Though many of the superhero characters had been around for many years, decades even, the 1980s brought about a new school of thought when it came to the tone of the text and characterization. Comic story lines were products of the environment around them. With that being said, in the 1980s drugs, crime, and anything that can be classified as “dark” thrived. So all media outlets, especially comics, displayed such occurrences. The question can be raised: Was this digression into a darker text a bad thing or a good thing? Readers enjoyed the darker characterizations because it was a reinvention of the characters they grew up reading but with a new twist.
Ohhh my goodness... When I decided on trying to analyze the mythological origins and references in superhero comics, I had no idea the can of worms I was opening up... On the one hand, it was awesome to see just how many connections there were between superheroes and psychology/mythology/philosophy, but all the information also made it terribly difficult to distinguish what I should be using and how to tie it all together. When I was talking to one of my sorority sisters about it she said, "Oh yeah, well, research essays are kind of like putting together puzzles..." and I think that really sums up what writing this paper was like for me. Fortunately, I was really interested throughout the whole process and I very much enjoyed writing the paper. Being a psychology major, I was especially interested in reading about the Jungian archetypes that had a lot of parallels with major modern comic books superheroes. I was also able to incorporate Joseph Campbell's "hero cycle...
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