What Cold War-era superheroes reveal about American society and
foreign policy
Physicist Bruce Banner, caught in the nuclear explosion of his
experimental gamma bomb, is transformed into the rampaging green
monster, the Hulk. High school student Peter Parker, bitten by an
irradiated spider, gains its powers and becomes Spiderman. Reed
Richards and his friends are caught in a belt of cosmic radiation
while orbiting the Earth in a spacecraft and are transformed into
the Fantastic Four. While Stan Lee suggests he clung to the
hackneyed idea of radioactivity in creating Marvel's stable of
superheroes because of his limited imagination, radiation and the
bomb are nonetheless the big bang that spawned the Marvel
universe.
The Marvel superheroes that came to dominate the comic book
industry for most of the last five decades were born under the
mushroom cloud of potential nuclear war that was a cornerstone of
the four-decade bipolar division of the world between the US and
USSR. These stories were consciously set in this world and reflect
the changing culture of cold War (and post-cold War) America. Like
other forms of popular entertainment, comic books tend to be very
receptive to cultural trends, reflect them, comment on them, and
sometimes inaugurate them.
"Secret Identity Crisis" follows the trajectory of the breakdown
of the cold War consensus after 1960 through the lens of superhero
comic books. Those developed by Marvel, because of their conscious
setting in the contemporary world, and because of attempts to
maintain a continuous story line across and within books,
constitute a system of signs that reflect, comment upon, and
interact with the American political economy. This groundbreaking
new study focuses on a handful of titles and signs that
specifically involve political economic codes, including Captain
America, theInvincible Iron Man, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, the
Incredible Hulk to reveal how the American self was transformed
and/or reproduced during the late Cold War and after.
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