Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre by Alex Beringer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre by Alex Beringer Alex Beringer (bio) Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre. By Daniel Stein. The Ohio State University Press, 2021. 306 pp. $99.95 (hardcover), $34.95 (paperback), $34.95 (ebook). For fans of superhero comics, the lore surrounding the artists and writers behind favorite heroes sometimes echo the mythic quality of the stories themselves. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, teenagers who struggled to get girls and experienced anti-Semitism, invented Superman as a response to pain and tragedy. Harvard psychologist William Moulton Marston came up with Wonder Woman to sneak feminism into the reading habits of children of the 1940s. And Marvel heroes like Iron Man and the Hulk were created by failed novelist Stan Lieberman who reinvented himself as famed comics impresario "Stan Lee." These tales of superhero creators make for great stories in no small part because they resonate with the core superhero fantasy of an ordinary person acquiring extraordinary powers. Yet, for all its heroic appeal, this creator-centered model does not always make for especially nuanced scholarship given the complex factors that go into the authoring of figures like Superman, Wonder Woman, or the Hulk. Here is where Daniel Stein's new book Authorizing Superhero Comics comes in. For Stein, superheroes are collective creations, influenced not just by individual writers or artists, but by a web of actions and relationships. Stein contends that superheroes were not so much "created" by artists or savvy entrepreneurs, so much as they "evolved" amid a "convergence of economic interests, technological possibilities, and the availability of creator teams" (9–10). Stein thus asks readers to turn away from the conclusion that "Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel invented Superman, that Bob Kane created Batman, that William Moulton Marston originated Wonder Woman, or that Jack Kirby innovated Captain America" and instead wants readers to consider how these popular characters were enabled by "dislocated actions" along the "actor-network" (9). As one might guess, Stein relies heavily on Bruno Latour's actor-network-theory for his methodology, deemphasizing the intentions of individual creators and instead focusing on secondary influences like fan letters, adaptations, editorial commentary and anthologizing practices. [End Page 211] Stein's shift to a collective authorship approach builds on a longstanding project in comics studies. Over the last decade or so, scholars have increasingly puzzled over how to make sense of the fact that many comics—superhero and otherwise—are shaped by their connection to mass audiences and market forces. In 2015, for example, Daniel Worden described a critical mass of scholarship that viewed comics as a form of "popular modernism" serving as a "bridge between the populist, working-class visions [of popular fiction] and the more rarefied world of modernist art and literature" (61). Like the dime novels described in Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents, comics thus serve as a "contested terrain, a field of cultural conflict" where mass audiences use popular figures like Superman and Batman as vessels for debates about the meaning of modernity (qtd. in Worden 61). Recent books like Jared Gardner's Projections (2012), Ramzi Fawaz's The New Mutants (2016), and Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels (2021) have all adopted some version of this approach. Stein pushes these conclusions about collective authorship even further. Where scholars have typically stopped short of declaring the death of the author in superhero comics, Stein's Latour-inspired approach doubles down on the idea that these are truly collective creations. In this view, Superman and Batman are not merely vessels for discourse among a mass readership, but creations of countless "serial agencies" including fans, advertisers, and publishing networks. To that end, much of what separates Authorizing Superheroes from previous scholarship is its in-depth close reading of the role that these non-traditional "actors" played in the evolution of the superhero genre (15). Authorizing Superhero Comics thus applies a microscopic lens to the finer details of its actor-network, treating materials like fan letters and advertisements with the near-obsessive levels scrutiny that scholars of modernism typically apply to the novels of Henry James or Virginia Woolf. The...