Throughout the book, Johnson provides such examples in effective ways to prove the Historic turmoil to which our heroes reacted. In the end, Superman becomes a true hero: he forces the government to build new apartments providing these hooligans the dignity they deserve. In Action Comics #8, Superman befriends a gang of delinquents and decides to burn down the slums they live in, just to prove that the government is partly responsible for their delinquency. One example is Action Comics #3, where Superman disguises himself as a coal miner to trap the mine owner and his socialite friends underground in order to show them the importance of safety regulations and working men. We might remember that Superman was created during the Great Depression (1938), and it’s fairly easy to assume that the caped hero was to provide a temporary escape for impoverished and desperate Americans, but unless we have an infinite (and expensive) golden age collection, it would probably never occur to us that during his first few years, Superman was actually a savior of the oppressed, almost in a Marxist fashion. In the four chapters of the book, Johnson provides the reader with the rare pleasure of being told old stories, gems actually: instead of just sociological analysis and high ideas, Johnson provides the actual plot of the comic issue he chooses in order to support his commentary. Not even the bad Batman movies have flopped in opening weekends: people always want to see The Dark Knight’s new metamorphosis, as if they wanted to understand what they’ve turned into. This might also be the reason for Batman’s smoother translation to modern cinema: since the release of the first movie - Batman ( Burton, 1989)- has always kept the public interest with strong sales figures, - The Dark Knight ( Nolan, 2008) being the most popular to date, having made 533 million dollars in revenue for its creators in the US alone. Through Johnson’s account it is evident, though, that Batman and his creators have done a better job than Superman’s in adjusting to radical changes in American society (such as the US’s disillusionment after JFK’s assassination or the introduction of TV and its immediate popularity). Even if most of us modern readers assume fixed traits for both The Dark Knight and The Man of Steel, Johnson carefully demonstrates there’s no such thing: Superman couldn’t even fly in his earliest adventures, and through the period of the TV series in the mid-sixties, Batman, the so-called Dark Knight, was a goofy, campy character with not a bit of darkness in his soul. Batman and Superman, however, remain ‘two heroes who have survived, and often thrived, for over seventy years because they are important to current Americans and speak to modern social problems and contemporary cultural necessities’ ( Johnson 2014: 104).Ī noted World War II historian, Johnson points out that the characters have endured the trials of time mainly because of their abilities to bend so as not to break. Avid comic readers can surely think of many other examples of great modern characters who, for some reason, just didn’t make it. The author mentions The Yellow Kid and Captain Marvel as those characters who were once ü ber famous and popular and now are but receding memories in people’s minds. ‘American culture is littered with faint remembrances of characters who flourished for a season and then became inconsequential and vanished’ ( Johnson 2014: 104). However, Jeffrey Johnson refocuses this concept in his monograph Superheroes in Crisis ( RIT Press, 2014): after going into detail of the myriad of changes Superman and Batman have gone to stay relevant, he suggests we should narrow our assumptions of what constitutes a true comic book myth, given that the character stays true to what the present society demands. The idea that superhero comic books are part of a modern American mythology is probably not a surprise to anyone.
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