To make their stories more accessible for new readers, superheroes have their origins and defining moments updated regularly. However, due to the eternally repeating nature of comics, any innovations or changes are soon reversed, and the narratives return to their original status quo. The much-hyped 1992 Death of Superman multi-crossover storyline is a prominent example, when after the eventual return of the Man of Steel even his hairstyle would soon revert to the original.

One of the writers who had a more lasting impact on the characters they tried to redefine is Frank Miller with his two runs on Daredevil. In his first run (#168-#191, 1981-1983) he transformed Bullseye and the Kingpin into major adversaries of Daredevil and introduced his love interest/ninja-assassin Elektra. In his second run Miller, with artist David Mazzucchelli, wrote his ultimate Daredevil storyline: Born Again (1986). In this 7-issue (#227-#233) series Miller had Daredevil meticulously destroyed by the Kingpin, so he had to be reborn to defeat his archenemy. All the characters mentioned above, and the story patterns established by Miller are still major elements of the Daredevil storyverse, even in the current series, restarting with #1 in 2023. This paper aims to analyze Miller’s lasting impact on Daredevil and comics.

In my presentation, I explore how "The Wicked + The Divine" by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie reimagines superhero narratives by queering archetypes and blending Western traditions with global mythological reinterpretations. Set in a world where reincarnated gods drawn from various myths and religions enjoy fame and power only to die within two years, this series uses superpowers as extensions of (queer) embodiment, rejecting the expectation of superheroes to conform to normative heroics. Thus, members of the Pantheon embody superhero archetypes in ways that disrupt traditional good-versus-evil binaries as their superpowers (and their use) are fluid, plural, morally ambiguous, and culturally transformative.

Drawing on queer theory and comics studies (most notably research on the intersections between mythology and superhero genre), I explore how the series queers the ethics of superpowers by linking it to broadly understood queerness and intersectional identity. To start with, Lucifer queers the archetype of a rebellious superhero by rejecting rebellion as duty, using flames as an act of personal and performative defiance. Moreover, Inanna subverts the super-heroic healer archetype by blending care and intimacy as well as defying expectations of altruistic sacrifice. Baal’s leadership reveals the compromises of systemic power, queering the archetype of a leader by exposing the burdens tied to fame and ethnic and racial identity. Finally, I bring together all the elements of the presentation and highlight how by engaging with diverse mythological traditions (including South Asian, Japanese, and Mesopotamian) and subverting the superhero archetypes, the series critiques the universality of Western ethics of heroism.

A comic book cover becomes a threshold across which multiple meanings and contrasting ideas manifest themselves. Divorced from the sequential order of the comic, the encounter with the cover more closely resembles the encounter with a painting than a comics page. Functioning as a singular work of art, a comic cover captures a snapshot, a fleeting moment, the pulse of the story, a dominant affect, a dynamism that one must brace for, or a bold style.

The comic book cover incorporates the reader in an active meaning-making process. The unnerving depictions of monstrous figures presented on Metal Hurlant absorb the beholder into the face of the monster. I argue that the gaze, as theorized by John Berger and Laura Mulvey collapses the tenuous divide between heroes and villains, self and other. The monstrous other performs a pivotal deconstructive function in its “subversive relationship to established epistemic binaries” (Sewel, Tom. Spirit in the Gutters, 2023. 158). The monstrous body, as a source of this epistemic instability, is not only the object of our gaze but also a gazing subject. Compelled by the doomed urge to classify or categorize the monster, the reader’s gaze becomes the first interpretive act of the comic reading experience. In their unstable significations, comic covers evade such easy interpretation.

Through the dual processes of projection and objectification, I argue that visual depictions of otherness lend themselves to a complication of the hero villain dichotomy, and the starting point for this complication is cover art. I analyze a selection of Metal Hurlant covers published between 1975 to 1980, as well as classic superhero covers as the earliest visual representations of heroism in Superman (the 1938 cover of Action Comics #1) and Batman (1939 cover of Detective Comics #27), interrogating whether heroism is signified in these graphic depictions or imposed retroactively. I analyze the necessity of sequentiality in Sergio Toppi’s comic Sharaz-De: Tales from the Arabian Nights. Gaze theory, as an active interpretive tool, deconstructs comic covers, explaining how such visual depictions of otherness demand theorization before text can unpack every possible interpretation.

I show how cover art raises interesting questions regarding otherness and its representations. Metal Hurlant covers encapsulate thematic concerns through amalgamation instead of simplification, rejecting neat archetypes in favor of strange bodies trembling with potentialities.

Over the last 70 years, the superhero has grown from one genre among many in mainstream US/UK comics into the most prominent genre of graphic narrative in both the US and UK. From the brightly-coloured moral certainties of the Golden and Silver Ages to the fraught and trammeled, ethically ambiguous figures of millennial comics, the figure of the superhero has often been used as a weathervane to understand the tensions and anxieties of its contemporary era.

This paper argues that this seeming flexibility of the superhero figure is misleading, and that in actuality, the figure of the superhero has always been, and is always already, an avatar of fascist politics of one kind or another. While such figures may be deployed to diverse political ends, in the forms of satire or parody, I argue that the idea (still held by many progressively-minded comics writers and scholars) that the superhero can be rehabilitated or recovered from its inherently fascist origins is an illusion.

I analyze some of the works of the British Invasion writers, including Moore, Morrison, and Ellis, to develop a critique of the fascism of the superhero through close attention to the precise configuration of the figure of the superhero in their works (Watchmen, The Invisibles, Planetary). I look at representations of the most prominent superheroes of bygone eras, and read their political valences through Fredric Wertham, Walter J. Ong, and Umberto Eco. I look at key moments in comics history, from Captain America punching Hitler, to Judge Dredd delivering summary justice to perpetrators, to think about how the figure of the hero (and especially the superhero) in comics conditions the reader to desire “the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them – by force” (Wertham 34).

I use the theory of Rey Chow to think about how the idealization of the individual is the central aesthetic principle of fascism, and turn that apparatus towards superheroes to show how even where the figure of the superhero is deployed as satire it cannot avoid running foul of the tendency to idealize, idolize and ideologize.