Beyond Men of Steel

This chapter introduces the book’s three thematic sections, highlighting the superhero archetype as it exists outside of conventional white male identities, the comic book medium, and its traditional home in the United States. Unpacking Into the Spider-Verse’s sentiment that “anyone can wear the mask,” the introduction asks how critical and cultural imaginings of the superhero have made this a necessary declaration. Analogizing the superhero with André Bazin’s treatise on the Western as the American film genre par excellence, this introduction sets out a similar mythologization of the superhero’s “dimensions of imagination” within narrow categories that our understanding must move beyond. In contextualizing the assumed defaults of the superhero, the introduction provides a conspectus which foregrounds the contributions of the collection’s chapters in their exploration of how the transcultural, transmedia, and transhistorical operations of the superhero rupture these defaults and recalibrate how superheroes are imagined and understood.