In Theaters
Asking superheroes to abandon their spiffy powers and outsize personalities is in itself a doomed proposition. One might as well as request that rappers stop boasting; it’s just part of the definition. You can come across the occasional modest MC or normal-seeming superhero, but those instances are going to be few and far between Yet when the creative revolution that swept up out of the indie comics’ world during the 1970s and ‘80s was rippling through the mainstream comics world, one of the great changes it promised was that superheroes would no longer be simply the titanic and implacable figures of yore. No, now they would be human characters, flawed and damaged and unsure of themselves just like the characters one finds in the greatest works of literature…
You can read the rest of this essay, “Let Us Now Praise Ordinary Men: Normalcy, Comics, and The Dark Knight,” at PopMatters.