Superculture : How Superheroes Changed the World

Capturing an enticing fusion between magic and science, superheroes resonate with many complex and fractured identities, their stories highlighting civilization’s most pressing concerns: the networked society, climate change, nuclear war, Artificial Intelligence, and the emergence of transhuman and posthuman bodies.

Superculture examines superhero narratives from their assemblage in the 1930s to the present day, diving into the ways in which these fictions give form to – and have sometimes even foreshadowed – key ideas and anxieties across the 20th century. Focusing on United States history from the Second World War to 9/11 and surveying the Anglophone superhero mythos in film, television, gaming, merchandizing, fandom and in the urban myths of daily life, Reynolds takes a chronological look at the superhero and social change.

Superculture digs into:

· The genre’s origins
· The relationship between the genre’s creatives and their film-making ambitions and achievements within the publishing industry and media
· The link between the development of superhero narratives and key historical moments for the US including World War II, the Cold War and the Vietnam War
· The genre’s expansion into new narrative forms and cultural niches from radio and animation to merchandizing
· The impact of developments in science and technology on superhero stories
· How the genre questioned and deconstructed itself in the 1980s and how this spawned a fraction in approaches in 1990s
· How creators fashioned narratives responding to the new geopolitics of the new millennia.

Expansive and with hard-hitting implications for way we view superheroes, Superculture offers a way into 100 years of history and ideas, demonstrating that the popularity of the super’s story lies in the fact that it has moved from the realms of fantasy into everyday lived reality of the contemporary world.