‘Mummified objects’: superhero comics in the digital age

Abstract

This article reads the museum-in-a-book-format of publications such as The Marvel Vault: A Museum-in-a-Book with Rare Collectibles from the World of Marvel and The Batman Vault: A Museum-in-a-Book Featuring Rare Collectibles from the Batcave as part of a historiographic turn in superhero comics and as one prominent answer to the challenges of digital culture. Drawing on historian Andreas Huyssen’s theories of musealisation, the article suggests that these museum-books simulate the tactile pleasures and potentially auratic qualities of earlier forms of comic book production and reception in an attempt to thwart the looming demise of the printed superhero comic book as a popular medium.

Keywords:

• superhero comics
• serial narration
• digitisation
• musealisation
• museal gaze
• museum-in-a-book format

Acknowledgements

This article emerges from a larger research project, ‘Authorization Practices of Serial Narration’, conducted with Frank Kelleter and funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the Research Unit ‘Popular Seriality – Aesthetics and Practice’ between 2010 and 2013.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For further analysis, see Stein (2013).

2. For a longer version of this argument, see Kelleter and Stein (2012).

3. See Woo (2008) for a succinct discussion of comics historiography and its problematics.

4. On the interplay of centrifugal and centripetal serial dynamics in popular television storytelling, see Mittell (2015, 222).

5. My approach here and throughout this essay is indebted to Jenkins (2013).

6. Due to limitations of space, I exclude the similarly designed The Spider-Man Vault: A Museum-in-a-Book with Rare Collectibles Spun from Marvel’s Web (see David and Greenberger 2010).

7. For further historical contextualisation, see Gabilliet (2010).

8. Some of this original art was donated to actual museums, such as the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum of The Ohio State University in Columbus; quite a bit of it was sold to fans by artists trying to make some extra money besides their regular company salary; some of it was tied up for decades in court battles, as Jack Kirby’s litigation against Marvel indicates.

9. My understanding of the archive is based on Steedman (2002); Taylor (2003).

10. The vault books are not published by Marvel and DC, but by Running Press Books. This is part of licensing policy that allows Marvel and DC to control content while finding new niches and appealing to new audience segments in the book market.

11. Huyssen makes a ‘distinction between usable pasts and disposable data’ (Huyssen 2003, 18).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Stein

Daniel Stein is Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Siegen and a member of the DFG-Research Unit ‘Popular Seriality – Aesthetics and Practice’. He is the author of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (University of Michigan Press, 2012), coeditor of the special issues Musical Autobiographies (Popular Music and Society, 2015) and American Comics and Graphic Novels (Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2011), and co-editor of the essay collections Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (Bloomsbury, 2013) and From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative (De Gruyter 2013/second edition 2015).