Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology

by Richard Reynolds

Book Overview

The superhero has been the staple of the modern comic book since the late 1930s. The phenomenally successful movies Superman and Batman have made these two comic book superheroes as familiar worldwide as any characters ever created. Yet to relatively few aficionados are they known at first hand from their appearances in comic books.

Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology explores the origins of the superhero by documenting how...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0878056947
• ISBN13: 9780878056941
• Release Date: April 1994
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Length: 134 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.8" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Super Heroes rock the world!!!

Best book I've read so far! I'd read it over and over if I were you!

Highly Insightful and Well-Written

In Superheroes: A Modern Mythology, Richard Reynolds does an excellent job of dissecting some of the origins of the superhero genre. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, he lays bare some of the prevailing ideas and iconography and puts superheroes in context. Reynolds also does an able job of analyzing The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen, as well as certain superhero origin stories. This book's only disappointment comes from the fact that his analyzes of superheroes' mythic origins don't go far enough - those looking for explicit comparisons to assorted mythic pantheons or full-throated examinations of how superheroes fall into legendary templates (except those of the Joseph Campbell variety) will be disappointed. However, an excellent and important read for anyone interested in comic books.

Great.

This book forever changed the way that I read superhero comics. Reynolds discusses the factors that are present in virtually every superhero comic since Superman was created. Some are apparent (devotion to justice, secret identitities), and some are subtle (lost parents, accountability only to one's own conscience). Virtually all factors are recapitulations of the developmental struggles of the primary audience of these comics: adolescent males. Reynolds continues by illuminating the grand, mythical nature of the comic-book universes, all stories blending into one vast "canonical" story, each comic becoming part of a larger continuity. This continuity shares several features of classical mythologies, which Reynolds explores in depth, citing the X-Men, the Watchmen, and the Dark Knight Returns series (among others) as evidence. Read this, it's great.