'I'm a Virgo' Points Toward a Leftist 'Superhero' Future
You probably know about Watchmen , the comic book series from the late '80s that has long been regarded as a literary masterwork and helped catapult mainstream superhero stories into maturity. It presents a world in which superheroes are ultimately ineffective, actively harmful, or, in the case of the godlike Dr. Manhattan, often apathetic to humanity's struggles. Writer Alan Moore might have meant for Watchmen to be a sort of a death knell to the superhero myth , but the industry seems to have only considered its surface level aesthetic. Superheroes continue to hold up the status quo, but now a gritty palette is more common place. [Watch the video version of this post here .] Moore lamented the state of fandom in a 2022 Guardian interview : “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge toward...