Origin Stories

Michael Kobre is Dana Professor of English at Queens University of Charlotte. His essays and stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review; Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society; South Atlantic Review; Tin House; TriQuarterly; The International Journal of Comic Art; West Branch; and other journals. He is author of Walker Percy’s Voices, and his writing has also been featured in the collections Reading the Boss: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Works of Bruce Springsteen; Walker Percy’s "The Moviegoer" at Fifty: New Takes on an Iconic American Novel; and Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation.

Peter Nagy is associate professor of English at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in publications like Modern Fiction Studies, College Literature, The Journal of Men’s Studies, The Atlantic, Ms., and Bitch Magazine.

Introduction: Unstable Molecules
Michael Kobre and Peter Nagy

Part 1: Secret Identities
1. Climbing the Walls: How I Got Bit and Turned Spider-Man into Me
John Edward Martin
2. Man or Monster or . . . Is He Both? Hulk en el Valle
José Alaniz
3. "It’s a Jewish Thing": Monstrosity and Jewish Identity in Fantastic Four
Michael Kobre
4. The Enigma of Always Being Other: A Path Toward Research and Reflection
Michelle Bumatay

Part 2: Transformations
5. The Marvelous Mutant Gaze: On Seeing and Being Bluer
Anna F. Peppard
6. "My Other Life": Queering Genres in Search of Bisexual Female Superheroes
Samantha Langsdale
7. Bitten by the Bug of Women’s Fashion: Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen as Transvestite Fantasy Fiction
Peter Nagy

Part 3: Masks
8. Sound of Her Wings: Feminist Counterpublics and the Gender of Death in The Sandman
Alison Wellford
9. Horsey-Come-Lately: No Asian American Superhero Comics Until Little Monkey
Sheng-Mei Ma
10. "The Black Girl You Cannot Kill": Autoethnographic Reflections on Black Girlhood, Power, and Superheroes
Sika Dagbovie-Mullins

About the Contributors
Index