... of stories.These origin stories are, alm ost w ith o u t exception, marked w ith incidents o f trauma: the m urder o f Spider-Man's uncle, the death of Batman's parents, the destruction o f Superman's home planet, etc.Thus, the m onthly superhero comic requires a distinctly different model than the novel...

...: "Sprang," "Robinson," and "M oldoff." Dick Sprang worked on pulp magazines in the late 1930s and early 1940s and was hired to produce a backlog of Batman stories in case Kane was drafted; he continued drawing Batman and Superman until 1963. Jerry Robinson was "discovered" by Kane at age seven­ teen...

...-1968 America. As fantasy entertainment, comic book superheroes since the earliest Depression-era pop­ ulist crusades of Superman had always been rooted in contem porary realities. In the wake of 1968, there was sim ply no reasonable way that comic book makers could ignore the chaos and radical...

..." of their lives; thus the characters seem to "have a little future but an enormous past." Eco finds this quality in vintage Superman comics, and it also appears in Hernandez's work, w ith its fixation on m em ory and its penchant for revisiting episodes from C h a r le s H a tfie ld 14 3 the characters' earlier...

... and nihilism , stretching the lim its o f the genre. Philip Sandifer's essay, "Amazing Fantasies: Trauma, Affect, and Superheroes," takes up the serialized Superhero comic where W right leaves off. Sandifer reads the stories of Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man as continuous narratives w hat he calls the super...