'Nuff Said: American Graphic Media

The UK trailer for Gotham gives us a few new perspectives on character.  The ideology turn in this show is to focus on Gotham as a character. My forthcoming course, "Creating the Comic Book City" uses this same structural analysis to great effect. To understand comics, you must understand the urban fears and aspiration that inform the character's archetype.  For Batman, Gotham represents the civilizing ethos associated with the frontier applied to the urban experience.  This might make the difference for the Anglo-American audience.

   The drum beat to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who grows ever louder. Still this particular short film addresses a question I've had about Doctor Who for a long time.  As I consider the impact of superhero in a global context , Doctor Who strikes me as singular example of an organic creation of a  superhero archtype in different cultural context.  Doctor Who, based on the definition of the superhero defined by Peter Coogan in his book, Superhero: The Secret Origins of A Genre , is a superhero. As Coogan explains, the superhero acts as an orienting figure that resolves conflicts and contradictions. Furthermore,  Coogan argues mission, powers, identity, and costume are the elements that distinguish the superhero from other kinds of heroes. A careful examination of the Doctor demonstrates that the character has all of these elements.  The Doctor's adventures since 1963 have offered a global audience a vision of superhero cas...