Document Type
Article
Abstract
[Introduction]
Superhero comics have changed. They have passed through a Golden Age and Silver Age, they have been transformed, cancelled, revived, killed, deconstructed, reconstructed, revisited, etc. My aim is to account for part of these changes and show how superhero comics have been innovated. In order to track these changes I chose to compare different versions of a few DC Comics series, such as Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Shade, that had been cancelled and then revived and are known to have introduced relevant changes between the earliest and the subsequent versions.
Before tackling the series mentioned, I will also analyze the Green Lantern series, known as one of the first series where, at the beginning of the '70s, radical changes were introduced. The Green Lantern is a classic superhero, much more prototypical than, let's say, Robotman (Doom Patrol), Shade or Swamp Thing. These latter are, indeed, more marginal characters in the DC universe and, when they were created, they were, to some extent, already innovative. For this reason, the analysis of the first issues of the Green Lantern series accounts for the standard features of the DC Silver Age superhero comics. Changes, variations and innovations will be tracked in relation to these features.
I will carry out a semiotic analysis of a corpus [1] of comics chosen within the mentioned series in order to track changes at the narrative and the discursive level [2], by comparing different versions of the same series.
Repository Citation
Mattozzi, Alvise. "Innovating Superheroes." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 3, no. 2, 2003, pp. 1–45. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol3/iss2/4
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