The Superhero Multiverse focuses on the evolving meanings of the superhero icon in 21st-century film and popular media, with an emphasis on re-adaptation, re-imagining, and re-making.

The Superhero Multiverse focuses on the evolving meanings of the superhero icon in 21st-century film and popular media, with an emphasis on re-adapting, re-imagining, and re-making. With its focus on multimedia and transmedia transformations, The Superhero Multiverse pivots on two important points: firstly, it reflects on the core concerns of the superhero narrative—including the relationship between ‘superhero comics’ and ‘superhero films’, the comics roots of superhero media, matters of canon and hybridity, and issues of recycling and stereotyping in superhero films and media texts. Secondly, it considers how these intersecting textual and cultural preoccupations are intrinsic to the process of remaking and re-adapting superheroes, and brings attention to multiple ways of materializing these iconic figures in our contemporary context.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Lorna Piatti-Farnell

Part I: Across Platforms and Formats

1.¬From Cinematic to Podcast Universe: Wolverine: The Long Night and the Multiplication of the Marvel Multiverse

Cory Barker

2.The Multiverse Paradigm and the Reinvention of Legion

Whitney Hardin and Julia Kiernan

3.Frictions, Factions, and Fatalities: Adapting DC Comic Characters into Video Games

Carl Wilson

4.“I feel like I'm getting my Wonder Woman back,”: Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter, Fans, and Authenticities in the DC Extended Universe

Joan Ormrod

5.Postmodern Parody in Animated Superhero Cinema

James C. Taylor

Part II: Transformative Meanings

6.Reanimating Witchcraft: Creating A Feminist Embodied Experience in Marvel’s Scarlet Witch

Forrest Johnson

7.Resurrecting the Hero: Disrupted Histories, Ghostly Returns, and Gothic Transformations in MCU’s Captain America

Lorna Piatti-Farnell

8.Challenging Typical Ideas of Heroism and Toxic Masculinity in Alias and Jessica Jones

Matthew Thompson

9.Super-heroine Objectification: The Sexualization of Black Widow Across Comic and Film Adaptations

Angelique Nairn

10.An ‘Extra-Ordinary’ Adaptation: Exploring Time and Trauma in The Umbrella Academy

Carmel Cedro and Blair Speakman

11.Battle of the Black Superheroes: Or, Why Blade Will Never Live in Wakanda

Simon Bacon

Part III: Transnational Dialogues and Evolving Political Contexts

12.From “Bat-Manga” to “Attack on Avengers”: Transnational Superhero Adaptations Between Japan and America

Anne Lee

13.Kamen Rider, Masked and Unmasked: Tales of Transcultural Transformation

Sophia Staite

14.Spider-Man, The Panopticon, and The Normalization of Mass Surveillance

Demi Schänzel

15.Adapting Judge Dredd: Civic Guardian or Hyperviolent Cop?

Justin Matthews

16.All the President’s Supermen: Political Appropriations of Superhero Rhetoric

Michael Soares

Index

About the Contributors