How to Read Superhero Comics and Why
by Geoff Klock
Buy on Amazon"An analysis of superhero comic books beginning with Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen drawing on the literary and psychoanalytic theory of Harold Bloom and Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why argues for the recognition of a new age of superhero comic books. Klock builds through a discussion of Marvels, Astro City, Kingdom Come, Alan Moore's America's Best Comics and Grant Morrison's Justice League of America to argue that Planetary, The Authority and Wildcats usher in the future of the superhero narrative: a future that will be what Spiderman and the Fantastic Four were in the early 1960s, and what Superman and Batman were in the late 1930s."--Cover p. [4].
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"And why? This is quite a challenging book, taking comic books very seriously and applying literary theory to key comics of the 1990s. It has especially good analysis of Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns . The argument is that comics work through a process of one period replacing another. So the superheroes of the golden age and silver age, from the 1940s to the 1960s, replaced the pulp heroes of the 1930s – the Spider, Doc Savage and so on. Then the Marvel superheroes of the 1960s replaced the DC ones, and new characters in the 1990s in turn replaced the Marvel ones. So it goes in phases. The book talks about the anxiety of influence – how every new creation has to come to terms with the figures that inspired and shaped it, and overcome them like a father figure."
The Best Comics · fivebooks.com