I created this video for DePaul’s Pop Culture Conference in 2021 on superheroes. For the first time, it was an entirely online conference with asynchronous, video presentations for academic work. The ideas in this piece come from a chapter I wrote for an anthology being produced by Bryan Carr and Meta G. Carstarphen. That chapter…
Tag: Marvel Comics
The Pop Culture Lens Episode 11: Captain Midnight
In the eleventh episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome friend of the podcast Blair Davis of DePaul University to discuss a pulp hero from the radio era, Captain Midnight. Captain Midnight began as a radio serial in 1938 (which you can listen to here), at the dawn of the…
The Pop Culture Lens: Episode on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Fandom
On a special episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I discuss a subject that has been one we have debated numerous times in our private lives and has become one that I have been focusing on as a research project: fandom, is it good or bad? We begin the conversation with…
Making Sense of Superheroes: Awareness of superhero genre conventions around the world
Report by CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Roskilde University (March 6, 2009) of the Quantitative Results (This paper was presented at the Danish scifi convention Fantasticon to discuss the nature of superheroes.) A series of quantitative and qualitative questions were asked of individuals around the world on: whether or not certain characteristics defined superheroes; creating their own…
The Morality of Superheroes
Previously I have discussed the definition of superheroes, the international nature of superheroes, and the ability to consider superheroes from different legends and religions. In this post I share my thoughts on the ethical and moral nature of superheroes, on how we could consider them to be role models for our modern lives. The further…
A World of Superheroes
As a lead up to a panel I will be on about superheroes and religion, I am reprinting here a series originally created for Clearance Bin Review. This series focuses on one of the current driving forces in American pop culture: superheroes. In the previous article, I focused on working out just what exactly is a…
From Jezebel: DC Comics Contest: Draw a Naked Woman Committing Suicide
Seriously, just what is wrong with DC lately? Have the editors in charge taken leave of their senses? Has the success of Marvel as of late completely rattled them? First the horrendous sexualization of women in the New 52 (and everything else idiotic since then). Then the horrendous death of Lois Lane to spur a…
