Echoes’s Reviews > Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society > Status Update

“...pop-culture both reflects and is reflected by society. Perhaps the flaw is thinking of media and entertainment as separate from our lives. Given the ubiquitous nature of media and fantasy images, there is no longer a clearly defined dividing line between the two.“

“Superheroes tell us that things will be all right, if we just have faith in our own abilities. With each era, the specifics of how these powerful concepts are depicted and resolved takes on a new character and sensibility. Each generation will redefine the superhero according to its needs.

But one way or another, the superhero is here to stay.”

“The superhero has become an effective shorthand to convey myriad ideas... When Jerry Segel and Joe Schuster created Superman, they stumbled onto a metaphor system that everyone in modern society could understand at a glance. So in that sense, superheroes are with us and will be with us forever. There’s no escaping them. The concept is part of our [society’s] vocabulary.”

“But even when a filmmaker as offbeat as Tim Burton or as inspired as Ang Lee makes a superhero movie, they know that to make accessible films, they must hark back to the non-ironic straight-ahead portrayal of these characters.”

But with ten years of hero movies after this publication we get deconstructive movies and shows such as the ‘Dark Knight Trilogy’ and ‘The Boys.’

“Imposing the view of today’s society on pop culture of the past would result in a lot of our favorite pop icons never being brought into being. ‘Sesame Street’s’ Cookie Monster, for example, is certainly a character with a troubling addictive nature, always vowing not to eat the cookie —and always eating the cookie.”

“In the beginning was the hero, and the hero was lonely. And the comics gods created for the hero... the kid sidekick.

Hmmm. Wouldn’t you think those gods would have created the female hero to counteract that loneliness?”

Of course not. Comics were for kids and written almost exclusively by men. Of course they’d create a kid partner for the hero before a woman hero in her own right.

“The 1989 ‘Punisher’ movie was never released theatrically. There’s a new one due out later in 2004, as this book goes to press, and it remains to be seen if the pop-culture audiences of the new millennium will sustain such a franchise or if it will seem outdated.”

It’s 2019 and only the Netflix show was good.

To this new generation, a woman could be in a position of power was not unusual or a “credit to her sex,” but just the way things were.

Ugh, this sentence. Someone, anyone, just proofread before publishing. The grammar! What even is this? Put “that” between generation, and a woman. That would make more sense.

Up until the 1990s, in pop culture, if a woman was powerful – really powerful – she was either evil, or made evil by the power.

“This is not to say that Spider-Man is a humorless, obsessed character. That distinction goes to Batman, and, more pathologically, to the Punisher, more about whom (sic) shortly.”

Who the hell edited this thing? Whom should be him. Major typo there.