Superheroes and Excess A Philosophical Adventure

Finding the superhero genre in need of further investigation from philosophical standpoints that value excess as a creative drive, rather than denigrate it as a problem to be resolved, this book opens up discussions that highlight different approaches to ‘the creative excess of being’ as expressed through the genre. While superheroes are an everyday, culturally dominant phenomena, philosophical methods and investigations have a reputation for lofty superiority. Across 13 chapters, this book facilitates a collision between the superhero genre and the discipline of philosophy, resulting in a voyage of exploration where each illuminates the other. The contributions in this book range from new voices to recognized scholars, offering superhero studies a set of critical interventions that are unusual, conceptually diverse, theoretically grounded and varied in practice. These chapters consider ‘excessive’ traits of superheroes against schools of thought that have attempted to conceptualize and understand excess by analysing texts and figures across a variety of mediums, such as The Fantastic Four, Captain America, The Vision, Logan, Black Panther and Super Hero Girls. With its unique approach to the superhero genre, this book will be an invaluable read for students and scholars working on comic studies, transmedia studies, cultural studies, popular culture and superhero studies.

List of FiguresList of TablesList of ContributorsAcknowledgements 1.IntroductionJamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds 2. Excessive Embodiment and Monstrous Containment in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic FourAnna F. Peppard 3. Legion, Fugue and Ontological ExcessJamie Brassett 4. Captain America, Ronald Reagan, and the Battle for the American Dream of ExcessJohn McGuire 5. Image Comics: A New Flight of ExcessLillian Céspedes González 6. ‘You Too Shall Be New’: Synthezoid Phenomenology and Canonical Memory in The VisionTiffany Hong 7. Evolve or Die: Logan, Repetition, and the Excesses of TraditionGeoff Klock and Mitch Montgomery 8. Difference, Repetition, and the Superhero ComicScott Jeffery 9. Heroic Skin: Superheroes, Excess and Black Skin as CostumeLorraine Henry King 10. Too Many Wonder Womans: Constraining and/or in the DC Extended UniverseJoan Ormrod 11. Design Fictions from Beyond: A Pataphysics of Objectile ExcessDerek Hales 12. Superheroes at the Vanishing PointRichard Reynolds 13. Afterword: Defeated TaxonomiesJamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds

Jamie Brassett is an independent philosopher, futures researcher and innovation consultant. He is Visiting Professor on the international MA Integrated Design at Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau, Germany. He worked at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, from 1995–2021. A Creative Philosophy of Anticipation (co-edited with John O’Reilly) was published by Routledge in 2021. Richard Reynolds is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader, MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries and Joint Head of Academic Support at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has been lecturing and writing about comics, superheroes and other facets of popular culture since 1991. His best-known work is Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (1994).