A review by whitneyborup
On the Origin of Superheroes: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1 by Chris Gavaler

2.0

I'm so happy about superhero scholarship branching out. For a long time now it seems like books about superheroes were limited to less-than-serious looks at generic tropes and shifting characters through time. Occasionally someone would release a book about their personal history with superheroes. And though this book doesn't quite deliver the kinds of insights I would really like to see, and though it is firmly entrenched in popular criticism (maybe, as comics scholars Beaty and Miodrag claim because there seems something co-optive and elitist about academic theorizing of a populist medium) I'm still glad it was published.