‘We’re all Avengers now’: Community-building, civil religion and nominal multiculturalism in Marvel Comics’ Fear Itself

This article discusses Marvel Comics’ 2011 crossover ‘event’ ‘Fear Itself’. It suggests that the event argues for national unity in a time of crisis by mobilizing America’s self-definition as a multicultural nation as well as civil religion. The article discusses ‘Fear Itself’s’ attempted construction of national myth through looking at the way it represents the media, US multiculturalism (in a generalized form that nominally includes non-white groups while frequently failing to account for them) and ‘sacralized’ civil religious aspects of US history. Especially salient in this connection is the event’s engagement with the Roosevelt years. In doing so, it is argued, ‘Fear Itself’ presents an Americanness that relies on an idealized and nostalgic notion of the so-called ‘Greatest Generation’, a tightly knit, self-sacrificing civil society that supposedly came into being during that period.