'Nuff Said: American Graphic Media

The costumed crime fighter returned to primetime television Sunday with NBC’s midseason debut of The Cape . For all the emphases on superheroes in popular media, those heroes, at least on television, have shied away from costumes. They provided the function associated with superheroes, but not colorful form. Why then, the return to the costumed hero on the small screen? The Cape is a family friendly show about a wrongfully accused cop who takes on the persona of his son’s favorite comic book hero to clear his name and save “Palm City.” A genre show that draws on familiar themes, The Cape offers a fight for justice and an individual’s struggle against societal corruption. As with its big screen counterpart, The Green Hornet , The Cape returns places the pulp hero in the spotlight at a time when the value of individual agency is in question. This neo-pulp moment is both stimulated by and a reaction to social upheaval and economic uncertainty. Like superheroes, pulp character...

In a recent article, my colleague and I argued for consideration of the origins of the superhero in relation to the action adventure hero in pulp magazines. We discuss at length, the origins of the pulp magazine character type and of course examined Conan the Barbarian created by Robert E. Howard. Yet, I think there is much to be said about two other Howard characters: Kull and Solomon Kane. In both, I think Howard offered a complex narrative about race and identity. As a consequence, neither character reached the popularity attained by Conan. In Kull especially, the tension between established modern races and "primitives" is front and center. For the Kull stories Howard created a ‘Pre-Cataclysmic age’ set before the dawn of recorded history. Atlantis and Lemuria had not yet vanished into the seas, but they are inhabited by savages not by advanced, utopian civilizations. In the Kull stories, the Thurian continent boasted grand civilizations and mysterious pre-human races. ...