![]() It begins with a brief overview of the discourse of posthumanism, how it is used in three different but overlapping realms- philosophy/critical theory, techno-scientific practice, and speculative fiction. ![]() This paper demonstrates how the science-fictional discourse of superhero comics both influences and is influenced by these wider discourses.ĪBSTRACT In this paper I present some preliminary work from my thesis on the posthuman body in superhero comics. The Golden Age of superheroes of the thirties and forties are understood in terms of the eugenics movement, the Silver Age of the sixties in terms of the psychedelic counter-culture of that time, and the contemporary superhero in terms of a globalised military/industrial complex and the emerging technologies it is funding and building. This paper highlights three of these intersections between the comic book posthuman and the wider discourse of the posthuman. These developments have been paralleled outside of comic books by a wider discourse of posthumanism, which has taken both popular and academic forms, but shares in both cases an emphasis on the impact of science and technology on the human body. In these stories the posthuman body has been put to work as patriotic propaganda, used to explore notions of morality and identity, and, in more recent years, used to interrogate, however crudely, the workings of the military industrial complex. For over seventy years the superhero comic book has presented narratives of the posthuman body.
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