Death, disability, and the superhero: the silver age and beyond

An examination of the hyperbody of the superhero from the perspective of disability studies is a timely addition to the growing field of comic book scholarship. With the superhero genre in ascendance at the cinematic box office over the past two decades, these fantastic narratives about fantastic bodies are no longer glibly ghettoised as the preserve of childhood fantasy or teenage frustration. Drawing on theories and critiques addressing the representation of the body in visual art and narratives, as well as previous histories and analyses of comic books, Alaniz seeks to cover a lot of ground in his study.

The opening chapter serves as a rather muddled introduction, in which the author attempts to outline a brief ideological history of the superhero, twentieth-century American masculinity, and theories of ‘the body’. The very ambitious breadth of topic is already weighing on the text, with not enough room to fully explore and unpack all of the necessary terminology; there is no clear attempt to make evident the links between cultural power dynamics, masculinity and able-bodiedness that the author will later rely on in constructions like ‘the emasculating threat of disability’ (87). The second chapter is much stronger, and more specific, in establishing the author’s perspective as grounded in disability studies, serving as a strong literature review of the field, with specific reference to comic book narratives. The illustrations are well chosen, and complement the close reading of the texts. Alaniz is at his best in this section when addressing the white, male characters who dominate the comic books of the silver age that this book focuses upon, as in Chapter 3 on Daredevil/Matt Murdoch’s performativity of able-bodiedness and disability.

The second section of the book, from Chapter 7 onwards, is the most cohesive; dealing with the representations of death, this section opens with a comprehensive overview, followed by two briefer case studies. This structure works well, and could be signposted more clearly in the outline given on the contents page. Alaniz considers what it can mean for a fictional character to die, and what fiction can do to represent the unknowable state of death, by examining the denial of death in comic book narratives in which characters are revealed to have survived when the audience thought them dead, or are able to return to life through mystical or magical means. Addressing multiple instances of death from within the same comic series, or featuring the same character, Alaniz charts cultural approaches to death in different eras of twentieth-century America, and the changing attitudes to ‘the body’ that they represent. The focused case study on the death of Superman is an excellent choice to close; the parallels suggested in the introduction between Superman and American popular culture and national identity are brought to the fore once again, forging a link that was missing between the section on death and the book’s opening chapters.

This cohesion, however, serves to highlight the less-clear construction and development in the preceding chapters focused on disability. Although the book opens by addressing the topic of disability, the clarity and focus of the later chapters on death rather made this reviewer wonder whether the original topic had not been expanded to include a less compelling and rather hastily constructed opening section. The conclusion also echoes with this lack of focus, as mental health is rather suddenly introduced as a topic that deserved a rather more developed depiction than is permitted by the crowded nature of this volume.

The ambitious scope of this work leads to several sections on important topics feeling as though their content is skimmed, although they warrant a greater depth of analysis. This is particularly evident in Chapter 4 that tries to address both gender and race, exploring the topics in separate sections which therefore prevents an analysis addressing the intersections. The brief reading of Cyborg’s origin myth does not refer back to the previous sections, such as that discussing Daredevil and ‘passing’, a missed opportunity to address key intersections of race and disability with regard to masculine identity and the body. The section on the characters She-Thing and She-Hulk problematically fails to address the point that these are female characters created and written by able-bodied men, for an audience also envisaged as predominantly male. Drawing direct parallels between such characterisations as a potentially ‘empowering, redefining model’ (107) of disability with the writings of disabled performer and activist Cheryl Marie Wade is problematic at best. As is referring to the character Ron Ever’s ‘Black Power’-based distrust of white people as ‘racism’ (114). These topics deserved a more thorough and sensitive treatment than they receive in this volume. The idea of a ‘masculinity in crisis’ is often mooted in these pages, but masculinity as a social construct is not addressed or defined. Although Alaniz writes about the non-standard body of The Thing making visible the usually invisible standards of physical normativity, he has not addressed the fact that femininity and blackness make visible whiteness and masculinity. The intersectionality that Alaniz references is lacking in the analysis undertaken in his text.

Death, Disability, and the Superhero would perhaps have been more compelling if it had been limited in scope to representations of death and dying, through the lens of disability studies, providing compelling insights into the intersections of embodied identities. The references to Superman and his real-life counterpart, actor Christopher Reeve, stitch sections of the text together confidently, linking fiction to reality and theory to text. There is excellent scholarship in this book that is unfortunately overshadowed by a construction which opens with the weakest chapters; a tighter focus on, and unpacking of, white masculinity would have formed a unifying core for what feels like a fragmented work.

Evan Hayles Gledhill
University of Reading, Reading, UK
[email protected]
© 2015, Evan Hayles Gledhill
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1075948