The Superhero Multiverse: Readapting Comic Book Icons in Twenty-First-Century Film and Popular Media Lorna Piatti-Farnell 9781793624611

The Superhero Multiverse focuses on the evolving meanings of the superhero icon in 21st-century film and popular media, with an emphasis on re-adapting, re-imagining, and re-making. With its focus on multimedia and transmedia transformations, The Superhero Multiverse pivots on two important points: firstly, it reflects on the core concerns of the superhero narrative-including the relationship between 'superhero comics' and 'superhero films', the comics roots of superhero media, matters of canon and hybridity, and issues of recycling and stereotyping in superhero films and media texts. Secondly, it considers how these intersecting textual and cultural preoccupations are intrinsic to the process of remaking and re-adapting superheroes, and brings attention to multiple ways of materializing these iconic figures in our contemporary context.

Lorna Piatti-Farnell is professor of film and popular culture at Auckland University of Technology, where she is also director of the Popular Culture Research Centre.

Blitzed with cascades of superhumans that zip like quicksilver betwixt and between print, podcast, videogame, as well as big-tent and smartphone silverscreens, virtuoso comics scholar Lorna Piatti-Farnell, and her league of extraordinary cultural critics, invite us to take a critical pause. From incisive analyses of transmedial recreations of Wonder Woman, Scarlet Witch, Blade, Captain America, Spidey, and Jessica Jones as well as the Umbrella Academy and Power Ranger teams, we're finally handed the roadmap we've been longing for: insight, understanding-knowledge. The Superhero Multiverse wakes us to long and deep histories of class-, race-, and gender-based societal traumas. It shouts from rooftops the emancipatory power of superhero narrative performativities!

This collection of 16 essays "follows in the footsteps of existing scholarship in the field ... and focus[es] on the textual and cultural impact of the superhero icon on transmedia production, with an emphasis on re-adapting, re-imagining, and re-making" (p. 2). The volume considers an array of topics in an accessible, intelligent manner. This includes analysis of the dramatic podcast Wolverine: The Long Night, engagements with streaming programs such as The Umbrella Academy and Jessica Jones, and considerations of Batman across cultures. Focused almost exclusively on contemporary iterations of the superhero, often beyond the confines of the printed page, this volume will appeal to students and scholars of popular culture. Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty and general readers.