The Ages of Otherness: How Superhero Comics Reflect on Systemic Injustice and Racial and Gender Representation

Abstract

Presenting complex worlds where literary narrative, “visual experience”, and “esthetic perception” perfectly mix, comics, especially uperhero comics, are an original, compelling, and useful medium for an analysis on otherness and intersectional feminism. Studying the Ages of Comics, the article will underline the evolution of the medium and the fictional and historical fears, prejudices, hopes, and claims of its stories, also revealing the utopian and dystopian grounds of these realities. Behind tight-fitting suits, masks, and superpowers (or super-technology), comics often hide serious, compelling, urgent themes, such as, just to name a few, identity, discrimination, violence, segregation, migration, injustice, racism, misogyny, homophobia, illness, ecology, urbanization, materialism, and many more.

Keywords

• otherness
• embodiment
• comics history
• systemic racism
• intersectional feminism