychoanalytic point of view, both Anita and Buffy engage in particular forms of repetition compulsion encoded within both the fights and the romances throughout the series representing the twin impulses of thanatos and eros respectively that become the focus for analysis for this paper.

Both series position Anita and Buffy, within the narrative, to struggle against accepting their status as different from other humans, despite their respective powers as a necromancer and vampire slayer. Both texts represent the slayer's powers as innate, destined, and so integrally part of their lives that they are unable to not utilise these powers without serious consequences. Such narrative constructions separate them from other human characters. However, the narrative provides a loophole. By fighting for humans against the other monsters, their pretence that as slayers they are not like the monsters they are fighting can be maintained. As both series continue, both slayers become increasingly marked with difference: sometimes by choice and sometimes not. Since they are both women, one could ask whether part of their resistance to such difference might also represent a resistance to while still seeking to use the powers of the monster within. Do these texts position the slayers to both recognise and reject the powers that come from being the monstrous feminine subject as theorised by Barbara Creed? Through inner supernatural powers, Anita and Buffy embody this monstrous feminine in the form of les femmes castatrices; that is a threat to masculinity representing the ability to castrate, with their phallic nature displaced onto their constant use of penetrating weapons, stakes, swords, and in the case of Anita guns as well.

While it could be argued that they threaten masculinity, it is actually within their romantic relationships with men that their own subjectivity is most threatened offering the greatest stimulation for their character development. Since neither slayer accepts her liminality in terms of the human/monster divide, they both engage in forms of repressed projective identification with their transgressive love objects. They both desire particular vampires while slaying all the rest. Their transgressive choices of love objects allow them to project their repressed monstrosity onto their love objects in order to both identify with and reject that monstrosity while simultaneously rejecting their own repressed monstrosity. Generally the slayers battles with a plethora of vampires, monsters, demons, werewolves, zombies and so on can be read as displaced metaphors of their internal struggle for identity and power. They project what they unconsciously perceive as their own monstrosity onto the monsters and then kill them that further represses the monstrosity provoking a return of yet more waves of monsters, metaphors of repression, to arise and be vanquished.

Freud theorised that the repressed returns through the mechanism of the repetition compulsion in order for the possibility of healing to take place through the development of greater psychic harmony. This is why these women's choices of love objects are so significant. They both choose lovers from among the population they are usually slaying; namely vampires and werewolves. In the case of their love objects, they do not want to kill them and through their relationships with them, they have the opportunity to deal with those elements of their repressed selves the lovers represent. To varying degrees, this is and is not accomplished. Here is the tension but also the possible salvation of the two vampire slayers. Both series provide different solutions, one conservative and one more radically transgressive from the point of view of the representation of female desire and subjectivity.

Bio Note ::
Email :: ingrid.hofmann@adelaide.edu.au

Gibson's The Passion: The Superheroic body of Jesus :: Peter Horsfield

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ has been largely dismissed by general press reviewers, but has been a major box-office and merchandising success, the subject of significant controversy, and promoted by major religious groups who would otherwise have little to do with each other. This paper examines the film from the perspective that Gibson, as a major commercial cultural producer and self-confessed traditional Catholic Christian is attempting to renew the cultural relevance of his Jesus by representing him as superhero. In the absence of substantial narrative background and character development in the film, this is achieved primarily by the visual repersentation of extreme pain and suffering inflicted on and endured by the body of the superhero.

The merging of Gibson's two worlds within this genre is pursued artistically through a multi-layered intertextuality: visual evocation of gothic religious art and the suffering bodies of other filmic heroes (including his own film roles such as Mad Max, Pay Back and Braveheart - Jesus as Gibson); theological allusions and narrative construction on the pattern of stations of the cross; the use of melodrama; pushing the boundaries of visual depiction of screen violence in realism and relentlessness in order to create a supernatural character in this particular superhero.

Bio Note :: Program Director- Bachelor of Communication, School of Applied Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne
Email :: peter.horsfield@rmit.edu.au

"My Name is Neo": Reimagining the Noir Hero as Computer-Age Superman :: Marie C. Hyland

The Matrix movies center on a dynamic of personal identity which is framed by, and overlaps with, an American vision of national identity. Playing off late 20th/early 21st century anxieties about privacy and selfhood in the wake of advances in computer technology, the films enter into the recognizable Hollywood dialectic of paranoia and reassurance, retooling the Romantic self/subject for the postmodern age.

The first movie of the trilogy makes this personal/national reification project particularly transparent its use of typically American ( Hollywood ) genre markers. Through visual references to the western, noir, and blockbuster "action" movie genres, The Matrix locates itself in an American film tradition which spans far beyond the movie's most obvious antecedents in sci-fi. The Matrix's gestures toward the film noir tradition provide a particularly important window into the movies' larger universe: the savior/protagonist character Neo is an updated variant of the tough, terse noir hero, described by Julian Murphet as the "new white man" (24). Murphet and Eric Lott trace the noir's "new white man" to mid-20th century fears about shifting boundaries of class, race and gender. Similarly, The Matrix's "Neo-white man" reinstates/recreates white patriarchy in the face of collapsing boundaries within the postmodern age. My paper will explore The Matrix's construction of race through the character of Neo, the movies' Euro-American superhero protagonist. Reading this character in the context of noir constructions of whiteness/masculinity, I will explore The Matrix's use of the superhero as a propaganda tool to reinvigorate and reify historic relations of power in American society.

Bio Note :: Department of English, University of Alabama Tuscaloosa , AL 35487
Email :: hylan002@bama.ua.edu

Animals as Superheroes in 19th century art :: Alison Inglis

This paper will examine the rise of "the animal" as a major sub-genre in painting and sculpture during the nineteenth century.  Specific artists (such as Landseer, Barye and Swan) and artistic groups (e.g. the French animalier sculptors) who specialised in the depiction of heroic animal subject matter will be examined; as will new developments in the way animals were depicted (e.g. anthropomorphism, etc).  The extent to which this nineteenth artistic sub-genre influenced later developments in cinema and television (such as animals 'stars' like Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Mr Ed, Kimba the White Lion, etc.) will also be explored.

Bio Note :: Alison Inglis is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Studies, University of Melbourne

Email :: asi@unimelb.edu.au

Father for Hire, Son for Hire :: Darshana Jayemanne

Tales of superheroes are often concerned with the more-than-human in a difficult relation to the merely human. Thus the idea of the 'secret identity' so familiar to comics readers, through which the character is relieved of both its superiority and its heroism and is able to be all too human. For some characters, however, the mediation between their humanity and their superiority ­ and between the private and public spheres ­ is more complex than what may be figured from Clark Kent 's civilian attire, Bruce Wayne's corporate portfolios or Peter Parker's photographs.

Although it may seem inappropriate to class as superheroic Ogami Itto and his son Daigoro, the protagonists of Goseki Kojima and Kazuo Koike's Lone Wolf and Cub, one need only attend to the testimony of their contemporaries to find ample support for the assertion. They are called "Demon God of Death", "Monsters" and of course, "Lone Wolf and Cub". Of the six lives of the Buddhist way, Ogami has chosen the Path of Slaughter and in so doing relinquished the higher Path of Humanity, placing him on the degraded but potent level of being haunted by the 'hungry ghosts' of folklore. Most telling of all is Ogami's former position as kogi kaishakunin or executioner for the shogun himself, charged with the ritual beheading of troublesome lords or daimyo. In effect, it is as if the shogun's sovereign or executive power, once connected by the metonymic effect of the Tokugawa clan's Hollyhock crest to Itto's person, has split off from the state and become an autonomous force bent on devouring the world it once served as guarantor in extremis. In an era that Koike and Kojima are at pains to present as aesthetic in the extreme (albeit one in transition away from such a state), it is in this light that Lone Wolf and his Cub can be seen as truly superhuman.

What perhaps distinguishes them from the superheroes of American popular comics is the element of the quest. Where the costumed crusader can mediate interiority and exteriority, humanity and superiority, or the private and public spheres through their synchronic identities, a character on a quest defers their superiority until the quest has been fulfilled or makes of the quest the very and condition process of achieving an exalted state (or simple absolution). In so doing, however, the questing character often brings out to the exterior the interiorities of the people and situations they encounter on their way. Rather than interiorising the atomizing spectacular in Debord's sense as do modern superheroes, Ogami Itto represents the last figure of his age in which the concept of superhumanity can still open onto a total social process: shido. This paper will examine the concepts of interiority and exteriority and the difficult relationship they maintain with the superhuman, particularly in reference to Koike and Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub.

Bio Note :: Darshana is pursuing his PhD in English Literature at the University of Melbourne on the subject of wasted time and virtuality. He entered academic life after becoming frustrated working in a call centre where callers could never believe his name belonged to a) a guy and b) an Australian. This led him to his current work on the non-neutrality of the (technical) medium as message, in engagement with such thinkers as Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin
Email :: escapismvelocity@gmail.com

'Just Men In Tights':  Genre , Popular Memory, And Silver Age Comics :: Henry Jenkins

For decades, intellectual comics fans have resisted the idea that comics should be understood primarily or exclusively in terms of the superhero genre. What if we stopped worrying and learned to love the dominance of superheros over the American comics tradition? What would we learn?

The American comic book represents a rich case study for thinking about genre evolution and hybridity, since once all works operate in the same genre, the role of genre in managing difference starts to break down. As with other media, the play between standardization and diversification (what David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson calls "the bounds of difference") within an industrial mode of production shapes how genre operates in comics, yet the results are very different than what has been observed by genre theorists and historians focused on film or television.

Despite the repetition built into such a seemingly closed system, the superhero genre has continued to reinvent itself, expanding to absorb elements from many other genres, so that Mary Jane is a romance comic involving superheros, Gotham Central a police procedural in a city where the Joker and Batman clash, The Pulse a story about newspaper reporters trying to dig up dirt on the Marvel superheros, and 1602 is a strange fusion of historical fiction and caped crusaders.  Some longstanding series, such as Elseworlds, existed to allow mainstream comics writers to enlarge the generic vocabulary of their medium by situating familiar superheroes in different historical or genre contexts: Superman's Metropolis, for example, is set in the world of Fritz Lang's German Expressionist masterpiece. More recently, mainstream comics have sought to absorb some of the energies of alternative comics artists and writers by allowing them to play in the DC and Marvel sandboxes, creating works which even more radically transform the ways we look at Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and the like. And at the same time, pressures towards globalization have resulted in what Marvel calls "transcreation" -- the development of a Japanese style version of The Hulk or an Indian-inflected version of Spiderman, remaking them to fit within very different national and genre traditions.

Following an overview of what genre theory can tell us about the continuous diversification of Superhero comics, I will then turn my attention to the Silver Age and its lasting influence on contemporary comics production. In the history of the superhero genre, the so-called Silver Age (from the late 1950s to sometime in the 1970s, by most accounts) represents a key turning point. On the one hand, this period of time felt the aftermath of the 1950s moral panic about crime and horror comics and the imposition of the Comics Code which restricted the ability of this medium to explore mature themes or address adult consumers. The readership for comics was dwindling, the genre categories narrowing, and distribution pipeline tightening. Many  producers went out of business as consolidation took place within the comics industry. This was the moment that the superhero came to totally dominate production schedules. On the other hand, the Silver Age was a period of time of heightened creativity within the superhero genre, as Golden age protagonists at DC were re-invented to reflect new tastes and sensibility and the stable of Marvel heroes emerged. The period initiates a shift towards more character-centered and more serialized approaches to storytelling as the age of the average reader matured. Perhaps most importantly, the Silver Age was when many of the people currently running the comics industry  first started reading comics and thus it loams large in the popular memory of the current comics industry.

This paper will explore a range of different strategies by which comic book artists and writers have sought to tap popular memories of the Silver Age as a means of revitalizing the contemporary superhero comic. Mark Waid's JLA: Year One seeks to reclaim the sense of wonder and the feelings of comradery longtime fans experienced when they first encountered the Silver Age versions of The Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, not to mention, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Joe Sturm's Unstable Molecules recontextualizes the origin story of the Fantastic Four, suggesting how the archtypes emerge from contemporary social and political realities, including the emergence of feminism, the Beat movement, and the early days of NASA. Darwyn Cooke's DC: The New Frontier depicts some of the defining events of the DC continuity during the early Silver Age in a style which evokes the popular modernism of graphic design during the late 1950s and early 1960s but looks nothing like actual comic book style of the period. By contrast, Alan Moore's 1963 tries for a perfect pastiche of the look and contents of early 1960s comic books in general and the work of Jack Kirby in particular. Through a focus on these, and other recent revisionist comics, I hope to show the ways that the superhero genre continually re-invents itself, returning to its past for inspiration but retooling well-established characters, events, themes, and stylistic elements to create novelty and difference.

Bio Note :: Henry Jenkins is one of the conference keynote speakers. He is Professor and Head of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published numerous books dealing with film, television and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, What Made Pistacchio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, and Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Dr. Who and Star Trek (co-authored with John Tulloch). He has also published numerous articles in journals and book anthologies that deal with a range of his research interests, including superheroes, television, computer games and fan culture. His website is available at: http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/

Email :: henry3@mit.edu

To ‘Infinity and Beyond’: Women Action Superheroes and the Transformation of Gender Identities :: Vicki Karaminas

The recent influx of women action heroes in popular culture suggests a shift in how gender roles are being reimagined and portrayed not only by the media, but by women themselves as market consumers and active participants and producers of cultural commodities. The popularity of such representations, embodied in the figure of the hyperfeminine action superhero, also suggests a changing perception in the way that women conceptualise and experience themselves as women and how society engages with these constructed representations.

After decades of traditional feminist critique, which opted for the moral high ground of egalitarian sisterhood and condemned representation of women in the media as sexual objectification and male-focused, third wave feminism has incorporated the archetype of the ambitious and dynamic superheroine as a site of personal experience and self-empowerment.

The realm of the superhero is occupied by women who possess skills and abilities that exceed the boundaries of everyday life while simultaneously representing (and protecting) the values of the society that produces them. Although the new breed of women superheroes, as exemplified by Lara Croft, Ripley, Elektra and Captain ’Frankie’ Cook may not possess fantastical powers, (whether magical or science based) they are acute strategists and skilled practitioners in combat, expertly wielding knives, ropes and explosives. In any case, they do the job and in most cases better than men. In the world of the action superheroes women are just as good or equal to men, in fact they’re better.

This new and subversive hyperfeminine superhero has replaced media images of weak and emotional women who sacrifice themselves for family and heterosexual love with a new stereotype that embodies both traditional masculine and feminine traits. This active, aggressive and self-sufficient woman knows what she wants and will destroy any opposition that she encounters. In this realm of mediated superheroes, women no longer just appear; they act, they kick arse. The gaze is no longer restricted to males but heterosexual, gay or queer women are enjoying what they see.

This paper will examine citations of gender organisation (such as masculine/feminine) embodied in the images of woman superheroes in the popular media. It will argue that they are not simply representations of identities in a gender framework, but a parody of the idea of the ‘natural’ or ‘original’, a hybrid form that deliberately blurs the binarism of gender relations as they are understood, even exploding them in favour of a polymorphous range of identities, (sexuality, class, race) where subjecthood is claimed and negotiated.

Her choice of ammunition may be an Uzi or a Sai, a pair of three-pronged daggers; she may even be a consummate practitioner of martial arts, a hired assassin or a bold space captain, hell bent on saving the universe from a depraved mercenary. The post modern woman superhero embodies a politics of parody that challenges and blurs the totalising and unifying categories of gender, class and race and opens up a new battlefield where power, truth and knowledge is staked out and claimed.

Bio Note :: Dr Vicki Karaminas teaches critical theory in Fashion and Design Studies in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is a cultural studies scholar with a background in visual culture and gender studies. She has been published in the area of identity and representations of the body in western discourse. Her current area of research is on women superheroes and popular culture.

Email :: Vicki.Karaminas@uts.edu.au

Spider-Man & Contemporary Adult Collector Culture :: Matt Knight

Over time, superheroes have evolved from being predominantly the domain of children to the domain of adult collectors and children at the same time, creating an unusual place in which for cultural producers to work. Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15, 1962 and has evolved over time, with a variety of comic series, television series and movies that are updated every few years for a new audience, representing contemporary morals and masculinity.

The continued popularity of certain superheroes challenges the ideas put forward by Wark, that popular or fashionable items are susceptible to 'semiotic redundancy'. It is possible that the reason for this, is due to the idea that what is fashionable is worn as a badge of identity, and that the consumption of fashionable culture can be viewed as being just as susceptible to 'semiotic redundancy' as clothing.

In constructionist terms the construction of identity is an ever evolving process and as such, Spider-Man and other superheroes have a particular resonance to individuals, particularly men, looking for guidance. Roger Horrocks feels masculinity is difficult to define, which it is, and fears there is a crisis in regards to the definition of masculinity. Yet cultural artifacts such as superheroes in comics, film and merchandising, do offer forms of masculine identity and to a degree it could be argued, a positive image the likes of which Linda Artel and Susan Wengraf would appreciate, in so much as they're doing what is predominantly 'good' deeds.

But as society's values change, so does their cultural productions meaning Spider-Man and other contemporary superheroes have been an integral part of children's culture for an extraordinarily long time by pop culture standards. Individuals who have grown up with these contemporary constructions of what is right and wrong and what it is to be masculine have been so deeply affected by their teachings, that they have carried them with them into adulthood, resulting in an adult collector market operating along side the traditional child's market.

This important change has been brought about by 'adult's continued interest with what is usually considered to be children's culture due to I will argue, the profound impact made upon them as children, with developing inquisitive minds by these cultures. Add to this, the notion that contemporary superheroes have evolved with society it is easy to understand how they sustain their immense popularity. Not only has this meant the introduction of a new market for traditionally children's playthings but a sort of cultural growth of the children's market as well. Changes in story telling and toy manufacture have occurred to create a product that will appeal to children and the burgeoning adult market at the same time, producing a far more advanced superhero culture than before.

4,000 Years before the Galactic Empire: Expanding the Star Wars universe in Knights of the Old Republic :: Scott Knight

This paper examines the various forms of retrospective continuity present in the video game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (LucasArts, 2003) and its elaboration of the Star Wars universe. SW: KOTOR is set approximately 4,000 years before the Battle of Yavin (SW Episode IV: A New Hope) making it one of the earliest narratives in the Star Wars timeline. The game is assessed with particular reference to the Original Trilogy and the Prequel Trilogy in terms of environmental design, characters, politics, and narrative.

Game stylistics, control, rules and gameplay, determined in part by the genre boundaries of the RPG, in addition to the narrative form of the main quest in which the gamer's avatar makes choices which set the character on the road to becoming a Dark Jedi demonstrate an exceptionally rich and complex extrapolation of the existing mythos.

Depending on the eventual date of release, SW: KOTR II The Sith Lords will also be analysed in terms of its stylistics and place within the early timeline of the Star Wars expanded universe.

Alien(ated) Subjectivity: Triangulations of Desire in Smallville :: Nisha Kunte

This paper is concerned with the WB's Smallville, now the most popular show to ever air on the network. The show is a retelling of the Superman mythos set during the adolescent years of Clark Kent in the small town of Smallville . Superman as conceived by Smallville is a young man torn by his relationships to those around him and his relationship to his own future. This is not the story of the self-assured superhero, a being confident in his abilities as superior and not displacing. What Smallville presents is the coming of age story of (perhaps) a hero, a bildungsroman fraught with the crosscuttings of desire of multiple subjects for multiple objects. It is with these crosscuttings as a method for the re-telling of a compelling story that this paper is primarily concerned. In examining who is desiring whom (and how), we can see how a particular and productive narrative of Superman is constructed which at once maintains a hegemonic relationship to the alien other and yet, necessarily includes seemingly sympathetic views of that other in the characters of Clark Kent, Lana Lang, and Lex Luthor. It is in the shifting and multiple triangulations of these three characters that we may find the way that the seemingly sympathetic can work to create spaces for both subversive counter-narrative (for example, a queer or raced reading of the text) and simultaneously reinforce maintenance of the supremacy of a master narrative.

In exploring these triangulations, this paper endeavors to read the story of Smallville as that of three alien(ated) bodies. Lana, Lex, and Clark are alien(ated) through machinations of plot as well as the ways in which their bodies are queered and raced. Lacan's phrase "desire is the desire of the other" is played out in both the possibilities of its grammar as each character tries to resolve desire through knowing or making closer the alien other while simultaneously enacting the alien(ated) body that is known. It is the simultaneous threat and pleasure of the possibility of knowing the alien(ated) other that leads to the compelling nature of this story of Americana at this moment. The pleasure of the story of the alien in Smallville is matched by the possible resolutions of the relationships between these desiring subject/objects.

But as we located these possibilities in the reality of television narrative, we find that these newly created alien(ated) subjects can never really "have" their objects. As alien(ated) subjects in a story with an ever deferred ending, Clark , Lex and Lana are perpetual melancholics; they can never relinquish their love of the other as they are trapped in an endless narrative that will not allow it. However, we can use the very structures and necessities of storytelling to depathologize and productively read Clark , Lex and Lana. In the viewer's simultaneous desire for and fear of subject/object resolution, we can find a Barthian "longing to inhabit" that animates and powers the circuitry of the alien(ated) triangulation of these three characters.

Smallville's Sexual Symbolism: From Queer Repression to Fans' Queered Expressions :: Anne Kustritz

In 1938, at the tail end of the Great Depression, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster weren't offering economic security, or a solution to the mounting tensions in Europe which would shortly produce the second World War.  What they could offer was a hero willing and able to fight for "truth, justice, and the American Way ," demonstrating by so doing that there was something left worth fighting for.  In the first issue of Action Comics, Siegel and Shuster introduced Superman, an alien with incredible powers orphaned on Earth and raised by human parents on a farm in Smallville , Kansas , as an avatar whose destiny was to protect the "common man." Often appearing at moments of cultural crisis, in his various incarnations Superman saves "average citizens" and in doing so helps to define who deserves to be saved, which acts are deviant enough to warrant punishment, and what exactly constitutes the "American Way."

The reintroduction and popular success of Superman mythology at various points in American history is not merely incidental.  When first introduced, Superman helped to reestablish trust in and attachment to traditional American culture, symbolized by the honest and hard working farmers who raised him and his imposition of their values onto the degenerate city where he worked as an adult.  When Superman was once again reintroduced in 2001, the world was a very different place.  Smallville, a television series devoted to Clark Kent's life as a teenager on the farm in Smallville, Kansas before he fully develops his powers and becomes Superman, premiered in early October 2001.  The writers developed the series as the country was in a state of uncertainty about who constituted "the enemy" once Russia no longer posed a direct threat, and faced an uncertain fiscal future after the dot com bust crushed investors' cyberdreams. 

Although a product of the era before the September 11th attacks, the symbolism and mythology of Smallville fit perfectly within the new discourses produced by politicians and the media in the months which would follow.  Mirroring anxieties about the security of our borders and the threat posed by external influences, the meteor rocks on Smallville, which traveled to Earth with Superman as a baby and litter his childhood town, exert a destructive alien influence on the population, making it impossible to know who to trust.   The FBI, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security have been using the sweeping latitude given them by the present administration to investigate the private lives of US citizens in an effort to redraw clear lines between patriots and evildoers; small deviances are enough to make one immediately suspect.  In the similarly confusing town of Smallville , the mutants' grotesque deviances make all partially deviant behavior questionable and reinforce the importance of traditional norms.

Within the structure of an average episode it is revealed that a member of the community, usually a teenager, is violating community norms and/or social hierarchy.  As the episode progresses, the violation magnifies until it manifests itself as an inhuman power, a hyper-magnification of a fairly banal and common adolescent condition.  This hyper-presence is determined to be dangerous to the community and Clark steps in to protect the non-mutated "normal" citizens, punish the mutant, and contain or eliminate the threat that he or she posed.  In each case the mutant in question deviates against both community norms and standards as well as against the law and their punishment, therefore, reflects a repudiation of both the legal and moral infraction.

On Smallville, characters Lana Lang and the her boyfriend Whitney were a very traditional ideal American couple, the Homecoming queen and the captain of the football team.  As the best, brightest, and prettiest youth that Smallville High School had to offer, their union, and the children they may have produced, represented a particular kind of future for America .  Their literal reproduction represents a cultural reproduction of the social hierarchy they dominate and the nuclear family structure they inhabit.  The political rhetoric common after the attacks often attempts to link terrorism to a desire for the complete destruction of the American way of life, the destruction of America itself and America 's future.  When Tina, a shape-shifting meteor influenced mutant, attempts to take Whitney's place, her lesbianism threatens to metaphorically pollute Lana Lang, thereby perverting the futurity that she and Whitney represented.  What is at stake in this social upheaval is the literal future of the nation and to protect it Clark has to neutralize Tina once and for all.  It can hardly be considered accidental that the program's only canonically lesbian character is then killed by impalement.

Given the program's hyper-heteronormativity, it is perhaps unsurprising that fans' devotion to a perceived homoerotic subtext between Lex Luthor and Clark Kent has not exactly been met with shouts of glee by the show's creators and producers.   On the air Smallville walks the fine line of all "buddy" dramas; the homosocial male bonding between the two principal characters can only be "safe" for a heterosexual audience by the repeated and dramatic exclusion and repression of homosexuality.  However, in an underground genre of fan writing called slash fan fiction, these fans' critique of Smallville's cultural conservatism flourish in original stories that build on the professionally published canon.  Originating in stories that paired Star Trek's Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock in a romantic and erotic sense, slash refers to stories written almost exclusively by heterosexual women which are circulated at-cost on the internet and in print form, and feature same-sex romances based on previously published film, television, and literary characters.  By self-consciously working against what they feel to be the ideological failings of the original, slash writers build a very different kind of national and sexual symbolism.  Recuperating Superman's ideological power to define what constitutes American citizenship, these stories redefine power, sexuality, gender, and romance to suggest that egalitarian pleasures, rather than traditional patriarchy, are worth saving and defending.

Xena's Double-Edged Sword: from Sapphic Love to the Judaeo-Christian Tradition :: Ivar Kvistad

This paper analyses the particular mythical traditions that inform Xena's characterisation in the cult TV series Xena: Warrior Princess. As an artefact of popular culture, Xena caters to a mass, globalised audience, incorporating various mythical, popular, religious and cinematic traditions that are not necessarily cohesive. Most notably, the series modifies the Classical figure of the Amazon by incorporating into its narrative particular traditions of Sapphic love, Asian martial arts cinema, and an uneasy subscription to both New Age and Christian metaphysics (the final series, in particular, emphasises the latter). The world of Xena, known by fans as the Xenaverse, then, is a multi-layered and often multicultural pastiche of competing discourses that reflect the complexity of the modern, globalised world. While its heroine's ostensibly classical Greek characterisation is 'impure' (and symptomatic of the perilous enterprise of representing the past in an authentic way), this is not an inadequacy of the Xenaverse. Rather, Xena's layering of different discourses alongside each other, and its mobilisation and parodying of particular ancient and modern mythical tropes, offers a commentary on the processes of narrative production, presenting an opportunity for theorising the problems of authentic representation in a postmodern world and the libidinal pleasures - and politics - of playfulness. Thus, Xena is an example of a text from popular culture that presents a double-coded politics: it ambivalently, and simultaneously, deploys subversive and conservative strategies for its narrative production.

The paper frames its discussion through an analysis of two striking ambivalences within the Xenaverse: its representations of Sapphic love and of Christianity. It positions Xena's understated Sapphic relationships (particularly with, but not restricted to, her sidekick, Gabrielle), alongside the final series underlying subscription to ideas of epochal, religious succession - that is, Judaeo-Christian religious supremacy at the end of the 'pagan' world. Although they may seem disconnected, both the Sapphic and Judaeo-Christian elements in Xena operate within the economy of the discourses of modernity. While the series representation of Xena's Sapphic love-life is complicit with modern discourses of sexual liberalism, its Judaeo-Christian elements gesture towards cultural evolutionist ideas that raise the spectre of western cultural chauvinism in the mass media, and hence the broader issue of popular culture as a medium of modern western imperialism. Xena, finally, advocates the supremacy of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in a way that may undermine its more radically liberal, multi-layered and multi-cultural aspects. Thus, like the sword of its heroine, the politics advocated by the series Xena: Warrior Princess are double-edged.

Surrounded by Danger: Adrian Monk, Supersleuth :: Eden Leone

Traditionally, the idea of a superhero conjures up images of a mild mannered person by day and a costume clad crime fighter by night that possesses inhuman strength, agility, and extrasensory perception.  Although Detective Robert Goren of the NBC television series Law and Order: Criminal Intent maintains the guy next door image, he embodies the ideals of a classic superhero.  His attention to detail, willingness to help those in distress, and his perseverance to ensure justice is done makes him a more identifiable crime fighter.  The proposed study will examine season one and other available episodes and will demonstrate Detective Goren's perceived extraordinary powers of observation and intellect and how such characteristics, although thought of as supernatural, are actually obtainable and thus make him a modern day superhero.

Computer Ethics through Superhero Comics :: John Lenarcic

Is the modern computer a tool for empowerment or a tyrant by default? In either scenario it functions as a "super" entity: As a heroic exoskeleton it can amplify and the extend humanity's capacity for altruistic action. As a villainous prosthetic it can efficiently wreak havoc devoid of conscience, mirroring the mechanical arrogance of flawed creators.

Computer Ethics deals with professional conventions of responsible behaviour for IT practitioners in their dealings with each other and the general public. Ethical IT professionals have a greater chance of producing computer systems that function for the greater good of society. The tales of superheroes and supervillains can function as modern parables to communicate more readily the complexities of Ethics to IT professionals in a clear and entertaining manner.

Superheroes, such as Wolverine, are seemingly invulnerable and, even if they are injured, are often capable of rapid self-repair. In a sense, they are more like intelligent machines than human beings. However, they are living machines that can withstand pain and be rebuilt, yet still retain a moral purpose. Relative to an external observer lacking such powers, how does a superhero's personal ethical framework alter in the face of almost a complete lack of fear? Sometimes, invincible heroes are used in narratives as a "deus ex machina" (or in the case of supervillains, a "diablo ex machina"!) Is the notion of "Information Technology" in society today almost regarded by the non-technical as being a similar kind of device that can as if by magic save our lives or rob us of our very livelihood? Lord Acton proclaimed, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Does the computer enable the hacker to have absolute power over the virtual and all that it entails? Is the hacker a superhero or a supervillain?

Computer Ethics is a mandatory course prerequisite for anyone wishing to become an accredited Computer Scientist or IT professional in either Australia or the U.S.A. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests that many students find traditional presentations of the subject boring and irrelevant to their chosen career paths. This would seem to be especially true if the students are compelled to undertake any kind of theoretical philosophy as part of their IT Ethics training.

In an attempt to avoid a future in which the technological elite will be morally ambivalent, a novel case study based instruction technique is proposed. Using the allegorical content exhibited in the contemporary mythology of comic book superheroes, guided discussion of the right and wrong of "probable" technologies encourage students to explore their own responsibilities to today's society as well as the moral implications of future scenarios.

Pertinent examples from comic book literature can be used to illustrate possible present-day moral dilemmas confronting practitioners of internet and multimedia technologies. Morality plays acted out how people should live in medieval times. Speculative fiction that features cultural icons such as superheroes and their counterparts has the potential to do the same for technologists of the 21st century and beyond.