Superhumans - The Unconventional

The Sandman, Part 2
In this instance, we’ll explore how Gaiman revitalizes the roles of women and trans/queer characters (a segment of the comic book population which has been trampled by sexist expectations in the comic book medium previously). We will also explore how he resuscitates the roles of family identity (an age-old and worn-out theme in the hands of other authors). Familial identity and gender identity are two of the strongest threads of the entire series, and they take on a new and vivid existence through The Sandman texts.
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The Sandman, Part 1
We owe one of the greatest sea changes in comic book history to the “British Invasion” of the 1980s and ’90s, from the likes of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Watchmen and The Sandman ushered in a new era of comics as a legitimate storytelling medium, not just a shallow arena for tights-clad muscle men secure in their abilities to the point of cockiness.
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Superheroes in Flux–Watchmen Part 2
Authorship in comics is a tricky business. Superheroes and the trajectory of their identities, more often than not, take on lives of their own. The legendary ones are written by slews of authors and drawn by dozens of different artists. At peak popularity, they go on to live in video games, movies, TV shows, and even the covers of lunchboxes. This is both the modern norm and this is how it has been for decades; it is the art and business of comic books as we know them. But what happens when the author fights this process tooth and nail, and what does that indicate for the meaning of his work? This is exactly the case for Alan Moore over his long career.
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Superheroes in Flux–Watchmen Part 1
Comics, as a genre, are deeply rooted in history and pop culture. In order to understand any part of modern comic books (or graphic novels) one must first understand the history behind them. The two works I will focus on in this essay are Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a story of remarkably normal superheroes, and, to a lesser extent The Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s surrealistic work on the nature of dream, imagination, and collective memory revolving around Morpheus the King of Dreams. Like any pieces of literature, comic books such as Watchmen and The Sandman come out of a storytelling tradition with historical implications and a variety of ideological frameworks.
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Warts and All
The comic book as a storytelling medium is a remarkable and unique creature. Comic book icons have a flexibility and a capacity for redirection. Characters with solid decades-long histories and worldwide popularity, paradoxically, do not achieve it through a rigid retelling of the same stories, but through their endless ability to adapt their meaning. Well-known heroes and villains are very different people from one decade to the next, or in the hands of different writers and artists. When the way comic books are written undergoes a sea change, it inevitably ripples into all the other storytelling mediums.
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The Paragon & The “Psycho” Pathologist
In this week’s installment of Chasing at Shadows, we’ll address the characters of Wonder Woman and Harley Quinn: their hidden similarities, their stark differences, and the importance of their influence on what it means to be a well-rounded, well-written female character in comics.
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The Dark and Haunted Prince
I whole-heartedly believe that comics, movies, and television shows are imbued with all the power and meaning of the classic works we read in university classrooms—and as such, deserve to be written about critically, and linked to the pillars of literary theory. In this new series, a collection of academic close-studies of popular culture, I aim to do just that. For my first installment, we will examine the connections between the characters of Batman, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the true burdens of vengeance.
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The Mind of a Metahuman
What would be the psychological and sociocultural consequences of the emergence of a population of metahumans with a large and infinite variety of traits?
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Restoring Faith
Fat-bodied individuals are woefully underrepresented in media, and seeing them positively showcased is even rarer. As lighting rods for vicious stereotypes, this has profoundly negative effects on how fat people, and fans as a whole, relate to media. Let’s dig a bit deeper, into insidious effects on self worth, and positive steps for the future.
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From Quill to Quest Item—Series Conspectus
There’s more to your favorite interactive entertainment than meets the eye! Join us for an examination of video games as a reimagined presentation of tropes from classical theater and text as seen and interpreted through the eyes of an enthusiast of all three.
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