Superheroes and Excess

Jamie Brassett is an independent philosopher, futures researcher and innovation consultant. He is Visiting Professor on the international MA Integrated Design at Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau, Germany. He worked at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, from 1995–2021. A Creative Philosophy of Anticipation (co-edited with John O’Reilly) was published by Routledge in 2021. Richard Reynolds is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader, MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries and Joint Head of Academic Support at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has been lecturing and writing about comics, superheroes and other facets of popular culture since 1991. His best-known work is Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (1994).

1.Introduction; 2. Excessive Embodiment and Monstrous Containment in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four; 3. Legion, Fugue and Ontological Excess; 4. Captain America, Ronald Reagan, and the Battle for the American Dream of Excess; 5. Image Comics: A New Flight of Excess; 6. ‘You Too Shall Be New’: Synthezoid Phenomenology and Canonical Memory in The Vision; 7. Evolve or Die: Logan, Repetition, and the Excesses of Tradition; 8. Difference, Repetition, and the Superhero Comic; 9. Heroic Skin: Superheroes, Excess and Black Skin as Costume; 10. Too Many Wonder Womans: Constraining and/or in the DC Extended Universe; 11. Design Fictions from Beyond: A Pataphysics of Objectile Excess; 12. Superheroes at the Vanishing Point; 13. Afterword: Defeated Taxonomies