![]() 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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