Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes
Comics and the Origins of Manga
JEFFREY A. BROWN
A Revisionist History
“It’s a bird, plane. . . No, it’s actually a phallic-bulged Man of Steel, ultrasonic orgasming Black Canary, jester in hot-pants Harley, vanilla romancing Spidey, a gay lip-locking Iceman, queer Batcave encounters, and out-and-proud Young Avengers. With his usual superhuman infrared analytic prowess, Jeffrey Allan Brown makes visible to the human eye a superhero universe that at once feeds straight fanboy wish fulfillment fantasies of square-jawed virility and radically troubles mainstreamed norms of love, sex, sexuality, and gender!” —Frederick Luis Aldama, author of Eisner Award-winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics
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230 pp 40 color images, 1 table 6.125 x 9.125 978-1-9788-2526-0 paper $29.95AT 978-1-9788-2527-7 cloth $69.95SU November 2021 Comics Studies • Gender • Popular Culture Table of Contents Introduction: Signifying Love, Sex, and Gender 1. The Visible and the Invisible: Superheroes and Phallic Masculinity 2. Women Dark and Dangerous: Super Femme Fatales and Female Sexuality 3. Love, Marriage and Superheroes (For Better or Worse) 4. Secrets of the Batcave: Masculinity and Homosocial Sp ace 5. KRAKK! WHACK! SMACK!: Comic Book Violence and Sexual Assault 6. “F**k Supes!”: Adult Themes and The Boys in the Era of Superhero Blockbusters 7. It Starts with a Kiss: Straightening and Queering the Superhero 8. Super Fluidity: Transing and Transcending Gendered Bodies 9. Pleasure, Pain, Climaxes, and Little Deaths Conclusion: Insatiable
“From porn parodies to Bat man-caves, from hidden Hulk phalluses to robots in revealing negligees, Jeffrey A. Brown demonstrates convincingly that superhero narratives are filled not just with superfeats, but with supergender.” —Noah Berlatsky, author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics “We know that superhero comics are concerned with masculinity, but Jeffrey Brown makes a powerful case for understanding superhero comics as also foundationally about love and sex. Perhaps this accessible text with its impressive breadth will finally put to bed the idea that these works are only selling adolescent fantasies about manhood. Creators and fans consistently use superhero comics to explore very adult ideas about intimacy. Adding one more important volume to his prolific body of work, Brown yet again demonstrates that he is a skilled reader of gender in popular culture.” —Rebecca Wanzo, author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence. JEFFREY A. BROWN is a professor in the Department of Popular Culture and the School of Critical and Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His many books include The Modern Superhero in Film and Television and Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts: Marvel, Diversity, and the 21st Century Superhero (Rutgers University Press).
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Manga
EIKE EXNER “Through subtle formal analysis and groundbreaking archival research, Comics and the Origins of Manga makes a compelling argument for the strong influence of translated American comics on the development of modern Japanese manga.” —Henry Jenkins, author of Comics and Stuff “...A compelling investigation of an historical ‘audio-visual’ dialogue between the ‘sound images’ of comics and manga...this text becomes a meaningful revelation of the unique and multifarious histories of world print and comic cultures.” —Frenchy Lunning, editor of Mechademia “Eike Exner has meticulously researched voluminous archival materials transnationally, analyzed them critically and carefully, and, in the process, challenged, contradicted, and corrected the history of manga’s origins. Without any reservation, a history-altering masterpiece!” —John A. Lent, Founder/Publisher/Editor-in-chief International Journal of Comic Art “This is an excellent book that I enjoyed reading immensely. The topic is timely and important and the scholarship is meticulous and comprehensive.” —Gennifer Weisenfeld, author of Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 “Modern Japanese comics, or ‘manga,’ have enjoyed huge success around the world in the last three decades. So much so that today some fans occasionally seem to think manga—perhaps even all comics—are really a purely Japanese invention. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In his book, using primary sources from inside and outside Japan, Eike Exner does a wonderful job of cutting through both mist and myths and showing us another reality.” —Frederik L. Schodt, author of Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga
A Revisionist History
Eike Exner
232 pp 10 color, 50 b/w images 6 x 9 978-1-9788-2722-6 paper $27.95AT 978-1-9788-2776-9 cloth $69.95SU November 2021 Comics • Popular Culture Table of Contents Acknowledgments A Note on Images Foreword Introduction Prologue: The Historical Origins and Changing Meaning of “Manga” up to 1923 Chapter One: “Popular in Society at Large:” the First Talking Manga Chapter Two: “Listen Vunce!” The Audiovisual Revolution in Graphic Narrative Chapter Three: When Krazy Kat Spoke Japanese: Japan’s Massive Importation of Foreign Audiovisual Comics Chapter Four: From Aso Yutaka to Tezuka Osamu: How Manga Made in Japan Adopted the Form of Audiovisual Comics Epilogue: The Myth of Manga as a “Traditional Mode of Expression” Brief Chronology List of Foreign Comics in Japan 1908-1945 List of Illustrations Bibliography Index
Comics and the Origins of Manga challenges the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from traditional Japanese art, and reveals how Japanese cartoonists in the 1920s and 1930s instead developed modern manga out of translations of foreign comic strips like Bringing Up Father, Happy Hooligan, and Felix the Cat. EIKE EXNER is an independent scholar who has taught at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Josai International University in Tokyo. His research has appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art, ImageTexT, and The Comics World, and he has received the John A. Lent Award in Comics Studies.
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