Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

By José Alaniz

The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities--disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies--José Alaniz seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol.

Alaniz traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series--some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar United States as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body's "imperfection" comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series as The Human Fly, Strikeforce: Morituri, and the landmark graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel, all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Oct 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781626743274

José Alaniz

José Alaniz, Seattle, Washington, is associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington-Seattle. He is the author of Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (published by University Press of Mississippi).

Reviews for Death, Disability, and the Superhero

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jose Alaniz has written an extremely ambitious work in Death, Disability, and the Superhero. The first part of the book focuses primarily on disability and the superhero while, from chapter seven on death and the superhero takes center stage. As with any work that encompasses such a broad range of thought, there is a need for some basic assumptions to be made explicit from the beginning so that readers will understand how the writer will use and interpret some concepts. Unfortunately it is precisely in this introductory area where it seemed the scope of the study prevented Alaniz from clearly linking his premises and thus set up the rest of the book. This is unfortunate because the following chapters are very well researched and presented.While I was initially more interested in the disability studies sections rather than those addressing death and mortality, I felt the latter chapters were better organized and presented. Often in the early chapters there were analyses which were quite effective as far as they went but tended to overlook intersections where additional factors also come into play. For instance the contrast between disabled and super-abled bodies could benefit from also addressing racial and gender issues. Let me say, however, that I don't consider this a particularly significant negative since the book touches on so many aspects of death and disability studies. One of the most valuable aspects of this work will be the future scholarship it will help to launch, furthering analyses begun here as well as filling gaps between what is and is not addressed here.I anticipate revisiting most if not all of this book again in the future and expect to find it referenced widely in future research. This may not appeal to every casual comic fan, which is understandable, but I think many will also find new avenues into their favorite comics through the act of wrestling with some of this material. Scholars in the death and disability fields as well as popular culture and comics/graphic novels studies will find many useful points to ponder and address in future work.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[jpporter · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an entertaining book, although is is more on the order of pop psychology than substantive psychological insight. The thesis presented by Mr. Alaniz is that developments in the nature of the superheros that are in vogue at any given point in history are a reflection on the nature of ourselves, or at least a reflection on our perceptions of ourselves and the world we live in.The thesis is interesting, and the author gives a fairly credible account of the plausibility of his take on graphic literature, but on the whole, the connection seems more contrived than substantive. If one wants to make the case that literature reflects the mindset of its creator, and that the creator of literature is simply a product of his/her culture, it is a point well taken. It is entertaining, but it should be taken as light reading, and not as something insightful and substantial.

[zzshupinga · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

ARC provided by NetGalleyEver since the beginning of superhero culture we’ve seen them as invincible and indestructible. Until...we started to see “disabled” figures like The Thing, Daredevil, and others who proved they were not infallible or had something that prevented them from being “normal.” In this volume Jose Alaniz takes a look at comics alongside disability studies and dying studies, for an insightful look into our favorite superheroes in a new way. Alaniz helps us understand how fans turned away from wanting the infallible warrior of Superman, that became increasingly harder and harder to relate to, to heroes that could be injured or die or had something else that made them not “normal,” such as Daredevil whose blind. Its a fascinating look into understanding that, while comics missed out on covering many areas of life, that they did understand that people wanted heroes that were more like them. I give the book 3 out of 5 stars.

[daniexj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What can I say, I’m a sucker for Non-Fiction Superhero books and that’s why I wanted to read it. THe thing is that this was more like a dissertation than a book like Supergods or The Law of Superheroes. Of course that’s not a bad thing, but that wasn’t what I was expecting, I was expecting a prose sort of non-fiction novel, while this was a very technical tome. And while some of what I did get was interesting, a whole lot of it was incomprehensible to me, a layperson. I’ve never heard of people like Reynold or Cogan or Quayson.All in all it wasn’t a bad book, just not my kind of book. Someone who is a little more versed in this particular area of research, death and disability and the high nerdness of nerds (I’m only at middling nerd myself) might love the book though.I got this advanced galley through Netgalley on behalf of University Press of Mississippi.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Free review copy. The basic argument is that Silver Age superheroes engaged with American masculine relations to death and disability, along with everything else. Superpowers sprung from and erased disability, often literalizing the “supercrip” stereotype that let society individualize disability rather than recognize it as socially constructed (we don’t build our buildings with the assumption that everyone can stretch their limbs out twenty feet as necessary). But the disabled alter ego would persistently return, showing the instability of such a solution. Highlights/lowlights included a story, “The Case of the Disabled Justice League,” where the JLA tried to make a group of children with disabilities feel better, got various disabilities themselves, and then found the courage to “overcome” them in order to provide a good example for the children—thus reinforcing the message that disability was an individual issue to be overcome by persistence and cheerfulness. The comics also occasionally pointed to that social construction, at least for those who were looking. For example, the Thing’s experiences often made clear the way that the city was not built for people with non-normative bodies—he could create destruction just trying to make his way across town in good faith. At the same time, the Thing was the member of the Fantastic Four most likely to turn on the others; his recurring depression tied into narratives about people with disabilities as bitter and vengeful, “foisting unreasonable demands on society” and thus earning them deserved retribution. She-Thing is the one female superhero Alaniz considers in any detail (apparently because Barbara Gordon’s paralysis isn’t a Silver Age thing, though he does go later for some of the other heroes), and he argues that her femininity is persistently shown as something that makes her disability much more wounding and much more grotesque. Alaniz also covers Cyborg as an African-American disabled superhero whose cyborg consciousness offers a case study in assimilation and moderation. I found the section of the book on death and superheroes less novel. As Alaniz points out, the multiverse concept provides an “elegant” solution to the otherwise intractable problem of character stasis. The market demands the return of the repressed/slaughtered, so the superheroes we care about, by definition, can’t be killed. Alaniz reads this as a version of death denial—the Freudian cape instead of the Freudian slip. (I did quite like his point that the superhero narrative also demands unchangeable deaths—pearls scattering in a rainy alleyway; a red sun exploding. The origin story starts with death. (Except Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman defies convention!)) Overall, Alaniz argues, the tactics of the superhero story—its conventions and cliches—served as strategies to contain threats to American male dominance, but the inevitability of death and non-normative bodies led to “paradoxes, absurd compromises, disavowals, and bad-faith ‘resolutions.’” Despite moments of challenge, like Ben Grimm’s story or The Death of Captain Marvel, comics more often participated in dehumanizing people with disabilities. This isn’t a reception study, so it’s Alaniz’s readings; I would love a book that looked more at readers’ reception.

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I haven't completely finished reading this, as I'm not familiar with all the superheroes, etc, mentioned, and I kind of want to look at the source before I really engage with this. It's not really something for a casual fan of comics -- or rather, even a major fan of comics just for a bit of fun and goofiness. It actually looks deeply at some of the tropes and potential underlying meanings: in other words, it treats comics seriously as literature. Some people won't like that just on principle: to me, it's good. The stuff lurking behind what we read for fun is just as important to recognise and critique -- maybe more so -- than "serious" literature that's written to have layers and layers of meaning.

José Alaniz has written a very thorough work here. I really don't know enough to critique it, but I enjoyed reading it even where I thought I might disagree if I knew the material better (or had been reading it with more of a critical eye). It was really nice to engage with something intellectual like this that took a genre I'm coming to love seriously.