Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

by José Alaniz

The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities―disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies―José Alaniz seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol.

Alaniz traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series―some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar U.S. as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body's “imperfection” comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series as The Human Fly, Morituri , and the landmark graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel , all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond.

Genres: Nonfiction, Comics, History, Disability Studies, Graphic Novels, Disability, Sociology

363 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

José Alaniz is Professor in the Departments of Slavic Languages & Literatures and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Komiks: Comic Art in Russia and Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond.

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't completely finished reading this, as I'm not familiar with all the superheroes, etc, mentioned, and I kind of want to look at the source before I really engage with this. It's not really something for a casual fan of comics -- or rather, even a major fan of comics just for a bit of fun and goofiness. It actually looks deeply at some of the tropes and potential underlying meanings: in other words, it treats comics seriously as literature. Some people won't like that just on principle: to me, it's good. The stuff lurking behind what we read for fun is just as important to recognise and critique -- maybe more so -- than "serious" literature that's written to have layers and layers of meaning.

José Alaniz has written a very thorough work here. I really don't know enough to critique it, but I enjoyed reading it even where I thought I might disagree if I knew the material better (or had been reading it with more of a critical eye). It was really nice to engage with something intellectual like this that took a genre I'm coming to love seriously.

[Rowan MacBean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received DEATH, DISABILITY, AND THE SUPERHERO: THE SILVER AGE AND BEYOND as an ARC through NetGalley.com.


For the sake of transparency, I feel I should start this review out with a little information about myself. I'm a thirty-year-old disabled person, with a life-long fascination with death. My interest in comic books is new. I find the medium and the method of storytelling fascinating, but I'm not really into superheroes. (I like darker stuff than superheroes tend to go.)

Despite my lack of familiarity with many of the superhero storylines discussed here (I've read the late-80s Batman arc, A Death in the Family, but hadn't even heard of a lot of the characters mentioned in the book) I never felt confused. There are good descriptions, right down to the ways the panels were arranged on the pages, and visual aids, as well.

I came away from this book with a few things:
- a less harsh opinion of why superhero comics are the way they are about death
- a couple recommendations for comics I hadn't even been interested in before
- a realisation about why my favorite superheroes in movies are so interesting to me (hint: It's because they view and deal with their super powers as disabilities.)

The book is broken down into ten chapters. It's mainly about disabilities until the seventh chapter. Then chapters seven, eight, and nine are about death in superhero comics. I read the first seven chapters with great interest, but about halfway through the eighth, I started feeling like it was repeating a lot of the same things as the previous chapter. I skimmed through it and part of the ninth before just skipping to the conclusion chapter, which held my attention again.

So, I guess, for me, a book solely about disability in comics would have been better, but it's fascinating and thought-provoking, and I definitely recommend it to fans of superhero comics and people who are in death and/or disabilities studies.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of the myriad interrogations known to assemble reader perspectives concerning the moral perpetuity of superhero literature, those focusing on impairment (physical disability), body idealism (erasure of normalcy), and mortality (death, or lack thereof) have the potential to come of age at a time when sex/gender parity, visibility, intersectionality, and all other elements of postmodern sociability are the pillars of a new era of comic book storytelling.

As such, DEATH, DISABILITY, AND THE SUPERHERO, from José Alaniz, probes silver age comics for examples both unique and ordinary of the (super) human body as a prioritized metaphor for all manners of success and futility. The history of comic book characters using clever, peculiar, or otherworldly abilities to resolve their dilemmas is known. What is not as well-known is the politicized role of the physically impaired/disabled in said history.

Alaniz's work does the commendable job of organizing disability research, in DC and Marvel comics, to separately account for the presumptions, studied inaccuracies, "borderline cases," and assorted crumbling and rebuilding of disabled characters. The book takes an almost purely scholarly approach, which is appreciated. A laundry list of impaired or disabled characters wouldn't have been much help. But an academic disambiguation of the socialized (American) body (ideal) as it manifests unsympathetically in superhero comics, deliberately masking physical difference, is an intriguing approach readers should get behind.

The height of the book's analysis rests on the power of discerning patterns of logic through multiple comics over multiple years. Disability, for example, is frequently used as a tool for negotiating normalized and impaired bodies -- an approach that writers and artists often mistakenly believe is necessary to mediate reality. Alaniz halts the narrative and asks why reality requires mediation at all. Why filter and isolate a disabled character? Why articulate zero-sum narratives of "overcoming" (for good guys) or of "transformation" (for bad guys)? It turns out that isolating disabled characters and then heralding their successes (or failures) with stupendous stage directions promotes selective victimization.

To this end, DEATH, DISABILITY, AND THE SUPERHERO focuses as much energy on secondary characters, anti-heroes, and villains as it does on marquee characters. And while a few readers will cringe at having to discern the backstories of The Human Fly, Shroud, 3D Man, or the brilliant fools of The Doom Patrol, the analysis holds firm. Indeed, for some characters/stories, disability is regarded as uncommon but acceptable; for others, disability "is rendered a 'tolerable' deviance" worth pitying; while for yet others, disability wholly redefines what heroism can/should be.

Further, not all stories with disabled characters are disability stories, per se. This observation is not always evident when glanced through an academic filter, but the truth is that disability stories, proper, should they be necessary to tell, must inherently be less about individual capacity, when juxtaposed to a lack thereof (Alaniz's analysis of the so-called "supercrip" is phenomenal), and more about the social conditions that reinforce the purported futility of the individual impairment.

The book's bisection of disability studies and mortality studies is not always smooth (or obvious), but the author's exploration of death as a cultural affect (and the retreat from death as a manufactured principle) is quality work. To wit, it may not seem relevant for an extended philosophical debate on the quality of redemption as a consequence of nurturing existential grief . . . but as Alaniz smartly explains, step by step, superhero characters are often made to dramatize human deficiency for the sake of an imagined (that is, entirely fictionalized) maturating experience. As a result, the book's grasp of "the heroic death" proves enlightening.

DEATH, DISABILITY, AND THE SUPERHERO excels when deconstructing the social and emotional functions that characters with disabilities have had in silver age comics. However, on the other side of the coin, the author does get carried away from time to time. The most obvious example of which is Chapter 7, which clocks in at 80+ pages, 43 of which are exhaustingly dedicated to Jim Starlin's The Death of Captain Marvel. Alaniz's emphasis on the role of fatalism in modern comics, as well as the political consequences surrounding the heroic death as means of humanizing the system, is legitimate. It's good. Not so good? The longwinded and profanely tedious, panel-by-panel memorializing of Starlin's work. The Death of Captain Marvel may have merited mention given the title's quest to understand of death, through death, but 40 pages was way too much.

By extension, subsequent analysis on the death of consciousness (rectitude that pursues change) and its effect on human identity (implicit social, moral, emotional, and intellectual points of contact), suffer on account of the author having taken up so much oxygen after gushing about Starlin. Does the hero exist in any other context beyond the heroic death? Is heroism conditional? Why is death a preferred conclusion, versus psychosis, unreason, or uncooperativeness? And if turning the tragic into the mythic is the only prerogative for the so-called hero, then why bother in the first place? Are all heroes so dimly self-centered? Good questions, all of them, but the author doesn't have any time left to resolve them.

DEATH, DISABILITY, AND THE SUPERHERO is a carefully footnoted and meticulously cited book. Its mastery of the identity of silver age comics is impressive, considering the thoughtful scope of its observation.

[Mjhancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alaniz's title here basically says it all: this book is an academic look at portrayals of death and disability within superhero comics, with a focus on the 20th century, from the Silver Age (basically the 60s after Marvel comics started publishing stories about more flawed heroes and DC followed suit) to about the mid 90s. As far as academic writing goes, it's highly accessible too (while still being very different from non-academic writing), though it would probably help if you come into it with a base level of knowledge about disability studies. Essentially, Alaniz's argument is that disability studies and academic writing about death can be used to illustrate how superhero comics participate in the mainstream North American obsession and avoidance of death and disability, and occasionally offer alternatives.

That superhero comics avoid these topics is clear enough. They obsess over the perfect, above human body, one that rarely gets seriously hurt, and to whom death is rarely a permanent impediment. But there are still deviations, and given how genre-focused the superhero comic is, these complications are worth studying--and Alaniz does so, over the course of ten chapters--an introduction and conclusion, five on disability, and three on death. The introduction sets up the basic theoretical approaches to the superhero, defines the silver age, connects the hero to disability (by illustrating how quickly a 1970 Spider-Man abandons heroism in the face of the flu), and outlines the book. Ch 2 jumps into disability studies, offering seven examples featuring hero encounters with disability, and concludes with a brief focus on villains, Doom in particular. Chapter 3 is all about Daredevil, and the brief period where he took on the identity of his "normal" imaginary twin brother Mike. Ch 4 is a little broader, looking at the overtly monstrous hero through Thing, She-Thing, and Cyborg. Ch 5 is focused on the pre-Morrison Doom Patrol, in particular how the Chief offers a more active view of wheelchair use than Professor X of the X-Men. And finally, the section concludes with a chapter on the 70s series The Human Fly, which was based on a real-life stunt man, and deviates from many hero tropes (Fly isn't interested in fighting, for example) but still doesn't get away from some ableist ones.

Chapter 7 starts Alaniz's focus on death, and this chapter is probably the most ambitious of the book; it provides some theoretical background, goes into an overview of common superhero approaches to death (put it in a dream, an imaginary one-off, an alternate universe), the heroic sacrifice, the death of a loved one, and finally, a long, in-depth look at Captain Marvel's death of cancer. (Captain Marvel makes a particularly interesting case, as to readers my age or younger, he's now better known for his death than any of his living exploits.) There's a chapter on Strikeforce: Morituri, an 80s sci-fi series where people signed on to get superhero powers to fight space invaders, but the powers kill them within a year, and a chapter on the death of Superman, in terms of what private and public mourning meant in late 20th century America. The conclusion briefly recounts Alaniz's argument, while also presenting a brief look at portrayals of mental illness in supervillains.

I'll reluctantly concede a point for the reviews I've seen that say Alaniz doesn't pay much attention to comic form; while there are some very good discussions on panel layout (Strikeforce: Morituri has a great discussion there), his interest seems to be more in narrative. I won't begrudge him that, as my interest is along similar lines. I'm a big fan in doing a deep dive close reading of a work, especially if there's a firm theoretical background behind it, and that's what Alaniz does here, over and over again. And it certainly didn't hurt that he's doing it on a topic I'm deeply interested in. Moreover, once he presents the basic tropes that are used to obscure disability and death in superhero stories, it's easy to start seeming them in other fictional genres--in fantasy, in sci-fi, in film, in videogames. Perhaps the best indication that Alaniz is really onto something here is that despite the book being fairly substantial for the genre (for the academic monograph, a hundred pages or so is the norm and this is more than twice that), it still felt like he was just scratching the surface. An entire book could be written on comic book portrayals of supervillain mental illness--heck, you could get that whole book out of just Batman's rogue gallery. How does Neil Gaiman's Sandman's Death compare to the Marvel version? He touches on the dehumanizing aspect of clinical medicine regarding the patient during the Captain Marvel section --does that fit well with the abundance of comic book (mostly white, mostly male) super-scientists? And after the section on death, I really want to go back to the last few moments of New Mutants' Doug Ramsey.

That, I think, is the mark of a good intellectual work; it leaves you with an appreciation of the topic, and a roadmap for following your own questions that it inspired.

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jose Alaniz has written an extremely ambitious work in Death, Disability, and the Superhero. The first part of the book focuses primarily on disability and the superhero while, from chapter seven on death and the superhero takes center stage. As with any work that encompasses such a broad range of thought, there is a need for some basic assumptions to be made explicit from the beginning so that readers will understand how the writer will use and interpret some concepts. Unfortunately it is precisely in this introductory area where it seemed the scope of the study prevented Alaniz from clearly linking his premises and thus set up the rest of the book. This is unfortunate because the following chapters are very well researched and presented.

While I was initially more interested in the disability studies sections rather than those addressing death and mortality, I felt the latter chapters were better organized and presented. Often in the early chapters there were analyses which were quite effective as far as they went but tended to overlook intersections where additional factors also come into play. For instance the contrast between disabled and super-abled bodies could benefit from also addressing racial and gender issues. Let me say, however, that I don't consider this a particularly significant negative since the book touches on so many aspects of death and disability studies. One of the most valuable aspects of this work will be the future scholarship it will help to launch, furthering analyses begun here as well as filling gaps between what is and is not addressed here.

I anticipate revisiting most if not all of this book again in the future and expect to find it referenced widely in future research. This may not appeal to every casual comic fan, which is understandable, but I think many will also find new avenues into their favorite comics through the act of wrestling with some of this material. Scholars in the death and disability fields as well as popular culture and comics/graphic novels studies will find many useful points to ponder and address in future work.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Dani Shuping · Rating 3 out of 5]

ARC provided by NetGalley

Ever since the beginning of superhero culture we’ve seen them as invincible and indestructible. Until...we started to see “disabled” figures like The Thing, Daredevil, and others who proved they were not infallible or had something that prevented them from being “normal.” In this volume Jose Alaniz takes a look at comics alongside disability studies and dying studies, for an insightful look into our favorite superheroes in a new way. Alaniz helps us understand how fans turned away from wanting the infallible warrior of Superman, that became increasingly harder and harder to relate to, to heroes that could be injured or die or had something else that made them not “normal,” such as Daredevil whose blind. Its a fascinating look into understanding that, while comics missed out on covering many areas of life, that they did understand that people wanted heroes that were more like them. I give the book 3 out of 5 stars.

[Bookphile · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very scholarly examination of superhero comics and their depictions of death and disability. By scholarly, I do mean scholarly. There's a lot of technical language here, and it reads like a thesis. This isn't a bad thing, but it's dense, so it's not a good bet for someone looking for a casual read about comics.

That said, I don't know much at all about comics and I found it fascinating. Alaniz really dissects the genre using a plethora of examples to support his thesis. Since I'm not a comics fan, I can't speak much to whether or not he seems to be on to something, but his ruminations did make me think a lot about how death and disability are depicted in a variety of media.

A well-done, hefty tome that will likely hold great appeal for knowledgeable fans for the genre looking for a serious examination of it.

[Michele Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Death, Disability and the Superhero by Jose Alaniz
University Press of Missouri, 2014
ISBN: 1628461179
Available: Print and ebook

This book is a beast. A heavy brick of text with a massive amount of research behind it, it's not for casual comic book fans. But if you're passionate about comic books and superheroes as a serious art form, a reflection of culture as much as any other fiction genre, this is a book for you. Alaniz starts out compiling themes and commentary on Golden Age superheroes and the ideals of culture they represented at the time. But the real meat is in his own research and take on the Silver Age of comics, the rise of Marvel and the expansion of superheroes from Ubermench to complicated characters.
Highly recommended because of the rarity of such studies on superheroes and disability culture.
Contains: discussion of violence, rape, and war

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver age and Beyond" is an interesting read as well as very informative covering fan-favorite disabled characters such as DareDevil, Cyborg, and Oracle as well as some lesser known ones. The book also addresses the shift of how characters with disabilities were viewed from being seen as helpless to allowed to be more of actual characters.

The book is a very well documented source on disabled superheroes and the how these characters were represented. Highly recommended for anyone interested in these subjects.

[Lili · Rating 3 out of 5]

From Netgalley for a review:

This was a LOT more dense and scholarly than I was expecting! I was expecting more of a lighthearted look at how Superheroes would deal with death and disability, but what I got was an intensely researched and very dry work. I really appreciated the amount of research that went into this book, my only real complaint is it is immensely boring, something you never want to combine with superheroes. If you want a book that is very academic in its approach to the world of superheroes then I highly recommend.

[sabrina caho · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC kindly provided by NetGalley. Thank you!

It’s a good reference guide. The scholar format weighs the reading.