Heroic Moments: A Study of Comic Book Superheroes in Real-World Society

Abstract Comic book characters are a pop culture phenomenon. Many characters have been in publication for more than half a century and now star in annual blockbuster fi lms. Many of these characters have enduring popularity, but why? Marvel Comics and DC comics have told Captain America and Batman stories since 1940 and 1937, respectively,. These two characters have only become more popular with the release of Batman’s Dark Knight Trilogy fi lms and Captain America: The First Avenger and Marvel’s The Avengers; These characters were not always this mainstream, however. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the comic book speculation market, wherein comic book were bought by collectors and resellers because of their perceived value, had just collapsed, leaving comic book publishers, vendors, and collectors looking to reformat their business practices. Yet Batman and Captain America stories were still published each month. How did these two characters maintain their fans and keep going into more fi scallystable climates? People will always need heroes, and by acting like classical heroes, teaching and inspiring their readers to be something more than themselves, Batman and Captain America captured an audience, weathered the post-market collapse storm, and are now multibillion dollar characters. Using content analysis, I found lessons in universal values that can be taken from the comic books of Batman and Captain America and those lessons were consistent throughout the decade between 1999 and 2009. I believe that these lessons are the reasons that these characters have maintained their relevance over time, and I will demonstrate these fi ndings within this thesis. Heroic Moments: A Study of Comic Book Superheroes in Real-World Society