The Superhero Multiverse: Readapting Comic Book Icons in Twenty-first-century Film and Popular Media

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.

Lorna Piatti-Farnell is Academic Dean at SAE Creative Media Institute in Auckland, New Zealand.

Carl Wilson is the music critic at Slate and also writes for The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, The New York Times Magazine and many other online and print publications. He lives in Toronto, where he is the doorman at the Trampoline Hall Lecture Series.

Joan Ormrod is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, co-author of Superheroes and Identities (2014) and has an extensive journals publication record.

Simon Bacon is an independent scholar, author, and film critic based in Poznan, Poland.