MDST 3883 – Spring, 2023 | Meeting Time TBD
This course is applicable toward the MDST Film Concentration.
How has the “superhero” come to dominate contemporary media? What does it mean for our understanding of media industries? How have changes in superheroes — across comics, film, television/streaming, and games — reflected changes in media industries and fan cultures?
Over the past 80 years, the “superhero” has gone from a storytelling genre found in pulpy paper magazines to transmedia narrative “worlds” that serve as the basis for multi-billion-dollar media franchises. In this class, we will interrogate the superhero through a critical media lens, looking at its roots in comic books, but also their contemporary expansion into cartoons, television series, toys, video games, board games, theme parks, and, of course, the blockbuster film and streaming media franchises of recent years. We will critically evaluate the “superhero” from its roots as a comic book genre for children and wartime G.I.s through its many iterations in kids’ and adult popular media.
In this class, discussions of the cultural significance of these media will be grounded in their material histories, uncovering what they mean for our understanding of changing media industries. Superheroes will be discussed as a popular genre across multiple media, a significant influence on the shape of contemporary narrative film, and a significant economic factor in multiple corporate portfolios.
Our goal will also be to understand superheroes as the foci of media cultures, both production cultures and fan cultures. We will consider topics from the history of how superheroes became dominant in comics to media industries’ use of comics intellectual property to the ongoing culture wars around the push for diversity in comics and film. As such, we will balance considerations of their creative sources, critical perspectives on the fan cultures that surround them, and their roles as intellectual property in the globalized media of the 21st century.
For this course, we will focus on Marvel as a preeminent transmedia franchise or perhaps collection of franchises, though we will also bring in discussions of other superhero franchises (from DC Comics/Studios to The Boys franchise to more offbeat approaches). This focus on Marvel will stretch from their early days as Timely Comics to the rise of the “Marvel Age” of comics in the 1960s through their acquisition by a toy company (Toy Biz) through the mid-2000s rise of Marvel Studios and its recent dominance as a key part of Disney’s intellectual property portfolio. In lieu of textbook, we will dive first-hand into these media — students will be required to have access to Disney+ for the duration of the course (and accommodations will be made for students unable or unwilling to subscribe to this streaming service). We will also sporadically read our way across this history, sampling first-hand the evolution of the “superhero” through the decades — as a consequence, students will be encouraged to have access to a Marvel Unlimited account.
Additionally, we will critically discuss the rise of Marvel Studios, the cinematic interpreters of these characters, and Disney, the corporate behemoth that currently owns Marvel. In considering “superhero media,” we will critique Disney’s approaches that have led to this genre’s box office dominance, as well as their connection to US/Chinese media policy, “militainment” and corporate connections with the US military, as well as theatrical exhibition and the impact of these media on film distribution. As with comics, watching multiple films and television episodes will be required, and we will attempt to organize a few optional screenings of current films at a local theater (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and potentially other recent releases).
Popular and scholarly texts will provide the interpretive and intellectual backbone for the course — see below for a series of texts which will be drawn upon (either excerpted or assigned as full texts) for the course. These privilege the franchise(s) which will be the focus for this term — Marvel Comics, Marvel Studios, and the “Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
One final note on the expected activities and assessment: This course is a seminar, with student discussion and active participation in the face-to-face and online components of the course serving as the primary activity. Students who are unprepared or uninterested in seminar discussion should not register for the course. Also, primarily forms of assessment for the course will be multiple written papers — no examinations will be given, including no Final Exam. Students will also have the opportunity to work on a group creative project, crafting a detailed “pitch book” of a novel superhero adaptation.
Finally, we are assuming we’ll be meeting face to face in the fall, but this course will still have an online component, which will likely take the form of the occasional Zoom call replacement for a class session and the use of a course Discord to foster out-of-class discussion.
If you have any questions about this course, please don’t hesitate to email Dr. Duncan at sean [dot] duncan [at] virginia [dot] edu!