 I'll open up my superhero shirt for this. Woo! Yes, and with good reason. So I'm going to address a few of the points made in today's talk, as well as some general questions about the book. What I find most fascinating in comic book crime is the emphasis on the retributive tease, which I think is the best analysis that I've read of how violent retribution works in the comic books, where the heroes go up to the point of absolute retribution and then stop repeatedly. The term retributive tease, I assume is your term, and having worked in the comic book industry and written about it and still being associated with many people in the industry, this is something that we would talk about without having an effective vocabulary. I think this text provides that vocabulary. And I also want to add that the analysis of the place of women in comics is important, and that this was something that even in the late 80s, early 90s, we were talking about in the comic book industry, there were repeated efforts to rectify the problem. As noted, female-centered books don't sell. If we put a naked woman on the cover, the book would sell. And so there was this conflict between what the people in charge wanted to get the books out the door and what people who were writing and creating the books wanted to do, which made some interesting aesthetic problems. One of which you've mentioned is the aesthetic problem of the continuity, which is that you can never bring the stories to a conclusion because the books are continuing. So it creates a very unusual situation where the same villain will reappear time and time again, which is, I think, what leads to the retributive tease that any final solution to the problem of the Joker or Dr. Doom eliminates part of the continuity that is essential to the comic book universe. And the creators understanding that would just have to work within this system so that they were actually constrained by the various aesthetics of the medium. And it's very similar to what you see in soap operas, where the stories unfold over very long periods of time that are related to the contracts of the actors in the series, at least in those occasionally the actors age out, whereas the conflict characters never did. I also am interested in the discussion of the virtual imagined community. And here we see policy lessons and policy questions put forward in the standard utopian mode, which is to say an institution that we understand from the real world is placed in a world with an exaggerated condition, in this case the exaggerated condition of crime and the exaggerated condition of the capacity to stop crime. And using this, we can then analyze what our social justice or our criminal justice institutions would be like if both sides had exaggerated powers. And my utopian thought class is here, so I'm hoping they'll have questions on that as well at the end. I think here, of course, of Metropolis and Gotham, both of which have utopian or dystopian elements, Metropolis being the city of tomorrow, as it's always called. And Gotham a place where crime was rampant prior to the arrival of the Batman, so terrible that Batman's parents were killed, even the wealthiest citizens in the city. And it's often the case that they mentioned how things were before the Batman arrived. I will add that I object to the claim that comics have gone uninterrogated on the question of race and sex. They were interrogated. I just don't think they were effectively altered, especially with regard to the role of women in comics, the poses, the costumes, these things problematic. However, we did see women more and more in the 90s and the 2000s entering into leading roles and stronger female characters. So I think much was rectified, though it's still a very long way to go in producing anything like equality. And part of the problem is the difficulty in getting sales on female-centered texts. Now I'll raise some general objections to the text, which I've discussed with the authors. First off, oh, can you hand me my book if you would? There's one of the things that I noted was that throughout the text, there will be lines like criminologists, Cesar Lombrosa's idea of an adivistic stigmata or marker that symbolizes the evil embodied. We see criminologist Ray Serretta finds that most criminals are portrayed as psychopathic killers. In her analysis of serial killers, Sue Epstein points out, and yet when I see a discussion of the comic books, I see in Captain America the character Sin is recruited by Norman Osborn. Or in the opening pages of Daredevil, a young Wilson Fisk and his sister witness the brutal attack on their mothers, which is to say the writers of the comic books are not credited while the criminologists are. Seems to me if someone was doing an analysis of mid-20th century literature, even covering 100 texts, in each instance in which a text was put forward, the author of that text would be mentioned. So I was concerned about that because I think it represents, and I understand that the editors of your text, actually just as the editors of comic books can create problems, the editor of your text created this problem. I can't blame the authors. But the failure to cite creators bothers me because it's part of a general cultural position that the comic books merely exist, that they don't come from the source of creative individuals. And they do, and I know these people, and they think hard about this. And I know the artists, and they all went to art school, and they can tell you the history of Western and medieval art, and they'll all tell you why Albrecht Durer is their favorite artist. And strangely, it is always Albrecht Durer. And I think it's because of the detailed drawing skills that he had. So I want more respect for the creators, which is fine. For example, we could talk about the differences between the creators. For example, Brian Michael Bendis has renowned for excellent depictions of heroes of color, and that his rehabilitation of the character Luke Cage has drawn a great deal of praise. Mark Miller has discussed the nature of criminality in his text, The Authority. Peter Millican has discussed the problems of a belief in vigilanteism and ecstatic. On the other hand, I think many of the creators follow exactly the stereotypes you talked about and don't push back. I would think of Jeff Johns, Jeff Loeb, anyone named Jeff, roughly, would be in that category. Second, I want to point out that there is a hegemony of the race, class, sexual orientation, gender analysis in the social sciences. And while those are very important categories, I think it's important to, when looking at any given cultural field, find the categories that are native to that field. So, for example, there is extensive discussion of sexuality in comic books. However, sexuality is much less thematized than many other forms of consensual human interaction. And this is partly because you can't depict it on panel. So, the discussion of sexuality overrides discussions of other forms of consensual human interaction in this text, and in, I think, work in the humanities in the last 40 years. In comic books, the more centrally thematized question of consensual human interaction is the question of friendship. We see this as central to plots like Civil War, where the heroic, where the superheroes, though friends take separate sides and constantly stop to debate each other in the middle of fights, calling upon their previous friendship. We see this in a fight of Thor versus Iron Man in Captain America versus Iron Man. Similarly, they form friendships with the villains. The Flash and the Pied Piper, for example, are going back to the 1980s. The Pied Piper, one of the very rare, openly homosexual characters in the 1980s, who then became a hero and shocks the Flash with his discussion of his sexuality, and then becomes a common part of that text, and their friendship grows. Spider-Man and Black Cat, Batman and Catwoman, though having sexual relationships also have relationships of friendship. Similarly, Spider-Man and the Human Torch, and Spider-Man's general relationship of friendship to the other heroes, where he often feels lesser than them. Another example, the analysis of race, which is, of course, centrally important to comic books. The Black Panther was envisioned in the 1960s as the epitome of the strong Black man and named for the American political movement. He was made king of the most technologically advanced nation on earth, and was a diplomat and warrior, and one interested in peacemaking, not only not the stereotype of the superhero, clearly not the stereotype of the Black man in 1964. On the other side, the ridiculous initial story of Green Lantern John Stewart has a Justice League in 1968 flabbergasted that a Black man is a superhero, even worse in the Legion of Superheroes, which occurs in the 31st century. People wrote in noting that there were no Black superheroes, and that by the 31st century, this should have happened. The writers were forced to write a story. I know the writer who wrote this, and he was very unhappy, the editors actually made me this, in which all the Black people on earth had seceded and were living on their own island nation. Just to point out, this is the 60s, so things have improved. However, and I could give many more examples, and I think the examples in the text are excellent, the central phenotypic difference analyzed and thematized in comic books is not race, however. The central phenotypic difference that is commonly thematized is one of the most central themes of comic books, but which really isn't picked up in this text is that of deformity. This is true of the Hulk, She-Hulk, Tiger, the Beast, the search for a cure for the deformities of these male heroes, and interestingly only the male heroes in these examples, occupies many issues of their respective comics and crossovers. The difficulty of deformity, its role in creating social ostracization, and the way the appearance of difference leads to judgment of differences is central to comic books, recurs but isn't dealt with so centrally in this text. So I feel like this was a thematic that was in the cultural field that was in some way masked by the methods employed by the authors. The authors do note that some of the villains have evil written on their faces, but we should note it's not only the villains who are deformed. However, when they are deformed, this often becomes central to their identity. It is not merely that they are identified as villains by this that it is written on their faces. Rather, the very fact of their deformity is psychologically, sociologically, and even criminologically thematized. For example, Dr. Doom does not become Reed Richards arch nemesis until his face is scarred. The Joker is a perfectly ordinary person until he falls into a vat of acid that dyes his skin white and turns his hair green. It is after this that he goes insane. I could go on on this point. However, I'll move to another, which is that in the first chapter, the claim is made that story arcs are as much driven by editors as by creators, if not more so. Again, I think this is diminishing the role of the creators. As a former editor and friend of current editors and creators, I would say that this is largely true in certain periods in DC comics, and they cite the blog of Valerie Doratcio, who was an editor at DC, but in Marvel much less so. In the last 10 years, the creators, Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Miller, were given over a seven-year period free reign to establish the overarching story lines in Marvel Comics. The reason for editorial intervention occurs to maintain character integrity. So, for example, you couldn't have a character crippled in one comic and not in another. It was a question of continuity across titles, and to make sure that we didn't cross lines that would prevent the comic book from being saleable to all ages. Having done that on occasion in the comics, we found that it was incredibly detrimental to sales, and the store simply wouldn't carry them. There are a few exceptions. When I was the assistant editor on the comic She-Hulk, the creator, John Byrne quit because he had a scene where she was shaving her legs, which we cut, because in another comic, it had been stated that since she became She-Hulk, she didn't shave her legs anymore. But I mean, if that's the level of intervention that they get you to quit, I'll accept that there was too much editorial intervention. But we let them do otherwise. The stories were up to the creators. They would present six and 12 month story arcs, and we merely approved them based on continuity questions. Two more points. One is that the analysis of villains, I think, to some extent fails to take into account how much of the crime is nonviolent crime in comic books. For example, there's a thematic in comic books that is glossed over is environmental crime. This is central to the Swamp Thing comics. We see this as a central issue in the authority where large swaths of the earth are being destroyed and characters in the authority use their powers to restore the earth. The character Firestorm does the same thing. The economic and white collar crime, for example, in the DC universe, Lex Luthor, Superman's arch-nemesis, is a respected businessman, and much of the evil that he does involves corporate bullying, corporate takeovers, the elimination of small businesses. When Superman started, actually, he was sort of the socialist superhero. He'd go out and fight industrialists and so on. The writers in the early books were New York, Jewish, largely Marxists who attempted to express some of this in the comic books. And we still see this in what Lex Luthor does today. In the Bendis Miller story you talked about before, Civil War, Norman Osborn, who is a respected businessman, is indeed committing crimes of violence but his much more serious crimes seem to be economic crimes and crimes that are corrupting the system, the justice system. We also see this with Dr. Doom who commits very few crimes of violence, but an intense number of political crimes as he rules a small nation. So in fact, it's not the case that these characters are faced with a wave of the sort of street crime, although that does go on. The serious crime is upper level white collar criminality. And I'll make two more notes. One is that I think there's a question about the general influence of the floppies which you raise, which is to say the books that come out on a monthly basis. Mostly what we see of the superheroes is from the movies. And it's important to note that the movies often take only tiny bits of the stories or change them. I'm gonna note in the film Kick-Ass, for example, in the movie, a young girl becomes a vigilante because the mafia is hunting her father who was a former police officer and has killed her mother. And the father decides to turn her into a vigilante. In the comic book, which is a much more intelligent piece of writing, the girl believes that she has become a vigilante because her father was a police officer who was being hunted by the mafia and that the mafia killed her mother. In fact, the father is not a police officer. He was a father who lost custody, kidnapped the daughter, told her that he was a police officer, told her the mother had been killed by the mafia and did this so she wouldn't trust anyone or ask questions. And she's in fact saved from this later. In the movie, the main character, Kick-Ass, pretends that he's homosexual so that he can be near a woman he's in love with. He's a high school student. He's actually in the room with her when she's undressing and asking about clothing. And when she finds out that he is in fact not homosexual and that he is the hero of Kick-Ass, she kisses him and becomes his girlfriend. In the comic book, when she finds this out, she punches him and is angry that he looked at her naked which makes more sense to me. So I'll just note that some of this stuff gets dumbed down as it gets filtered into the mass audience. I do want to importantly note that I am very impressed with the work in this, especially on the notion of the nature of retribution and the analysis of the sex roles in comic books. And I believe that the discussion of retribution will form a foundation for much of the coming literature on comic book crime. Thank you. We'll take any questions. All right, here first. Oh, one minute. I think there's a microphone that'll go around. Once again, in relation to homosexual representation in comic books, because I haven't read your book yet, have you discussed North Star's marriage in the astonishing X-Men and also Alan Scott in Earth Two? This was, I believe, a year or two ago, a reimagining of Alan Scott, the original golden age Green Lantern as a homosexual. 2002 to 2010. So Earth Two was post-sample. So we didn't, yeah. Even since we finished our manuscript and submitted it, lots of race and sexual orientation issues came up that we talked about, but it was just too late to include. So we didn't. I feel like we may have actually jumped the gun by cutting things up at 2010, because actually the last three years, particularly on the gay superhero, there's been a lot of activity on that front. The X-Men cover about a year ago, which was a gay marriage between two X-Men. So perhaps that's moving in a direction that we didn't anticipate cutting things off at 2010, so there's definitely more work to be done. And I think if you read the text, it becomes more apparent that though the formulas are pretty discriminatory, the sort of dominant formula can be rather discriminatory, there are spaces of difference, spaces where things are experimental, and in a way not to overprivilege our current historical position, but we are at a crossroads in the last decade as to which direction this is gonna go, actually. And perhaps if we did this analysis up to 2013, we would have been more positive. I might have been on that front, actually. So you make a really good point that there's activity since then. Yes. Well, as a non-comic book reader, so speaking from total ignorance, what to mind, as you were talking, was the Stig Larsen books in Sweden. And you have this indomitable, almost superhero woman who keeps popping up again when she should be dead, right? And you have this atmosphere of not only severe sexual abuse of women, but of corruption in government. And apparently there's a Swedish genre, and there's a word for it, which of course I don't know, of generally super women heroes. She's not the only one. And I was wondering if, I mean, it's a different venue. It's not comic books. It's crime mystery. But if this trend in Sweden, in some ways resonates, or it leads you to think of differences between the societies. That's really interesting. I'm gonna have to give that one to Niki because she was actually doing some work on the movies. So the movie, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there was one in Sweden first, and then there was an American version. And at one point. And now there's a graphic novel. And now there's a graphic novel, so the comic books have picked it up. But at one point you were looking into, whether there was a cultural difference there that was significant. I was looking at, yeah, it's not a criminological aesthetic. So just a sort of a different take on the, not really related to this, but thanks. So I don't, I mean, I would say it's interesting because when you have characters like that, sort of revenge, that's really a revenge fantasy movie. And characters like that, and like the Brave One with Jodie Foster, those sort of like revenge fantasy movies that are so popular, but it's just the case that in this medium that the female-centric titles they just don't sustain themselves for some reason. So. And that's not necessarily true. I wouldn't think I'm not an expert on this, but it's not necessarily true. A popular crime novel so much. But it is interesting that Liz Veth, is that the name of the character? She is a lesbian or has lesbian relations. I don't know if I've heard her exact identity is maybe she's bisexual. Bisexual, thank you. And she's tough. I mean, she has some masculine qualities to the way that she will exact her revenge. She's certainly rejecting her objectification by corporate governmental horrible evil men. And trying to sort of live in a different frame and perhaps that's her journey, right? And it goes in various directions. I think there is a relationship, but we don't necessarily explore that here, yeah? Yeah, no. But that's something, yes, there is. I just don't know exactly what it would be other than to say that it's all a part of this sort of Western tradition of revenge and gender. Which perhaps is. I don't know how that would have played though if they did not make her bisexual though. That's what I'm saying. Because it was really her relationship with McCall. Yeah, exactly. So I still think it's falling. It's sort of pushing the envelope while maintaining a certain formula that we're used to. And I guess that's sort of how change often happens in any cultural field, right? I mean, people buy it because they're in a genre, especially with the crime novel. But then there's space for change. And so then that perhaps could change things later. And so it's that dance of what's old and what's new, maybe? Yeah, I just wonder if there's a difference with Sweden versus America because my slight experience, like four days working in Sweden with lawyers who made a big, big deal of stopping. I mean, this was one of the notorious trials in Sweden in the century. And the lawyer made a big deal of stopping, OK, I have to call my son to find out such and such. And I've never worked with an attorney in a serious case where I have to do my child care responsibilities. And there have been talk about the Swedes making this big effort. Guys are sexy when they take care of their children. So it did seem different. But that's me being one example, what I used to call philosopher's induction, one example. And I'm making generalization. So any other questions? Yeah, we've got some over here. Sorry, we're having some microphones. Awkwardness. It's working now. I think I've got it figured out. Hi, that was just really fascinating. So I'm looking forward to reading the book. I devoured comic books when I was a kid. And I haven't looked at them in years. I was madly in love with Superman until my late teens or something like that. But I was wondering if there's a, first of all, about age group. Like, who are the dominant readers today in terms of age group? And also, whether in your sort of related to that in your focus groups with adult readers, did you ask them about their political views? For example, are they pro-death penalty? Did they favor the invasion of Iraq? Do they tend to vote Republican or Democrat? Did you get any sense of correlations like that? Yeah, we did try to get some sense of that. And it's mentioned in the book. We probably have more to say than is even in the book on that score. First of all, it's mostly men. We only had, in our focus group, we did several focus groups. We only had one woman show up. And that was representative, actually. I mean, sadly, of the readership. And mostly middle-aged men. Some young people, but I would say the average age, we didn't ask age. We didn't want to make the conversation about age. It was whoever showed up and was willing to talk to us. But I would say around 35, right? I mean, in your 35 or so. I mean, these are not books for kids, obviously. And we, in our sample, we didn't mention this. We actually weeded out any best-selling childrens. Like, Simpsons has a comic. We were not looking at the all-ages comics. These are folks that live in New York City. They tend to vote Democrat, for the most part, or in this area. So our focus group is sort of New York City-based, which for comic book readers, I would imagine, I don't have raw data on this, that this is probably a higher per capita comic book readership than maybe other parts of the country. I could be wrong about that, but certainly a good place to study people reading comics. So they tend to vote Democrat. They're not necessarily for really retributive punishments like the death penalty or so on. They're probably more tough on crime. You know, sort of like, I always think of sort of the Clinton era where Clinton was incredibly tough on crime, but sort of liberal in other ways. I also think that part of the allure is this transgression of when I read these books, I get to be more of a conservative asshole than I actually am. That's, you know, this is Stacy speaking. And, you know, Mickey and I talked about this a lot. I think I'm a little bit more, I went so far at one point, I think we edited it out, that this was some sort of sleeper self or like conservative American value. Just waiting to be tapped into, you know, I got a little, you know, a little concerned about it, but I definitely think it's a more conservative medium than others as a sort of main dominant trope. And that's interesting, but certainly folks are tough on crime and are more likely to say things like, you know, this city is a shithole and we've got to clean this place. You know, these kinds of sort of disparaging comments. I would just add one other thing that what we found was interesting. We did ask those, we did specifically ask those questions, but a lot of times the conversation organically turned to those issues, because what we found is that they, when they read these books, even though it's a very solitary endeavor, right? So you go home and read or you read on the train or whatever, but it's not solitary for the, it's all about community. It's all about sharing. It's all about talking about what happened, what happened in the books. And so when they talk about these books, a lot of times they would work through what was going on in the world through those books and they would talk about the Bush administration or they would talk about the death penalty just organically as part of us asking questions about particular storylines or what did you think about our domestic violence when we talked about Hank Pym. And so a lot of it came organically from them and really got us to thinking about how these books really, the readers really sort these, work through these moral anxieties through their reading. And I just wanted to spin off on something in the sense of community, I have to tell this story. You're right, that's something that we found that we didn't know that we would find was this sense of cohesion among people who read these. And we went to one discussion group and everybody was talking about, this was before the formal event started, they were talking about the first time they had read The Sandman. And it was like, oh my first time. And I was like, and it sounded like other first times that one might talk about, but it was The Sandman. And everybody had, because that's such an iconic book, people had stories about how they came across it and how touched they were. And it was part of the sharing and it was a bonding experience for them. They take it very seriously. This is interesting, they would talk very seriously about which heroes killed and which, like Wonder Woman, snapping Max Lord's neck, they were all about whether or not it was acceptable, whether it wasn't. And at the same time, they were fully invested in whether or not that action was just or not, whether it was criminal or not criminal, they would then turn and say, this is just a comic book, it's really not, I don't really, we don't really take this seriously, but they're very serious, they're very serious about it. So, that's true. So I actually have a question, I'm sorry to jump the line, but I wanted to see if Professor DeGivana would weigh in on this along with the authors. I wonder if you can do a bit more to unpack the relationship between print comic books, which are arguably a bit of a sub-cultural medium and the mass market films that have become so popular in the last 10 years or so. What aspects of the sub-culture appear to be sort of bleeding over or being adopted wholesale by that mass market medium and what aspects are sort of blocked, what aspects are just not making it? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, if we look at the history of superhero films, what we'll find is that earlier in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, very little attention was paid to the actual form of the comic books. This continued through the 80s. When I was working at Marvel, for example, they made a Punisher movie in which they did not use the logo that he normally wore on his chest and the director said it was because he wanted to get, quote, get away from the comic books, which drew the question, well then, why did you license the comic book? Similarly, they made a Captain America film and you can see Captain America here has these vertical stripes and they changed the stripes and moved them horizontally and changed the shield and they said it was because it, you know, created a better line on this particular actor's abdomen. So there was very little interest in it. What happened was the comic books, then the creators of comic books moved into Hollywood and the Hollywood creators moved into comic books and so we saw greater cohesion and we began to get writers who had read comic books who were writing the movies. So for example, Kevin Smith was paid to write one of the Superman movies, it was never made but this was one of the first examples where a hardcore comic book fan wrote one of the films. We now see that the entire Marvel comic book, your movie line is overseen in fact by one of the comic book writers by Jeff Loeb and that there's consultation from comic book writers on this and so there's been an effort to bridge this gap on the other hand, these are still Hollywood movies and so what's left out is gonna be the complexity that you have in the continuity. So while it's one thing to adapt a story, like for example, the Skrull Invasion story in the Avengers, which you can wrap up neatly, they can't adapt the sorts of stories that comic book fans really are drawn into like the Civil War story which took years to our final crisis for example, which it just involves too much continuity. So what you get is there's a particular kind of literacy to comic book fans, you're talking about, well, they know all these characters, they know the parts, I mean, these are people who were they Russian literature scholars could cite you every instance in which Nikolai ties his shoes in war and peace. They know this stuff backwards and forwards in the manner of the obsessive literature scholar. So their level of literacy is very high and you can't ask an audience to have that level of literacy in something like a movie and as a result, I think some of the deeper thematics are left out. We're talking about the politics. There were two comic book series, weirdly enough in which superheroes murder George Bush. One is the authority, the other is black snow. I can't imagine that's, I mean, if you know these creators they tend to be fairly leftist actually. So that kind of politics is gonna be left out. The level of sophistication will be left out. But what's being drawn from it more and more is the mood of seriousness which didn't use to exist. The idea that you have to take someone seriously despite the fact that they're wearing a ridiculous outfit. And whereas in the 1950s and 60s this was all played for laughs, somehow, and I don't know how this happened, you now have a truly serious set of Batman movies. And I think the comic fans are gratified by that change. I'm not so familiar with comic books and the heroes within the comic books but as I understand, at least the popular heroes suffer some sort of injustice in their history, right? So Spider-Man loses his uncle, Batman loses his parents, Superman, whole family planet, whatnot. So I'm to understand that this kind of injustice or crime shapes them to be crime fighters. But I was wondering how many heroes are shaped by injustices that, let's say, Martin Luther King faced, like the injustice of the laws. How many superheroes face those kinds of injustices and then become fighters for justice totally? Like, you know, just changing the laws. Do we see superheroes that catch a bad guy, say, we understand this law is ridiculous but it's the law so we have to enforce it? Are there instances like that? I was thinking as we were talking of Luke Cage who was the victim of a, he was an innocently convicted person. Though he did have a small criminal past, he was convicted of something actually he didn't do and so that's part of his origin story. But it's really, comic books in general are not very critical and certainly ones that sell of the system or the laws per se. The vigilantism is often what I would call a hyperconformity to the status quo. It's this notion that the police are ineffective or corrupt or what have you but it's not revolutionary. It's not saying we shouldn't have capitalism, for example, or that we shouldn't live in cities or that we shouldn't, right? It is, there is this sort of status quo orientation. There's some exceptions. We talk about it in the book in terms of the 1970s with Green Lantern and Green Arrow taking a side trip to some, some blighted neighborhood of New York. I can't recall. Anyway, some New York neighborhood that's in bad shape in terms of economics and realizing that this was what they really should be fighting which is poverty and unemployment and all of these things. But that kind of sort of more revolutionary or leftist sort of trope doesn't do so well in the mainstream over the long haul. There are exceptions to that that are critically acclaimed but they aren't the sort of popular books. I don't know if you wanna add some more or James, do you have something? I would, I'll go ahead. I was gonna say I think the one that answers your question would be that the X-Men and all those titles are about people who are from a despised minority and that the majority of those stories tend to deal with dealing with things like laws against mutants and that. And that's why we see Magneto who's the villain is actually often a hero as well plays back and forth. So I think that's much more like the Martin Luther King story. And in general, mutation has served as a proxy for race in the comics. And this was explicit in the 1960s when they weren't able to write the sort of stories that they wanted to write about race, that they were gonna use this as their proxy throughout it. The other thing that I would add about that is that, that is true that a lot of the origin stories for the heroes have these sort of terrible backgrounds but then so do the villains. So a lot of times they'll say there'll be a story where I think it was one of the scarecrow stories but Batman was saying his background was, he suffered a lot of abuse as well. So they suffer a lot of abuse as well but the difference is that only the heroes have the will to overcome. So those types of backgrounds could lead to good or they could lead to evil. An individual offending and sort of individual punishment is very much what's on order in these books. So this is a notion of restorative justice or bringing people back into the community of repairing harm. I mean, this is just sort of not, not really on order in most of these mainstream books. So I think some of that, perhaps even if the origin is similar, I mean, I would argue that it's really a status quo orientation about punishing or coming very close to punishing individuals which means it's outside some of the framework of what you are talking about, yeah. Over here, I think this person has had a question for a while. Thank you. You just touched a bit about mutation as a proxy for a race, I was wondering if you guys could talk a little bit more about that. I feel like at the time, very similar to how Rod Serling used the Twilight Zone to talk about race and government overreach and things of that nature. So if you guys. Yeah, I mean, what was most fascinating to me is some of the ways that the Middle East was projected. So even in a JLA story as recently as about eight years ago, you had the source of apocalyptic crime coming from a, was it an alien country? It was an alien planet where everybody was a monkey. Yeah, where everybody was actually a monkey, but it looked very much like a Muslim scape with minarets and domes and stuff. So that's sort of another sort of animalization, not really mutinization, to signify the other, right? And then this goes on and this is common throughout. This is a visual medium and there's a history of sort of how that's done. And it's interesting to sort of read that in light of sort of more politically correct lenses on that. Because as you're saying, I mean, it's not just comic books who have made sort of those kinds of commingling of race or ethnicity with something other and to sort of visualize the other in that way. Did you want to add something to that? So we talk about it a lot in terms of Arab and Muslim scapes. Not as much with other types of... Why didn't I stand in for gay too? Right, I think the thing with the mutant books was a way to tell all of these sort of stories. An interesting feature, if you looked at the X-men, even as back as the mid and early 80s, the team would be largely and occasionally exclusively female characters. These characters were given very rich lives and they didn't have to play female stereotypes so much. So the writer at that time was Chris Claremont was very concerned with sexism in comics. Prior to that, when it was invented, Stanley and Jack Kirby thought that this was a way they could tell a set of stories about the civil rights struggle without alienating the readership. And they did so. I mean, there's the mutant registration laws, there's anti-mutant laws, mutants. So they really just, it was as bald as it could be without causing problems for them in selling it in the South in 1963 and so on. Nowadays, of course, you don't have to make those moves but as a result, there's a tradition in comics of using something like deformity or some visual effect to signify all sorts of difference and say, well, you know, the thing, for example, as we see the Rocky figure there, right, is always stood in as this person who phenotypically it doesn't look heroic and has to prove it over and over again. So it's something that the heroes, I mean, the writers and creators are concerned with. Having worked in the medium, I will say there was, I don't know that it's an excessively white group of creators. It reflects New York, they're New Yorkers and so in the Marvel bullpen, the majority of people working on inks and letters and stuff were Hispanic and black at that time. Of course, there were old racist white guys in the back room as well. Methodologically, whether you ever thought of using the internet so that you could get your focus groups beyond New York and have online discussions. We use it to gather focus group participants, but we used the internet a lot for monitoring, looking at participating in discussion boards, reading what people had to say. We do cite a lot about internet discussions that were going on and debates about the issues, but we didn't use it to recruit. Yeah, some of it's just my own bias of running a focus group. We wanted to get into the stores too. We really wanted to hang out with people. And you know. I think I'm personally, maybe not so much to Nikki, a little bit of a dinosaur on that and I wouldn't feel so comfortable doing social science research over the internet, but that's just me, but I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, we had this limitation of, there was like almost no budget. We got a couple small grants, but we had really no budget for this and so we got focus groups where we got them, which was here. But you're right. That would have made it more generalizable for sure. Absolutely. Yes, Karen. So this is fascinating. I'm sorry I came late. So if you mentioned this, please forgive me. First of all, as a teacher of literature, this is fascinating and I can make so many connections, but this is something off topic, but it's been really fascinating me. I've known all, well, Professor Strobel and Professor DiGiovanni for years and I knew nothing about your interest in comic books and I'm wondering how you got to find each other. Well, we have an origin story for James as well. Can I, can I break the silence on this please? So I was at Forbidden Planet on Broadway down by Union Square and who did I see back when James was on the Senate? We were both at the cash register with our stat, it was Wednesday, which is the traditional day when the new comic books come out and we sort of looked at each other and went, uh-huh. And I said, I think I said something like, look, I'll keep the secret, you know, safe, if you'll keep the secret safe. Right. We were buying a lot of the same titles, actually. Yes, we were. Oh, how interesting. So. I don't think I hide it. I mean, I wear those to class all the time. Yeah, I clearly wasn't paying attention. I could ask old my students, I think they would know. Well, I have a t-shirt that I wear to class that's Shakespeare wearing a super, Superman cape and everything. And so when I teach Shakespeare, I take off my jacket and there is my Shakespeare Superman t-shirt. But I've always loved comic books and this is just wonderful, fascinating. Thank you. Professor Giovanni, it's amusing that you're wearing the shirt, the red ring, which is the ring for a hatred, if I'm not mistaken. Anger or rage. Okay, because the question I have kind of ties into that. Do you believe that the portrayal of evil hinders conflict resolution practices in the international arena where differing nations tend to vilify individual persons of other nations or certain subcultures, thus justifying their extremes to which they are used in war, such as like in Kosovo and so on? So is your question about the vilification of people that would then lead to hatred, that would then lead to war? Yes, because it seems that villains are portrayed as like being foreign, like being that, which we don't really relate to. So therefore we consider an opposed opposition to our identity. Yes, so we have a chapter five of the book is on villains and we do an analysis of this sort of through the criminological text of Lombrozo who you may recall from CRJ101 if you took that class, right? He was the Italian criminologist who felt that he could measure crime and he can measure it through physical characteristics of people, right? And so we used convicts. And so people with protruding foreheads, asymmetrical smiles, wrinkled skins, these were all markers of deviance, yeah. And so I think that you can follow that very, very well in comic books that the villains have these markers. And if you're an unsophisticated reader, I'm not sure people are unsophisticated necessarily, but you could sort of superficially read that people who look funny are problematic. I mean, you can do that reading. And sometimes it is explicit. So the example might be two-faced, right? No, that's all over the back. Go, go, go. Sometimes it is very explicit. You really don't, it's not, you don't have to think very hard. It's, that's the purpose of the illustration is to designate that otherness on the page. Right. And I think the X-Men is trying to sort of do something different by saying that being a mutant can be empowering, especially if you have a collective and that you can organize. But I still think that there's an inherent tension in these books because it's a visual medium, because the graphics need to be flashy to sell and because they're depicting crime and deviance, that I'm not sure there's a complete way around having some kind of visual depictions of evil. The question is whether it needs to be on the body. And I think that that can feed into all sorts of sort of notions of difference that are negative that could lead people to despise others based on superficial characteristics, but that would be a less sophisticated reading. And I'm optimistic that people, I don't know if they do, because that wasn't really our question per se, but I'm hoping that people see a little bit beyond that and see that the heroes, as Professor Giugiovani just said, that the heroes also have mutations and deformities and so on as well. And so they're not perfect people either. And so I think that helps to soften the potential for what you're talking about. I think we're gonna wind up, Professor Giugiovani had to leave because he had to teach a class. He wasn't just, you know, bailing for no good reason. But we thank you so much for coming. We're gonna stay for a few more minutes if anybody has other questions. Thank you so much.