Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Current Issue

The television adaptation of The Boys, originally a comic book series written by Garth Ennis, has garnered attention for its graphic violence and satirical treatment of the superhero genre. The Boys engages with a number of critiques of the superhero genre and its tropes, one of which is the recurring presence of a Nazi supervillain. This article links The Boys to previous examples of comic books and screen adaptations which feature Nazis or similar fascist organizations, such as Captain America, Superman and X-Men. In particular, it argues that The Boys’s status as a subversive superhero narrative impacts the portrayal of Nazism in new ways, further troubling the distinction between superhero and supervillain and providing insight into contemporary cultural concerns. Through its representation of the superhero origin story and the Nazi character Stormfront, The Boys draws upon the memories of the Second World War in order to condemn the rise of fascism in the twenty-first century. Despite this ostensibly worthy goal, it is also important to consider criticisms of this type of representation of the historically specific atrocities of the Second World War, the role of exploitation and its resulting reception by viewers.

This article places two Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films, Avengers: Infinity War (Russo and Russo 2018) and Avengers: Endgame (Russo and Russo 2019), in dialogue with the Marvel comic books on which they are based. As this article demonstrates, in their depiction of Thanos and the partial species extinction event, the films deviate substantially from their source material to reflect a contemporary cultural interest and growing anxiety over the real-world threat of species extinction. However, as this article argues, Avengers: Infinity War’s and Avengers: Endgame’s ecocritical potential are limited, owing partly to the villain’s role in superhero films and comic books more broadly. Limits also owe to the anthropocentric viewpoint that underwrites much of superhero fiction. Superheroes may serve a conservative function as an upholder of the social order, but, as this article shows, in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, as well as films and television series in the MCU set thereafter, this function often comes at the detriment of the conservation of nature and species-other-than-human.

This article explains how Marvel’s Black Widow film constructs both political liberation and personal satisfaction as dependent on a striving towards the heteronormative family. The family is, to use Sara Ahmed’s framework, the ultimate ‘happy object’: a relationship that promises social harmony as well as happiness and fulfilment, and the characters strive towards and ultimately agree upon the family as the good for which they fight. The film simultaneously enacts a Cold War politic by coding the enemy – the Red Room – as a communist Other whose cruelty manifests by perverting the model of the American nuclear family in favour of an extreme patriarchal model that foregoes normative reproductive. Consequently, the establishment of justice resides in defeating this communist Other and reinstituting the nuclear family, a narrative imported nearly wholesale from the Cold War era.

The superhero as a masculine ideal has been extensively scrutinized; he is perceived as a man of physical strength, selflessness and conformity but also one capable of aggression, toxic violence, vigilantism and emotional detachment. Nolan’s superhero, Batman, is situated within this discourse of contradictory masculinity. Recent scholarly discussion has considered how superheroes, including Batman, portray a masculinity designed to fulfil the desires of a post-9/11 audience. This article will extend this examination of contradictory masculinity to consider the father figures who teach Batman to be a superhero and what their instruction identifies as desirable heroic traits in the decade following the 9/11 tragedy. This form of heroic masculinity is not new and exhibits an uncanny resemblance to the cowboy who, like the superhero, is a stylized, uniquely American character. This article will argue that this is a masculinity that is learned and then performed: it reveals the imitative nature of gender, such that Nolan’s trilogy acts as a series of lessons in the problematic, fictive and performative expressions of masculinity in a post-9/11 world.

Over the past four decades, since the transition of Robin into the Nightwing superhero persona in DC’s Tales of the Teen Titans #44 (July 1984), sidekick characters have become increasingly relevant in their narrative function for DC’s overall superhero storytelling and world-building strategies. By examining the comic book and television narratives across Teen Titans and Young Justice titles, this article argues for a critical examination in how sidekicks mature into independent superheroes and how this impacts the broader storytelling paradigm for DC and their related media. The animated Young Justice and live-action Titans series highlight the progression in a sidekick’s temporal function, guiding not only their own maturation into independent superheroes but also the overall evolution of the superhero storytelling genre, allowing the passage of time, the inevitable death of the superhero and the renaissance of the sidekick-turned-superhero.