The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS
THE POSTHUMAN
BODY IN SUPERHERO
COMICS HUMAN, SUPERHUMAN,
TRANSHUMAN, POST/HUMAN
Scott Jeffery
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
Series Editor
Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, United Kingdom
This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital
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tacular one. Those capital letters have been earned.
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Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the
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the boards of the main academic journals in the field and reviews graphic
novels for the international media.
More information about this series at

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Scott Jeffery
The Posthuman Body

in Superhero Comics
Human, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human
Scott Jeffery
Perth College, University of the Highlands and Islands,
Perth, UK
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

ISBN 978-1-137-57822-8 ISBN 978-1-137-54950-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955733
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the help and support
of too many people to list. My thanks go to everyone, but a few people
are deserving of a special mention. Firstly, thank you to my brother Craig
Jeffery and my friend Tom Casey for allowing me to use a series of living
rooms and kitchens as makeshift offices. I couldn’t have done this without
you. Secondly, I am grateful to Drs Ian McIntosh, Sharon Wright and
Roger Sabin for their support and encouragement during the long gesta-
tion of this book. Thank you, too, to my editor for being patient above
and beyond the call of duty.
This book is dedicated to my muse, without whom it would never have
existed.
And finally, perhaps especially, it is dedicated to my son, who may very
well live his life out in a posthuman age of gods and monsters. The lucky
duck.
v
CONTENTS
Introduction: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman,

Post/Human 1
What Is Posthumanism? 11
The Rhizome of Comic Book Culture 37
The Perfect Body 69
The Cosmic Body 93
The Military-Industrial Body 115
Animal Bodies and Artificial Bodies 137
Reading the Superhuman 155
Readers on Transhumanism and Post/Humanism 175
Towards a Theory of Reader-Text Assemblages 205
vii
viii CONTENTS
The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics 227
Bibliography 239
Index 259
Introduction: Human, Superhuman,
Transhuman, Post/Human
In issue ten of All Star Superman1 the titular hero attempts to discover
what a world without Superman would look like by creating a miniature
universe, complete with a miniature Earth whose development he can
observe from the outside. In the glimpses of this alternate Earth afforded
the reader, we move swiftly from early humankind to the Renaissance
thinker Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola delivering his 1486 “Oration on
the Dignity of Man”, in which he stated that instead of yielding sover-
eignty to gods and angels we should instead “become like them”, and,
“if we but will it, surpass even imagination’s greatest paragons”. Later in
this Earth’s history we see the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writing
by candlelight, “behold! I teach you the superman”. This is swiftly fol-
lowed by a glimpse of the studio of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel (though
both off-panel) at the moment they create the first comic book superhero:
Superman himself.
The world that Superman has created is, clearly, our world. The impli-
cation is clear; in a world where Superman did not exist, we would need
to create him. From the Classical myths of Icarus or the Minotaur, forms
that blurred the line between the human and technology and the human
and animal, through to the modern superhero comic, humans have enter-
tained themselves with posthuman visions and engaged in arguments
about the very category of the human itself. The scientific advances of
the last century—in plastic surgery and prosthetics; neuropharmacology
and robotics; genetics and information technology—have bought us ever
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

S. Jeffery, The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_1
2 S. JEFFERY
closer to actualising these visions with the implications being a source

of debate for philosophers, scientists and, increasingly, a topic of inter-
est for politicians, policy makers and the public. New technologies con-
tinue to be produced, themselves producing ever more cyborgian realities.
Meanwhile, the fictions of superhero comic books continue to migrate
from their “ghetto” in comic book fandom onto the big and small screens
of “mainstream” audiences. The thirst for the posthuman, in both science
and science fiction, has become popularised. However, as Brown points
out, any analysis of comic books, “often comes down to a privileging of
the critic’s own reading rather than a realistic consideration of how the
text actually works for audiences”, and as such, “the intentions and prac-
tices of both the creators and the consumers must be incorporated into
the inquiry”.2 To address this issue the book also incorporates interviews
with comic book readers about their views of the posthuman body, not
only in the form of the superhero, but also in terms of Trans and Post/
Humanism.
This book concerns itself with the same developmental trajectory of
posthumanist thought suggested by All Star Superman. Nevertheless, this
is no simple linear progression; if Mirandola, Nietzsche and Siegel and
Shuster each articulated a vision of the posthuman they each did so in very
different ways. For this reason, the book that follows refers to the general
idea of the posthuman (or more specifically, the posthuman body) as a
rhizome formed from three overlapping yet distinct discursive realms. The
realm of the Superhuman encompasses fictional representations of posthu-
man bodies, with particular emphasis placed on its manifestation in comic
books. The realm of transhumanism refers generally, though certainly not
exclusively, to a philosophy and practice of human enhancement that runs
from the Renaissance humanism of Mirandola and the Enlightenment
conception of the human as rational, autonomous subject, to the increas-
ingly popularised ideology of Transhumanism proper, which calls for the
active use of science and technology to improve the cognitive and physical
abilities of human beings.
Nietzsche’s concept of the Ubermensch diverges from this Transhumanist
lineage to create the discursive realm this book refers to as Post/Humanism.
Post/Humanism differs from Transhumanism as Nietzsche’s Ubermensch
differs from Humanism: by interrogating and undermining the self-
proclaimed qualities of reason, autonomy and even morality on which
humanism presumes to position itself. Thus, while it is possible to talk of
“posthumanism” in general terms and, as All Star Superman implies, there
INTRODUCTION: HUMAN, SUPERHUMAN, TRANSHUMAN, POST/HUMAN 3
is a history of posthumanist thought, the various connections between

these modes are not strictly linear. It is these non-linear connections, or
“underground root-systems”, between the human, Transhuman, Post/
Human and Superhuman that this book explores.
WHAT THE BOOK DOES NOT DO

It would be worth acknowledging two theoretical schools that are not fully
elaborated upon within this book, but lie dormant within its theoretical
approach and subject matter. As such, some brief words on the subject are
worthwhile. Firstly, the field of Queer Studies has long played a role in the
study of comics. Brooker3 has even playfully suggested that queer readings
of superheroes have existed ever since Fredric Wertham infamously sowed
the seeds for the “comics scare” of the 1950s. Alongside the potential of
horror and crime comics that might cause juvenile delinquency, Wertham
also interpreted the relationship between Batman and his young side-
kick Robin in homoerotic terms. Lendrum4 highlights how Wertham’s
comments shaped the subsequent discourse around queer superheroes;
as does Schott5 in his consideration of the shift from the “implied” to
“actual” homosexuality of some contemporary superheroes in terms of
fans’ acceptance, resistance and appropriation of comics texts. Elsewhere,
Palmer-Mehta and Hay6 have perceived positive representations of homo-
sexuality in Green Lantern, while Shyminksy7 argues that the queerness
of the superhero is “straightened” by projecting queer desire or fear onto
the “gay” sidekick.
Similarly, many studies of the cultural representation of disability read
texts ideologically as examples of “Othering” practices common to rep-
resentations of minority groups,8 arguing that such representations have
real-world effects in terms of shaping social policy.9 Certain canoni-
cal texts often cited as early examples of disability stereotyping include
Shakespeare’s Richard III and King Lear,10 Tiny Tim in Dickens’s A
Christmas Carol, Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab,11 or Long John Silver from
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. For Snyder and Mitchell,
media images of disability serve the same constraining function as medical
discourse: “as medical science strains to reign in the disabled body’s devi-
ance, movies unleash nightmarish images of disability as a threat to social
stability”.12 Thomson draws upon literary, feminist and social theory to
study the freak show and literature, arguing that the figure of the disabled
body functions as “a repository for social anxieties”.13 In effect, many
4 S. JEFFERY
cultural studies of disability are marked by an attempt to extricate disabled

bodies from their “historical mooring as medical and supernatural oddi-
ties”.14 This same trend can be observed in the way scholars of disability
have approached comic books. Kokaska,15 Alaniz16 and Lees and Ralph17
explore the representation disability in superhero comics. By comparison,
Squier shows a real engagement with comics studies and disability studies,
noting that comics’ status as a medium one is supposed to “grow out of”
puts it in a unique position: “shadowed as they are by the label abnormal,
comics can offer a rich area in which to explore some crucial issues in
disability studies”.18 Squier focuses on independent comics while arguing
that, “in general the super-hero genre relies on the discourses of develop-
mental normalcy for its role in the construction both of comic books and
of disability”.19
WHAT THIS BOOK DOES DO…

Many of the studies provide numerous important insights for both post-
humanist theory and comics studies. However, by focusing on particular
identities, such studies often display an inclination towards a legitima-
tion/criticism dichotomy when it came to analysing superhero comics.
As will become clear as this book proceeds, the adoption of a Post/
Humanist approach, expressed methodologically through the adoption of
Deleuze and Guattari’s20 concepts of the rhizome and assemblages, marks
a deliberate attempt to avoid all such binary categories, including making
claims about legitimate or illegitimate portrayals of the posthuman body.
Adopting the concept of the rhizome has certain implications for under-
standing the choice of respondents and texts, and the collection, analysis
and presentation of information. Of course, in order to make one’s self-
intelligible it was necessary to structure the book in a traditional manner.
Resisting the organisational structure of the root-tree system, chronologi-
cal causality and the search for the original source, the rhizome instead
presents history and culture as a map of influences and events with no
specific cause.
Considering the posthuman body as rhizome therefore involves recog-
nising that the posthuman body “is always in the middle, between things,
interbeing, intermezzo”.21 As such, despite the adoption of a fairly tradi-
tional structure in terms of presentation it is suggested that the chapters
be read with the rhizome in mind, and that there are connections and
pathways to be followed throughout the text. Despite the chronological
presentation of the cultural history of the posthuman body, it is important

to emphasise that the appearance of these bodies is not a simple linear or
teleological progression. The book is also explicit about the necessarily
provisional nature of these discursive formations, which are but a few “of
the many possible presentations (or entrances)”22 into the rhizome of the
posthuman body.
The adoption of the rhizome also resulted in a theoretical tension in
the approach to the responses of comic book readers presented in the final
section of the book. The use of interviews (even semi-structured) pres-
ents a fairly unproblematic account of respondents’ views and experiences,
but it is important to admit and emphasise that one cannot ever present
the respondents’ complete rhizomatic selfhood (because it is always in a
dynamic state of becoming). Rhizomatic thinking foregrounds—even cel-
ebrates—that the researcher “can thus never have a view of the complete
map of one’s participant, seeing that this map is co-constructed, multiple,
and constantly changing”.23 Even so, while in the rhizome, “no single
organising principle predetermines the consistencies and compatibilities
between the network of its elements”,24 my position as author inevitably
placed me in a more central position. It is important to note the tension
between the adoption of the rhizome as a theoretical position and the
limits placed on it by my methodological choices and the final presenta-
tion of the book. This involves a recognition that as much as the research
strived to, “avoid tracing in favour of a Deluezo-Guattarian ‘mapping’,
such a complete departure is not possible. Traces remain, despite our car-
tographic intentions”.25
HOW THE BOOK IS STRUCTURED

This book is divided into three sections. Section One is comprised of two
chapters. “What Is Posthumanism?” introduces the figure of the post-
human body, demonstrating that the posthuman manifests in three par-
ticular (and overlapping) discursive realms that this book identifies as
the Superhuman, Transhuman and Post/Human. The histories of Post/
Humanism and Transhumanism are not to be conflated. In many respects,
Post/Humanism’s interrogation of the tenets of Humanism makes
them very much opposed to Transhumanist values in several respects.
Nevertheless, both philosophies are concerned with the potential for new
technologies and regimes of power that shape and alter human bodies,
making the figure of the posthuman a fundamentally corporeal concern.
6 S. JEFFERY
This chapter also introduces Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the rhi-
zome and assemblages, concepts which are put to use in various forma-
tions and contexts throughout the book.
Although an investigation of the development of the superhero through
the analytical lens of the posthuman seems fruitful, this book wishes to
avoid the problems associated with many other analyses of the superhero,
while still acknowledging the contributions made by them. In order to
achieve this, this current chapter presents Deleuze and Guattari’s concept
of the rhizome, offering it up an alternative model for theorising comic
books. This chapter highlights three areas where the concept of the rhi-
zome will prove particularly useful. Firstly, it considers how the unique
nature of comic book culture displays a rhizomatic structure, describing
how the relations between comics, creators, corporations and readers can
itself be conceptualised as a rhizome. Secondly, it argues that the complex-
ities and unique properties of continuity in superhero comics is also rhi-
zomatic in form, and that, importantly, readers are often embedded within
these continuities, either as store-houses of knowledge or being directly
addressed by characters on the page. Finally, building on the previous
two points, this chapter highlights the implications of the rhizome model
for the critical analysis of comics and readers, particularly as it applies to
ideological analysis, or attempts to pin down the final “meaning” of the
posthuman.
Section Two presents a cultural history which identifies five loosely
bounded categories of posthuman body in superhero comics. Each chap-
ter journeys across and through the discursive plateaus of each body (rhi-
zomatically connected to each other as part of the larger assemblage of
the posthuman body). Thus, the development of each of these three types
of Superhuman body is accompanied by parallel developments in the dis-
cursive realms of Transhumanism and Post/Humanism. In each instance
the notion of the posthuman body as discourse, that is, a matter of both
representation and corporeal/institutional practices will be highlighted,
alongside the notion that each of these corporeal forms should be seen as
an assemblage whose properties are not innate but the effect of what other
assemblages (social, historical, philosophical) they connect to.
“The Perfect Body” presents a journey through the rhizome of the
posthuman form I have dubbed the “Perfect Body”. Focusing primar-
ily on what has come to be known as the “Golden Age” of comics, this
chapter connects Superman and Captain America with two early forms of
Transhumanist thought—the culture of physical fitness and the (related)
pseudoscience of Eugenics. Post/Humanism too, makes an appearance at

this point, but in almost unrecognisable form as a popularised, watered-
down, “misreading” of Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch, from which
Superman gets his (mistranslated) name, and inspired both the Nazis and
the early science-fiction Superhumans that preceded the superhero comic.
“The Cosmic Body” turns its attention to the 1960s and the Silver
Age of comics, suggesting that this period is notable for the use of what I
dub the Cosmic Body. This chapter’s journey through the rhizome of the
Cosmic Body, taking in the counterculture of that time and a particular
vision of posthumanity that drew upon an eclectic mix of science fiction,
Eastern spiritualties, psychedelic drug use and the notion of “cosmic con-
sciousness”. It argues that this early Transhumanist discourse is reflected
in the critical-theoretical work of several key Post/Humanist thinkers,
with particular emphasis on Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari.
“The Military-Industrial Body” jumps forwards to the present to con-
sider what this thesis calls the Military-Industrial Body and argues that
contemporary superhero narratives are increasingly concerned with both
the production of posthuman bodies through the nefarious machina-
tions of the military-industrial complex, and the regulation of these same
bodies by the state. The chapter connects this to the historical devel-
opment of Transhumanism and its links with libertarian thinkers. This
link is highlighted through several critiques of Transhumanism as politi-
cally conservative or disengaged from social concerns. Donna Haraway’s
A Cyborg Manifesto (which “What Is Posthumanism?” positions as the
“ground zero” of Post/Humanist theory) was published in 1985, coinci-
dentally chiming neatly with the concerns of contemporary comic books.
Nevertheless, many works of the last decade share marked affinities with
Haraway’s project, and the comics published contemporaneously with
that essay during the so-called Dark Age of comics make clear that cyborg
imagery may still harden around the thematic of masculinity.
By way of concluding Section Two, “Animal Bodies and Artificial
Bodies” discusses those characters who are non-biological beings:
Artificial Intelligences (AI), robots, androids and synthezoids. Artificial
beings such as Red Tornado and The Vision dramatise the very questions
which concern philosophers of mind and that AI researchers ask: What
does it mean to be human? Human brains in prosthetic bodies like the
Doom Patrol’s Cliff Steele/Robot Man literalize the Cartesian dualism
that so much critical Post/Humanism interrogates. Simulated bodies also
illustrate the general limits of the superhero comic book’s representation
8 S. JEFFERY
of the posthuman body, as does the Animal Body. Like the Artificial Body,
the Animal Body conforms to a model of the Perfect body; indeed, a
recurring trope is to have characters such as the X-Men’s Beast devolve
into more truly animalistic forms, frequently at the cost of their “human”
assets such as intelligence, language or self-control. The chapter concludes
by noting a similar potential blockage in Transhumanism’s focus on the
Military-Industrial Body, finally highlighting how the more intellectually
anarchic figure of the Cosmic Body remains a key component of narra-
tives of the Superhuman; finds expression in much Post/Humanist theory
and remains an important, if currently neglected, strand of Transhumanist
thought and practice.
Having concluded the cultural history of the posthuman body, Section
Three presents reader responses to the posthuman body. “Reading
the Superhuman” addresses several of the recurring criticisms of the
Superhuman body, but in particular the charge of ideological fascism and
suggests that readers did not generally take images of the superhero’s
Perfect Body as a representation of desirable or even achievable bodies,
but as signifiers of the superhero genre, existing on the same plane of
meaning as capes or masks. This semiotic distance between reader and
text is explored further in relation to depictions of science and technology
in superhero comics. The chapter then discusses whether respondents felt
that the Superhuman could say anything meaningful or accurate about
posthumanism.
“Readers on Transhumanism and Post/Humanism” deals with respon-
dents’ feelings about human enhancement and shares rhizomatic connec-
tions to “The Military-Industrial Body”. It discusses how readers felt about
the idea of human enhancement technologies. Having considered the
Superhuman and the Transhuman, it then describes how the participants
felt about the more complex philosophical territory of the Post/Human
(thus forming a rhizomatic connection with “The Cosmic Body”). The
most pressing theme in this regard was the question of mind/body dual-
ity. It then goes on to consider how several further dichotomies played
into respondents’ feelings about the posthuman body, particularly the
perceived distinctions between the natural and the artificial and fiction/
reality.
“Towards a Theory of Reader-Text Assemblages” offers a consideration
of the “reader-text assemblage” and how this concept alters our under-
standing of reader-text relations, emphasising how forming reader-text
assemblages facilitated new becomings for respondents. These becomings
included material transformations in which the body was modified with

tattoos, suggesting at least some movement towards the posthuman body;
as well as incorporeal transformations such as identity formation, with the
figure of the “geek” seen as pleasurable, but also negative if allowed to
stratify and prevent further becomings. The chapter will also demonstrate
how the types of posthuman body presented in Section Two resulted in
new becoming when readers formed particular assemblages with them.
Finally, “The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics” brings together
the cultural history and the reader responses for a summary and conclusion.
NOTES
1. Morrison, G., Quitely, F., and Grant, J. (2007). All-star Superman Vol. 2
New York: DC Comics.
2. Brown, J. A. (1997a) New Heroes: Gender, Race, Fans and Comic Book
Superheroes. PhD. University of Toronto, p. 29.
3. Brooker, W. (2001) Batman Unmasked: Analysing a Cultural Icon.
Continuum International Publishing Group.
4. Lendrum, R. (2005) Queering Super-Manhood: Superhero Masculinity,
Camp and Public Relations as a Textual Framework. International Journal
of Comic Art, 7(1) pp. 287–303.
5. Schott, G. (2010) From fan appropriation to industry re-appropriation: the
sexual identity of comic superheroes. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics,
1(1) pp. 17–29.
6. Palmer-Mehta, V. and Hay, K. (2005) A Superhero for Gays? Gay Masculinity
and Green Lantern. The Journal of American Culture, 28(4) pp. 390–404.
7. Shyminsky, N. (2011) “Gay” Sidekicks: Queer Anxiety and the Narrative
Straightening of the Superhero. Men and Masculinities, 14(3) pp. 288–308.
8. Shakespeare, T. (1993) Cultural Representations of Disabled People:
Dustbins for Disavowal? Disability & Society, 9(3) pp. 283–299
9. Biklen, D. (1987) The Culture of policy: Disability Images and Their
Analogues in Public Policy. Policy Studies Journal , 15(3), p. 515.
10. Ibid.
11. Snyder, S. L. and Mitchell, D.T. (2001) Re-engaging the Body: Disability
Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment. Public Culture, 13(3) pp. 367–389.
12. Ibid., p. 369.
13. Thomson, R. G. (1997). Extraordinary Bodies: figuring physical disability in
American culture and literature. NY: Columbia University Press, p. 6.
14. Snyder and Mitchell, Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the
Resistance to Embodiment, p. 381.
15. Kokaska, C. J. (1984) Disabled superheroes in comic books. Rehabilitation
Literature, 45(9/10) pp. 286–88.
10 S. JEFFERY
16. Alaniz, J. (2004) Supercrip. Disability and the Marvel Silver Age Superhero.
International Journal of Comic Art, 6(2) pp. 304–324.
17. Lees, T. and Ralph, S. (1995). To Others He’s Just a Helpless Man in a
Wheelchair! But When I See Him…: Case Studies of Physical Disability in Marvel
Comics, 1961–1970. Paper presented to the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication annual meeting, Washington, D.C.
[online] Available from: http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind9602a&L=A
EJMC&E=0&P=5452089&B=--&T=text%2Fplain [Accessed: 20/12/2013].
18. Squier, S.M. (2008) So long as they grow out of it: Comics, the Discourse
of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability. Journal of Medical Humanities
29 p. 72.
19. Ibid., p. 86.
20. Deleuze, G. and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
21. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 25.
22. Sermijn, J., Devliger, P. and Loots, G. (2008) The Narrative Construction of
the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic Story. Qualitative Inquiry 14(4) p. 646.
23. Sermijn, et al. The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic
Story, p. 644.
24. O’Sullivan, S. (2002) Cultural Studies as Rhizome – Rhizomes in Cultural
Studies. In Herbrechter, S. (ed.) Cultural Studies, Interdisciplinarity and
Translation. New York: Rodopi, p. 84.
25. Mazzei, L.A. and Kate McCoy (2010) Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative
research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5)
p. 506.
What Is Posthumanism?
A book such as this ought to begin with a neat definition of “posthu-

manism”. However, it would be misleading to suggest that posthuman-
ism is a neatly bounded category. Roden,1 for instance, sees two distinct
posthumanisms that he terms the “speculative” and the “critical”, which
Simon2 formulates as “critical” and “popular” posthumanism. This axis
of critical and speculative/popular posthumanism roughly corresponds
to the discursive realms this book will refer to as Post/Humanism and
Transhumanism. The terrain of critical Post/Humanism may briefly
be mapped by three modalities of posthumanist thought identified by
Castree and Nash.3 Firstly, the, “posthuman as an incipient historical
condition … [secondly] a set of ontological theses about the human
that never was and never will be… [and thirdly] as a ‘both/and’ form
of deconstructive reading”.4 The posthuman can be seen as either an
“object of analysis” or as an “analytical-theoretical position”.5 Braun,6
McCracken7 and Panelli8 each offer further definitions and formulations.
Indeed, if it were desirable to make any claims for what exactly Post/
Humanism “is” or “does” then it would almost certainly hinge upon just
such a blurring of categorical boundaries, whether between the natural
and the artificial, the human and the machinic, fact and fiction, or criti-
cal theory and superhero comics. In fact, the boundary between criti-
cal Post/Humanism and popular/speculative Transhumanism remains
inherently fuzzy. Nevertheless, this book will use Transhumanism to
refer to the philosophy of human enhancement through technology.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_2
12 S. JEFFERY
This deliberate pursuit of technological evolution would involve invit-

ing technology into our bodies, resulting in Transhuman beings. The
offspring of Transhumanity would eventually result in fully Post-Human
beings; that is, humans so fully integrated with technology so as to be
no longer recognisable as human. Though this may sound similar to
Post/Humanism, Transhumanism’s use of the figure of the posthuman
is distinguished by a markedly Enlightenment form of Humanism, pre-
mised on rationality and faith in progress. For the purposes of this book
“Transhumanism” will also to refer to those techno-scientific practices
that have been carried out in reality.
Whether manifesting in the discursive realms of Transhumanism
or Post/Humanism, the figure of the posthuman body is always con-
cerned with the future (and past and present) status of humanity, yet,
there remains a third discursive realm, which this book refers to as
Superhumanism. As Badmington has noted, “the debate about the end
of humanism…was not the exclusive property of critical theory”.9 Just as
visions of posthumanity have emerged in the techno-scientific discourse
of Transhumanism and the critical-philosophical discourse of Post/
Humanism, the history of science fiction displays a similar concern with
the question of what it means to be human, and what comes after the
human. Indeed, posthumanism marks the meeting point of high theory
and mass culture where “the boundaries between theory and fiction have
been breached beyond repair”,10 giving birth to a new genre of what
Badmington terms “fictive theory”. Similarly, science fiction becomes
considered less an entertainment genre and more as what Cscisery-Ronay
calls “a mode of awareness”.11 That is, a form of cognition that incor-
porates scientific speculation, cultural theory, philosophy and unfettered
imagination. I have chosen the term Superhumanism to represent this
discursive realm because nowhere is the posthuman body, and the ethical
dilemmas that come with it, more often represented than in the super-
hero comic book. Indeed, in the universe of WildStorm Comics, super-
heroes are designated by the term “Posthuman” (DC comics use the
term “Metahuman”, while Marvel uses the designation “Superhuman”).
Transhumanists, critical-theoretical Post/Humanists and producers and
consumers of science-fiction Superhumans can all be seen as attempting
to create new conceptual spaces and metaphors adequate to our cur-
rent technologised and information-rich society. At the intersection of
these various forces lies the figure this book refers to as the “posthuman
body”.
WHAT IS POSTHUMANISM? 13
SUPERHUMAN BODIES
Badmington has argued that although mass culture such as science fic-
tion books, films and comics have generally been regarded as generically
distinct from cultural theory both, “shared a common concern with the
end of human sovereignty”,12 and that Post/Humanism was born when
they met. Similarly, as Locke13 points out, “super-hero comics deal with
questions about the social and cultural meaning of science that are con-
stituted out of the same basic stuff as academic concern, that is, available
cultural resources that provide the means of thinking”. Klugman makes a
similar point when he suggests that cyborg fictions “motivate the reader to
consider the social and ethical implications of new technologies”.14
Given Haraway’s assertion that “the cyborg is a creature of social real-
ity as well as creature of fiction”,15 the genre of science fiction, whether
in cinematic, televisual or literary form has been the subject of much
scrutiny in the quest for what Braidotti calls “positive social and cultural
representations of hybrid, monstrous, abject and alien others in such a
way as to subvert the construction and consumption of pejorative dif-
ferences”.16 This postmodern blurring of theory and fiction is indicative
of the way in which, as Miah puts it, “the philosophical and the cultural
are interwoven within the history of posthumanism”.17 McCracken has
suggested that cyborg fictions actually provide “the kinds of transforma-
tive metaphors through which…cultural conflicts…are mediated”, and
that, “it is through such forms that new kinds of consciousness (both
empowering and disempowering) arise”.18 More specifically, Taylor sug-
gests that although Haraway may not have been thinking of superheroes
when composing her cyborg manifesto, “their polymorphous perversity
and androgynous bodies are well suited to her utopian ideals”.19 Oehlert20
marks an early attempt to categorise the cyborg types in superhero comics,
while Heggs goes into greater depth in his analysis, stating that super-
heroes, despite their transgressive potential, remain poor exemplars of
Haraway’s cyborg.21 Nevertheless, there has yet to be a sustained investi-
gation into the relationship between the superhero and the posthuman. As
such, this book presents a cultural history posthuman body in superhero
comics that pulls together these diasporic strands, reading the superhero
comic books as a “posthuman body genre”; arguing that superhero narra-
tives, which deal almost exclusively with posthuman bodies, ought to be
a fertile site for Haraway’s anthropology “of possible selves and realiz-
able futures”.22 Before it can do this however, it is necessary to clarify
14 S. JEFFERY
the concepts that will be employed and gain a better understanding the
histories of Transhumanism and Post/Humanism.
RHIZOMES AND DISCURSIVE PLATEAUS

As Miah has noted, “the history of posthumanism has no obvious begin-
ning, middle or end point in philosophical thought”.23 For this reason
this book argues that the posthuman body is best approached through
Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the rhizome and assemblages. It is no
easy task to clarify the concept of the rhizome; indeed, part of Deleuze
and Guattari’s project was precisely to escape clarification. Bruns explains,
“Deleuze and Guattari are notorious improvisers of concepts, which are
not always meant to be clear, since for them a concept is never exactly
‘about’ something, but is a certain way of articulating complexities, as if
to avoid closure or resolution whatever the matter at hand”.24 Formulated
one way, the rhizome becomes a model for thought. Deleuze and Guattari
propose that the figure for thinking that has dominated Western rational-
ism is the image of the tree. As Perry describes, “these arborescent struc-
tures, with their interlocking arrangements of symmetrical and polarized
branches – either-or, thesis and antithesis, and division and analogy all
serving equally this formalization – have dictated the limits and reductions
built into an inherited mode of thinking”.25
Unlike trees with their roots and central trunk, rhizomes possess no
fixed origins; “they are tuberous-multiplicitous, adventitious-and con-
nect in nonlinear assemblages to other things”.26 Rather than following
in unproblematic linearity as in the branches of a tree, any point within
a rhizome can be connected to any other. A rhizome is non-hierarchical
in structure, it has “no roots, no starting place, no sequence, no ending
place; only multiple sources, interruptions, interceptions, foldings, merg-
ings, partings, multiple entry ways”.27 For further clarification, here it is
reformulated by Sermijn et al.: “A rhizome is an underground root sys-
tem, dynamic, open, decentralized network that branched out to all sides
unpredictably and horizontally”.28 Such a structure means that a view of
the whole is impossible, because rhizomes contain multiple entryways and
“no main entryway or starting point that leads to ‘the truth’”. Within
rhizomatic thinking there is no “truth”, no single reality, no static beings
or essences. There are always many possible truths and realities that can
all be viewed as social constructs. As Sermijn et al. remind us, “the notion
of unity [within the rhizome] only appears when a particular dimension
(e.g., a particular discourse) takes over”.29 That final point is worth reit-
erating in a slightly modified form: “Within the rhizome, ‘unities’ can be
viewed as temporary takeovers by one story construction with the result
that other possible constructions at that moment (for whatever reason)
are excluded”.30
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts (such as “rhizomes”
and “assemblages”) are designed to take “the conceptual imagination
into a world transformed by science and technology”.31 The resonances
with Post/Humanism are clear. Deleuze and Guattari’s is one in which
all humans are “machinic-assemblages”. Our social institutions such as
the family, the state or mass media are also machinic assemblages which
the human being can “plug” into. These assemblages take human desire
and process it for use in particular social regimes. When one of these
assemblages become stabilised or “coded”, a territorialisation occurs and
the body is “captured and pinned down by signifying regimes, semantic
orders that assign us meanings and identities”. These territorialisations
establish boundaries of identity that temporarily restrain the movement,
new becomings made possible by “lines of flight” through the rhizome,
the forming of new assemblages, becomes restricted as the smooth space
of transformation becomes stratified. Nevertheless, the forces of deter-
ritorialisation eventually breaks them apart and able to flow anew, “only
once again to be recaptured and reterritorialized by another social regime
of signification”.32
The concepts presented thus far of the rhizome and assemblages will be
developed by putting them to use in various ways throughout this book.
At this juncture it will be helpful to emphasise how these concepts relate
to Foucault’s conception of “discourse”. Rivkin and Ryan suggest that
Deleuze and Guattari’s work invites us to view history as a succession of
“signifying regimes, ways of ordering the flows of matter and desiring pro-
ductions”.33 These “signifying regimes” are not dissimilar to Foucault’s
notion of “discourse” as regimes of power/knowledge, and how Foucault’s
concepts might be usefully plugged into Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome as made of plateaus. Honan34
elaborates on this concept, helpfully suggesting that each plateau compos-
ing the rhizome be considered as “discursive plateaus”. These discursive
realms/plateaus may be considered through a Foucauldian lens. Elaine
L. Graham describes how Foucault’s work privileges “representation, lan-
guage and imagery and recognize the importance of popular and scientific
discourses in the formulation of hegemonic notions of what it means to be
16 S. JEFFERY
human”.35 For Foucault the “human” is not a natural being but an histori-
cal and cultural construction. In short, for Foucault, “there is no ‘natural’
or a historical self awaiting liberation from oppressive social structures or a
subject who exists independent of constitutive discourses”.36 By identify-
ing “the specific interstices of discourse and social organization and how
these fuse to create particular technologies of the self”,37 Foucault was able
“to question what is ‘natural’ and, particularly in later work as the genea-
logical replaces the archaeological, to enquire into the actual mechanisms
by which ‘knowledge’ produces ‘normality’”.38
Hall writes of discourses taking shape in particular periods, arguing
that, “they leave traces of their connections; long after the social relations
to which they referred have disappeared…[furthermore] these traces can
be re-activated at a later stage, even when the discourses have fragmented
as coherent or organic ideologies”.39 Thus, for Hall, such a discursive chain
becomes the site of ideological struggle, “not only when people try to
displace, rupture or contest it by supplanting it with some wholly new
alternative set of terms, but also when they interrupt the ideological field
and try to transform its meanings by changing or re-articulating its asso-
ciations, for example, from negative to positive”.40 As Currier points out,
Deleuze and Guattari work with a Foucauldian understanding of power as
operational, working through historically specifically discursive regimes.
However, these discursive regimes (representational and material) are ele-
ments of an assemblage, “and, as such, are implicated in the subsequent
forms and arrangements of that assemblage”,41 rather than transcendent
structures. Where Foucault views the subject as always created and delim-
ited by power, the concepts of assemblages and rhizome encourage us to
see past the illusionary subjectivity to the fluidity of flows and processes.
However, discourse, at least in the Foucauldian sense that interests us
here, should not be understood as the same thing as ideology. As Hall
suggests, “the classical formulations of base/superstructure which have
dominated Marxist theories of ideology represent ways of thinking about
determination which are essentially based on the idea of a necessary cor-
respondence between one level of a social formation and another”.42
Discourse theory, by contrast, does not recognize any “necessary corre-
spondence”: “the notion essential to discourse- [is] that nothing really
connects with anything else”.43 This means that, “even when the analysis
of particular discursive formations constantly reveals the overlay or the
sliding of one set of discourses over another, everything seems to hang
on the polemical reiteration of the principle that there is, of necessity, no
correspondence”.44 In the rhizome, by contrast, everything is connected

to everything else, but these connections are multiple and shifting, and
not reducible to a central trunk such as an economic superstructure. A
rhizo-analysis draws attention to just such “overlays or the sliding of one
set of discourses over another”, viewing these instances as forms of re and
de-territorialisation.
This book will argue that in many respects this is what the history of the
comic book posthuman offers; an unbroken chain of posthuman represen-
tations put to very different uses and given different meanings at certain
times and by certain creators. Yet “traces” remain, hence the comic book
posthuman body still regularly manifests itself as a white, male, muscular
body. We do not need to accept the notion of an “ideological struggle”
in an essentialising sense to see the value of the concept to cultural his-
toric approach to the discourse of posthumanism. By conceptualising the
posthuman body as a rhizome it is possible to consider how the various
discursive plateaus within it interact with one another in a mutual dance of
de/re/territorialisation; to grasp, however temporarily, the underground
root systems that connect the posthuman body through its manifestations
in techno-scientific practices, philosophy and superhero comic books.
TRANSHUMAN BODIES
For clarity, this book describes the posthuman, in its guise in film, television
and comic books, as the Superhuman. Speculative/popular posthumanism,
hinging on real world techno-scientific developments and geared towards
human technological enhancement, will be referred to as Transhumanism.
All approaches that use the posthuman for critical or ontological purposes
will be described as Post/Humanism. These categories are themselves
“temporary takeovers” within the rhizome of the posthuman body and are
presented not as an essential typology of posthumanism but as heuristic
tools. It is important to separate these concepts early on because, although
they are interrelated, “the history of posthumanism should not be seen
as the same as the history of Transhumanism”.45 As such the history of
Transhumanism will be addressed first.
Transhumanism is a specific movement but in this book also provides
a useful umbrella term to describe a particular way of thinking about
the human relationship with technology. The World Transhumanist
Association (WTA) was founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce in
1998. Their 2004 FAQ46 defines Transhumanism as:
18 S. JEFFERY
1. The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and
desirability of improving the human condition through applied reason,
especially by developing and making widely available technologies to
eliminate ageing and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical
and physiological capacities.
2. The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of tech-
nologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limita-
tions, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing
and using such technologies
Surveying the corpus of works that could be said to constitute

Transhumanism gives a strong idea of the movement’s ambitions. For
Transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom,47 Transhumanism is merely
an extension of an ideological/philosophical position that has existed for
centuries and he makes reference to such early works as L’Homme Machine
(1750), Bertrand Russell’s Icarus and the Future of Science (1924) and
the biologist Julian Huxley’s’ Religion without Revelation (1927) (which
introduced the phrase “transhuman”) as paving the way for consideration
of how humanity might be improved though technology. For now, it is
illustrative simply to peruse the titles of some of the many transhumant
texts that have proliferated over the last 40 years, beginning, for exam-
ple, with Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality (1962) and Man
into Superman (1972). The eighties saw works such as Erik Drexler’s
Engines of Creation (1986), which popularised the idea of nanotechnol-
ogy; roboticist Hans Moravec’s Mind Children (1989) (which introduced
the idea of uploading consciousness into machines); F.M. Esfandiary’s Are
You Transhuman? (1989); Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines
and The Singularity is Near (2005); or Gregory Stock’s Metaman and
Redesigning Humans (Stock 1993; 2002).
Contemporary Transhuman visions rest upon the development of a
number of converging technologies. These include such developments as
nanotechnology (self-replicating, molecule-sized robots), Biotechnology,
Information Technology and Cognitive Science (sometimes known as
the NBIC suite),48 and GRAIN (genetic manipulation, robotics, artificial
intelligence, nanotechnology). The promised/threatened effect of these
technologies converging is the creation of “posthumans whose capacities
so radically exceed those of present-day humans as to be no longer unam-
biguously human”.49 Moreover, “such technologies may also lead to the
creation of new living organisms, machines with human or superhuman
intelligence, and humans with machine parts [cyborgs] and genetically

enhanced bodies”.50 As its name implies, Transhumanism envisions these
enhanced humans as a transitory phase on the evolutionary road to a no
longer recognisably human form of posthumanity. While some of these
technologies are closer than others, such possible enhancements high-
light the central notion of Transhumanism that humanity as we currently
understand it is simply a “work in progress”.51
Despite Bostrom being quite explicit in positioning Transhumanism
within an Enlightenment tradition of rational humanist thought, several
commentators52 have argued that Transhumanist writings betray an “irra-
tional” or even mystical streak and that Transhumanism is ultimately a
theological or Gnostic narrative. The fixation of some Transhumanists on
bodiless minds existing in virtual realities may not be a Cartesian human-
istic division of body and mind, but a more archaic Gnostic or Platonic
view that regards the world of matter as an imperfect shadow of a higher
realm of pure forms. This is not entirely surprising when one considers
how the mystical-psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s heavily influ-
enced (or rather, spawned) modern cyber-culture, including the philoso-
phies of Transhumanism. Erik Davis53 has investigated the connections
between posthuman thought and imagery, new technologies and archaic
and modern spiritualties (a matrix of mutual influences that he attempts to
capture with the term “techgnosis”) and is not alone in observing that the
growth of ICTs has facilitated the proliferation of “new religious move-
ments untethered by ancient texts…synthesizing multi-dimensional, real
time rituals, [and] neo-pagan cyborg ritualists play in the medium they
inhabit”54 that have emerged from the confluence of new technologies
and neo-shamanic practices.55
TRANSHUMAN BODIES AND THEIR DISCONTENTS

While the scholars above have posited a religious aspect to Transhumanist
thought and fiction it is precisely this same impulse that drives many
critics of human enhancement technologies. In one pilot study of atti-
tudes towards human technological or genetic enhancements amongst
pro-Transhumanists and people with strong religious convictions, the
religious respondents commonly agreed that “it is wrong to play God
with mind, body, or spirit”.56 Similarly, a recent article released by the
Vatican’s International Theological Commission stated that “the use of
genetic modification to yield a superhuman or being with essentially new
20 S. JEFFERY
spiritual faculties is unthinkable…A man [sic] can only truly improve by

realizing the image of God in him by uniting himself to Christ”.57 At any
rate, as Wilson and Haslam point out, opponents of modification are gen-
erally agreed that “humans are imbued with a ‘given’ or ‘sacred’ essence
or soul-understood in either a religious or secular sense”.58 This antipa-
thy and suspicion towards human enhancement technologies is known as
“bioconservatism”, and is an ideological position that makes for strange
bedfellows.
Bostrom has defined bioconservatism as “Transhumanism’s opposite”,
noting that, “people drawn to bioconservatism come from groups that
traditionally have had little in common. Right wing religious conserva-
tives, left-wing environmentalists and anti-globalists have found common
cause”.59 One of the earliest and most influential proponents of biocon-
servatism is Francis Fukuyama who argued in his bestselling book Our
Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002)
that biotechnology’s potential to usher in a posthuman stage of history
is dangerous “because human nature exists… [It] shapes and constrains
the possible kinds of political regimes, so a technology powerful enough
to reshape what we are will have possibly malign consequences for liberal
democracy and the nature of politics itself”.60 Both Badmington61 and
Miah62 point out that Fukuyama fails to clarify what he understands by the
term “human nature” despite his assertion that it exists. Fukuyama’s argu-
ment does not bear close scrutiny. As Miah writes, “at most, it reasserts
the fundamental values of humanism”.63 Indeed, Fukuyama’s definition
(which arrives, Badmington notes with some derision, only in the chap-
ter “Readers on Transhumanism and Post/Humanism”) smacks of the
very totalising, statistical model that critical Post/Humanism (and post
structuralism generally) attempts to subvert. Transhumanism has been
criticised by Jurgen Habermas (who is also sceptical of Post/Humanism),
fearing that biotechnologies will have adverse effects on equality and free-
dom: “We cannot rule out that knowledge of one’s own hereditary fea-
tures as programmed may prove to restrict the choice of an individual’s
life, and to undermine the essentially symmetrical relations between free
and equal human beings”.64 Habermas, like Fukuyama, sees worth in the
notion of the rational, liberal humanist subject but sees it as a process that
requires working through rather than abandoning. For Habermas, the
Enlightenment is an “unfinished project”.65
In this regard we might also take the liberal humanist subject born
of the Enlightenment as a similarly “unfinished project”. Badmington
finds Derrida most useful in this regard, arguing that, “precisely because
Western philosophy is steeped in humanist assumptions, he [Derrida]
observed, the end of Man is bound to be written in the language of Man”.
Derrida’s work, “testifies to an endless opposition from within the tradi-
tional account of what it means to be human. Humanism never manages
to constitute itself; it forever rewrites itself as posthumanism”.66 This pro-
cess is ongoing and inevitable: “humanism cannot escape its ‘post-’”.67
For this reason this book refers to critical-philosophical posthumanism
as Post/Humanism. This conception of the “Post/Human” is indebted
to Elaine L. Graham who uses this term rather than the more common
“posthuman” (or even “post-human”) because it suggests “a questioning
of both the inevitability of a successor species and of there being a con-
sensus surrounding the effects of technologies on the future of humanity”
and that the Post/Human is “that which both confounds but also holds
up to scrutiny the terms on which the quintessentially human will be con-
ceived”.68 It is necessary then to address questions of power and social
divisions if such technologies are not to rapidly exacerbate already existing
social divides, such as the creation of technologically enhanced “upper
class” and a “merely human” lower class. As such scholars have called
attention to what they see as a lack of rigour in the speculative/popular
mode of much Transhumanist literature. With these criticisms in mind,
this chapter turns its attention from the techno-scientific speculations of
Transhumanism to the philosophical interrogations of Post/Humanism.
POST/HUMAN BODIES
In its critical guise, Transhumanism becomes Post/Humanism. For schol-
ars in this tradition, posthumanism becomes either an interrogation of, or
an outright denial of, Enlightenment humanism. More explicitly, Pepperell
has argued that posthumanism signals the end of “that long-held belief in
the infallibility of human power and the arrogant belief in our superiority
and uniqueness”.69 To clarify the difference: whereas Transhumanism is
largely situated within an Enlightenment discourse of self-improvement
and progress, for critical Post/Humanists, “the Posthuman is a condition
in which the foundational status of humanism has been undermined…
expressed in the postmodern incredulity towards Enlightenment narra-
tives of emancipation and material progress”.70 Drawing from post struc-
turalism, feminism, science and technology studies, post colonialism, and
even fictional narratives, Post/Humanism may be thought of as “a general
22 S. JEFFERY
critical space in which then techno-cultural forces which both produce and
undermine the stabilities of the categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’
can be investigated”.71 Before proceeding it is worth clarifying what this
means. Badmington concisely defines Humanism as “a discourse which
claims that the figure of ‘Man’…naturally stands at the centre of things;
is entirely distinct from animals, machines, and other nonhuman entities;
is absolutely known and knowable to ‘himself’; is the origin of meaning
and history; and shares with all other human beings a universal essence”.72
The discourse of Humanism hinges on a variety of binary oppositions to
assert its absolutist assumptions, such as human/inhuman, natural/cul-
tural, normal/abnormal and so on.
The Enlightenment project, in figuring the human subject as a rational,
autonomous subject possessed of a unique “essence” later incorporated
the discoveries of Darwin in positing an evolutionary vision of constant
progress and improvement for individuals and society as whole. However,
while the revolutionary narratives of the Enlightenment re-envisioned
“man” as rational, autonomous and free so as to challenge the oppressive
feudal order of the time, these narratives have been challenged in turn
and “the emancipator impulse of liberal humanism has come to be under-
stood as being unwittingly complicit in colonialist, patriarchal and capital-
ist structures”.73 Thus, a new figure, the Post/Human, emerges to fill the
void left by (or perhaps simply to hasten) the “death of man”. Nietzsche’s
work played an important role in the development of Post/Humanist
thought.74 This can be seen most clearly in the view that Humanism is lit-
tle more than a secular theism, “a slave morality”, as Nietzsche would have
it. Nietzsche introduced the Post/Human figure of the Ubermensch as a
corrective to this. Later “anti-humanist” thinkers such as Michel Foucault,
who cited Nietzsche as a formative influence, saw the creation of subjects
by the mechanisms of the Enlightenment project as a political question.
The supposedly objective, rationalist pursuit of truth was, in fact, a ques-
tion of power. As Newman summarises, “it is through ‘regimes’ of truth
that individuals are dominated, pinned to an identity that is constructed
for them…these identities which constrain the individual are made pos-
sible precisely through absolute discourse on truth and morality”.75 For
Foucault, as for Nietzsche, humanism was “everything in Western civiliza-
tion that restricts the desire for power”.76 Foucault’s project then, has been
said to be the creation of “new conceptual spaces in which the individual
can explore new subjectivities and not be limited by essence…rather than
achieving a stable identity that will become colonized by power”77; that is
to say, shaped by discourses. It should be remembered that for Foucault

it was bodies that these discursive regimes worked on and through, and
his notions of “bio-power” and “governmentality” have also been cred-
ited with hastening the turn to embodiment in the social sciences.78 This,
“growing awareness of changing modes of governmentality… [And]
attempts to manage differentiated populations”79 helped foster a socio-
logical interest in the state’s attempts to control bodies en masse.80
As Snyder and Mitchell summarise, “Foucault’s influence on body
studies came about primarily through his ability to provide a working
methodology for historicizing the institutional production of embodied
subjectivities…[becoming] the basis for deflecting empirical practices back
onto institutions and the professionals who staffed them”.81 For Foucault,
“…bodies are constituted within the specific nexus of culture or discourse/
power regimes…there is no materiality or ontological independence of the
body outside of any one of these specific regimes”.82 As Foucault himself
put it, “nothing in man- not even his body-is sufficiently stable to serve as
the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men”.83 The main
point of interest here is Foucault’s contention that the body is shaped
by “a great many distinct regimes” which reach “into the very grain of
individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and
attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives”.84 Put
another way, “the body is directly involved in a political field; power-rela-
tions have an immediate hold on it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture
it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.”85 The
body is shaped by the institutions of its socio-historical moment. In spite
of this, there remain concerns over the ontological status of the body in
Foucault’s thinking. For Foucault, “the body is not only given meaning
by discourse, but is wholly constituted by discourse…the body is present
as a topic of discussion, but is absent as a focus of investigation”.86 It is
for this reason that other theorists, while still acknowledging a debt to
Foucault, have tried to engage with the body as a material object as much
as a discursive one.
As a result of these abiding concerns, theoretical approaches to the
body can be said to be marked by its own dualism between “discursive”
and “pre-discursive” bodies. Butler has observed that the argument that
“the body is a site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe them-
selves…invariably suggests that there is a body that is in some sense
there, pregiven, existentially available to become the site of its own osten-
sible construction”.87 Many of these works position the body as “socially
24 S. JEFFERY
constructed”, “an umbrella term used to denote those views which sug-
gest that the body is somehow shaped, constrained and even invented by
society”.88 Yet the impossibility of locating this pre-discursive body can
easily lead to a situation where “natural essentialism is displaced by dis-
cursive essentialism…society is brought so far into the body that the body
disappears as phenomenon that requires detailed historical investigation in
its own right”.89 Siebers categorises approaches to social constructionism
as weak or strong. While in its weak version social constructionism “posits
that the dominant ideas, attitudes and customs of a society influence the
perception of bodies”, the strong version “posits that the body does not
determine its own representation in any way because the sign precedes the
body in the hierarchy of signification”.90 Instead, the body is perceived as
merely a text, “a writing surface on which messages can be inscribed”.91
While generally acknowledging that the social constructionist perspective
has been useful in revealing the dynamics of power/knowledge and the
malleable nature of discourses and the creation of subjects, others have
found the perceived lack of a living, breathing body at the heart of such
views troublesome.
It now becomes possible to suggest that the common threads that link
together work on bodies (both human and posthuman) are concerned
with social construction and, most often linked to this, control and reg-
ulation of bodies.92 The notion of the posthuman bodies thus emerges
“out of a disenchantment that is both anti-aesthetic and anti-scientific”,93
and as a reaction to increasing techno-scientific developments that not
only place stresses and controls on the body but confuse the boundaries
between them.94 As Seltin puts it, “the cyborg and the post-human appear
in a range of academic disciplines as symbols of radical change, signifying
a range of breaks with past bodies, past modes of subjectivity and past
humanities”.95 Post/Humanism can be seen as the point(s) where post
structuralism, constructionism, feminism, techno-science, and science fic-
tion converge upon the body and represent a challenge not just to our
understanding of body-subjects and the relationship between macro- and
micro social processes.
The figure of the posthuman embodies the interrelatedness and mutual
dependency of nature-culture or micro and macro. For example, how
bodies shape and are shaped by cities96 or describing how the emerging
bio-technologies, in allowing for genetic modification, make “‘nature’
effectively enculturated”.97 The posthuman body does not exist abstractly
outside of political economy. Rather, “the very body of the cyborg is
structured and dictated on every level by capital” to the degree that “the
intimate interfaces and co-pollution of technologies and bodies can only
be understood in terms of capital and capital production”.98 Where post-
humanism departs from classical understandings of labour and production
is that it does not privilege “labour-as-identity”, or indeed any fixed, and
therefore exclusionary, Humanist identity, but instead tries to reconcep-
tualise the relationship and power differentials between technology, infor-
mation, production and the body.99
THE CYBORG MANIFESTO

It can be suggested that these concerns first crystallised in Donna
Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985.100 Rosi Braidotti views Haraway’s
work as a “pioneering effort to set up a connection between the culture
of contemporary bio-technological sciences and that of human and social
sciences”.101 McCracken situates Haraway’s concept of the cyborg within
the same spectrum of “suspicion of ‘grand narratives’ that has upset many
of the carefully constructed [humanist] projects of emancipation in twen-
tieth century… [designed to] interrogate the central role of the liberal
individual as the assumption around which most science works”.102 It was
with deliberate irony then that Haraway plucked the Transhuman vision of
the cyborg from the military-industrial complex. The term “cyborg” was
coined in the 1960s by NASA scientists in search of ways to make humans
better adapted to space travel. A contraction of the terms “cybernetic”
and “organism”, the cyborg is a fusion of biology and technology, the
natural and the artificial, functioning as a single being. Such figures have
long been a staple of science-fiction but with the rise of communication
technologies and other advances, Haraway was able to offer the cyborg as
“a postmodern metaphor for the contemporary subject”.103 Importantly,
this figuration is not just an abstract exercise but also a political one, for
the cyborg is a being who encompasses and articulates, “the kind of hybrid
identities produced by the new global economy…both local and global,
regional and transcultural, biological and technological”.104
Indeed Haraway’s project was in part a response to the limitations of
Second Wave feminism and its failure to account for other subaltern iden-
tities. With the proclamation that she would “rather be a cyborg than
a goddess”,105 Haraway was providing at once an emancipatory meta-
phor for a more plural feminism; a break (or rather, a mutation) from the
association (by both some feminists and patriarchal discourse) of women
26 S. JEFFERY
with nature and men with science and technology; and a questioning of
anthropocentric thought. Haraway’s cyborg is a “feminist project located
in a desire to reconstitute identity politics”,106 an analytical category and
form of subjective consciousness: “a tool of empowerment that confronts
basic modernistic and oppressive socio-cultural dualistic assumptions”.107
Once again, Post/Humanism can in large part be distinguished from the
Enlightenment values that inform Transhumanism.
The concerns of cyborg theory and its Post/Human kin are more phil-
osophically rigorous than Transhumanism’s often uncritical desire for sim-
ply enhancing human bodies with technology. As Miah notes, “Haraway’s
claims about cyborgs were not based on an interest to enhance humanity,
but intended to disrupt uniform ideas about what it means to be human
and the social and political entitlements this might imply”.108 Indeed,
Haraway has been explicit about her debt to the theoretical tradition
of the Frankfurt School, describing the cyborg as an “act of resistance”
against the “prevailing scientific consensus”.109 As such, Haraway is suspi-
cious of the idea that posthumanism is “located in the prospect of radical
futures [as with Transhumanism] rather than socio-cultural reform”,110
and has responded to this development by extending her work on the
cyborg to the concept of “companion species”, a concept that, “simi-
larly interrogates the human…[by considering] how humans live among
other, non-human entities”.111 It will soon become evident that much
of the literature of critical Post/Humanism owes some sort of debt to
Haraway’s cyborg and is involved in a similar interrogation of humanist
(and Transhumanist/techno-scientific) assumptions.
FROM CYBORG TO POST/HUMAN

Cultural theorists in the wake of Haraway’s cyborg have developed a vari-
ety of approaches to Post/Humanism. Many critical Post/Humanists are
themselves engaged in a debate with Transhumanism. This frequently takes
the form of highlighting the humanist tendencies in Transhumanism. Cook
accuses the Transhumanists (in their earlier incarnation as Extropians) of
paradoxically maintaining “a nostalgia for the phallogocentric legacy of
patriarchal control and power and by creating a hierarchical dualistic sys-
tem based on difference”112 that separates the enhanced from the merely
human and whose desire for progress based on reason recreates a hierar-
chical Cartesian division. Burfoot makes the case, summarised by Simon,
for a “materialist approach to posthumanism that is wary of masculine
desires for an unaccountable transcendence or dissolution of the wholis-

tic or ‘formative’ body’”.113 N. Katherine Hayle’s influential book How
We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and
Informatics (1999), traces the history and discourse of cybernetics in
science fact and science fiction. Disturbed by roboticist Hans Moravec’s
ambition of uploading human consciousness into a computer, she writes:
“How, I asked myself, was it possible for someone of Moravec’s obvi-
ous intelligence to believe that mind could be separated from body? Even
assuming such a separation was possible, how could anyone think that
consciousness in an entirely different medium would remain unchanged,
as if it had no connection to embodiment?”114 For Hayles, this aspect of
Transhumanist philosophy, in conceptualising the human self as merely a
pattern of information, and moreover, conceptualising information itself
as something “distinct from the material substrate in which it is embed-
ded…[creates a] dichotomy played out as the belief that information cap-
tured all that was essential about the organism”115 and that the body was
just excess meat.
In privileging the mind over the body or the message over the
medium, Moravec and others recreate the same Cartesian mind/body
opposition that characterised, it is argued, the very Enlightenment proj-
ect, and liberal humanist subject, that post-structuralist critical theorists
attempt to dismantle. This has much in common with Haraway’s stance
on Transhumanism outlined above; technological change, even radical
technological change, cannot fulfil its emancipatory potential without
an accompanying change in the power/knowledge matrix from which
such technologies emerge. The insinuation being that without working
through the human that lies within the figure of the posthuman, the same
abuses of power and inequalities are liable to be repeated with ever more
speed and efficiency, not to mention the as yet unimagined consequences
that might result from posthuman technologies.
The uneasy and often unspoken relationship between Transhumanism
and Post/Humanism can be demonstrated by a debate in the pages of the
Journal of Evolution and Technology, a peer-reviewed e-journal formerly
known as the Journal of Transhumanism. The debate centres on a piece
by Sorgner116 written in response to Bostrom’s History of Transhumanist
Thought,117 in which he writes that, “despite some surface-level similarities
with the Nietzschean vision, Transhumanism – with its Enlightenment
roots, its emphasis on individual liberties, and its humanistic concern for
the welfare of all humans (and other sentient beings)—probably has as
28 S. JEFFERY
much or more in common with Nietzsche’s contemporary the English lib-

eral thinker and utilitarian John Stuart Mill”.118 In essence, for Bostrom,
“Transhumanism has roots in rational humanism”.119 Indeed, Graham has
noted that Transhumanism, seen through a Nietzschean lens, appears,
“fatally flawed by its inability to shed the vestiges of a Comptean ‘reli-
gion of humanity’”.120 Max More, founder of the now defunct Extropian
movement, takes a more measured stance, suggesting that while there are
indeed parallels between Nietzsche’s thought and some Transhumanist
ideas, “the latter are inspired very selectively”121 by the former. For
instance, while Nietzsche’s concept of self-transformation can be fairly
easily technologised as part of the Transhumanist agenda, his opposi-
tion to the notions of progress and transcendence sit less easily within a
movement drawn to the idea of a technological Singularity. In poststruc-
turalist and postmodernist theory this amounts to a critique of totalising
“grand narratives”, whether about history, society or the self, as poten-
tially, or implicitly, authoritarian. In brief, the key difference between
Transhumanism and Post/Humanism is that the latter does not take the
human for granted. Instead it investigates “what sorts of knowledge for-
mation made humanity a monolith so constructed as to be vulnerable to
collapse […] demonstrating that pure human nature was never so pure,
nor so natural to begin with”.122
POSTHUMAN BODY AS ASSEMBLAGE

Having surveyed the debates within and between Transhumanism and
Post/Humanism, it is now possible to return to the concept of assem-
blages and the rhizome, and how these conceptual tools will be utilised
throughout this book. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts have had some
influence on the development of Post/Humanism. Unsurprising when
much of their thought has close ties to Nietzsche’s early, prescient brand of
Post/Humanism. Tuck points out that Nietzsche’s concept of “drives” is
foundational to their project. These drives are, “those parts of our self that
interpret the world…within ourselves…we can be egoistic, hard-hearted,
magnanimous, just, lenient, can cause pain or give pleasure”.123 Given
this, for Nietzsche as for Deleuze and Guattari, there can be no facts,
only interpretations. Moving ahead a century from the Post/Human as
Ubermensch to the Post/Human as cyborg it is clear that these philoso-
phies remain complementary. As Roden points out, Deleuze can be seen
to, “agree with proponents of cyborg ontology that humans are not unified
subjects but effects of generative systems that can be grafted or iterated

onto other systems when material conditions allow, generating new kinds
of subject effects”.124 For Deleuze and Guattari bodies are “assemblages”
whose, “function or potential or ‘meaning’ becomes entirely dependent
on which other bodies or machines it forms an assemblage with”.125 It is
not that a body’s relations and affects directly determine what it can do.
Instead the body and its relations combine within assemblages.
A drinking-assemblage might for instance comprise
Mouth-water-cup-thirst
Or a reading-assemblage (discussed in more detail below) might com-
prise of
Eyes-book-chair-coffee
The relations that make up an assemblage may be drawn from any
domain, symbolic or actual, but the assemblage is always dynamic and
will vary from person to person, body to body, dependent on their own
relations. For example some reading assemblages might comprise eyes-
glasses-bed-book-and so on in a multiplicity of directions.
In discursive terms, assemblages can be formed from a multiplicity of
ideas, thoughts, pieces of data and discursive moments. Taken together
these assemblages form “plateaus”. Deleuze and Guattari describe a pla-
teau as, “any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial
underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome”.126
Assemblages link the body to the social and cultural environment, defin-
ing its capacities and limits. Nevertheless, the body always retains the pos-
sibility of forming new relations, new assemblages that offer the possibility
of becoming otherwise. For as Malins describes it: “the body retains its
own impetus…for forming assemblages which allow desire to flow in dif-
ferent directions, producing new possibilities and potentials…brief lines of
movement away from organization and stratification and toward a Body
without Organs (BwO); in other words, towards a disarticulated body
whose organs (and their movements and potentials) are no longer struc-
tured in the same way, or structured at all”.127
The linking of one machinic assemblage with another can result in
what Deleuze and Guattari term “becomings”. A becoming is “born
of a machinic assemblage in which each term deterritorializes the other
to become something else entirely”.128 Becoming is “to affect and be
affected”,129 a process of change or movement within an assemblage. For
Malins, understanding how machinic assemblages prevent or facilitate
(territorialising or deterritorialising) these becomings is an ethical one;
30 S. JEFFERY
“an assemblage becomes ethical or unethical depending on the affects

it enables and the potentials it opens up or blocks. It becomes ethical
when it enables the body to differentiate from itself and go on becoming-
other”.130 To take an example from Carstens, “in terms of the environ-
mental crisis, the assemblage people might make while becoming-tree, or
becoming-animal may expand our sense of interconnectivity with other
beings and the land”.131 For human bodies this can mean the masoch-
ist’s breasts become for whipping or that the anorexic’s mouth becomes
for emptying the stomach or the skin becomes a canvass for the tattooed
body. If a particular assemblage is repeated too often through habit how-
ever, the components of that assemblage can become stratified and coded.
A reterritorialisation occurs. Even so, a body’s becoming remains always
transitional because, “a body-in becoming soon re-stratifies: either cap-
tured by or lured by the socius…[but]…these territorializations are also
never fully complete: a living desiring body will always form new assem-
blages that have the potential to transform it and its territories”.132
This book concerns itself with the posthuman body in superhero com-
ics. The posthuman body, then, can be understood as a rhizome, made
up of discursive plateaus, or assemblages formed between art, science and
society. The Superhuman is not a totality in which the components are
fixed. As an assemblage, those same components can play different roles
in diverse assemblages. Relations between components are thus only con-
tingently obligatory. In Deleuze and Guattari’s own words, “assemblages
have elements (or multiplicities) of several kinds: human, social, and tech-
nical machines…We can no longer even speak of distinct machines, only
types of interpenetrating multiplicities that at any given moment form a
single machinic assemblage”.133 The meaning, function or identity of any
given assemblage emerges only through the interaction between its parts.
No single component can be said to be the essence of the assemblage
because any component is itself a multiplicity rather than a unified object.
This book argues that the posthuman body is best understood as a
rhizome formed by the multiplicity of connections between the assem-
blages, or discursive plateaus, of Post/Humanism, Transhumanism and
Superhumanism by analysing how and why the posthuman body has
taken on particular, contingent forms at various historical junctures.
Remembering that assemblages are formed by and from relations between
material entities like human bodies, comic books or technologies, as well
as expressions about these material entities in the forms of laws, ideolo-
gies and symbols, this book highlights both the connections and ruptures
between the discursive realms of Trans, Post/and Super-Humanisms,

emphasising not what these assemblages “are”, but what they can do
when they connect with other assemblages. What happens, for instance,
when the posthuman body plugs into a state-machine, a countercultural
machine, or a corporate machine? As Deleuze and Guattari ask, “given a
certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a cer-
tain machine, what can it be used for? Can we possibly guess, for instance,
what a knife rest is used for if all we are given is a geometrical description
of it?”134 Specifically, what happens when the Superhuman assemblage is
plugged into the Transhuman and Post/Human assemblages? And what
becomings are facilitated when reading-assemblages are formed?
NOTES
1. Roden, D. (2009) A Defence of Pre-Critical Posthumanism [Online]
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2. Simon, B. (2003) Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures.
Cultural Critique 53: pp. 1–9.
3. Castree and Nash (2004) Introduction: Posthumanism in question. Environ-
ment and Planning, 36(8) pp. 1341–43.
4. Ibid., p. 1342.
5. Ibid.
6. Braun, B. (2004) Querying Posthumanisms. Geoforum, 35(3) pp. 269–273.
7. McCracken, S. (1997) Cyborg fictions: the cultural logic of posthumanism,
Socialist Register. London: Merlin Press. pp. 288–301.
8. Panelli, R. (2009) More-than-human social geographies: posthuman and
other possibilities. Progress in Human Geography, 34, pp. 79–87.
9. Badmington, N. (2000) Posthumanism. New York: Palgrave p. 8.
10. Ibid.
11. Cited in Carstens, J. P. (2005) Techno Genetrix: Shamanizing the New
Flesh – Cyborgs, Virtual Interfaces and the Vegetable Matrix in SF.
MA. University of South Africa. p. 13.
12. Badmington, N. Posthumanism. p. 8.
13. Locke, S. (2005) Fantastically reasonable: ambivalence in the representation
of science and technology in super-hero comics. Public Understanding of
Science 14(1) pp. 26.
14. Klugman, C. M. (2001) From cyborg fiction to medical reality. Literature
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15. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
New York; Routledge. p. 149.
32 S. JEFFERY
16. Braidotti, R (2006) Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process
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18. McCracken, S. (1997) Cyborg fictions: the cultural logic of posthumanism,
Socialist Register. London: Merlin Press, 288–301. p. 289.
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29. Ibid.,
30. Ibid., p. 641.
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p. 39.
36. Ibid., p. 42.
37. Ibid., p. 43.

38. Ibid.
39. Hall, S. (1985) Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the
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40. Ibid., p. 112.
41. Currier, D. (2003) Feminist technological futures: Deleuze and body/tech-
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42. Hall, S. (1985) Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the
Post-Structuralist Debates p. 94.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
46. Bostrom, N. (2003) The Transhumanist FAQ, v. 2.1. [online] Available from:
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Evolution and Technology, 14(1) pp. 1–41.
48. Roden, A Defence of Pre-Critical Posthumanism.
49. Wilson, S. and Haslam, N. (2009) Is the future more or less Human?
Differing Views of Humanness in the Posthumanism Debate. Journal for the
Theory of Social Behaviour, 39(2) p. 249.
50. Ibid.
51. Roden, A Defence of Pre-Critical Posthumanism p. 2.
52. For example: Zimmerman, 2009, and Graham, 2002.
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55. See also Ascott (2006) Larkin (2005) Slattery (2008), York (1995) and
Tramacchi (2000, 2006).
56. Bainbridge, W. S. (2005) The Transhuman Heresy. Journal of Evolution and
Technology, 14(2) pp. 1–10.
57. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_docu-
ments/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040723_communion-stewardship_en.html
[accessed 14/06/2015].
58. Wilson, S. and Haslam, N. (2009) Is the future more or less Human? Differing
Views of Humanness in the Posthumanism Debate p. 253.
59. Bostrom, A History of Transhumanist Thought p. 18.
60. Fukuyama, F. (2002) Our Posthuman Future. London: Profile Books. p. 7
(italics added for emphasis).
61. Badmington, N. (2004) Mapping Posthumanism. Environment and Planning,
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34 S. JEFFERY
63. Ibid., p. 97.

64. Habermas, J. (2003) The Future of Human Nature. Oxford. Blackwell.
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66. Badmington, Posthumanism. p. 9.
67. Ibid.
68. Graham, Representations of the Post/human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in
Popular Culture.p. 11.
69. Pepperell, R. (1995) The Post-Human Condition. Oxford: Intellect Books
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70. Roden, A Defence of Pre-Critical Posthumanism, p. 1.
71. (Waldby 2000, cited in Simon, B. (2003) Introduction: Toward a Critique
of Posthuman Futures. Cultural Critique 53: p. 3.
72. Badmington, Mapping Posthumanism p. 1345.
73. Simon, Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures, p. 4.
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76. Foucault 1977, cited in Ibid. p. 228.
77. Ibid. p. 232.
78. See, for example, Shilling 2005; Goto 2004.
79. Shilling, C. (2007) Sociology and the Body: Classical Traditions and New
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80. Lupton, D. (2006) (ed.) Medicine as Culture. London: Sage. p. 34.
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86. Shilling, C. (2003) The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage, p. 65.
87. Butler, J. (1989) Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions, p. 601.
88. Shilling, C, The Body and Social Theory, p. 62.
89. Ibid., p. 71.
90. Siebers T. (2001) Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the

New Realism of the Body. American Literary History, 13(4) pp. 738–739.
91. Grosz 1990:62, cited in Lupton, Lupton, Medicine as Culture, p. 41.
92. Morgan, D. and Scott, S. (eds) (1993) Body Matters. London: Routledge,
p. viii.
93. Halberstam, J. and Livingstone, I. (1995) Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, p. 1.
94. Shilling 1993, 2005, 2007.
95. Seltin, J. (2009) Production of the Post-Human: Political Economies of
Bodies and Technology. Parrhesia, 8, p. 43.
96. Cregan, K. (2006) The Sociology of the Body: Mapping the Abstraction of
Embodiment. London: Sage.
Popular Culture p. 121.
98. Seltin, Production of the Post-Human: Political Economies of Bodies and
Technology, p. 51.
99. Ibid.
100. Later published in 1991s Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature. New York; Routledge.
101. Braidotti, Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology,
p. 197.
102. McCracken, Cyborg fictions: the cultural logic of posthumanism, p. 289.
103. Phoca, S. (2001) Feminism and Gender. In Gamble, S. (ed) (2001) The
Routledge Companion to Feminism and Post feminism. London: Routledge,
p. 55.
104. McCracken, Cyborg fictions: the cultural logic of posthumanism, p. 295.
105. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, p. 181.
107. Cook, P.S. (2004) The Modernistic Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway.
In Social Change in the 21st Century Conference, Centre for Social Change
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108. Miah, Posthumanism: A Critical History, p. 78.
109. Cited in Murdoch, J. (2004) Mapping Posthumanism. Environment and
Planning, 36, p. 1357.
111. Ibid.
112. Cook, The Modernistic Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway, p. 6.
113. Cited in Simon, Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures, p. 6.
114. Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. p. 1.
36 S. JEFFERY
115. Hayles, N. K. (2003) Afterword: The Human in the Posthuman. Cultural
Critique, 53, p. 136.
116. Sorgner S. L. (2009) Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism.
Journal of Evolution and Technology, 20(1) pp. 29–42.
117. Bostrom, A History of Transhumanist Thought.
118. Ibid., pp. 4–5.
119. Ibid., p. 3.
Popular Culture, p. 66.
121. More, M. (2010) The Overhuman in the Transhuman. Journal of Evolution
and Technology 21(1) 1–4.
122. Kelp-Stebbins, K. (2012) “Hybrid heroes and graphic posthumanity:
Comics as a media technology for critical posthumanism.”, in Studies in
Comics 3.2, p. 333.
123. Quoted in Tuck, Breaking up with Deleuze: desire and valuing the irreconcilable,
pp. 639.
124. Roden, D. (2010) Deconstruction and excision in philosophical posthu-
manism. Journal of Evolution and Technology 21:1, p. 32.
125. Malins, P. (2004) Machinic assemblages: Deleuze, Guattari and Ethico-
aesthetics of Drug Use. Janus Head 7(1), p. 85.
126. Deleuze, G. and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press., p. 2.
127. Malins, Machinic assemblages: Deleuze, Guattari and Ethico-aesthetics of
Drug Use, p. 88.
128. Hainge, G. (2006). Interdisciplinarity in rhizome minor: On avoiding rigor
mortis through a rigorous approach to jazz, metal, wasps, orchids and other
strange couplings. In Ramière, N. and Varshney, R. (Ed.), Rhizomes: Connecting
Languages, Cultures and Literatures Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing. p. 10.
129. Mercieca, D. and Mercieica, D. (2010) Opening Research to Intensities:
Rethinking Disability Research with Deleuze and Guattari. Journal of
Philosophy of Education 44(1), p. 86.
Drug Use, p. 102.
131. Carstens, J. P. (2005) Techno Genetrix: Shamanizing the New Flesh – Cyborgs,
Virtual Interfaces and the Vegetable Matrix in SF. MA. University of South
Africa , p. 56.
Drug Use, p. 88.
133. Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, p. 36.
134. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, p. 3.
The Rhizome of Comic Book Culture
In his study of comic book readers, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and
True Believers,1 Matthew J. Pustz describes comic book culture as being
possessed of its own distinctive knowledges, practices and language; its
own canons and special form of literacy. In this sense, building upon the
ideas introduced in the last chapter, comic book culture can be consid-
ered as a rhizome formation, emerging from the interactions between
a multiplicity of reader-assemblages, comic book-assemblages, creator-
assemblages, corporate-assemblages and critical-assemblages. The fol-
lowing chapter introduces this concept in more detail, illustrating it with
specific examples from comic book culture. In particular, this chapter
demonstrates how many of the recurring debates within the critical study
of superheroes can best be reconfigured through the use of Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept of the rhizome and assemblages. This is highlighted
in three main ways. Firstly, how the rhizome can be used as a model
of comic book continuity; secondly, how a “rhizo-analysis” moves the
analysis of comics away from the binary of criticism/legitimation; and
thirdly (and related to the second point), how the rhizome allows us to
reconceptualise the relationship between readers and texts. In doing so,
this chapter lays the groundwork for the more detailed investigation of
the posthuman body in superhero comic books (and its readers) that
will follow.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_3
38 S. JEFFERY
WHAT IS A COMIC BOOK UNIVERSE?

The fictional, printed worlds which superheroes inhabit are often referred
to as “universes”. The designation of the term universe to Marvel and
DC’s (to choose the two best-known examples) publications is no small
claim and is worth elucidating. The Marvel and DC Universes are popu-
lated by human, posthuman and non-human characters interacting with
one another regularly. These characters live, work and adventure in cities
and countries that are known to exist, such as New York, America, and
others that are fictional, such as Superman’s Metropolis or the Eastern
European country of Latveria, home to Marvel’s Dr. Doom. Outside of
these cities and countries are a large number of hidden cities and coun-
tries—Marvel’s Wakanda for example or DC’s Themyscira, island home
of Wonder Woman. There are also undersea kingdoms; both Marvel
and DC are home to versions of Atlantis, where they house Namor and
Aquaman respectively. This is Earth in Marvel and DC universes. Each
of these Earths, in turn, exists within a widely populated solar system.
In the outer space of Marvel there exist the long-warring alien races of
the Krees and Skrulls, the space-faring Shi’ar Empire and alien demi-gods
such as Galactus and Thanos. DC’s space-opera element includes the plan-
ets Rann and Thanagar, the planet Oa, home to the Guardians, creators of
the Green Lantern Corps. At the lower end of the scale are found micro-
scopic universes, and beyond the material cosmos are immaterial, magical
realms. Gods, both from pre-existing and imaginary pantheons populate
these dimensions.
Without delving further into the metaphysics of comic book universes,
the scale of such constructs should, by now, be apparent. The notion of the
shared universe has become so central to the superhero genre that writers
outside of the “big two” of Marvel and DC deliberately set stories in pre-
existing universes laden with implied history, as in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City
or Alan Moore’s ABC line of comics. Even Marvel’s own Ultimate line,
which was set up in 2000 as an alternate universe in which new readers
could enjoy updated versions of characters such as Ultimate Spider-Man
or Ultimate Fantastic Four without the baggage of continuity has, in the
last ten years, developed its own levels of complexity (compounded by a
handful of crossovers with the regular Marvel Universe). These Universes
also have timelines onto which war heroes, western characters, pirates,
first men on Earth and last men on earth can be fitted. Their futures also
diverge into parallel timelines, creating alternate universes, meaning that
THE RHIZOME OF COMIC BOOK CULTURE 39
the Marvel and DC Universes are, in fact, multiverses. That Marvel and
DC have also crossed over with one another suggests that those two mul-
tiverses themselves exist within a multiverse of yet higher order.
To avoid confusion, companies will sometimes declare comics as offi-
cially continuous or discontinuous. In the Superman comics of the Silver
Age, the term “imaginary story” was often used, denoting, “not fiction-
ality […] but rather a state of unreality within the rules of continuity:
it is ‘imaginary’ because it does not have consequences or connection
within the network”.2 Until recently, DC has designated such stories under
the title Elseworlds. The mini-series and graphic novels presented under
this imprint tell stories where familiar DC heroes are, according to the
imprint’s tagline, “taken from their usual settings and put into strange
times and places—some that have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t
or shouldn’t exist”.3 For instance, Superman: Red Son4 takes place in a
universe where the infant Superman landed in Russia rather than America.
Whilst most of the Elseworlds tales take place in Universes distinct from
the continuity of DC’s main line of titles, the long-running Marvel series
What If..? examines parallel universes born from minor divergences in
mainstream Marvel continuity. For both fans and creators the nature
of these multiple universes has been a consistent source of fascination.
In the late 1970s, before entering the industry proper, the late comic
writer-editor Mark Gruenwald published a fanzine titled Omniverse: The
Journal of Fictional Reality. Dealing primarily with issues of continuity
it featured articles such as, “A Treatise on Reality in Comic Literature”,
which attempted to systematise parallel dimensions and time travel in
comic books. The concept of the “Omniverse” itself can be thought of a
structure containing the sum total of all universes. DC Comics had their
multiverse and Marvel Comics had one of their own, but both were subdi-
visions of the same overarching Omniverse (which also encompassed every
other fictional reality).
Attempts to conceptualise such a theoretical structure have existed
before. Perhaps the most celebrated are to be found in the works of
Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges, particularly his short stories the
Garden of Forking Paths and the Library of Babel.5 It should not be surpris-
ing to hear that another of Borges’s variations on this theme, The Aleph,
“a point in space and time that contains all other points”6 – has found its
way into the comic book continuity of the DC Universe via Alan Moore’s
run on Saga of the Swamp Thing. The Aleph also appears in Moore’s
Image series 1963, meaning it contains not just all other points in the DC
40 S. JEFFERY
Universe, but, like the Omniverse, all fictional realities. In Warren Ellis
and John Cassaday’s Planetary, there is the concept of the “snowflake”.
Described as, “the shape of reality”, it represents the Multiverse as a “the-
oretical snowflake existing in 196, 833 dimensional space”.7 As the snow-
flake rotates, each element of the snowflake also rotates, with each rotation
describing a new universe, containing a new earth. In DC’s The Kingdom,
Hypertime was introduced and described as, “the vast, interconnected web
of parallel timelines which comprise all reality”.8 Hypertime comprises a
central timeline (the DC Universe main continuity) that flows like a river
but with an infinite number of tributaries branching off and forming alter-
nate timelines. Most off these alternate timelines are never encountered
again. Rather than the central timeline being the “true” timeline however,
other realities can intersect, and frequently do: “sometimes feeding back
into the central timeline, other times overlapping it briefly before charting
an entirely new course”.9 The history of the timeline is therefore changed,
sometimes briefly, sometimes permanently (permanence being a relative
notion here). By feeding back into the timeline, or trunk, these tributary
timelines form a structure with, in fact, no “central” timeline; Hypertime’s
structure is more rhizome than arboreal. The tributaries of continuity do
not simply branch off from a central trunk but back through, under and
over it to such a degree that any central line is impossible to grasp. In
effect, as writer Mark Waid summarised, “it’s all true”.
The concept of comic book continuity is central to the creation of these
universes. As Wolk writes, “superhero comics’ readers understand each
thirty-two page pamphlet as a small element in one of two gigantic nar-
ratives”.10 While narrative continuity may seem a familiar idea to anyone
who has ever watched a soap opera, continuity as practised by Marvel and
DC “is of an order of complexity beyond anything to which the television
audience has become accustomed”.11 Craft calls such constructions “large
scale fiction networks”.12 Within these fiction networks the superheroes of
Marvel and DC can interact with one another, share a history and visit the
same places. Reynolds13 describes three types of continuity. The first type,
serial continuity, is the same as that found in soap operas, which is that
the back-story comprised of all previous issues remains consistent with the
current storyline. This serial continuity is diachronic in that it develops
over time. The second, hierarchical continuity, situate characters within
a hierarchy of power, so that, put simply, Spider-Man could not best the
Hulk in terms of pure strength. Unless, of course a prior change to conti-
nuity resulted in his gaining such powers. Similarly, retroactive changes to
serial continuity can ensure that previous issues are seen in a new light or
ignored entirely (explored in more detail below). Hierarchical continuity
is synchronic and refers to the state of affairs at any given moment. The
third type of continuity identified by Reynolds is structural continuity,
which embraces the previous two, combining the history of the entire uni-
verse with its history at any given point, but also all moments and events
merely implied but not recorded in any specific comic book.
The comics produced by Timely (now Marvel) and National Periodical
(now DC) in the Golden Age of Comics did not set out to create such
complexity. As Craft notes, these universes are “emergent structures”
whose initial parameters of parallel serial narratives created by various art-
ists and writers “resulted, over time, in unpredicted behaviours, specifi-
cally intertextual connectivity and a slowly encroaching sense of narrative
history”.14 The “universe” must be understood as a “retroactive story
structure, which imposes continuity upon all the episodic comic books
published before as well as after the universe’s advent”.15 Here then is the
first indication of the rhizomatic qualities of comic book universes, dis-
playing what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the first two principles of
the rhizome: the “principles of connection and heterogeneity”,16 that any
point in the rhizome can be connected to any other. In continuity terms
it can be said that each issue within the comic book universe can be (and
implicitly must be) connected to every other issue.
The retroactive nature of the universe concept does not simply extend
to Marvel and DC’s history of superhero comics. The superhero comic is
no longer (if it ever was) an identifiable genre. Rather, the superhero genre
is itself an assemblage, made up of heterogeneous, overlapping genres, and
characters drawn from the publishers’ back catalogues. As Jenkins reminds
us, the story of the superhero’s dominance of the medium is also retroac-
tive because from the 1940s to the 1970s, superheroes represented just
20 percent of all American comics.17 Thus, characters from long-forgotten
western, horror and romance titles are liable to find themselves living side-
by-side with superheroes as they are integrated (connected, as an assem-
blage of an assemblage) into the fiction network. Crossover can be seen
as the plugging of one comic book assemblage into another. The comics
can be read separately but together they allow something new to emerge;
a shared comic book universe.
Crossover is essential to the emergence of continuity. The first use of
crossover took place two years after Superman debuted; issue three of
All-Star Comics introduced the Justice Society of America, demonstrating
42 S. JEFFERY
that superheroes with their own serials could exist together. Even so, these
early examples still resulted in self-contained single-issue stories and dem-
onstrated no real character development. It would not be until the Silver
Age that the concepts of crossover and continuity really took effect. In
the Marvel comics of the 1960s, not only did stories run over several
issues but events that happened in one book had repercussions in another.
Characters would meet each other, marry, leave school or have children.
These shared environments have also become central to understanding
the economic imperatives that would come to shape the comic business in
later years (the publishing side at least). As writer Alan Moore has pointed
out, there are “great economic advantages in being able to prop up an
ailing, poor-selling comic book with an appearance by a successful guest
star”.18 As well as crossing paths in individual issues, recent decades have
witnessed company-wide crossover “events” that, “start in one of a house’s
titles and continue over the months in several others, are an effective way
of compelling readers to spend more money”.19 These event comics are
“stories that cross over with scores of ongoing series and may change the
fundamental premises of some of them for as much as a few months”.20
Crisis on Infinite Earths, discussed in more detail below, was created in
response to and as a product of the rhizome of continuity.
THE CORPORATE ASSEMBLAGE

By viewing comic book universes as rhizomes it becomes possible to recon-
ceptualise the relationship between a variety of other assemblages that come
together to form comic book culture, particularly the assemblages of the
corporation, creators, critics and readers. Thus we may begin to ask what
happens when, for example, the corporate assemblage encounters the con-
tinuity assemblage? DC’s 1985 12-issue series Crisis on Infinite Earths,
which emerged as an attempt by DC to “put its house in order”,21 provides
an excellent example of just such an encounter. To understand the impetus
behind its creation it is first necessary to understand a little of DC superhero
history. Following the first appearance of Superman in 1938, DC comics
(as it would later become) ushered in what comic book culture refers to as
the “Golden Age” of comics. Throughout the Golden Age, DC’s pantheon
(which quickly followed Superman with Batman and Wonder Woman)
had been the most successful superheroes of their time. Like all publishers
however, DC found superheroes largely out of fashion in the 1950s and
responded by publishing other genres such as sci-fi and westerns.
Then, in 1956, DC decided to try out an updated version of The Flash

in the anthology title Showcase. The introduction to this new Flash is often
credited with being the beginning of the “Silver Age” of superhero comics.
Following its success, The Flash was then joined by further updated ver-
sions of DC’s Golden Age characters like Green Lantern and Hawkman.
In 1960, DC’s heroes were brought together to form the Justice League
of America just as the heroes of the Golden Age (including the original
Flash) had formed the Justice Society of America. While DC had pub-
lished stories featuring a character with speed-powers named The Flash in
the 1940s, DC editor Julius Schwartz reasoned that few young readers in
1956 would remember the Golden Age version, so while the Silver Age
Flash had the same power of super-speed, he also had a new secret iden-
tity and new “scientific” origin. Importantly, the introduction of this new
Flash plays an interesting meta-textual hand when the reader is introduced
to protagonist Barry Allen, himself reading an issue of Flash Comics, the
very comic that the Golden Age Flash appeared in.
As Craft recognises, the manner in which this new Flash’s story is pre-
sented “establishes that his ‘origin’ is not only the beginning of a new
narrative but a continuation of a history of the fiction network, both as
a narrative and as a history of textual production and reception”.22 He
continues, “the story of the Silver Age Flash is, then, at its outset a dia-
logue between a narrative space—the fictional world of Barry Allen—and
a text, Flash Comics, which occurs in both that space and in the read-
er’s reality: an emblem of the universe not as a simple continuing nar-
rative but a serial dialogue involving both things represented and their
representations”.23 In the 1961 story Flash of Two Worlds, this dialogic
exchange was literalised when Barry Allen was able to cross the barrier
between dimensions, finding himself in the world of his “fictional” inspi-
ration Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash. This other dimension came to
be known, confusingly, as “Earth-2”, despite the fact that it existed first
(at least in terms of “real world” publication), while “Earth-1” was the
name designated to the world inhabited by the Silver Age heroes. Flash
of Two Worlds was swiftly followed in 1963 by the first crossover between
the Silver Age’s Justice League and the Golden Age Justice Society in
Crisis on Earth One. These “crisis” stories became an annual feature of the
Justice League comic book. The world of DC’s 1940s heroes, “Earth-2”,
was really another dimension, another reality separated by cosmic vibra-
tional frequency. The concept of multiple Earths showed that “instead
of relating to past superheroes through nostalgia or allusion, with a clear
44 S. JEFFERY
hierarchy of representation and reference, the superhero comic book cre-

ates a space where everything can be represented in simultaneity”.24 This
lack of hierarchy is another example of how the structure of continuity
displays rhizomatic qualities.
By 1985, the DC fiction network had become, in the eyes of DC’s
editors, unmanageable. The existence of multiple versions of Batman
and Superman plus the fact that other characters such as Black Canary
had migrated from one Earth to the other was deemed too confusing
for casual readers. Hence, the publication of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the
title of which is a reference to those annual “crises” that bought together
the inhabitants of Earths 1 and 2. Crisis on Infinite Earths tells the story
of the Anti-Monitor, a god-like being who is destroying the multiverse
one universe at a time. This destruction is illustrated by encroaching
white space as each universe is wiped from existence. A neat metaphor: a
blank page where illustrations used to be. Finally, only five Earths remain
and the remaining heroes of each Earth band together to fight the Anti-
Monitor. In the aftermath only one Earth remains, with one timeline and
one Superman, one Batman and so on. The Superman and Lois Lane of
Earth-2, Alexander Luthor of Earth 3 and Superboy of Earth Prime are
all who remain, and they follow Alexander Luthor into what appears to
be Heaven. None of the heroes of this new Earth, indeed, no one in the
universe, has any memory of the crisis ever having happened.
In this new linear continuity, the Golden Age heroes of the Justice
Society were active during the 1940s and seen as a direct inspiration by the
heroes of the Silver Age, explaining why many of these heroes share the
name with their wartime precursors. Also folded into this new Earth were
characters from other companies which DC had since bought the rights
to. Hence, early in Crisis on Infinite Earths, we are introduced to an Earth
that is home to Captain Marvel and the other members of the Marvel fam-
ily. This “Earth-S” as it has come to be known, is a simpler, gentler uni-
verse, because Earth-S is in fact the Fawcett Comics stable of characters,
now “folded into” the DC Universe’s new continuity as if they always had
been there (see also Blue Beetle and the Question, whose “universe” was
the Charlton line of comics). The main goal of Crisis on Infinite Earths
was to tame the anarchic mess of parallel narrative universes and start
anew with a single continuity that would make the DC Universe more
accessible to new readers. As such, stories that had occurred “pre-crisis”
were now deemed outside of the new official continuity; non-canon, and
only of interest in terms of the history of the medium. But as Brooker
writes this territorialisation of the continuity-assemblage by the corporate-

assemblage “also served the purpose of wiping out almost five decades
of superhero history, and re-writing its main characters according to the
more ‘serious’, ‘adult’ ethos of the mid-1980s”.25
However, despite the best intentions of editors and creators, by 1994
DC published the company-wide crossover event Zero Hour to “clean
up” the loose ends of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Twenty years later saw the
publication of Infinite Crisis, in which the Superman and Lois Lane of
Earth-2, along with Alexander Luthor and Superboy-Prime are revealed
not to have been in Heaven but in a kind of pocket dimension outside of
space and time where they have been observing the development of the
new DC Universe. In what functions as a meta-commentary not just on
the narrative history of the DC Universe but also the recent history of the
superhero genre as a whole, Superman of Earth-2 (representative of the
naïveté of the Golden Age of comics) laments the “darkness” of this new
universe. One panel shows a jagged montage of events that happened
since the Crisis and that will be familiar to long-time readers—the Joker’s
murder of Robin in 1986, the breaking of Batman’s back in the 1992
Knightfall crossover, 1992’s Death of Superman. Escaping their pocket
dimension, Earth-2’s Superman, Luthor and Superboy-Prime plan to
return the DC Universe to the supposed innocence of the Golden Age.
A later twist reveals that while Alexander Luthor does plan to undo the
destruction of the multiverse it is not to recreate Earth-2. Instead, he
aims to smash various universes together until he creates what he consid-
ers a perfect Earth. Once again the heroes of multiple earths must band
together to fight the threat to all of their realities. And once again a new
earth is born from the resulting destruction.
The very next year, the series 52 revealed that, in fact, the multiverse
did still exist, albeit now limited to 52 parallel earths. However, this num-
bering of 52 is called into question, for the thoughtful reader, by the
revelation that the WildStorm Universe is revealed as Earth-50. Among
the comics that comprised the WildStorm line was Planetary, which as
stated above, featured the “snowflake”. This would make the multiverse
of the snowflake exist within the multiverse of 52. These developments
give some idea of the number of parallel worlds the committed comic
book reader potentially holds in their mind, and demonstrates the truth
of Klock’s observation that in fact, Crisis on Infinite Earths “would fail
miserably as an attempt at simplification”.26 The events of 52 have since
been superseded by the Flashpoint event, which resulted in a new reboot
46 S. JEFFERY
for DC’s Earth-1 continuity. At the time of writing this new, streamlined
Multiverse is currently undergoing yet another multiversal calamity that
threatens rewrite continuity, as is the Marvel multiverse.
With Crisis on Infinite Earths, the writers and editors at DC attempted
to take the polyvocality of the pre-Crisis multiverse and make it univocal
and, in theory, more marketable with a new “adult ethos” as its “organising
principle”.27 Nevertheless, as O’Sullivan reminds us, “the rhizome is anti-
hierarchical and a-centred… [and] no single organising principle prede-
termines the consistencies and compatibilities between the network of
its elements”.28 This highlights the fourth principle of the rhizome, “the
principle of asignifying rupture”; the continual refiguration of aspects of
the rhizome. If a line in the rhizome is shattered at any given spot it may
start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines, or re-erupt on the
same path as multiple lines. As Deleuze and Guattari themselves put it,
the rhizome “never allows itself to be overcoded…a rhizome may be bro-
ken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old
lines, or on new lines”.29 DC’s attempts at “overcoding” the rhizome with
Crisis on Infinite Earths and later works provide a neat illustration of the
manner in which “these lines always tie back to one another…you may
make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you
will reencounter organizations that restratify everything”.30 Thus the DC
Multiverse is best understood as a fluid structure, one in a perpetual state
of becoming. Most often order emerges from its chaotic flux temporarily,
while sometimes, as with the various crises, an attempt is made to impose
order as if from outside and a restratification occurs. As the return of the
multiverse demonstrates however, it seems that the perspective of readers
and creators shifted from seeing “unwieldy chaos” as a bad thing to seeing
it as “one of the genre’s unique strengths”.31 For the superhero genre, a
rhizomatic structure appears preferable.
CREATOR-ASSEMBLAGES
Given the centrality of continuity to both superhero comics and the inter-
pretive activities of readers it is little surprise that several comics writers,
perhaps most notably Grant Morrison, have demonstrated a marked inter-
est in building connections between the comic-assemblage and the reader’s
reality. This is not a process unique to Morrison; comics have longed dis-
played self-reflexive breakings of the fourth wall, and Morrison’s favourite
trick of appearing in his own fictions was pioneered long before by Jack
Kirby and Stan Lee being turned away for the wedding of Mr. Fantastic
and The Invisible Girl in issue 50 of the Fantastic Four.32 Nevertheless
Morrison has perhaps displayed the keenest awareness of the philosophical
and metaphysical implications of such games.
Morrison’s oeuvre engages in an investigation of reality; the reality of
the DCU and ours. As Pedler astutely observes, “Morrison’s mission…
[is] to make our reality as interesting as theirs, as surreal, full of every
potential and possibility”.33 The rhizome structure of continuity plays an
important part in this mission. Morrison himself explained in an interview
that the theory of Hypertime (discussed earlier), “allowed every comic
story you ever read to be part of larger-scale mega-continuity, which also
include other comic book ‘universes’ as well as the ‘real world’ we live in
and dimensions beyond our own”.34 Morrison is interested in the geo-
metric relationship between the worlds of “fiction” and “reality”. Just as
readers can pick up and leaf through the pages of the comic book because
of their 3-dimensional relationship to the 2-Dimensional DC Universe, so
too might our reality provide a form of entertainment for some hypotheti-
cal higher dimensional beings. In both his work and his life,35 Morrison has
consistently developed this notion in a playful yet deeply sincere attempt
to hook the assemblage that is our reality up to assemblage of superhero
fiction, an attempted deterritorialisation of reality itself. As Pedler puts it,
“it’s not that nothing is real…it’s that everything might be”.36
It is not the intention here to single Morrison out as a true auteur
who transcends the limitations placed on him by corporate-owned, serial,
genre narratives. Reynolds has noted that despite certain more popular
creators constituting a recognisable hierarchy and auteurist flourishes
within the genre, they do not (maybe even cannot if they are to be con-
sidered adequate to the task) negate “the assumption of continuity on
which the prosecution of the continuing saga rests”.37 The Marvel and
DC Universes are not the work of any one person, “but rather the pro-
cess of slow accretion and of the desire to make sense of what were once
quite random choices as they came to impinge on each other”.38 The fic-
tion network of the comic book universe is a collective work of art. As
in the rhizome, there is no real hierarchy (though there may be tempo-
rary takeovers). Of course, these choices will in turn change what came
before and after as new creators add to the continuity rhizome, building
upon, destroying or mutating what has come before: reterritorialisations
and deterritorialisations. This process also demonstrates the third principle
of the rhizome—that of multiplicity. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate this
48 S. JEFFERY
principle with the image of the puppeteer, where the puppet strings “are
tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity
of nerve fibres, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected
to the first”.39 The superhero comic book universe also exceeds itself in
this way. The “supposed will” of the creator or even the corporation are
but themselves further multiplicities.
Morrison’s work then, while undoubtedly interesting on its own, exists
to make connections with other parts of the rhizome and can only really
be understood in terms of those connections. Creators working in this
fashion launch themselves on lines of flight, transforming the rhizome as
they do so and opening up the comic book universe to different becom-
ings. Moreover, it invites the reader into them, reaches out to them and,
potentially at least, affects and is affected by them. The rhizome of conti-
nuity spreads out into the readers “reality”, understood here as merely one
more continuity within the Omniverse—the story of the reader’s “self”.
Corporations, creators, comics and readers are all connected within the
rhizome of comic book culture in this way, making it “overly reductive
to think of the corporation [or creator] as a unitary agent or to think
that its power is absolute”.40 In fact, they must respond to “coherent and
vehement reader communities, which can coalesce around Internet com-
munications and publishing technologies to organize those desires and to
make them known”.41 Some grasp of the development of comics’ fandom
will demonstrate the difficulty in separating the roles of fans and creators,
or even between reader and text.
READER-ASSEMBLAGES
Comics’ fandom, arguably even comics themselves, largely grew out of the
science fiction fandom.42 Indeed, the creators of Superman were highly
active within this already thriving subculture during the 1930s, as was
Julius Schwartz, the highly respected DC comics’ editor who oversaw
Superman’s comics adventures in the 1950s.43 During the Golden Age
of comics, publishers sponsored and controlled their own fan-groups.
Hence, young readers during World War 2 were invited to join Captain
America’s Sentinels of Liberty, for example, while in 1947 the first issue of
Comics Collectors News was published.44 In the 1950s, EC Comics became
the first comics company to seriously engage with their readers. Editor
William Gaines encouraged his “EC addicts” to write in letters that were
published in the back pages of titles such as Tales from the Crypt and Weird
Science. The letters were printed with names and addresses, encouraging
postal correspondence between fans (a feature of early sci-fi fandom) and
providing the building blocks for a growing fan community. EC would
feel the brunt of the comics controversy of the 1950s45 but ironically the
comics controversy and the advent of the Comics Code helped, in a sense,
to foster a sense of community among comics fans by further stigmatising
them46 and thus making the need for legitimation, or conversely, pride in
their outsider status, more pressing.
It was during the Silver Age of the 1960s that the comics fandom
really began to consolidate itself. Marvel Comics picked up where EC had
left off, with Marvel’s editor-in chief and main writer Stan Lee cultivat-
ing a convivial mood of conspiratorial agreement with readers by using
his editorials to flatter their intelligence for choosing Marvel over the
“Distinguished Competition”. Readers were introduced to the “Marvel
Bullpen” as Lee called it in his editorials, “Bullpen Bulletins”. Herein, Stan
Lee would write about the small group of writers (most often Lee himself)
and artists that worked in the Marvel offices. He introduced a policy of
naming the artist, inker and letterer in each comic, more often than not
with nicknames like “Jolly Jack Kirby” or “Swinging Steve Ditko”. Again,
the precedent for this was EC, who had always credited writers and art-
ists. The Silver Age saw a growth in fanzines and the first comic book
conventions where fans could gather with like-minded people to buy, sell
and discuss comics. In a related development, this period also witnessed
the birth of underground “comix”, independently published comics that
dealt, often explicitly, with the concerns of the emerging countercultures
without having to obey the censorious strictures of the Comics Code.
Although some have argued that comix represented an oppositional cul-
ture to the mainstream publishers47, it was the underground comix that
helped pave the way for the consolidation of mainstream comic culture.
The fact that many independent publishers that sprang up to take advan-
tage of the, “informal network of head shops and record stores that were
prime outlets for selling underground ‘comix’”48 also led to the system
that would replace the traditional outlets such as news-stands and gro-
cery stores. This alternative system led to the opening of shops, “devoted
primarily or exclusively to the sale of comic books and commonly oper-
ated by proprietors who were also comic book fans”.49 Wright elaborates
further, “the specialty retailer placed unsold comic books in plastic bags,
50 S. JEFFERY
boxed them, and retailed them—often with higher price tag—as collect-
ible items”.50 The annual Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide debuted
around the beginning of this stage in 1970 and “fan culture became a cot-
tage industry in and of itself”.51 The direct market had proved profitable
for the comic book industry, and had a side effect on the content of comic
books, in that the continuities of the Marvel and DC Universes became
increasingly complex, existing as a feedback loop between fans and cre-
ators and corporations.
Within the rhizome of comic book culture, “corporate creativity, indi-
vidual creativity, and consumer response” are “porous, intertwined and
interdependent categories”.52 The line between fan and creator in the
world of comic books is arguably more porous than any other entertain-
ment industry. At around the same time as the direct market began to
be seeded, “adult fans began moving into the industry as professionals…
fans offered the comics companies a chance to fill the [creative] vacuum
with employees who specifically wanted to write comics and were young
enough not to worry about benefits”.53 Gordon illustrates an impressive
number of creators who moved from the letters pages of Marvel and DC
into the profession itself.54
Conceptualising continuity as rhizome therefore opens up new ave-
nues for exploring the relationship between superhero text and reader.
In the Marvel comics of the 1960s, writer-editor Stan Lee encouraged
Marvel Maniacs to write in with suggestions for stories and team-ups. He
also introduced the “No-Prize”, awarded to correspondents who high-
lighted continuity flaws in the then still-young Marvel Universe and could
come up with imaginative ways of accounting for them. In this way fans
even contribute to continuity structure (even more obviously when fans
become creators themselves). The fanzine Omniverse “discussed parallel
dimensions in almost encyclopaedic detail”, indeed fan fictions and online
blogs like those of Siskoid55 are heavily invested in continuity, in the “con-
sistency and history” of these diegetic universes.56 Kaveney suggests that
because these universes are “the largest narrative constructions in human
culture…that learning to navigate them was a skill-set all of its own”.57
Pustz, too, describes the importance of continuity to long term readers,
noting that for some fans there is even pleasure in the difficulty non-fans
have in comprehending continuity.58 This need not just be a single con-
tinuity either; post-Crisis, comic readers became accustomed to holding
multiple universes in their heads.
CRITICAL-ASSEMBLAGES
Although “comics” have existed for over a century, and the comic book
proper for just less than that, the academic study of comics can still be
said to be, in what Beaty (2004) calls a, “state of infancy”,59 though
the last decade has witnessed an expansion of the volume and scope of
Comics Studies. Nevertheless, Comics Studies has yet to be defined as
clearly bounded discipline. This lack of definition is so acute that in much
scholarly work on comics “the attempt at definition… by now constitutes
a distinct rhetorical convention-a formula or strategy for, in essence, the
initial framing of comics as an object of study”.60 The act of naming and
identifying has been something of a recurring theme, with haggling over
nomenclature plaguing both the subject (“what is Comics Studies?”) and
its object (“what are comics?”). In the meantime, however, both remain
somewhat amorphous in both form and content. This lack of disciplinary
boundaries means that comics scholars are always reliant to some extent
on the work of fans or fan scholars when compiling, say, historical or auto-
biographical material. In lieu of any academic interest until recently, lit-
erature by fans, creators and critics have filled the gap. For Smith, such
non-academic work remains useful because as fans and writer-artists, “they
pay close attention to the production, distribution and circulation con-
texts”.61 As such, any academic approach must draw upon, consolidate
and repurpose such materials, albeit with “greater methodological rigor, a
new kind of critical attention, and a wider relevance”.62
It can be suggested that this mirrors the assemblages formed by readers,
creators and corporations, with the membrane between fan and scholar
being particularly porous. At any rate, the critical-assemblage is engaged
in attempted territorialisation of its object of study, and by extension, the
readers (whether implied or objects of study themselves). As such, many
critical-assemblages are more vociferous in their attempts to strengthen
the barriers. Beaty63 and Smoodin bemoan the perceived lack of critical
perspective in fan-based or popular approaches to comics that Smoodin
calls “individualized, aestheticized, and ultimately depoliticized”.64 For
both, the problem is that much comics scholarship, in attempting to legiti-
mate itself and its area of study, fails as criticism because of a reliance on a
“redemptive critical methodology which stresses the political or aesthetic
worth of comics”.65 For Beaty however, “the place of scholarship is not to
celebrate but to interrogate”.66 There are important historical reasons for
52 S. JEFFERY
this apparent reluctance to “interrogate” comics including a longstanding

academic and cultural prejudice against them.
The earliest moments of critical interest in comics were not of a posi-
tive bent, as evidenced most clearly in the “comics controversy” of the
1950s (itself the subject of much scholarly attention67). Fueled by the
1954 publication of The Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredric Wertham,
who alleged links between comic books and juvenile delinquency, this
moral panic spread as far as the comics themselves, manifesting not only
in America but also Britain and Australia.68 In an effort to protect their
industry from the ensuing moral panic the various publishers decided to
regulate themselves through a self-imposed, and stringent, Comics Code.
The imposition of the code can be seen to have ghettoised comics as chil-
dren’s literature, and the ensuing to have impeded the medium’s devel-
opment as an art form69 and, by extension, as object worthy of academic
attention. One result has been a dichotomy in the study of comics between
arguments that comics are ideological products of socio-economic hege-
mony and, in contrast to this, scholarship that, “celebrates the diversity
and complexity of issues raised in comic books”.70
In the study of superhero comics three arboreal approaches in particu-
lar make frequent appearances, and often work in tandem. The first are
those works that view the superhero as an ideological construct; the sec-
ond comprises the wide range of works that place the superhero within
pre-existing mythological structures, and often draws upon the first; and
the third being strictly formalist analyses that attempt to pin down what
comics are. The application of rhizome and assemblage theory has impor-
tant consequences for these traditionally arboreal approaches. Beginning
with the first, the concept of ideology is generally taken to explain how
people act against their own best interests: “the production of an imagi-
nary dimension that masks oppression…a way of explaining how economic
or material exploitation is masked by images”.71 So. for instance, female
readers of romance novels are, it is supposed, identifying with the ideal of
marriage, thus internalising the demands of patriarchy. As such, “theo-
ries of ideological politics work at a cognitive level and assume that we
are being deceived or misled by power; peel away the power and images
and there we will be”.72 Despite Barker’s73 thorough deconstruction of
the methodological problems and unaddressed assumptions of ideological
readings of comic books, the superhero comic remains a target of such
analyses. Sometimes this idea extends beyond the actual content of any
single text to the very structure of the visual grammar used by such text.
A precedent for this approach can be found Film Studies during the 1970s
when the Screen theorists took these notions of ideology, identification

and representation and began to argue that, in essence, “one could assess the
social impact of a text simply by looking at its structure”.74 The Screen
theorists shifted the analysis of cinema away from the consideration of
the ideological content of individual films to the ways that cinema itself
might interpellate viewers into subject positions based on their identifica-
tion with the characters on screen.75
In Comics Studies, perhaps the most famous analysis of this kind is
Eco’s 1972 Myth of Superman.76 Though Marc Singer77 has corrected sev-
eral recurring misunderstandings about Eco’s essay it remains the most
influential analysis of this kind and has inspired many scholars, rightly or
wrongly, to argue that Superman’s unchanging nature and related failure
to fight injustice on the macro-social level implied “an implicit acceptance
and defense on the hero’s part of the tenets of capitalism and bureau-
cracy”.78 Several later formalist critiques have centred on the serial nature
of superhero narratives. Thomas Andrae elaborates upon Umberto Eco
by claiming that the lack of continuity between issues “reveals a fixed
core that is impervious to substantial change, thereby becoming a vehicle
for the stable reproduction of social relations”,79 and that furthermore,
“the disintegration of time in Superman stories has ominous psychoso-
cial implications”.80 Both Eco and Andrae’s pieces fail to fully grasp the
nature of comic book continuity, which was building as they were writing.
But more recent scholars also make claims about the ideological nature of
comic book continuity. Dittmer, for example, argues that “the tyranny of
the serial” enforces a “structural limitation”81 on comic book discourse.
Wolf-Meyer82 and Hughes83 make similar points and all use Moore and
Gibbon’s Watchmen to illustrate their arguments, comparing the finite
narrative of Watchmen with ongoing superhero narratives, whose ending
is always indefinitely delayed in a “continuous present” as Eco called it
(or “floating timeline” as the comics community sometimes refers to it84).
All these authors argue for the conservative ideological effects of con-
tinuity and serialisation, exhibiting something of the textual determinism
exemplified by the Screen theorists85 in which the “spectator” became a
“function of the text”.86 For example, Andrae’s claim that, “one could
argue that the destruction of time [in comic book continuity] undermines
the individual’s capacity to become a self-constituted subject”87 applies
much the same logic to superhero comics and their readers. Such critical-
assemblages are engaged in territorialisations of both the comic-assemblage
and reader-assemblages; attempts to fix both the meaning of the superhero
and create an image of the reader who falls prey to this ideological meaning.
54 S. JEFFERY
A simple objection to such analysis can be raised, which is that in holding

up comics like Watchmen as artistically and ideologically superior to seri-
alised superhero narratives involves certain assumptions about mainstream
comics. As Jenkins writes of the so-called deconstructive or revisionist take
on superheroes in Watchmen: “calling such works revisionist makes no
sense because there is not a moment in the history of the genre when the
superhero is not under active revision”.88 The superhero comic book was,
“always intertextual, hypertextual and drew its power from the instability
and ambiguity of word and image interactions”.89 In other words, rhi-
zome like qualities existed at the level of individual issues even before their
coalescence into the meta-textual rhizome of continuity. Unlike the above
“arboreal” forms of ideological analysis, the rhizome presents a more
flexible model for thinking about the complexities of continuity in rela-
tion to ideology. Individual comic books must be understood as part of a
wider, several-decades old (in our time) continuity-assemblage; an ongo-
ing large-scale alternate universe created piecemeal, month by month, by
committee, with its own internal logic, physics, geography and history.
This aspect will be examined in more detail in “The Perfect Body”, in a
discussion of Captain America.
The second influential “arboreal” approach to superhero comics has
been to emphasise their apparent mythological aspects; hardly surprising
given that “heroic narratives have a history that’s as old as that of the estab-
lishment of human socialization”.90 For example, Jewett and Lawrence
describe superheroes as a modern mythology, claiming that superheroes
fall within the remit of what they term “the American mono-myth”,91 a
localised variant on Joseph Campbell’s influential mono-myth. Jewett and
Lawrence see this mythology as ideological, and the prevalence of the
monomyth informs not just American popular culture but also its foreign
policy-vigilante superheroes justify a vigilante superpower. Conversely,
Reynolds’s92 use of structural mythology leads him away from ideological
issues, suggesting that stereotypes, for example, are negated by the fact
that minority characters are subsumed into the superhero narrative and its
generic rules. A similar argument to that put forward by Barker who draws
on the formalist ideas of Vladimir Propp to suggest that “a wondertale
[Propp’s term for the folk tale genre] takes over elements that enter it and
converts them into elements-in-a-wondertale”, as such, representations
can only be understood within the “transforming lens and structure” of
the genre they appear in and can “reinforce nothing” such as negative
stereotypes.93 Given this, Ndalianis is given to wonder whether it really is
the case “that shifts in the genre, its characters, and narratives have much
to tell us about the social order in which they were produced… [When
they may be] a sign not of social reality but of generic reality in the process
of metamorphosis”.94 In short, that comic book worlds represent nothing
other than themselves.95
A rhizomatic approach to understanding superhero comics offers ave-
nues for investigation that arboreal approaches, whether they claim to
uncover ideological or mythological structures, close down by reducing
the multiplicity of meanings and functions to a single explanatory trunk.
The superhero narratives of DC and Marvel Comics are ongoing con-
cerns, so that while “mythic tropes introduced by the superheroes of the
late 1930s [and] 40s still exist” the history of the superhero has, almost
from the very beginning, seen “the traditional superhero image is scruti-
nized, deconstructed, reconstructed and ridiculed”.96 As such, they are
not quite the unchanging structures or archetypal figures of either a uni-
versal monomyth or the ideological American monomyth.
The third major arboreal approach favoured by critical-assemblages
has been formalist analysis. As Witek has observed, “formalist analyses of
comics often begin with an attempt to establish a comprehensive defini-
tion of comics by isolating a set of textual features that will constitute the
irreducible essence of ‘comicsness’”.97 Though it remains largely outside
the scope of this book, the focus of which is the posthuman body in super-
hero comics, it is worth noting Corsten’s attempt to merge assemblage
theory with a formalist analysis. Assemblage theory conceptualises entities
(be they humans, rocks, corporations, nation states or comic books) as
singular multiplicities; wholes made up of components that connect and
disconnect in a variety of ways and in various directions. Corsten uses the
example of the comic book panel to elaborate on this. The panel might
seem the smallest unit of analysis of the comic book but is itself an assem-
blage composed of colours, lines, text and so forth. The panel-assemblage
is part of the page-assemblage, and this page-assemblage is a component
in a larger comic book assemblage, which in turn may become part of an
even greater graphic novel-assemblage .The function and virtual meaning
of the initial panel therefore adapts to the new relations or exteriority it
forms with other components in the wider assemblages.
By plugging assemblage theory into Groensteen’s formalist approach
to the comics page, Corsten adapts assemblage theory to the study of
how meaning (specifically how time and space are constructed) emerges
from the assemblage of comics. Corstens is careful to point out that this
56 S. JEFFERY
is not “a unified meaning but a multiplicity of meaning that can take on

different forms according to the way assemblages are constructed and the
qualities of the components”.98 Meaning(s) exist as potential, “as virtual
meaning” which may be actualised by a reader, “depending on what kinds
of reading path s/he chooses to follow through the assemblage”.99 All the
components of the assemblage are interrelated virtually, but the mean-
ings that may emerge are only actualised as a particular shape/appearance
depending on how the components are related.
Corsten’s conception of comics as assemblage is useful here as it draws
attention to the ways in which neither reader nor creator are able to fix
narrative meaning, instead seeing it as process, an emergent property. For
Corsten, the fragmented nature of the comic book page does not exist for
the purpose of being made whole by readers’ filling in the gutters between
panels with their own imaginary content. Rather, “the gutters are gaps…
empty space over which relations can be made between the components
at either side”.100 In Corsten’s terminology, when applied to the comic
book assemblage this interplay is a process of connection and disconnec-
tion, or stabilisation and destabilisation, where the former works towards
the wholeness of the assemblage and the latter serves to break the assem-
blage apart. Continuity, in this sense, can, “for readers familiar with the
codes”, have a “strong stabilizing effect that ties the assemblage of, for
instance, Superman comics together”.101 However, for readers who are
new to comics, the codes of continuity may have a destabilising effect,
thus breaking the assemblage apart.
Assemblage theory has the distinct advantage of allowing the comic
scholar to “scale up” their analysis. This book highlights the importance
of such work, and will refer to questions of form throughout, but a
sustained elaboration of these ideas is not within its specific remit. If
formalism is about pinning down what comics are, and then this too
can be seen as an attempted territorialisation by the critical-assemblage.
The comics-assemblage is able to reterritorialise of course. To take just
one example, as Kelp-Stebbens argues, “privileging either text or image
as the dominant element of comics only reasserts a hierarchy that com-
ics, by their very ‘nature’, destabilize”.102 Instead, this book “scales up”
from the assemblage of the panel, page, issue and graphic novel to inves-
tigate the connections these form with other assemblages like readers,
creators, corporations and critics, what we have called the rhizome of
comic book culture.
CRITICAL-ASSEMBLAGES V READER-ASSEMBLAGES
When a critical-assemblage territorialises, however temporarily, the comics-
assemblage it is often accompanied by an explicit or implicit attempt to ter-
ritorialise the reader-assemblage. Comics fans are viewed as demonstrating
how “textual meaning” “spilled into other areas of life”, but they are also,
“conceptually representative of a number of popular and academic fears
concerning media power”.103 Ruddock demonstrates how these are also
are analogous to the differences between modernist and postmodernist
approaches to the mass culture debate. For instance, in allowing textual
meaning to spill over in to their “real lives”, the “obsessions” of fans may
appear from a modernist (read Humanist) perspective as evidence of the
Ideological State Apparatus’ success in firmly enmeshing the viewing/
reading subject in its workings; “ultimate victims of realism as textual
practice; people who are entirely convinced by media artifice”.104 From
a postmodern (read Post/Humanist) perspective however, “fan activity
is a discourse, a way of thinking and behaving that has more to do with
an organization of the self than it does the aesthetic appreciation that is
central to modernist reception”.105
An early and influential model of fans and fandom was Jenkins’ notion
of “textual poachers”. Jenkins’ textual poachers seek to defend the prac-
tices of people whom, from his perspective, can be claimed as a subaltern
group in as much as their tastes and desires are not sanctioned by the
official culture, arguing that fans are not simply obsessive consumers but
active producers who “construct their cultural and social identity through
borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which
often go unvoiced within the dominant media”.106 This identity build-
ing often incorporates material practices such as the creation of literature
and video featuring favourite characters. This network of inter and extra-
textual practices extends to the creation of fanzines, discussion groups
and websites, the organising of conventions and the process of collect-
ing. For Jenkins, this often places fans in opposition to the producers and
owners of the copyrighted texts they are poaching from and repurposing.
Implicit within this insistence on activity, productivity and poaching of
mass produced texts is the suggestion that “but for audiences’ ‘activity’
or ‘resistance’ an unsullied text might influence them”.107 Conversely,
as was shown earlier, theories that position audiences as passive victims
of the text are actually concerned with the productive activity that texts
58 S. JEFFERY
might influence them to engage in. Given that both these positions con-
tain their opposite within them, a Post/Human rhizomatic perspective on
text-audience relations suggests itself. Certainly, as Gray points out, recent
studies of fandom have shifted away from the defensive mode of earlier
theorists and begun to focus on “differences, nuances and even contradic-
tions within fandom”.108
It is surprising that so little attention has been paid to comics’ fans as
they would seem to provide an excellent case-study for many of the con-
cerns that have been addressed in this current chapter. In Comics Studies,
as Roger Sabin has noted in a recent issue of Participations focusing on
comics’ audiences, audience analysis, “has continued to be the poor rela-
tion to textual exegesis”.109 Thus there remain relatively few studies of
superhero comic book readers. Such work would help to redress the bal-
ance in this regard, for as Pustz writes, “inside interpretations of this cul-
ture may be problematic and subjective, but the few outsider perspectives
on comic books…are perhaps even more flawed by denying the consumers
the power to explain how they use their favoured texts”.110 Maigret and
Brown both concur with this, and further call into question the notion
of ideology being a “univocal process of inculcation”,111 because “fans
demonstrate that they do not just passively accept dominant messages”.112
COMICS STUDIES AS RHIZOME

This book proposes that the rhizome provides a much-needed model for
thinking about comic book culture; that is to say, the collective of mate-
rial comics books, creators, corporations, critical analysis and fandom that
comprise it. Seen this way, Comics Studies’ lack of disciplinary boundaries
can potentially be one of the great strengths of comics studies, facilitating
the same sort of generic and even stylistic promiscuity displayed by the
medium itself. Rather than fuzzy disciplinary borders making comics stud-
ies a “critical backwater”, comics studies “might take part in the on-going
and essential re-examination of how, by whom, and under what auspices
knowledge is produced in academe…. [With a] commitment not simply
to multi- but to interdisciplinarity”.113 A rhizomatic approach moves us
away from essences and identities, and so has implications for our under-
standing of comic book culture.
Adopting the rhizome as a mode of analysis moves attention away from
“beings” to “becomings”. A rhizo-analysis of superhero texts and read-
ers does not involve forming structuralist arguments about the “truth”
or ideological “meaning” of them. As such, contra ideology, we can-

not assume, “that there are real interests that are concealed…nor some
pre-social and essential individual that we might discover underneath
power and images”.114 Avoiding this assumption involves the difference
between what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “mapping” and “tracing”.
Drawing upon the work on bodies discussed in “What Is Posthumanism”,
an example from the field of Disability Studies may help to highlight the
difference between these two methods of analysis. Mercieica and Mercieca
demonstrate how the influential model of emancipatory research has
become dominant in Disability Studies, “but without the negotiation
and questioning that brought about their initial development”.115 As a
result, researchers accept the emancipatory paradigm as the correct, even
only way to conduct research and the terminology involved become fixed
structures which shape the researcher’s thinking; “the researcher is, there-
fore, tracing over structures that are pre-determined”.116 Because of this,
the disability researcher is closed off to things that its current form would
consider “side issues”.117
This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean by “tracing”. In the example
above, “this amounts to a tracing of disability, an understanding that per-
petuates how we understood it before”.118 Although this example is taken
from disability research it can just as well be applied to those works above
that applied ideological analyses to superheroes. In Deleuze and Guattari’s
terms these researchers reduced the rhizome to an arboreal model with a
central explanatory trunk. As such, “the tracing has already translated the
map into an image: it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and
radicles”.119 By organising, stabilising and neutralising the multiplicities
according to the axes of significance and subjectification, it structuralizes
the rhizome, “and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in
fact only reproducing itself”.120
This book presents a rhizo-analysis of the posthuman body superhero
comics, informed by an epistemology that “does not fetishize completion,
closed circuits, or discrete processes”.121 As O’ Sullivan puts it, thinking
about the study of culture as rhizome implies “not a different kind of read-
ing but a transformation”.122 Deleuze and Guattari urge the researcher to
“lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers,
find an advantageous point on it, find potential movements of deterritori-
alization, possible lines of flight, experience them”.123 This involves a move
away from the “interpretation of culture” and towards what O’Sullivan
calls “a pragmatics which allows for a mapping of connections between
60 S. JEFFERY
different objects and practices, events and assemblages”.124 As Deleuze and

Guattari themselves put it, “a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections
between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances rel-
evant to the arts, sciences, and social struggles”.125 While many approaches
to the superhero have fallen along an axis of criticism or legitimisation,
understanding posthuman bodies (specifically their manifestation in comic
book form) as assemblages moves analysis away from understanding what
they are, to what they can do.
As well as a conceptual model of interdisciplinarity, the rhizome may
also prove useful to Comics Studies as a paradigm for the inevitable “cross
hybridization” between the spheres of fan appreciation, essayistic criticism
and academic criticism endemic to Comics Studies.126 More pressingly,
the rhizome allows for drawing connections between the disciplinary
realms of Sociology, Audience Studies, Post/Humanist theory, History
and Comics Studies. This book has chosen to utilise the concept of the
rhizome as a model of thought that is able to journey across the pla-
teaus that make up the rhizome of posthumanism, addressing questions
of organisational and industrial constraint, but also wider socio-historic
trends these constraints were connected to (“as a machine of a machine”).
These trends and constraints in turn affected the aesthetic; it is important
to understand that even as superhero comics are produced in connec-
tion with wider social discourses and industrial developments they “refer
to” or “signify” themselves as well. In particular, to their own fictional
(and often meta-fictional) history. These fiction-assemblages connect with
comics’ fans to form reading-assemblages, which in turn connect with
the body social. This is most clearly evident when considering the ways in
which superhero fictions cross over into their own lives. That fans engage
in many kinds of semiotic and/or textual productivity (the creation of
further assemblages) has been noted by audience researchers. Audience
“activity” can thus be reconceptualised as a mode of “becoming”. Readers
feel an emotional attachment to these characters or use superheroes to
make sense of moral questions. For others, superhero comics allow them
to form networks with other comic readers. With this in mind “Towards
a Theory of Reader-Text Assemblages” will later present an outline of a
new way of conceptualising texts and readers as a forming a rhizomatic
assemblage with one another.
This chapter has introduced Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the
rhizome and shown a number of ways in which aspects of comic book
culture exhibit rhizomatic properties. The structure of comic book con-
tinuity was seen to exhibit the first two principles of the rhizome are
the “connection and heterogeneity” which states that any point in the
rhizome can be connected to any other.127 The third principle of the
rhizome—multiplicity—was seen in the way that readers, publishers,
comic books, and creators formed a mutually influential assemblage. The
fourth principle of the rhizome, “the principle of asignifying rupture”
could be witnessed in the way that continuity always exceeded the will
of creators and publishers who sought to “overcode” it, instead caus-
ing it to grow new shoots or start up again on old narrative lines. The
fifth and sixth principles of the rhizome—“cartography” and “decalco-
mania”—state that the rhizome is a map with multiple entry points, not
a tracing mechanism. A rhizomatic understanding of comic books would
therefore not be “amenable to any structural or generative model…any
idea of genetic axis or deep structure”.128 Indeed, the notion of unity
only appears when a particular dimension (e.g., a particular discourse)
takes over (however briefly).129 These last principles were demonstrated
by highlighting how despite the best efforts of creators, critics, corpora-
tions and readers to force, or create, unities of interpretation, continuity
or purpose of the comic book superhero, its rhizome form has ensured
that it always exceeds such grasps; each critical interpretation, each fic-
tional universe, each corporate rebranding, is but one entry point. As
such, each of these attempted territorialisations is faced with its own
detrritorialisation as it becomes part of the rhizome itself.
THE RHIZOME OF THE POSTHUMAN BODY

It is with this in mind that this book now prepares to journey through the
rhizome of the posthuman body. In order to talk of this it is necessary to
consider its representation not just in the discursive realm of Superhumanism
but also those other discursive realms where the posthuman can be found,
for example, academic critical theory (Post/Humanism), and in scientific
discourse and practice (Transhumanism). Rhizomatic thinking opens up
different ways of asking, “how to assess the social imaginary that produces
such representations”.130 Whether the analytic tool is structuralist or post-
structuralist, each is capable of producing (tracing) their own discourses on
posthumanity. This book thinks with Braidotti, who in turn, “think(s) with
Deleuze that neither science fiction nor in any other text is there a master plot
to be unveiled or revealed by the simultaneous deployment of world history
and individual psychic processes…only fragments and sets of hazard-meeting
and ad hoc intersections of events, Deleuze’s points of crossings, rather than
Freud’s libidinal predestination or Marx’s teleological process”.131
62 S. JEFFERY
This book investigates the relations between the posthuman body,

comic books and the responses of readers to these representations. Given
the heterogeneous nature of these three topics, the rhizome provides a
conceptual tool, for considering these issues simultaneously rather than
placing them within an ontological hierarchy. As a model of culture
the rhizome resists the organisational structure of the root-tree system,
chronological causality and the search for the originary source. Rather
than narrativising history and culture, the rhizome presents them as map
of influences and events with no specific cause because the rhizome has no
beginning and no end, “it is always in the middle, between things, inter-
being, intermezzo”.132 It would also be able to consider cultural repre-
sentations as being on the same plane as economic, material and aesthetic
factors, but not beholden to any of these as the final explanation for, or
hidden meaning of such representations.
The rhizomatic project is not “to understand the world (to understand
culture) but rather to create the world differently…such a project involves less
an object of study…even less does it involve a reading, an interpretation of
objects”.133 What is at stake in these experimental mappings is the accessing
of other worlds; “not worlds ‘beyond’ this one (no transcendent, nor uto-
pian principle) but worlds, ‘incorporeal universes’ as Guattari calls them, vir-
tual and immanent in this one”.134 Something close, perhaps, to how Pedler
describes Morrison’s superhero comics; an attempt to, “make our reality as
interesting as theirs, as surreal, full of every potential and possibility”.135
NOTES
1. Pustz, M. (1999) Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believer. USA:
University Press of Mississippi.
2. Craft, J. (2004) Comics Universes as Fiction Networks. MA. University of
Texas, Austin, p. 103.
3. Quoted in Jenkins, H. (2009) “‘Just Men in Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age
Comics in an Era of Multiplicity”, In Ndalianis, A. (ed.) The Contemporary
Comic Book Superhero. Oxon: Routledge, p. 24.
4. Millar, M., Johnson, D., and Plunkett, K. (2004). Superman. New York:
DC Comics.
5. Sasson-Henry, P. (2008) Borges 2.0; from text to virtual worlds. The Free
Library. Retrieved June 14, 2015 from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/
Borges 2.0; from text to virtual worlds.-a0174600925
6. Ndalianis, A. (2009) Enter the Aleph: Superhero Worlds and Hypertime
Realities. In Ndalianis, A. (ed.) The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero.
Oxon: Routledge, p. 288 n3.
7. Ellis, W., Cassaday, J., DePuy, L. (2012). Planetary: [Volume 1]. New York:
DC Comic.
8. Waid, M. (1999) The Kingdom. New York. DC Comics.
9. Quoted in Ndalianis, Enter the Aleph: Superhero Worlds and Hypertime
Realities, p. 281.
10. Wolk, D. (2007) Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They
Mean. USA: Da Capo Press, p. 90.
11. Reynolds, R. (1994) Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. USA: University
Press of Mississippi, p. 38.
12. Craft, Comics Universes as Fiction Networks.
13. Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology.
14. Craft, Comics Universes as Fiction Networks, p. 105.
15. Ibid., pp. 105–106.
17. Jenkins, H. (2009) “‘Just Men in Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an
Era of Multiplicity”, p. 17.
18. Quoted in Klock, G. (2002) How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. USA:
Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 101.
19. Kaveney, R. (2008) Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Film.
London: I. B. Taurus , p. 30.
20. Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean,
p. 103.
21. Daniels, L. (1995) DC Comics: Sixty years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book
Heroes London: Virgin Books, p. 188.
23. Ibid., p. 113.
24. Ibid., p. 116.
25. Brooker, quoted in Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, p. 19.
26. Ibid., p. 24.
27. Ibid., p. 21.
28. O’Sullivan, S. (2002) Cultural Studies as Rhizome - Rhizomes in Cultural
Studies. In Herbrechter , S. (ed.) Cultural Studies, Interdisciplinarity and
Translation. New York: Rodopi, p. 84.
30. Ibid.
31. Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, p. 24.
32. In fact, comics creators have a habit of appearing in their own fictions. Grant
Morrison has appeared in his run on Animal Man, Alan Moore opos up in
his own Promethea, and John Byrne has appeared in his own runs as writer/
artist on Fantastic Four and She-Hulk.
33. Pedler, M. (2009) Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality…
and Other Parallel Worlds! In Ndalianis, A. (ed.) The Contemporary Comic
Book Superhero Oxon: Routledge, p. 264.
64 S. JEFFERY
34. Ndalianis, Enter the Aleph: Superhero Worlds and Hypertime Realities,
p. 281.
35. Morrison, G. (2011). Supergods: What masked vigilantes, miraculous
mutants, and a sun god from Smallville can teach us about being human.
New York: Spiegel Grau.
36. Pedler, Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality…and Other
Parallel Worlds! p. 264.
37. Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, p. 47.
38. Kaveney, Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Film, p. 25.
41. Ibid.
42. Gordon, I. (2012). Writing to Superman: Towards an Understanding of the
Social Networks of Comic-book Fans. Participations, 9(2) 120–132.
43. See, for example, Schwartz (2000); Jones (2004).
44. Schlesinger, A. (2010) Holy Economic History of the American Comic Book
Industry, Batman! Degree Thesis. Wesleyan University.
45. Williams, J. (1994) Comics: A Tool of Subversion? Journal of Criminal
Justice and Popular Culture, 2(6) pp. 129–146.
46. Lopes, P. (2006) Culture and Stigma: Popular Culture and the Case of
Comic Book. Sociological Forum, 21(3) pp. 387–414.
47. See, for example, Williams (1994) and Wolk (2007).
p. 39.
49. Wright, B. W. (2003) Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth
Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 260.
50. Ibid., p. 261.
51. Ibid., p. 252.
53. Coogan, P. (2006) Superhero: The Secret origin of a Genre. Austin, TX:
MonkeyBrain Books, p. 218.
54. Gordon, Writing to Superman: Towards an Understanding of the Social
Networks of Comic-book Fans.
55. http://siskoid.blogspot.co.uk/
56. Fischer, C. (2010) “Worlds within Worlds: Audiences, Jargon, and North
American Comics Discourse.”, Transatlantica 1, [online] Available from:
http://transatlantica.revues.org/4919 [Accessed: 14/06/2015].
58. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, p. 130.
59. Beaty, B. (2004) Review essay: assessing Contemporary Comics Scholarship.
Canadian Journal of Communication, 29(3) [online] Available from:
http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/ar ticle/viewAr ti-
cle/1485/1603 [Accessed 20/12/2013] pp. 1.
60. Hatfield, C. (2010) Indiscipline, or, the condition of comics studies.

Transatlantica, 1 [online] Available from: http://transatlantica.revues.
org/4933 [Accessed: 20/12/2013] paragraph 10.
61. Smith, G. (2011) Surveying the World of Contemporary Comics Scholarship:
A Conversation. Cinema Journal , 50(3) p. 140.
62. Hatfield, C. (2006) Comic Art, Children’s literature, and the New Comics
Studies. The Lion and the Unicorn 30(2) p. 368.
63. Beaty, Assessing Contemporary Comics Scholarship.
64. Smoodin, E. (1992) Cartoon and Comic Classicism: High Art Histories of
Lowbrow Culture. American Literary History, 4(1), p. 131.
65. Ibid., p. 135.
66. Beaty, Assessing Contemporary Comics Scholarship , p. 409.
67. See, for example, Nyberg 1998; Lent 1999; Hadju 2008; Beaty 2005.
68. Barker, M. (1984) A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British
Horror Comics Campaign. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
69. Lopes, Culture and Stigma: Popular Culture and the Case of Comic Book.
70. McAllister, M. P. (1990) Cultural Argument and Organizational Restraint
in the Comic Book Industry. Journal of Communication, 40(1) p. 55.
71. Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge, p. 92.
72. Ibid., p. 94.
73. Barker, M. (1989) Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
74. Ruddock, A (2001) Understanding Audiences: Theory and Method. London:
Sage, p. 125.
75. Brown, J. A. (1997b) Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital. Journal of
Popular Culture 30(4) p. 23.
76. Eco, U. (1972) The Myth of Superman. Diacritics, 2(1) pp. 14–22.
77. Singer, M. (2013) “The myth of Eco: Cultural populism and comics stud-
ies”, Studies in Comic, 4(2) pp. 355–366.
78. Peaslee, R.M. (2006) “Superheroes, moral economy,and the iron cage:
Morality, alienation, and the super-individual” In Ndalianis,A. Haslem, W.
(eds.) Super/Heroes :Myth and Meaning. Melbourne: New Academia, p. 37.
79. Andrae, T. (1980) From Menace to Messiah: The History and Historicity of
Superman. In Lazere, D. (ed.) (1987) American Media and Mass Culture.
Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 136.
80. Ibid., p. 137.
81. Dittmer, J (2007) The Tyranny of the Serial: Popular Geopolitics, the
Nation, and Comic Book Discourse. Antipode, 39(2) pp. 247–268.
82. Wolf-Meyer, M. (2003) The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the
Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference. The
Journal of Popular Culture, 36(3) pp. 497–517.
83. Hughes, J A. (2006) “‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’: Ideology and ‘Real
World’ Superheroes”. The Journal of Popular Culture, 39(4) pp. 546–557.
66 S. JEFFERY
84. Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.
85. Moores, S. (1993) Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consump-
tion. London: Sage, p. 6.
86. Barker, M. (2005) The Lord of the Rings and ‘Identification’: A critical
encounter. European Journal of Communication, 20(3) p. 360.
87. Andrae, From Menace to Messiah: The History and Historicity of Superman,
p. 177.
88. Jenkins, “‘Just Men in Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an Era of
Multiplicity”, p. 29.
89. Murray, C. (2000)Popaganda: Superhero Comics and Propoganda. In
Magnussen, A. Christiansen, H. C. (eds.) Comics and Culture: Analytical
and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum
Press, p. 155.
90. Ndalianis, A. (2009) Comic Book Superheroes: An Introduction. In Ndalianis,
A. (ed.) The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Oxon: Routledge, p. 3.
91. Jewett, R., Lawrence, J. S. (1977) The American Monomyth. Garden City,
New York: Anchor Press.
93. Barker, M. (1989) Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, p. 127.
94. Ndalianis, Comic Book Superheroes: An Introduction, p. 10 (cf. Klock 2002;
Coogan 2006).
96. Ndalianis, Comic Book Superheroes: An Introduction, p. 8.
97. Witek, J. (2009) “The arrow and the grid”. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester,
K. (Eds.) A comics studies reader. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 149.
98. Cortsen, R. P. (2012). Comics as Assemblage: How Spatio-Temporality in
Comics is Constructed PhD. University of Copenhagen, p. 122.
99. Ibid., p. 119.
100. Cortsen, Comics as Assemblage, p. 124.
102. Kelp-Stebbins, K. (2012) “Hybrid heroes and graphic posthumanity.
Comics as a media technology for critical posthumanism”, in Studies in
Comics 3.2. p. 335.
103. Ruddock, Understanding Audiences: Theory and Method, p. 153.
104. Ibid., p. 154.
105. Ibid., p. 156.
106. Jenkins, H. (1992) Textual Poachers: Televisual Fans and Participatory
Culture. New York: Routledge., p. 23.
107. Barker, M. (2010) News, reviews, Clues, Interviews and Other Ancillary
Materials. Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies [online] Available
from: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cfm/research/scope.aspx?id=2
[Accessed: 20/06/2011] p. 10.
108. Gray, J. (2005) New Audiences, New Textualities: anti-fans and non-fans.
International Journal of Cultural Studise, 6(1) p. 67.
109. Sabin, R. (2012) Comics and Audiences. Participations, 9(2) p. 56.
110. (Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, p. 202.
111. Maigret, E. (1999) Strange grew up with me: Sentimentality and Masculinity
in Readers of Superhero Comics (trans.Liz Libbrecht). Reseaux 7(1)
pp. 5–27.
112. Brown, J. A. (2000) Black Superheroes: Milestone Comics and Their Fans.
Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. p. 200.
113. Hatfield, C. (2010) Indiscipline, or, the condition of comics studies, para. 14.
114. (Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze., p. 92.
115. Mercieca and Mercieca, Opening Research to Intensities: Rethinking
Disability Research with Deleuze and Guattari, p. 85.
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid.
118. Ibid., p. 87.
120. Ibid.
121. Tuck, Breaking up with Deleuze: desire and valuing the irreconcilable, p. 641.
122. O’Sullivan, Cultural Studies as Rhizome - Rhizomes in Cultural Studies,
p. 84.
124. O’Sullivan, Cultural Studies as Rhizome – Rhizomes in Cultural Studies, p. 81.
126. Fischer, Worlds within Worlds: Audiences, Jargon, and North American
Comics Discourse.
128. Ibid., p. 12
129. Sermijn et al. The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic
Story, p. 637.
130. Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory of
Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 174.
131. Ibid., p. 13.
133. O’Sullivan, Cultural Studies as Rhizome - Rhizomes in Cultural Studies, p. 84.
134. O’Sullivan, Cultural Studies as Rhizome - Rhizomes in Cultural Studies, p. 92.
135. Pedler, Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality…and Other
Parallel Worlds! p. 264.
The Perfect Body
Section Two of this book presents a cultural history of the posthuman

body in superhero comics. The book presents three types of posthuman
body which I have dubbed the Perfect Body, the Cosmic Body and the
Military-Industrial Body. This typology marks a new, and one would hope
useful, contribution to our current understanding of the posthuman body.
Because there are multiple entryways into the rhizome of the posthuman
body it is worth highlighting that the categories of Perfect, Cosmic and
Military-Industrial bodies, though of heuristic value, are necessarily con-
tingent and overlapping. The question is not just what each of these bod-
ies IS but what they can DO. What the cultural histories presented here
aim to highlight is how these assemblages develop more fully according to
wider trends in the discourse of posthumanity.
One advantage of the cultural historic approach is its ability to highlight
posthuman discourse as a matter of both language and practice. Discourse
is constructive, defining the ways in which a topic can be talked and rea-
soned about while also influencing, “how ideas are put into practice and
used to regulate the conduct of others”.1 Mixing a discourse analysis with
a cultural historic approach is not a radical move. As Hall points out, dis-
course is already “historicized” by Foucault. So for example, mental illness
was not seen as an objective fact that meant the same thing in all times and
cultures. On the contrary, “it was only within a definite discursive forma-
tion that the object, ‘madness’, could appear at all as a meaningful or intel-
ligible construct…and it was only after a certain definition of ‘madness’

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_4
70 S. JEFFERY
was put into practice, that the appropriate subject—‘the madman’ as cur-
rent medical and psychiatric knowledge defined ‘him’—could appear”.2
For “madness” and “madman” here we could replace “posthumanism”
and “the posthuman body”. A cultural-historic approach then, informed
by rhizomatic thinking, would trace the discourse of the posthuman body
across seventy years of superhero comics, placing these discourses within
wider discursive formations of posthumanism, more specifically by map-
ping the changes of the comic book Superhuman in relation to changes in
Transhumanism and Post/Humanism.
“Cultural history” is said by its supporters to “best combine the dis-
ciplinary strengths in writing history with the ferment of ideas associ-
ated with what might be loosely termed Critical Theory” and stresses the
“importance of situating texts in a variety of historically informed con-
texts”.3 For this book, that involves not just general social and political
contexts, but also attention to how the posthuman manifested at these
times, which situates within an always-shifting network of forces with
“different emphasis at different times”.4 In writing a cultural history, the
emphasis is shifted from trying to determine the meaning of text as if it
existed “as an entity which has already been formulated within the text”5
to “reveal the conditions that bring about its various possible effects”.6
Secondly, taking the moderate view that, “not all interpretation is over-
interpretation”,7 this cultural history proposes to “read” representations
of the superhero body in terms of its socio-historic and industrial context
and without recourse to presumptions about ideological or psychological
effects on the reader. This does not mean that no reference will be made to
critical works that do make these claims. Rather, any such works will also
be considered as part of the same socio-historic moment and posthuman
discourse—part of the same rhizome—as the texts they critique. To quote
Iser once again, “the interpreter’s task should be to elucidate the potential
meanings of a text, and not restrict himself [sic] to just one”.8 This book
understands other critical interpretations of texts as such “potential mean-
ings”, or “entryways” in the language of the rhizome.
THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION, MODERNITY AND EARLY

POSTHUMANISM
It is difficult to underestimate the impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution
on the development of posthumanism. Mazlish9 describes it as the second
discontinuity in humanity’s view of itself following those discontinuities
THE PERFECT BODY 71
ushered in by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. Copernicus dethroned

humanity as the centre of the physical universe, while Freud dethroned
the self, the rational, autonomous “I” from the centre of our psychologi-
cal universe. Darwin’s revelation was that humans were simply the result
of chance, not a specially chosen creation of God. Modern understanding
of genetics serves to further deepen this discontinuity. Graham highlights
a 1998 headline from The Observer reporting the discovery that chimpan-
zees and human beings are estimated to share 99 percent of their genetic
material.10 Next to a large photo of a suitably anthropomorphic chimp
reads the headline, “It’s official. He is almost human”. Graham points out
that this “scientific fact”, “enables commentators to locate in the slim mar-
gin of 1 per cent the very essence of human identity and distinctiveness:
their hairy pelts; our moon rockets”.11 In this respect, evolutionary theory,
in unseating the notion of the human being as unique, was a necessary
step on the road to posthumanism and its presence is felt across the discur-
sive plateaus of Superhumanism, Transhumanism and Post/Humanism.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, evolutionary theory had already
found some expression in the discursive realm of the science-fiction
Superhuman and the nascent realm of Post/Humanist philosophy by way
of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch (itself a further influence on the development of
the Superhuman). It is important to highlight how evolutionary theory also
played out in the discursive realm of Transhumanism. As Weising writes,
“the Darwinian theory of evolution was the prerequisite for the eugenic
movement”.12 Not coincidentally, it was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton
who introduced the term eugenics in 1883, defining it as “the science of
improving stock”,13 or, as Hack simplifies, “the quasi-scientific application
of Darwinism to the conscious breeding of stronger, smarter and more ethi-
cal human beings”.14 Theories of eugenics could generally be categorised in
two ways. Positive eugenics involved encouraging the “best” and “fittest” to
breed with one another, thus producing strong offspring. Negative eugen-
ics was the forced sterilisation of the “unfit”. Eugenics is clearly related to
the realm of “bio-politics”, concerned with “regulating bodies” as well as
the production of “productive” and “disciplined” bodies.15
For Transhumanism, despite this anxiety the rise of evolutionary theory
profoundly affected understandings of the human body, and what it could
do. Weising notes that, “whereas the people of antiquity viewed them-
selves as a well-ordered microcosm, and medieval people as the pinnacle
of god’s creation, modern people saw themselves in many different ways,
more like a machine, in a technical sense, and finally as a flawed result of
72 S. JEFFERY
chance evolutionary processes…as such, the theoretically conceived pos-

sibilities were broadened by means of creative intervention in the structure
of the machine”.16 As Shilling elaborates, national governments have often
taken the body as an object of concern during times of rapid social change
or crisis. During the nineteenth century, both the USA and Britain were
troubled by fears about overindulgence among the rich, and malnutrition
among the poor, with both issues being “related to concerns about racial
degeneration and the degenerating stock of society”.17 Thus Darwin’s
theory was applied not just to individual organisms or species, but to soci-
eties themselves.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, watered down notions of
evolutionary ideas were being expressed in pessimistic terms in theories
of social decline and degeneration.18 By 1912, eight American states had
passed sterilisation laws, going up to 30 states by 1914.19 Weising reminds
us that in these early decades, “liberal and left-leaning political parties also
argued from a eugenic point-of-view, not only the political parties tending
toward the right”.20 In fact, eugenics was incorporated into what was seen as
a utopian vision,21 and eugenics research and conferences displayed an inter-
national, and interconnected, dimension shared across Europe and Japan.22
In the USA, the concern with healthy, productive and disciplined bod-
ies can also be discerned in the contemporaneous “physical culture move-
ment”, which coalesced around the magazine Physical Culture. Launched
in 1899, Physical Culture was central to the early twentieth century body-
building culture and promoted diets, weight lifting and rational living and
specialised in displays of the human body,23 such as “fittest family con-
tests”. “Weakness is a crime”, it warned its readers, “don’t be a criminal”.24
It also became a frequent publisher of articles on the need for eugenic
reform.25 In 1922, the magazine publicised the pseudonymous Charles
Atlas as “the World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man”.26 Atlas would later
start his own mail-order fitness business and the adverts took the form of
comic strip in which a ninety-seven pound weakling develops the body of a
“new man” (or perhaps THE “new man”). These adverts became a fixture
of comic books for many years. As Landon puts it, “Charles Atlas’s famous
figure has become entwined with the cultural memory and experience of
reading comics in general”.27 Atlas presented a vision of transformation, of
metamorphosis that would become a key aspect of the superhero genre.28
The transformation of a skinny weakling into muscular Charles Atlas mir-
rored the transformation of the bumbling, ineffectual Clark Kent into the
capable, heroic Superman (and in fact, Superman’s co-creator, artist Joe
THE PERFECT BODY 73
Shuster, a skinny kid who himself took up bodybuilding, was a frequent

contributor of illustrations to the magazine). The link between the fantasy
of the comic book Superhuman and the apparently achievable reality of
Atlas’s perfect body can also be witnessed in Jack Kirby’s artwork for the
first issue of Captain America, another story of a skinny weakling trans-
formed into a muscular strongman; indeed, the panel layout of the famous
Charles Atlas adverts is an almost perfect mirror image of Kirby’s29.
FROM FREAK SHOWS TO PULP FICTIONS

Although visions of posthumanity had existed for millennia, it was only
in that difficult to define period known as “Modernity” that the siren call
of posthumanity began to seem irresistible. When Superman debuted in
1938, his appearance not only ushered in a new genre, nor did it simply
herald what fans and scholars have come to call the “Golden Age” of com-
ics. Superman and the heroes that followed in his wake presented a new
vision for posthumanity. To understand how the comic book Superhuman
emerged as and when it did it is necessary to consider the cultural assem-
blage it was plugged into. The changes brought about by modernity—
such as industrialisation, urbanisation and medicine—aided and abetted
changes in how the human was conceptualised. As Thomsen argues, “the
rising influence of secularization and the development of the theory of
evolution in the mid-nineteenth century helped to create a vision of a new
and improved human being who cast away self-imposed limitations”.30
The early sociologist William Ogburn invented the term “cultural lag”
in the 1920s to describe the process whereby humans failed to keep pace
with their technological achievements. Addressing the American Society
of Naturalists in 1931, he gave a speech to this effect whose language
evokes the idiom of the superhero comics that would emerge some seven
years later: “The lower animals have a simple natural environment toward
which to make an adaptation, as was also the case of early man…But mod-
ern man has a huge cultural environment to which he must adapt himself,
a huge culture that is whirling through time, gaining velocity as it goes.”31
Surely only a new kind of man, a Superman, could adapt himself to this
culture as it whirled through time, gaining velocity as it went?
Yet this vision of Modernity’s new man existed side by side with another
vision, one which we might call “the average man”. While Ogburn’s new
man was a question of consciousness, the average man, or “L’homme
moyen”, was introduced by the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet
74 S. JEFFERY
in 1842. Quetelet set out to identify the average features of humanity

using mathematical models. This new medicalised paradigm of human
corporeality paved the way for a new ideology of the body based on
the binary opposition of normal/abnormal. Indeed, the words “nor-
mal”, “normalcy”, “average” and “abnormal” all originate in the period
1840–1860. This medicalised definition of statistical normality explains
how, as Thomsen32 suggests, early twentieth century visions moved from
an idea of spiritual modernisation, or a shift in consciousness, to become a
political idea applied to whole societies.
Existing alongside modernity’s emphasis on the “normal”, “healthy”
human body was a public hunger for displays of unusual human bodies, in
the form of the freak show. Indeed, the freak show itself was a product of
modernity, catering to a mass market for amusement created by economic
growth and urbanisation. Moreover, the packaging and marketing of the
freak show prefigures many of the tropes that would later become central
to the comic book superhero, like outlandish pseudonyms and pseudo-
scientific origin stories of how the performer came to be as they were. The
exotic foreignness of certain performers might be enhanced by dress and
stage-props, while the new science of evolution was popularised through
the use of pseudoscientific categories like “missing link” or “throwback”.33
However, these stories served more purpose than just the hard sell; they
spoke to the public’s modernist concerns, of evolution and empire, of
what is was to be human, and, perhaps more pressing psychologically,
what was not human.
In the end, it would be the robust scientific categories that led to the
demise of the freak show. As Gerber puts it, “medicalisation transformed
public consciousness of people with physical anomalies, who now went
from being human oddities or monsters to sick people…the ‘giant’ was
now said to be suffering from acromegaly, the ‘ossified man’ from poly-
arthritis deformes, and the ‘dog faced boy’ from hypertchosis.”34 Medical
models of human anatomy reinforced a morality that said such shows were
exploitative. But the twilight of the travelling sideshow was also the dawn-
ing of mass media, and it fell to cinema, pulp fiction and comic books to
step into the breach, to provide audiences fresh corporeal fantasies, new
visions of extraordinary bodies. The cheap and ephemeral entertainment
of the freak shows gave way to the cheap and ephemeral entertainment
of mass-produced pulp fiction, and later, comic books. The move away
from the public display of physical anomalies to the fictional representa-
tion of the same entailed no small measure of metaphor, exaggeration and
THE PERFECT BODY 75
imagination, but the names of the earliest superheroes and pulp characters
would not have been out of place on a carnival hoarding: Batman rather
than the Elephant Man. No sideshow rubber man or contortionist ever
achieved the extremes of elasticity of Plastic Man. No strong man ever lifted
a car over their head like Superman. But certain tropes remain, such as the
outlandish names, gaudy colours and costumes, the origin stories involving
exotic lands and strange curses.
THE ANTEDILUVIAN AGE OF SUPERHUMANISM

Nevertheless, the road from human to posthuman was not an easy one.
Earlier fictional representations of the Superhuman were more likely to
appear as much a threat as a source of fascination, often expressing an
anxiety about the implications of evolutionary theory. The monstrous
forms of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) and Dracula (1897) for exam-
ple, “are articulated very precisely as regressions”.35 The evolutionary
visions of future humanity in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) or
the evolutionary divergences of the Martians in War of the Worlds (1897)
play upon these same fears. However, these concerns did not simply rest
upon a fear of devolution. Evolution also implied obsolescence. As such,
the early Superhuman was largely depicted as something to be feared.
Prior to Superman’s debut in 1938, and beginning with the creation of
Frankenstein (1818), the science-fiction Superhuman was subject to a
common trend: “whether saviour or destroyer the superman cannot be
permitted to exist”.36 As Coogan suggests, the idea of the posthuman
as “Homo Superior” at this stage embodied concerns about evolution.
Namely that, “just as we evolved from apes, and have conquered the animal
kingdom, the superhumans who evolve from us will conquer the human
world”.37 In some respects, it would take the popularisation (and dilution)
of Nietzsche’s proto-Post/Humanist philosophy for this to change.
Before the comic book, there were the “pulps”. Named for the cheap
wood pulp paper used to make the magazines, the pulps were easily
affordable anthologies in a wide variety of genres, most popularly science
fiction, detective and horror. Characters such as Doc Savage, “The Man of
Bronze”, prefigured Superman (“The Man of Steel”) by some five years.
Doc Savage is an example of what Coogan calls “the pulp Ubermensch”:
a perfect human specimen, the result of eugenic-like science that raised a
child to achieve peak human potential. For Coogan, the pulp Ubermensch
could be characterised by a shallow use of Nietzsche’s concept of the
76 S. JEFFERY
Superman: “the emptying of the philosophical basis of a form and the use
of an idea merely as the motive force behind a pulp plot”.38 In this sense
they embody the same “illegitimate misunderstanding” of Nietzsche that
the Nazis propagated (discussed in more detail below). But it remains to
highlight what Nietzsche’s vision of the Ubermensch actually stood for, or
rather, to supply a “legitimate misunderstanding” of it.
Asking “What is an ape to a man? A laughing stock…so will man be
to the superman”, Nietzsche’s Ubermensch (“Overman” in its correct
translation) was the ideal philosopher-artist who realises that the material
world is a chaotic flux of forces that cannot be grasped through rational
categories. As Rivkin and Ryan put it, “all our thinking is fiction making,
making metaphors that substitute stability for the inherent instability of
existence…that ultimately resists being translated into ideas or ideals like
justice or truth or sin and redemption”.39 The truly Nietzschean superman
is content to avoid categorisation, refuses to assign meaning to things and,
instead, “throw[s] himself into the play of the world and dance[s] with
it”.40 As shown in Chapter Two, “The Rhizome of Comic Book Culture”,
poststructuralist thinkers inspired by Nietzsche’s refutation of humanism
would later give way to critical Post/Humanism. Prior to this, however,
Nietzsche’s philosophy was prone to misappropriation. This is evident in
the figure of the pulp Ubermensch, for instance in Tarzan, who, despite
being orphaned and raised by apes, is possessed of an innate, hereditary
aristocratic nobility, intelligence and bearing. In fact, stories about jungle
heroes such as Tarzan were a thriving pulp subgenre themselves, in which
“derogatory racial stereotypes of the world’s people were positioned
against mythical images of America’s physical and, moral and intellectual
superiority”.41 This juxtaposition of the Superhuman body (always white,
almost always male) juxtaposed with the inferior mind and body of the
racial or gendered other is important, and a theme that will be returned
to in due course.
FASCISM AND THE POSTHUMAN BODY

It is curious that the superhero arrived at the same time as Hitler’s shadow
version of the same in his vision of a “master race”. Here, too, the presence
of both Darwin and Nietzsche can be felt. Deleuze himself distinguished
between “legitimate misunderstandings” and “illegitimate misunder-
standing” of Nietzsche. The former encourage “schizophrenic laugh-
ter or revolutionary joy” capable of bringing about a “transmutation of
THE PERFECT BODY 77
thinking”.42 The National Socialists represented the latter. So strong is this

connection that “many German philosophers continue to see Nietzsche as
a type of proto-fascist”.43 In actuality, the Third Reich did not universally
embrace the philosopher’s work and there were several key ways in which
Hitler and Nietzsche differed. For example, Nietzsche favoured a uni-
fied Europe, not German global domination, and Nietzsche’s interest was
in developing intellectual and artistic powers rather than crude militaris-
tic might. Perhaps most importantly, “Hitler was an anti-Semite, while
Nietzsche was an anti-anti-Semite”.44 At any rate, it should be highlighted
that the Nazi vision of a “master race” of fascist supermen did not emerge
sui generis. As has already been stated, interest in eugenics, in the early
decades of the twentieth century, was in fact widespread, and already being
expressed in the form of the pulp Superhuman. The form of eugenics
that was seen in Germany in the thirties and forties was known as “nega-
tive eugenics” through which “‘hereditarily defective’ offspring were pre-
vented through legally based forced sterilisation; afterwards the separation
of the races was controlled, then handicapped and mentally ill individuals
were murdered and finally the Jews faced extermination”. Moreover, the
SS had its own breeding programme, “with the aim of creating higher
quality of racial offspring”.45
More generally, National Socialism “revolved around a cult of the ‘mind-
less body’ which was reflected in its art and derived from clearly articulated
view of the desirable body”.46 A politics and policy, in other words, geared
towards the production of ideal bodies and the elimination of imperfect
ones. Nor was Nazi Germany unique in its misreading of Nietzschean phi-
losophy and its embrace of eugenics. For instance, Stone shows that while
many popularisers of Nietzsche’s work in Edwardian Britain emphasised
the ethical imperatives of the Superman, others “gradually came to place
more and more emphasis on breeding and race”.47 Moreover, the concept
of the “lethal chamber” “nowhere defined in the literature but frighten-
ingly suggestive to a post-Holocaust audience, is a common term of ref-
erence for British eugenicists from 1900 to 1939”.48 Even as the science
fiction Superman shifted from “menace to messiah”, the Transhuman
practice of eugenics, bolstered by diluted Nietzschean ideas, would soon
be shifting in the opposite direction. Indeed, if we take the Holocaust
to be, as some have argued,49 the culmination of the Enlightenment
project—in the application of science, technology and “reason” to the
management of human bodies—there are good reasons to be some-
what concerned with the Transhumanist quest for human enhancement.
78 S. JEFFERY
It is not hard to see how the eugenicists’ crude application of rational meth-
ods to human populations and to a lesser extent the physical culture move-
ment have certain affinities with the aims of the Transhumanists. Both are
concerned with the deliberate manipulation of human bodies to produce
beings of enhanced cognitive and physical abilities. Certainly the process of
somatic gene therapy, which makes it theoretically possible to “change the
genetic set up of a person”,50 has both utopian and dystopian potentials.
Ideologies aside, eugenics, it could be argued, marked the first clear example
of what can happen when attempts are made by the state to utilise science
and technology to tinker with evolution and improve humanity.
These concerns obviously overlap with those of the Post/Humanists.
Technological change, even radical technological change, cannot fulfil its
emancipatory potential without an accompanying change in the power/
knowledge matrix from which such technology emerges. The insinua-
tion being that without breaking decisively, or “working through”51the
human that still lies within the Posthuman, the same abuses of power and
inequalities are liable to be repeated with ever more speed and efficiency,
not to mention the as yet unimagined consequences that might result
from posthuman technologies. Aside from the critical Post/Humanists,
a wide variety of bio-conservatives oppose developments such as those in
genetic engineering. Their more prosaic concerns are, not coincidentally,
bolstered by reference to the Nazis’ use of eugenics policies. This is some-
times based on misunderstanding. For instance, it is ironic to note that
while some critics find Transhumanism’s lack of a Nietzschean critique
of humanism a potential road to fascist breeding ideologies, Habermas
rejects all procedures of genetic enhancement because he does associate
Nietzsche with Transhumanism but believes that it is precisely this associa-
tion that would result in fascist breeding ideologies.52
GOLDEN AGE SUPERHEROES: THE PERFECT BODY

One can hardly extract the Golden Age superhero from the contempo-
raneous popularity of the “eugenicist concept of the New Man”: “the
harbinger of Future Western industrial society”, which was common dur-
ing the time of their inception. Not for nothing “did the new superhe-
roes Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Sandman, and Batman all
visit the [1939 Wold of Tomorrow] fair within the fictional spaces of the
New York World’s Fairs Comics of 1939-1940, but a ‘live’ Superman
also made public appearances as part of 1940s Superman Day”.53
THE PERFECT BODY 79
Comics historian David Kunzle has suggested that late-nineteenth cen-

tury comic strips imagined “the human body violently flattened, stretched,
twisted, kinked or wrapped around a spinning drum…the body as machined
almost beyond recognition”.54 By contrast, the posthuman body of the
superhero was built to withstand these forces. For Bukatman, the spectacle
of the superhero body is a means by which “the fear of instability induced
by urban modernity” can be converted “into the thrill of topsy-turvey-
dom”.55 Similarly, Thurtle and Mitchell argue that superheroes, “embody
industrial-sized bodily capacities without sacrificing embodied human per-
ceptions… [Providing] readers with a means for exploring the forces and
potential of industrial society”.56 Thus the superhero makes its first appear-
ance in the modern, industrial age because: “only the Man of Steel has the
constitution, organs and abilities equal to the rigors of the Machine Age”.57
Indeed, by 1939 Superman was selling an average 1,300,000 copies per
issue, becoming a nationally syndicated radio show in 1939 and a series of
Fleischer brothers’ cartoons between 1941 and 1943.
But the popularity of the Golden Age superhero also needs to be under-
stood in its post-Great Depression context. Several authors have pointed
to the influence of New Deal politics on the creation Superman.58 Comics’
writer Grant Morrison has even called the original Superman a “social-
ist superhero”.59 In his earliest adventures he was something of a social
reformer, a “champion of the oppressed” who took on corrupt senators,
wife-beaters and slum landlords.60 Nor was Superman alone in his liberal
crusade. In one adventure the Green Lantern helps to organise a low-
cost law clinic funded by neighbourhood citizens to take on a corrupt
mortgage and loan company. Dr. Mid-Nite took on a mining company
to ensure access for government safety inspectors, and Hourman “ended
an abusive child-labour racket and lobbied for closer government supervi-
sion of private reform schools”.61 Though the Great Depression is often
characterised as a period of social reform—an image mirrored by early
Golden Age superheroics—America had not entirely shed eugenicist ideas
from the intellectual climate. In fact, more legal eugenic sterilisations were
sanctioned in the 1930s than any other decade.
With the advent of World War Two however, the emphasis shifted from
the protection of the “common man” to that of America itself, now seen
as “a repository of virtue and morality charged with extending justice and
freedom to the oppressed in Europe and Asia”.62 While the superhero
began as a New Deal reformer and “champion of the oppressed” the
economic boom precipitated by the advent of war in Europe incorporated
80 S. JEFFERY
the superhero into the establishment. Attention was turned from cor-
rupt politicians and capitalists towards “the defence of private property
and the extermination of criminals rather than a struggle against social
injustice”.63 The propaganda needs of World War Two served to further
strengthen this connection to the needs of the state. As Savage writes:
“Comic books became an integral part of Allied propaganda machines,
emphasizing the need for maximum war effort by portraying the enemy
as the inhuman offspring of a vast and pernicious evil…War stimulated
the comic book industry, not only by providing much of the editorial
matter, but also by expanding the audience for comic books”.64 Comic
books were shipped to military personnel to boost morale and patriotic
fervour. At one point during the war, 30 percent of all printed matter
sent to military bases was comic books, and comic book sales reached 15
million comic books per month. In 1943, retail sales hit nearly $30 mil-
lion.65 On the home front, publishers repaid the favour by having heroes
like Superman and Batman urge readers to buy war bonds or donate to
the American Red Cross. Captain America showed readers how to collect
scrap metal and paper. 66
The war also saw the introduction of explicitly patriotic superheroes
such The Shield and Uncle Sam. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s Captain
America actually debuted in 1939 and rivalled Superman in terms of
popularity and readership. A consideration of Captain America’s origin
story would help to highlight how all the concerns addressed thus far—
evolutionary theory, eugenics, the New Man, fascism and the posthuman
Superhuman—form an assemblage with one another. Unlike Superman,
who was already blessed with alien biology and simply disguised as bum-
bling human Clark Kent, the skinny Steve Rogers is labelled “unfit” for
service in the army. It is only the application of science, in the form
of the “super-soldier serum” that unlocks his potential, transforming
him into Captain America, a posthuman avatar of the USA blessed with
super-strength and athletic agility. This origin story evokes eugenics in
its language—Steve Rogers is “weak” and “unfit”, whereas he becomes
a “perfect specimen” following his metamorphosis. Hack points out
that the origin also recalls a 1918 cover of Physical Culture featuring “a
weakling and a coward regenerated by army physical training”.67 The
transformation even resembles the old Charles Atlas adverts in terms of
page layout as well as thematically. This cultural context proved to work
in the comics’ favour with the character selling close to a million issues a
month during the war.68
THE PERFECT BODY 81
Meanwhile, the stories concerned themselves with depicting the war

in simple black and white terms, often presenting enemy nations—the
Japanese in particular—as “subhuman, inhuman or even superhuman,
but never simply human”.69 In other comic books, the tradition passed
down from Tarzan of derogatory depictions of African natives as clowns
or savages juxtaposed with noble, Aryan heroes continued apace.70 In
this way, superhero comics displayed the same concerns with evolution as
the eugenicists and Nietzsche had in their different ways. Science fiction
generally, as Kirby71 has argued, is haunted by the spectre of eugenics and
the implications of evolutionary theory, appearing as either the themes of
“flawed humanity” or “evolutionary potential”. The same themes appear,
perhaps even more frequently, in superhero comics. For many however,
it was precisely this conflation of eugenicist ideals, disciplined bodies,
militarism and nationhood that marked the superhero as a potentially
fascistic figure.
Contemporary critics such as George Orwell dismissed superhero
comics as a form of “bully worship” similar to that which put Hitler and
Mussolini in power,72 while newspaper columnists argued that superhe-
roes gave “all the arguments a child ever needs for an omnipotent and
infallible ‘strong man’ beyond all law, the nihilistic man of totalitarian
ideology”.73 Others made the link to Nietzsche and fascism, bemoaning
superheroes as symptomatic of a “desire for a primitive religion much like
the European fascist’s vulgarisation of Nietzsche’s Superman”.74 Little
under a decade later, the infamous anti-comics campaigner Dr. Frederic
Wertham would sum up the issue by wondering, “How did Nietzsche get
into the nursery”?
While there are obvious historic parallels between the Golden Age
superhero and National Socialist vision of the Master Race, there remain
several reasons to be suspicious of the idea that the superhero, even in its
Golden Age, was ideologically fascist. The socialist bent of the very earliest
superhero comics is one reason but not least of these was the fact that the
early comic book industry was a predominantly Jewish one, whose creators
were acutely aware of the implications of fascism. Listing his inspirations in
the creation of Superman in 1975, writer Jerry Siegel suggested “hearing
and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in
Nazi Germany”.75 Meanwhile, the debut of Captain America featured him
punching Hitler in the face nine months before the country that gave him
his name entered the war. Nor did the Nazis appreciate the superhero. The
weekly newspaper of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps, published an article in
82 S. JEFFERY
1940 which mocks “the intellectually and physically circumcised…inven-

tive Israelite” Jerry Siegel for his creation Superman which they describe
as sowing seeds of “hate, suspicion, evilness and criminality” in young
hearts and minds because he depicts Superman taking on Nazis instead
of sharing their values.76 Clearly the Golden Age superhero was not quite
fascistic enough for actual fascists. More than these historically contextual
clues though, the subsequent development of the superhero problematises
the notion of the superhero as fascist. Captain America provides a helpful
synecdoche of this development.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: PERFECT BODY AS POSTHUMAN

ASSEMBLAGE
In the previous chapter, it was noted that several scholars have drawn
upon Eco’s notion of the “oneiric climate” of Superman comics. For the
authors drawing on Eco, these endless returns are almost wholly negative
and constitute an existential threat to readers’ subjectivity. As the preced-
ing discussing of continuity showed however, the superhero genre is not
“static” at all, but rather, “a dynamic, formal structure that plunges itself
into repeated, ongoing conversations with its creators, other creations,
and its audiences across time”.77 The characteristics of connectivity, simul-
taneity, and multiplicity found in the continuity structures of the DC and
Marvel Universes have much in common with the concept of the rhizome.
The metatext/universe/fiction network is a dynamic, fluid structure which
“can never exist in any definite form” as, presumably, “no fan has ever read
every single canonical Marvel or DC title” (not for lack of trying) and
also because new issues are being added every month, meaning that “any
definitive metatextual resolution is therefore indefinitely postponed”.78 In
the comics themselves, certain writers have come up with concepts that are
intended to articulate this narrative multiplicity, as was discussed above,
but the narrative evolution of single characters can also be read this way,
as well as functioning as a synecdoche for their respective universes. A
brief consideration of the development of Captain America should suffice
to clarify this point and to highlight the limits of ideological readings,
because the character’s origin as military super soldier and propaganda
tool positions him as ripe for ideological analysis.
Captain America’s development as a character is intimately tied up with
the continuity of the Marvel Universe. As a Golden Age character resur-
rected in the Silver Age, he serves as a bridge between those two eras,
THE PERFECT BODY 83
cementing the ongoing historical development of the Marvel Universe at

a narrative level. Many writers have taken advantage of this historical bag-
gage to re-examine the ideological meaning of the character. Implied gaps
in structural continuity are what often pave the way for what is known as
retroactive continuity changes, or “ret-cons”. This is when “the assumed
past of a comic or some other franchise is changed in order to make sense
of current continuity”.79 For instance, in issues 153–156 of Captain
America and the Falcon (September–December 1972) Steve Rogers
(Captain America’s civilian identity) and new partner the Falcon come up
against seeming doppelgangers of Captain America and his WW2 sidekick
Bucky Barnes. It is later revealed that these two are the Captain America
and Bucky of the 1950s. For three issues of Young Men Comics and three
issues of Captain America, Commie Smasher, published in 1954, Captain
America stories were presented. These could only be rationalised within
current continuity by reasoning that the character therein could not be the
real Captain America as he was frozen in ice during the time. Thus a ret.-
con was introduced to explain this incongruity: following the apparent
deaths of Captain America and Bucky the US government had attempted
to recreate the two patriotic icons, only to put the doppelgangers into
suspended animation when they were no longer of use. This incident illus-
trates how the practice of ret.-conning affects not only narrative history
but also the “meaning” of past stories.
Captain America’s career spans from World War Two to the present day
in both publication terms and in the continuity of the Marvel Universe.
When Captain America was found cryogenically suspended in the arctic in
Avengers # 4 in 1964 it served several purposes. Firstly, it allowed Marvel
comics to fully consolidate its Golden Age publications into modern con-
tinuity. Captain America and his Golden Age contemporaries—including
Namor the Submariner and the original Human Torch—existed within
the history of the Marvel Universe as inspirations for the heroes of the
1960s. More interestingly perhaps, because Captain America had been in
suspended animation for almost twenty years. he was presented as a man
out of time, a relic of a more simplistic age at odds with the tenor of the
strange new world he finds himself in. These themes became increasingly
explicit as the decade wore on and the Cold War consensus that had domi-
nated the earliest Silver Age Marvel comics gave way to “growing anxiety
and a fear of American institutions and leaders”.80 An extended internal
monologue from Captain America #12281 ends with him wondering if
“perhaps—I should have battled less—and questioned more!”
84 S. JEFFERY
Moreover, by 1971, extended debates in the letters pages of Captain

America moved Marvel’s Editor-in-chief Stan Lee to inform his readers
that, in fact, Captain America no longer lent himself to the John Wayne-
type character he once was, adding that he could not imagine any of
Marvel’s characters “taking on a role of super-patriotism in the world
as it is today”.82 In issues 153–156 of Captain America and the Falcon
(September–December 1972) the pseudonymous heroes come up against
seeming doppelgangers of Captain America and his WW2 sidekick Bucky
Barnes. The two imposters are presented as paranoid, unstable, commu-
nist-hating and racist. Several authors83 have suggested that the battle
between the two Captain Americas is a symbolic one. American history and
blind patriotism is interrogated, and “the extremism of the super patriot
is contrasted unfavourably with the more tolerant ideological position of
Captain America”.84 The real Captain America finds himself realising that
the nationalistic zealot he is fighting is a man “who began with the same
dreams I did and ended an insane, bigoted super patriot”. In short, the
fascistic potential inherent in the concept of the superhero, in particular
the super patriot, is clearly acknowledged. For Macdonald, the narrative
development of Captain America is “consistent with the larger trends of
American intellectual thought… [Moving] from an almost rural simplicity
to an urban complexity”.85 Throughout the seventies and eighties, Captain
America continued to be a vehicle for oblique political commentary.
Often it has been necessary for Captain America, the first super sol-
dier and symbol of American values, to either abandon his star-spangled
costume or come into conflict with the government. In many Captain
America stories of the seventies and eighties, what is presented as evil and
un-American is the desire to inflict one’s own beliefs upon others. In the
first flush of his creation, Captain America was born to fight fascism, the
infliction of totalitarian will upon populations. Later stories, unable to
return to the simplistic morality of the Golden Age, instead choose to sug-
gest that the seeds of fascism lie dormant within all moral crusaders, and a
depiction of government agencies, sometimes even presidents who lack the
necessary ethical framework, particularly to be in charge of super soldiers.
This type of questioning, as will be shown in “The Military-Industrial
Body”, comes to a head in the 2000s, where the issue of who controls
Superhumans, or “people of mass destruction”, became increasingly cen-
tral to superhero narratives in the form of Military-Industrial bodies.
In keeping with this emphasis on the fascistic potential of the posthu-
man Perfect Body, contemporary retellings of Captain America’s origin
THE PERFECT BODY 85
story also tend to play up the eugenics angle. By 2003, Captain America’s
nemesis (and thematic opposite), the fascistic Red Skull was threatening to
“breed a race of superman…Blond, Aryan superman” if Captain America
were to join him. The recent series Captain America: Man out of Time
presents an updated retelling of the character’s reappearance after years of
cryogenic suspension following the war. Examining him, scientist Hank
Pym remarks, “after six decades you’re still a perfect physical specimen”.86
Perhaps the most radical revision of this origin story is the series Truth:
Red, White and Black.87 This story reveals that the same super-soldier
project that created Captain America had begun by testing the serum on
a number of black soldiers, most of whom were killed in the process. This
story has in fact historically factual parallels in the Tuskegee syphilis experi-
ments in which the US Public Health Service deliberately withheld treat-
ment from around 400 African American men with syphilis from 1932 to
1972 in order to study the disease’s unchecked effects. The cover for issue
5’s The Math depicts a black head inscribed with numbers, alluding to the
math of the military sacrificing civilians but also drawing a parallel between
the character’s experience and that of the Holocaust whose victims were
tattooed with numbers.
SUPERHUMAN AS FASCIST
Many critics and commentators have noted the confluence of eugenic ide-
als and corporeal emphasis in superhero comics and concluded that the
genre is inherently fascistic in its ideology. For Kahan and Stewart, “the
very idea of the superhero presupposes racial purity and ethnic inequal-
ity”.88 Beaty, too, makes an explicit link between superheroes and “fascist
wish fulfilment”.89 Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel Maus was the
first of its kind to win the Pulitzer prize for literature and which relates an
allegorical biography of his parent’s experience in Auschwitz, has argued
that the work of Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain America, the Hulk, the
Fantastic Four, and arguably the single-most influential artist in the his-
tory of superhero comics, is fundamentally fascistic in its “celebration of
the physicality of the human body at the expense of the intellect”.90 This
same celebration of physicality can also be found in Superman. As Jones
points out, “Physical Culture was central to bodybuilding culture and so
as much a part of [Superman co-creator Joe Schuster’s] consciousness
as Amazing Stories and Tarzan”.91 The pages of the earliest Superman
comics even featured short exercises for young readers on “acquiring
86 S. JEFFERY
super-strength”. The October 1941 issue of Action Comics featured

Superman telling children that “it is your duty to yourself, your God,
your country and your parents to care for yourself in body and mind”.92
While readers were encouraged to become more like the Man of Steel,
Hitler was also drawing on metaphors of metamorphosis of man into
metal, commanding German men to become “hard as Krupp steel”.93
Such a confluence of ideas certainly exists and this chapter has presented
the first comic book expression of posthumanity as a form named, with
some irony, as the Perfect Body.
This assemblage was shown to be formed from and by several socio-
historic and cultural trends, drawing together patriotism, Nietzsche,
eugenics, physical culture and militarism into a particular form. It is unsur-
prising then that some critics would categorise the superhero in ideological
terms as fascistic, or, at best, right wing. As this chapter has demonstrated,
there are real and significant historical linkages. Even in more general
terms, Brown has suggested that “classical comic book depictions of mas-
culinity are perhaps the quintessential expression of our cultural beliefs
about what it means to be a man”.94 While this is debatable, it is still clear
that the corporeal form of the Perfect Body remains the standard. Indeed,
for years after he left Marvel Comics, the company still largely insisted that
artists follow the aesthetic template of Jack Kirby.95
This historically situated discourse of the Perfect Body laid the tem-
plate for the depiction of superheroes and gives some credence to those
critics who view the superhero as ideologically right wing. However,
this book argues that the Perfect Body is merely one particular assem-
blage within the rhizome of the Superhuman. Rather than the essence,
or fundamental meaning of the posthuman body, the fascist posthuman
is the emergent result of particular links being formed, an assemblage of
the posthuman AND eugenics AND Nietzsche AND Nationalism AND
militarism AND so on. As will be shown in the following chapters on
Military-Industrial and Cosmic Bodies, the meaning and practice of the
posthuman body emerges from the assemblages it forms with wider social
and cultural trends. The posthuman body is a becoming, not a being.
Grant Morrison’s character Flex Mentallo embodies this idea. Ironically
poaching Flex’s look and origin from the old Charles Atlas ads, Morrison
has Flex reveal that there was more to learn from the “Muscle Mystery”
book than simply strength. Flex discovers that his becoming posthuman
requires “techniques that I can’t even begin to hint at. Muscle power,
developed to such a degree it could be used to read minds, see into the
future, into other dimensions even!”96
THE PERFECT BODY 87
The development of the Perfect Body for Flex, as for the genre, leads
beyond the body into other minds, futures and dimensions. In order to do
this though, the posthuman body would have to form new assemblages,
disconnected from the needs of the state and plugged into the post-war
counterculture instead. Following the War, superheroes soon fell out of
fashion and were largely replaced by other genres. It would be almost
fifteen years before the superhero comic regained prominence in what has
become known as comics’ Silver Age during the 1960s, when the Perfect
Body began, like Flex Mentallo, to become a Cosmic Body.
NOTES
1. Hall, S. (1997) “The Work of Representation”, in Stuart Hall (Ed.)
Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practice. London:
Sage p. 44.
2. Ibid., p. 46.
3. Luckhurst, R. (2005) Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–2.
4. Ibid., p. 6.
5. Murphy, R. J. (2004) The Act of Viewing: Iser, Bordwell, and the ‘Post-
Theory’ Debates in Contemporary Film Studies. Comparative Critical
Studies 1(1–2) p. 124.
6. Iser, cited in Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 131.
8. Quoted in Ibid., p. 133.
9. Mazlish, B. (1993). The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-evolution of Humans
and Machines. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Popular Culture p. 24.
11. Ibid.
12. Weising, V. (2008) The History of medical enhancement: ‘From Restitutio
ad Imtegum to Transformation ad Optimum. In Gordijn, B. and Chadwick,
R. (eds.) Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity. Springer, p. 16.
13. Ibid.
14. Hack, B. E. (2009) Weakness is a Crime: Captain America and the Eugenic
Ideal in Early Twentieth-Century America. In: Weiner, R. G. (ed.) Captain
America and the Struggle of the Superhero: Critical Essays. USA: McFarland
and Company, p. 79.
15. Goto, Y. (2004) Bridging the Gap Between Sociology of the Body and Disability
Studies Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological
Association, Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel, Philadelphia, PA
Online <PDF>. 2009-05-25 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/
p21045_index.html. p. 5.
88 S. JEFFERY
16. Weising, The History of medical enhancement: ‘From Restitutio ad Imtegum

to Transformation ad Optimum., p. 13.
17. Shilling, C, The Body and Social Theory, pp. 29–30.
18. Stone, D. (2002) Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in
Edwardian and Interwar Britai. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
19. Whittington-Walsh, F. (2002) From freaks to Savants: disability and hege-
mony from the Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) to Sling Blade (1997).
Disability and Society, 17(6) p. 706.
to Transformation ad Optimum., p. 16.
21. Ibid.
22. Robertson, J. (2001) Japan’s first cyborg? Miss Nippon, eugenics and war-
time technologies of beauty, body and blood. Body & Society, 7(1) 1–34.
23. Jones, G (2004) Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the
Comic Book. New York: Basic Books.
24. Kasson, J. F. (2001). Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: the White Male
Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill & Wang
Pub. p.32
25. Hack, Weakness is a Crime: Captain America and the Eugenic Ideal in Early
Twentieth-Century America., pp. 82.
26. Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.
27. Landon, R. (2008) A Half-naked Muscleman in Trunks: Charles Atlas,
Superheroes, and Comic Book Masculinity. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
[online] Available from: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-218817882.
html [Accessed: 14/06/2015] p. 1.
28. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: the White Male Body and the
Challenge of Modernity in America.
29. A gallery of the various Charles Atlas adverts can be found at https://www.
charlesatlas.com/classicads.html
30. Thomsen, M. R. (2013). The new human in literature: Posthuman visions of
changes in body, mind and society after 1900. London; New York : Bloomsbury
Academic, p. 34.
31. Quoted in Currell, S. (2006) “Introduction” Susan Currell and Christina
Cogdell (Eds.). Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass
Culture in the 1930s. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, p. 6.
32. Thomsen, The new human in literature: Posthuman visions of changes in
body, mind and society after 1900.
33. Garland-Thomson, R. (1996). Freakery: Cultural spectacles of the extraordi-
nary body. New York: New York University Press. p. 44.
34. Gerber, D. (1992) “Volition and Valorization in the Analysis of the ‘Careers’
of People Exhibited in Freak Shows”, Disability,. Handicap & Society 7(1)
p. 60.
THE PERFECT BODY 89
35. Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 23.

p. 125.
37. Coogan, Superhero: The Secret origin of a Genre, p. 130.
38. Ibid., p. 135.
39. Rivkin and Ryan, The Class of 1968-Post-Structuralism par lui-meme, p. 335.
40. Ibid.
41. Pewewardy, C. (2002). From subhuman to superhuman: Images of first
nations peoples in comic books.Studies in Media & Information Literacy,
2(2), p. 4.
42. Cited in Perry, Deleuze’s Nietzsche, p. 184.
43. Sorgner S. L. (2010) Beyond Humanism: Reflections on Trans- and
Posthumanism. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 21(2) pp. 1–19.
44. Ibid., p. 15.
to Transformation ad Optimum, p. 17.
46. Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, p. 30.
47. Stone, D. (2002) Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in
Edwardian and Interwar Britai. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 16.
48. Ibid., p. 7.
49. Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell
University Press.
to Transformation ad Optimum.
51. Badmington, Posthumanism.
52. Sorgner, Beyond Humanism: Reflections on Trans- and Posthumanism, p. 16.
53. Ndalianis, Comic Book Superheroes: An Introduction, p. 7.
54. Kunzle 1990, 357. Quoted in Bukatman,S. (2009). “Secret Identity Politics”,
in Ndalianis, A. (ed.) The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. New York:
Routledge, p. 120 [ellipses added].
55. Bukatman, S. (2003) Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the
20th Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press., p. 3.
56. Thurtle, P. and Mitchell, R. (2007) The Acme Novelty Library: Comic
Books, Repetition, and the Return of the New. Configurations 15, p. 286.
57. Bukatman, S. (1994) X-Bodies: The Torment of the Superhero. In
Sappington, R and Stallings, T. (eds) Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of
Identity and Culture. Seattle: Bay Press, p. 99.
58. Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book;
Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
59. Morrison, Supergods.
60. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in
America , p. 11.
90 S. JEFFERY
61. Cited in Ibid., p. 23.

62. Ibid., p. 35.
p, 100.
64. Savage, W. (1998) Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens: Comic Books and
America, 1945–1954. USA: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 10–11.
America , pp. 31.
66. Ibid., p. 34.
67. Hack, Weakness is a Crime: Captain America and the Eugenic Ideal in Early
Twentieth-Century America., p. 82.
America , p, 36.
69. Ibid., p. 45.
70. Ibid.
71. Kirby, D. A. (2007) The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in
Science Fiction Films. Literature and Medicine, 26(1) pp. 83–108.
72. Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.
p.170
73. Quoted in Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture
in America, p 28.
74. Ibid.
75. Quoted in Fingeroth, D. (2004) Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes
Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society. New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group, p. 41.
76. Das Schwarze Korps, 25 April 1940, p. 8, “Jerry Siegel attacks!” [online]
Available from: http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/superman.htm
accessed 27/07/2013 [Accessed 23/08/2012].
p. 285.
80. Costello, M. J. (2009). Secret identity crisis: Comic books and the unmasking
of Cold War America. New York: Continuum, p. 90.
81. Lee, S. and Colan, G. (1972) “The Sting of the Scorpion!” Marvel Essentials:
Captain America Volume 2. New York: Marvel Comics.
in America, p. 244.
83. See Costello 2001; Skidmore 1983.
84. Costello, Secret identity crisis: Comic books and the unmasking of Cold War
America, pp. 107.
85. Macdonald, A and V. (1976), “Sold American: The Metamorphosis of
Captain America”, The Journal of Popular Culture, X, p. 253.
THE PERFECT BODY 91
86. Waid, M., amd Molina, J. (2011). Man out of time. New York: Marvel.
87. Morales, R., and Baker, K. (2003) Truth: Red, White and Black. New York:
Marvel Comics.
88. Kahan, J. and Stewart, S. (2006) Caped Crusaders 101. USA: McFarland,
p. 7.
89. Beaty, Assessing Contemporary Comics Scholarship, p. 4.
90. Quoted in Knowles, C. (2007) Our Gods wear Spandex. San Francisco:
Weiser Books, p. 192.
91. Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book;
p. 70.
92. Quoted in Gordon, I. (1998) Comic Strips and Consumer Culture,
1890–1945. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, p. 137.
93. Weltzien, F. (2005). Masque-ulinities: Changing dress as a display of mascu-
linity in the superhero genre. Fashion theory, 9(2), p. 231.
94. Brown, J. A. (2000) Black Superheroes: Milestone Comics and Their Fans.
Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, p. 168.
95. Howe, S. (2012) Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. New York: Harper; Ro,
R. (2005) Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic
Book Revolution. USA: Bloomsbury.
96. Morrison, G., Case, R., Saldino, G., Workman, J., and Vozzo, D. (2006).
Doom patrol: [No. 4]. New York: D.C. Comics Inc., p. 16.
The Cosmic Body
The Perfect Body of the Golden Age laid out the template for the ico-
nography of the comic book Superhuman while also manifesting contem-
poraneously in the material-scientific proto-Transhumanist practices of
eugenics, and in the nascent Post/Humanist idea of the “New Man”, a
pseudo-Nietzschean Modernist vision that, in its most extreme form, was
articulated and practiced in Hitler’s vision of a “master race”. The next
surge of popular interest in superheroes came to be known as the Silver
Age of Comics. This period also saw the emergence of a new posthuman
form that this book dubs the Cosmic Body. The aspects that “define”
the Cosmic Body, like the use of magic, occult tinges, and evolution-
ary mysticism, were already apparent in the Golden Age. Characters like
The Spectre, and Dr. Occult (both, incidentally, from Superman creator
Jerry Siegel) gained their powers from metaphysical rather than scientific
forces. As will be discussed below, all superheroes display aspects of the
Cosmic Body to some extent, in as much as the science presented in them
is, “at most only superficially plausible, often less so, and the prevailing
mood is mystical rather than rational”.1 But the corporeal concerns of
the Golden Age meant that, as a rule, and in terms of sheer popularity
and sales, the Perfect Body was emphasised over the Cosmic Body. As
with the previous chapter, the Cosmic Body emerged from a very particu-
lar socio-historic discourse of the posthuman, not simply limited to the
realm of the Superhuman but also discernible within Post/Humanism and
Transhumanism.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_5
94 S. JEFFERY
UNDERSTANDING THE SILVER AGE OF COMICS

The Silver Age of Comics coincided, and chimed with, the birth and con-
cerns of the 1960s counterculture. As such, to understand the Cosmic
Body, a certain amount of context is needed. Key to this understanding
however is acknowledging the countercultural trends of the 1960s. It has
been noted that “the movement”, for lack of a better term, of the 1960s
was comprised of several, often contradictory wings, finding expression in
popular music (exemplified by the artistic trajectory of The Beatles), lit-
erature (Burroughs, Ginsberg), radical or anti-psychiatry (Laing, Schatz),
psychedelic philosophers (Leary, Kesey) and proponents of Eastern phi-
losophies and religion.2 Added to this cultural mélange was a “more rec-
ognizably political wing”3 manifesting itself in the civil rights movement,
second wave feminism and growing protest against the Vietnam War. Nor,
like the eugenics and physical culture movement of the Perfect Body, or
the globalised reach of the Military-Industrial Body, was this countercul-
ture confined solely to the UK and the USA. The events of May 1968 in
Paris testify to the Francophone variant, while Brazil produced its own
psychedelic counterculture dubbed “Tropicalismo”, and bootlegged rock
and roll albums and black market drugs fuelled an underground revolu-
tion on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall.4
These strands, though each possessing their particular biases, were
often overlapping and international in scope. See, for instance, Black
Panther leader Huey Newton harbouring a then-fugitive psychedelic
proselytiser Timothy Leary in Algiers,5 or the 1967 London conference
that brought together beat poet Allen Ginsberg and radical psychiatrist
R.D. Laing and Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael.6 For Andersen,
what each of these disparate strands shared was a common “idea of real-
ity, of worldviews, of something in the realm of thought that could be
changed. Even the political revolutionaries, for all their contempt of Leary
and Watts, considered themselves to be at war against a ‘false conscious-
ness’ that propped up unjust political structures”.7 One result of this, to
use an example most indicative of this chapter’s concerns, was that “acid-
heads”, post-structuralists and popularisers of Eastern mysticism all agreed
(albeit for wildly different reasons) on the illusory and mutable nature of
both the self and society. It was but a small step then to see the “human”
as equally illusory and mutable, unlike the patriotic and obedient version
of posthumanity represented by the Perfect Body. Indeed, even without
the explicitly “cosmic” characters discussed below, the Silver Age remains
THE COSMIC BODY 95
notable for introducing elements of doubt, pain and emotional angst to

the comic book Superhuman that set them apart from the unproblemati-
cally moral and heroic Perfect Bodies of the Golden Age Superhuman.
DC Comics may have kicked off the Silver Age of Comics when they
recycled a character name form the Golden Age to reimagine The Flash
in 1956 but the Silver Age of Comics was, in many respects, the Marvel
Age of Comics. The Silver Age innovations of Marvel Comics had made
superheroes, especially Marvel superheroes, into the stuff of counter-
cultural fantasy. What distinguished Marvel comics was characterisation.
While DC’s superheroes remained to some extent stuck in the Golden
Age and more clearly noble and unquestioningly heroic, Marvel characters
like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and the X-Men were flawed
human characters, prone to neurosis, insecurity and bickering. Their pow-
ers were a curse and a burden as much as a gift.
Marvel’s comic books became popular on American college campuses
and writer-editor Stan Lee began to get invited to speak on the modern
mythology of superheroes. In 1965, a poll taken by Esquire magazine
“revealed that student radials ranked Spider-man and the Hulk alongside
the likes of Bob Dylan and Che Guevara as their revolutionary icons”.8
Comic book art was appropriated by practitioners of the Pop Art movement
like Roy Lichtenstein9 and Andy Warhol, while Marvel repaid the favour by
briefly branding their comics as “Marvel Pop Art productions”. Stan Lee
was courted by the leading lights of European cinema such as Alain Resnais
and Fellini.10 It hardly seems coincidental that in 1968’s Easy Rider, the first
film by and for the counterculture,11 and itself influenced by European art
cinema, should name a central character after Marvel’s Captain America.
COSMIC BODY AS ASSEMBLAGE

The vision of the Cosmic Body was formed from a loose bricolage of
cultural resources. This vision was both compounded and, for many, facili-
tated by the counterculture’s adoption of psychedelic drugs, which had
re-emerged as a source of intellectual and psychiatric interest in the 1940s
and ‘50s. Pilfering from Eastern spiritualties, science fiction paperbacks
and the Western esoteric tradition, the youth counterculture stitched
together a version of the posthuman that rested on an evolutionary muta-
tion of consciousness-and a realignment of humanity’s relationship with
the universe. It became increasingly common to adopt terms from science
fiction to articulate the emergence of this new youth consciousness.
96 S. JEFFERY
In 1967 the San Francisco Oracle published its “Manifesto for Mutants”
for example, stating, “Mutants! Know that you exist! They have hid you in
cities. And clothed you in fool’s clothes. Know that you are free.”.12
If Marvel spoke to the aesthetic and political leanings of the counter-
culture it also chimed with its psychedelic wing. Unsurprisingly, super-
heroes (some, like the X-Men, mutants themselves) provided another
source of metaphor and inspiration. Steven’s history of LSD in America
notes how the psychedelic movement embraced the comic book visions of
posthumanity, suggesting that for the “baby-boomers”, “encoded within
these lurid pamphlets was another version of the evolution myth that saw
mankind transforming itself upward”.13 Novelist Ken Kesey had found
fame with the publication of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), a
book whose story and themes exemplify many of the ideas raised later
in this chapter—the liberatory potential of madness versus the despotism
of reason—was particularly keen on interpreting superhero comics as
“Nietzschean parables”,14 and said that “a single Batman comic is more
honest than a whole volume of Time magazine”.15
For a good part of the 1960s, Kesey travelled America with his band
of “merry pranksters” in a bus (stated destination: “FURTHER”) driven
by Neal Cassady, a key figure of the Beat movement that had preceded
(or pre-seeded), the movement of the 1960s. Kesey and the pranksters
would stop on their travels to stage “happenings”; free concerts and such
like where attendees were invited to pass the “acid-test” via a glass of free
punch spiked with LSD.16 Stevens notes that while early proponents of
psychedelics like Huxley and Leary might utilise the iconography of the
Buddha to guide their “trips”, Kesey opted for Fawcett comic’s Captain
Marvel or Marvel Comics’ Thor.17 Despite their different inspirations
though, “in a sense, this was the same teleological yearning for a trans-
formed man”.18 Kesey was not alone. In a different register the Process
Church of the Final Judgment, a sci-fi infused religion that competed
with Scientology during the 1960s in terms of adherents and international
breadth, was not afraid to incorporate Marvel heroes like Thor and the
Hulk into its propaganda.19
SILVER AGE CREATORS AND CREATIONS

The key Marvel creators of the time, alongside writer Stan Lee, were artists
Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Dr. Strange was the co-creation of Ditko and
Lee, and Ditko’s depictions of non-Euclidean mystical realms held great
appeal for users of psychedelics in the 1960s. That Dr. Strange answered to
THE COSMIC BODY 97
an ascended Tibetan master known as the Ancient One and entered imma-
terial realms by projecting his astral form while his meditating body lay
prone in his Greenwich Village apartment (or Sanctum Sanctorum) could
only consolidate his appeal for a movement already primed by imported
Eastern mysticism and altered states of consciousness. It was not unknown
for trippers to use the pages of Dr. Strange as a guide for their experience.
It is testament to Dr. Strange’s unique appeal that the Wiccan priestess
and underground comic artist and publisher Catherine Yronwode, in a
supreme act of what Fiske20 calls “textual productivity”, compiled and
self-published a version of Strange’s fictional Grimoire The Lesser Book of
the Vishanti (1977) by compiling the various incantations, spells and refer-
ences to demons and other realms that Strange made in the comic books
(the text is available online21). At the simpler level of semiotic productivity,
October 1965 saw the rock band Jefferson Airplane and others put on an
evening of music entitled “A Tribute to Dr. Strange”.22 As well as having
a quite literal Cosmic Body in his astral form, Strange also encountered
super villains quite unlike any seen in comics before; literal embodiments
of abstract concepts, such as Eternity.
While Ditko co-created Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, Jack Kirby helped
lay the groundwork for the entire Marvel Universe. Alongside Stan Lee
the two men had a period of extraordinary productivity in the 1960s,
creating the Fantastic Four, Hulk, Iron Man, Daredevil, Thor and a mul-
titude of complex super villains for them. Kirby took the evolutionary
concerns of the Perfect Body and put them in a cosmological context.
Kirby’s Silver Age comics introduced a cosmic scope to their narratives
that implied unimaginable vistas of evolutionary development that made
humans seem a transient and insignificant stage by comparison. So it is
that when faced with the planet devouring Galactus, the Human Torch
plunges into existential anguish; “we’re like ants. Just ants—ants!”23 Even
a character as seemingly Earth-bound as Captain America found his nem-
esis, the Red Skull, wielding the Cosmic Cube, a kind of philosopher’s
stone whose properties would allow him to enforce his fascist ideology
not just on Earth but across the entire universe. Kirby’s work also fused
science and magic in interesting ways. As Bainbridge says, “the premod-
ern, the sacred, the mythological are replaced with science and technology
[…] in images like the Cosmic Cube, Ego the Living planet, the scientific
mythology of Asgard and the towering figure of Galactus”.24 This fusion
or blurring of science and magic, as will be seen, is central to understand-
ing the figure of the cosmic posthuman and it is a theme Kirby continued
developing throughout his career.
98 S. JEFFERY
While Kirby and Ditko were apparently working on instinct in their

psychedelic imaginings, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new breed of
writers had joined Marvel Comics, young enough to be influenced by both
Kirby and Ditko and the counterculture. This trend is especially evident
in the work of Jim Starlin and Steve Engelhart. Engelhart was a student
of esotericism and managed to sneak some alternative history into Marvel
comics by taking Dr. Strange through an occult history of America.25 One
of his most famous stories, “A Separate Reality”, takes its name from the
book by anthropologist Carlos Castaneda,26 which claimed to describe his
experiences with a Yaqui Indian shaman Don Juan Matus, and whose books
remain a fixture of countercultural libraries.27 Starlin’s lauded runs with
the characters Adam Warlock and Captain Marvel plunged both characters
into frequent battles with their own demons and mirror selves. The major
villain in these stories is the alien-god Thanos, whose threat was not one of
financial gain, property damage or even physical violence, but an ontologi-
cal assault on the nature of reality itself. Under Starlin’s guidance Captain
Marvel even underwent a quasi-shamanic death-rebirth experience, devel-
oping “cosmic consciousness” in the process. Starlin, who wrote and illus-
trated these stories, presents them in a way that chimes with descriptions
of the psychedelic experience. Wolk28 describes the book as “very druggy”
while Grant Morrison has called Starlin’s version of Captain Marvel an
“out and out Psychedelic superhero”.29 Both Engelhart and Starlin are
on record about the role that drugs played in their creative process; said
Engelhart, “I smoked dope, and dropped acid, and ate mushrooms—and
I made my deadlines”.30 He and Starlin, along with artists Al Milgrom and
Alan Weiss, were known to wander Manhattan under the influence of LSD
to come up with ideas for new stories.31
Perhaps this explains why some authors have recognised a genealogy
that links the superhero comic with the history of magic and religion.
Kripal and Knowles have drawn attention to the “surprisingly intimate
ties” superhero comics have to “the histories of occultism, psychical
research, and related paranormal phenomena”.32 But for some writers
this is not just a structuralist argument about repeated mythic patterns,
of interest for merely intellectual reasons. Often, the recurrence of these
mythic patterns is taken as evidence of a more fundamentally magical or
at least spiritual lineage. Wright has suggested that the supernatural feats
of the shaman can be understood as superheroic feats, and that “the mod-
ern superhero is a contemporary manifestation of the ancient shamanic
role”.33 Wright argues that epic narratives of the classical world, and by
THE COSMIC BODY 99
extension modern mythologies, contain vestiges of shamanic themes of

death, rebirth, initiation and transformation. Comic book writer and tarot
card designer/interpreter Rachel Pollack also argues that the superhero
comes from shamanism, stating, “all these people with animal powers trav-
eling to mysterious other worlds. That’s straight shamanism”.34
Meanwhile, Carstens has linked the figure of the shaman with the figure
of the posthuman more generally, arguing that, “in our techno-confused
world, no figure could be better suited to the task of gaining a new tech-
nological terra-infirma than the ancient arbiter of the sacred and mas-
ter (and mistress) of communicative ecstasy, the shaman…the hybrid and
science-fictional intersection between the cyborg, the new flesh of post-
humanism…has its origins in the ecstatic transformations of the alchemist
and the shamans”.35 Both are involved in the creation of new articula-
tions, new discourses; new narratives of becoming or “permanent possibil-
ity”.36 The Cosmic Body emphasises transformation and the unlocking of
potential and power. Perhaps the writers most influenced by this tradition
though, are Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.
SUPERHERO AS SHAMAN; CREATOR AS MAGICIAN

Just as writers like Steve Engelhart used Dr. Strange and Shang-Chi: Master
of Kung Fu as a way of exploring Western and Eastern mystical philoso-
phies,37 contemporary creators like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have
introduced magical themes, characters and ideas in their superhero (and
creator-owned) comics. Interestingly, both writers are practicing magicians
who have also actively created works designed to work as magic. Moore’s
Promethea38 begins as a Wonder Woman-type superhero comic before
making a U-turn into Moore’s personal cosmology whereby the narrative
effectively stops as the lead character becomes au fait with the symbolism
of the tarot and kabbalah. In Issue 15 Moore uses the comic to question
the ontological status of the reader’s reality compared to that on the page.
Speaking with the archetypal form of the god Hermes, the lead character
Sophie Bangs is confused by his claims that, “it’s all a story isn’t it? It’s all
fiction, all language…it can change like quicksilver”. Sophie replies, “But…
this isn’t fiction. This is our real life”. Hermes laughs and tells her (and
the reader), “Real life. Now there’s a fiction for you!” A few panels later
Hermes looks over his shoulder, out of the frame, and addresses the reader
directly, saying, “I’m saying some fictions might have a real god hiding
beneath the surface of the page. I’m saying some fictions might be alive”.39
100 S. JEFFERY
Like Moore, Morrison also uses his work to trouble the distinction
between fantasy and reality. The occult anarchist sci-fi thriller The Invisibles40
is an obvious example but even his superhero work has been used this way.
His Marvel Boy41 was designed to be an invocation of Horus, the conquer-
ing child of the notorious magician Aleister Crowley’s new aeon, represen-
tative of a “youthful, ruthless and revolutionary current that would sweep
through human affairs”.42 Animal Man,43 Superman Beyond44 and Seven
Soldiers45 all feature scenes of characters reaching out of the page to the
reader, effectively transcending their two-dimensional space. Superman
Beyond even came with 3-D glasses to literalise this visual metaphor. The
reader is free to make what they will of the above. Whatever one’s views on
the efficacy of using comics to effect magical changes in reality, it is inter-
esting to note that on a smaller scale, the superhero archetype seems to
have been invoked or utilised successfully by various therapists. Rubin and
Livesay46 and Haen and Brannon47 have attested to the efficacy of utilising
the superhero archetype in child therapy. Burte has written of using super-
heroes in hypnotherapy, calling them, “an incredible resource for fostering
self-examination, change and growth”.48 The superhero archetype seems
to have been invoked or utilised successfully by Jungian therapists, find-
ing that, “superhero archetypes are images that represent what is known
as the transcendent function, a process that operate as bridge between the
opposites, therefore providing unification in the psyche, restoring energy
and promoting healing”.49 These sources perhaps suggest some empirical
validity to the notion of superheroes as contemporary manifestations of
archetypal forms or mythic patterns. Or what Morrison describes as “a
radical enchantment of the mundane”.50 In short, shamanic fictions.
POST/HUMAN COSMIC BODIES

As has been seen throughout this chapter, the confluence of magic and
science is central to understanding the Cosmic Body. Moreover, it is this
hybridity that it most shares with critical Post/Humanism. Lachman has
mused that “while neither can be considered occult, Derrida’s critique
of meaning and Foucault’s exploration of forbidden states share much
with the irrationalism and ‘giving way to strange forces’ that character-
ized ‘60s occultism”.51 There are several good reasons for taking seriously
Lachman’s suggestion that what the Continental philosophers sometimes
known as anti-humanists or the Class of 196852 had in common with
their more psychedelic and mystically minded peers in the counterculture
THE COSMIC BODY 101
of the USA and Britain was a willingness to follow novelist and counter-
cultural figurehead William S. Burroughs’ injunction to “exterminate all
rational thought”.
Foucault’s ideas also share (both direct and indirect) links with psy-
chedelic discourse. The psychiatric uses of psychedelic drugs have already
been discussed, particularly their use by members of the “anti-psychiatry”
movement, with whom Foucault’s ideas are often aligned. Merquoir
memorably describes this movement as “a whole progeny of vindications
of psychosis…all cast in a strong ‘counter-cultural’ mould”.53 To be brief,
Foucault contends that there was once a “dialogue” between insanity and
reason. Merqouir summarises Foucault’s notion that, “before the consti-
tution of madness as an illness”, the inmates of mental institutions had
“actually enjoyed more freedom than the modern therapies allow them,
because ‘classical confinement’ treatment did not aim at changing con-
sciousness. Their body was in chains but their mind had wings”.54 Turning
back to the comic book posthuman, contemporary depictions of Batman’s
nemesis and shadow The Joker help to illustrate this point.
Since the 1980s, depictions of The Joker present him as an evolutionary
mutation; not insane but in fact possessed of a “higher disorder” of sanity.
In the Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious
Earth,55 which draws heavily from Jung as well as occultist Aleister Crowley
and the symbolism of the tarot, a psychiatrist tells Batman she believes
the Joker possesses “some kind of super-sanity…a brilliant new modifica-
tion of human perception”.56 Having no actual “self”, the only way the
Joker can cope with the chaotic barrage of input endemic in the post-mod-
ern, information society is to create a new identity each day, hence he is a
mischievous prankster one day and a cold-blooded psychopath the next.
Morrison’s annotated script for the 15th anniversary edition of Arkham
Asylum contains this glorious footnote concerning The Joker’s diagnosis:
“I used to have a problem with the idea of the Joker’s super-sanity until
I developed my theory of Multiple Personality Disorder as the next step
in evolutionary consciousness”,57 (a theme he would develop in the more
explicitly magical The Invisibles). This notion was explored more fully in the
character of Crazy Jane in Morrison’s Doom Patrol, each of whose person-
alities had its own superpower (an idea explored, albeit with less subtlety
with the X-Men character Legion, who shared the same condition).
Dery draws a parallel between The Joker’s “super-sanity” and
Deleuze and Guattari’s “radical strategy for survival under capital-
ism” of “becoming-schizophrenic”.58 The Joker shares the fragmented
102 S. JEFFERY
personality of the schizophrenic, refusing to be “the closed, centered

subject required (and reproduced) by capitalist society”.59 As Deleuze
and Guattari themselves put it: “the code of delirium…proves to have
an extraordinary fluidity…it might be said that the schizophrenic passes
from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes,
by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions
asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next,
never recording the same event in the same way”.60 In some respects
however, this “super sanity” or “higher disorder” is not so much post-
human as prehuman(ist). Thus, as has been shown, even when the ideas
being discussed here are not presented in evolutionary or psychological
terms (i.e., “scientized”) the comics often betray premodern mystical or
shamanistic sensibilities.
TRANSHUMAN COSMIC BODIES

The emergence of modern cyber-culture, particularly the growth of
Silicon Valley, can be traced back to the mystical-psychedelic movement
of the 1960s.61 Among the most outspoken of psychedelic advocates was
Timothy Leary, whose presence and influence is noted in many accounts
of the dawning of the “information age”.62 For example, the develop-
ment of Virtual Reality was linked to LSD early on, in part because of
Leary’s interest in the new technology, giving the idea news value for
journalists, “who at every opportunity tried to lure a very wary Leary…
into describing VR as a new form of hallucinogen”.63 As with the coun-
terculture, enchanted undercurrents accompany this psychedelic thread in
Transhumanist discourse. At least one leading advocate, Ray Kurzweil,64
theorises that our posthuman successors will eventually become so adept
at the manipulation of energy and matter (which are, after all, the same
thing) that they will be able to effectively redesign the universe, using the
cosmos itself as an information processor. For Kurzweil, this conscious
and intelligent universe is “about as close to God” as he can imagine. This
“essentially spiritual undertaking” has certain implications for the status of
the body, involving as it does, “the freeing of our thinking from the severe
limitations of its biological form”.65 The fixation of some Transhumanists
on bodiless minds existing in virtual realities may not simply be a Cartesian
humanistic division of body and mind but a more archaic Gnostic or
Platonic view that regards the world of matter as an imperfect shadow of
a higher realm of pure forms.
THE COSMIC BODY 103
It comes as little surprise then to find that there are many variations
of these Gnostic themes in superhero comics. Klock suggests that con-
temporary X-Men comics reflect what he calls a “Gnostic, or pessimistic,
Post-humanism”.66 Klock connects the Gnostic denial of the psyche with
the process whereby an ordinary human becomes Superhuman. When the
Ultimate X-Men’s Hank McCoy takes umbrage at his new code-name
The Beast for instance, Professor Xavier points out to him “You’ve just
been rebaptized as a Post-Human being. It’s … a name which describes
your own skills and personality as opposed to those of a long dead ances-
tor.” For Klock, this suggests “an identification of the post-human with
the pneuma, the Gnostic spark, the antithetical self opposed to the world,
the body and the psyche”.67 Other storylines display clear affinities with the
Gnostic strain of Transhumanism. Transcendence through technology for
instance is found in the 1977 Avengers storyline The Korvac Saga.68
In this story the title character, Michael Korvac, is a thirty-firstcentury
earthman who offers his skills as a computer technician to an invading alien
race, the Badoon. Later the Badoon graft Korvac’s body onto a mobile
computer module, turning him into a cyborg. Later events result in Korvac
finding himself in the abandoned command base of Galactus, devourer of
worlds. Korvac plugs his “tri-pronged electronic probe into the station’s
computer console” only to find that the absorption of infinite knowledge
elevates him beyond either man or machine to godhood. Korvac achieves
godhood, later doing battle on “every plane of existence”.69 Korvac’s
transformation from man to man-machine to God, of gnosis through
technology, clearly echoes Transhumanism’s Cosmic Body. Elsewhere,
science, at least in the form of evolutionary theory, also results in tran-
scendence. In superhero comics then, as with Transhumanism, “science
becomes enchanted, just as magic becomes ‘scientised’”.70 In New X-Men
the telepathic mutant Quentin Quire undergoes a secondary mutation,
apparently evolving into a being of pure light. Klock writes that the scene
suggests “Gnostic transcendence”71 and the attainment of posthumanity
through the dissolution of the ego. In fact, the attainment of godhood via
technological means, and the consequent joys and terrors that follow is
not uncommon in superhero comics, albeit mostly the province of villains
such as Marvel’s Thanos and the DC villain Libra.
As ever with posthumanism, such representations of Cosmic
Transhumanity and Superhumanity rest on the concept of the body.
Kreuger argues that, “in posthumanist visions, bodies do not disappear
at all: what has to be overcome is the material, real, concrete biological
104 S. JEFFERY
human body while simultaneously a vast number of new body images were
created”.72 Zimmerman cites Nietzsche in this regard, pointing out that
goals of immortality and cosmic mastery are not easily reconciled with
Nietzsche’s vision of the Overman, who calls “for humanity to ‘remain
faithful to the Earth’ and thus to human embodiment”.73 Returning to the
relationship between the development of the Human Potential Movement
and superhero narratives with this in mind highlights the wisdom in
Kripal’s observation that whatever constitutes any “religious wisdom” the
mythology of superheroes can be said to possess lies in “their implied
insistence that the mystical and occult transformations of the human being
are never simply matters of ‘the soul’ or of ‘the spirit’. They are also and
always matters of energy, which is another way of saying the ‘body’”.74
The debate about the Gnostic traces in Transhumanist thought is ongo-
ing. For every Krueger who concludes that Transhumanism is not Gnostic
but utilitarian there appears to be a Zimmerman to argue that Gnosticism
can be “discerned in its negative attitude to the human body” and even
a trace of the similarly archaic alchemy and Hermeticism “in its procla-
mation that humankind is destined to take control over and transform
nature [and] mysticism in its belief that humankind will absorbed into
God”75 in the form of the Singularity. Zimmerman, provocatively, goes
further than most in locating Gnostic inflections not just in posthuman-
ism but as already present in Modernity’s project, and that, “the goal of
the Gnostic-inflected Western humankind is to become God through self-
actualisation”.76 This sense of Gnosticism, as a kind of self-actualisation,
can also be found in the human potential ethic that underlies the work of
the Esalen Institute.
HUMAN POTENTIAL MOVEMENT OF COSMIC

TRANSHUMANISM
If superhero comics can be considered shamanic fictions then it should
come as little surprise to find the superhero narrative linked with the
emergence in the 1960s of a “human potential ethic” which, though long
present in modern Western societies, and particularly among occultists
and esoteric groups, “only became popular in the 1960s when, amongst
other factors, the development of latent abilities was popularized”.77 At
a 1962 symposium of scientists drawn together to discuss the threats of
overpopulation and atomic warfare, author Aldous Huxley spoke for the
group when he said that “the challenge is man’s obvious imperfection as a
THE COSMIC BODY 105
psychosocial being; both individually and collectively, he is sadly in need of

improvement, yet clearly improvable”.78 The eugenic echo of the Perfect
Body here is inevitable, but Huxley’s words also exhibit a science-cum-
shamanistic inflection typical of the discourse of the Cosmic Body being
addressed here.
The Human Potential Movement entered full bloom in the 1970s in
places such as the Esalen Institute, where “Eastern disciplines were adapted
to western settings, and this movement developed its emphasis on transper-
sonal and spiritual experience”.79 The Human Potential Movement viewed
the development of latent abilities as an “inner adventure” of self-develop-
ment.80 Yet even this most explicitly spiritual take on the posthuman ulti-
mately rests within the body. In his weighty tome The Future of the Body:
Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature,81 Esalen co-
founder Michael Murphy examines over 3000 ancient and modern sources
from medical sciences, anthropology, comparative religious studies, sports
and more for evidence of “metanormal” human functioning. By seek-
ing to identify those activities and practices that give rise to these capaci-
ties, Murphy aims to assemble a coherent methodology of transformative
practice. As Kripal summarises, Murphy’s conception of human potential
insists on the embodied nature of religious phenomenon, presenting what
is “essentially an evolutionary mysticism that argues, in effect, that it is
biological evolution that drives these mutations”.82 In other words, that
becoming cosmic remains a material transformation to be brought about
by embodied practices. The transcendental and the sacred are manifested
by, and exist as potential within, the material and profane.
Unsurprisingly, Murphy cites Superman and other science-fictional
texts as expressing “intimations of capacities that are available to us”,83
much as Jules Verne anticipated atomic power in 20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea, or H.G. Wells’ placement of The First Men on the Moon. Murphy
wonders if such images “might prefigure luminous knowings and pow-
ers…that can be realized by the human race”.84 Possamai too has posited
that “superheroes contributed to the creation of an imaginary doxa of
becoming a ‘super’ self”.85 Kripal finds it an interesting synchronicity that
the foundation of the Esalen Institute—a think tank-cum-retreat set up
to investigate human development and informed by the same “evolution-
ary mysticism” discussed throughout this chapter—and the introduction
of the “evolutionary mythology” of Marvel’s X-Men in 1963. He muses
that both cultural visions “imagined an esoteric or alternative academy
where the human potentialities of mystical and psychical experience could
106 S. JEFFERY
be protected, educated, disciplined, and eventually stabilized within a set

of transformative practices”.86 This constellation of ideas that formed the
1960’s visions of the Cosmic Body would wind themselves back into the
comics themselves. A character in Animal Man flung forward in time from
the 1960s wonders, “Did it happen? Did we all drop acid and become
superheroes like Leary and Kesey said we would?”87 It seems possible to
suggest that what marks the posthuman Cosmic Body is its blurring of the
distinction between science and magic; the fusion of archaic beliefs with
hyper-modern technologies. The superhero genre depends as heavily on
this reconfiguration of magic and the transcendental into “scientific” and
embodied terms as proponents of the Human Potential Movement.
Elsewhere, working from Letcher’s88 typology, I have argued for a dis-
course of the “scientist-shaman” in talk about psychedelics.89 The discourse
of the scientist-shaman represents a materialist approach to the shamanic
experience; what Leary90 called an “empirical, tangible meta-physics”.91 In
fact, before their adoption by the counterculture, psychedelics were the
source of great intellectual and especially psychiatric interest. In The Doors
of Perception (1954), a book that would become required reading for the
counterculture, the author Aldous Huxley outlines his experience with
mescaline and wrote that such substances were of “inestimable value to
everyone and especially to the intellectual”.92 Psychiatrist Stanislav Groff
identified what he called “transpersonal domains of consciousness”, acces-
sible through the use of psychedelics, arguing that researching them would
require models “far beyond the conceptual framework of traditional psy-
chology and the philosophy of Western science”.93 Perhaps the most (in)
famous of these scientist-shamans was Dr. Timothy Leary, arguably the
figure most closely associated with the popularisation of LSD in the 1960s.
Leary’s work, alongside other scientist-shamans such as John C. Lilley
and Terence McKenna, represents an under-explored (outside of the
counterculture) form of posthumanism, with psychedelics recast as evo-
lutionary tools, or chemical technologies. Titles such as Info-Psychology:
A Manual on the Use of the Human Nervous System According to the
Manufacturers,94 and Programming the Human BioComputer95 offered
a kind of avant-garde psychology that envisioned the human mind in
cybernetic terms; the brain is a “bio-computer” and psychedelic drugs
are considered as software that runs on it. By the same token, the con-
temporary human subject, and the social systems that support it and rely
on it, is presented as robotic (“mechanical” and “unconscious”) at best,
stupid and dangerous at worst. Debates about nationality and ideology are
THE COSMIC BODY 107
referred to dismissively as “mammalian politics” and Leary takes particular

delight in describing most human activity as “larval thinking”.96 For the
scientist-shaman, “the person who can dial and tune the receptive, inte-
grative, transmitting circuits of the nervous system [with drugs or spiritual
disciplines] is not just more intelligent, but can be said to operate at a
higher and more complex level of evolution”.97
In a similar register, Terence McKenna, who played a similar role in the
rave culture of the early 1990s as Leary did in the 1960s, proposed the
idea of psychedelics as an evolutionary trigger. His “stoned-ape” theory
suggests, in short, that Neanderthal humans evolved from apes when psi-
locybin (“magic”) mushrooms became a regular part of the apes’ diet. The
resulting psychedelic effects led to, among other things, increased capac-
ity for imagination and cognitive ability. Speaking of the technological
Singularity, a theoretical future point that marks a posthuman age much
discussed in Transhumanism, McKenna describes it as:
Like a transition from a lower-dimensional world, say a world of two or

three dimensions, to a world of four, five or six dimensions. This is what I
believe actually happens to a human brain-mind system under the influence
of psychedelics. So in a way, the best practice for the approaching Singularity
is the repeated dissolving and reconstituting of one’s personality through
the use of psychedelics…a microcosmic anticipation of a macrocosmic event
in history98
If, as has been suggested, critical posthumanism “is a philosophi-

cal stance about what might be termed a perpetual becoming”99 then
McKenna can be seen as suggesting that the repeated use of psychedelics is
its praxis. Seen through this lens, the history of shamanism becomes a his-
tory of “low-tech cyborgs”,100 Cosmic Body posthumans created through
the effects of such technologies on the body.
This psychedelic strain of Transhumanism is also evident in the realm
of the Superhuman. This strain was already evident in the antediluvian
age of the Superhuman, with chemically-inspired intellectuals a recurring
fixture of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century occult fiction.101
The opium use of Sherlock Holmes and the drug-induced transformation
of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde are perhaps the two most famous examples.
Given this heritage, it is little wonder that superhero comics also depict
many drugs, both fictional and real. When Stoddart performed a discourse
analysis of 52 comic books and graphic novels, he concluded that they
108 S. JEFFERY
reproduced a dominant discourse of negative drug use, mainly focused

on hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. However, of the five texts that
featured psychedelic drugs, the dominant discourse was one of spiritual
drug use, pleasure, revelation and enlightenment.102 Animal Man’s use of
peyote for instance leads to a visionary awakening where he is able to look
out of the page and into the face of the reader to exclaim, “I can see you!”
Not that the visionary use of drugs need always be depicted as benign.
In Kraven’s Last Hunt,103 for example, Kraven the Hunter is depicted
preparing for his final battle with Spider-Man by engaging in a bizarre
pseudo-shamanic ritual—drinking a potion of undisclosed herbs before
leaping into an oversized glass tank full of spiders, the better to absorb his
prey’s spirit. Without recourse to designations of “good” and “bad” drug
use it can safely be said that what all these narratives share is a depiction of
drug use as transformative. Or, to put it another way, these narratives pres-
ent drugs as a chemical technology that grants the user some kind of evo-
lutionary advantage. Some of these, like the serum that grants Hourman
sixty minutes of power are depicted as generally benign. Although in the
alternate DC Universe of JSA: The Golden Age104 Hourman is depicted
as heavily addicted to his serum and prone to mental instability. In New
X-Men,105 the mutant drug Kick enhances the users’ mutant abilities while
enacting deleterious effects upon the brain. That these instances of drug
use enhance the users’ powers indicates that they may be taken metaphori-
cally rather than literally. It is not the drug so much, but power (or the
thirst for power) that corrupts.
THE COSMIC BODY AND SOCIAL POLICY

It is interesting to note in this regard that while the discourses of the
Perfect and Military-Industrial Bodies were, and are, accompanied by
state funding and policy implementations (such as sterilisation laws for
the former and military super soldier projects for the latter, as discussed in
the next chapter), the discourse of the Cosmic Body was largely confined
to members of the counterculture and independent bodies such as the
Esalen Institute. Perhaps the closest that the discourse of the Cosmic Body
came to acceptance by the establishment was when the Stanford Research
Institute published its report Changing Images of Man in 1974.106 This
research project bought together a number of different academics and
intellectuals in order to “identify and assess the plausibility of a truly vast
number of future possibilities for society…to most usefully serve the needs
THE COSMIC BODY 109
of policy research and development”.107 By illuminating significant ways that

Western society has been shaped by myths and images, the study goes on
to explore key deficiencies of current “images of man” (sic) and identify
characteristics needed in future images. The research took place at the
Stanford Research Institute and one persistent and perhaps apocryphal
rumour has it that L. Ron Hubbard was involved in dosing the researchers
with LSD. Whether that is true or not, Changing Images of Man remains
a fascinating historical document. In the conclusion the authors note that
as of 1974, a new image of man appeared to be emerging. The authors are
optimistic about the new vision and describe it in terms very familiar, fol-
lowing this chapter’s discussion of the Cosmic Body: “the new image rec-
onciles such pairs of ‘opposites’ as body/spirit, determinism/free will, and
science/religion…It brings with it the possibility of a new science of con-
sciousness and ecological systems not limited by the manipulative rational-
ity that dominates the science and technology of the present era”.108
The findings of Changing Images of Man are in stark contrast to the
state-sanctioned policies dealing with Perfect and Military-Industrial bod-
ies and it is perhaps unsurprising that the more radical, anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist vision of the project—one in keeping with the figure of
the Cosmic Body—was not developed further. The process by which the
Cosmic Body could be reterritorialised by the interest of the Perfect and
Military-Industrial bodies plays out in comic books in their reliance on the
iconography established by the Golden Age. Traces always remain. But
the process is not univocal. The Cosmic Body can also deterritorialise the
others. For instance, the US military shared with the 1960s countercul-
ture a fascination with drugs. There is in fact a long history of the use of
amphetamines by the military in many countries to prolong performance
while sleep-deprived. More pernicious perhaps was the widespread interest
in the military applications of psychedelics. The CIA’s MK-ULTRA pro-
gramme which ran from the 1950s into the 1960s was set up to test LSD’s
potential as a truth serum and incapacitate. Agents who had been dosed
were dubbed “enlightened operatives”.109 Contrary to the psychedelic dis-
course of the counterculture however, the ingestion of psychedelics was
no guarantee of conversion to pacifist, peace-loving principles. Certainly,
none of the agents involved in the MK-ULTRA project were known to
have turned their back on the state-authority-sanctioned violence that
was, after all, their job.
Even so, some of the counterculture’s rhetoric found its way into the
military machine. In 1978, Vietnam veteran Jim Channon embarked on
110 S. JEFFERY
a two-year independent study into human potential and advanced human

performance. The resulting military field manual, called Evolutionary
Tactics,110 imagined a super soldier that combined the courage of the warrior
with spirituality of the monk, blending martial arts, meditation, intuition,
and non-lethal weapons. Channon imagined ways to make wars less violent
for both soldiers and civilians. There is an equally long history of military
experiments in telepathy and psychokinesis, and a recent trend has seen the
army become interested once again in Eastern and alternative practices,
such as exploring Reiki and meditation as treatments for post-traumatic
stress disorder. In general though, just as the counterculture dissipated and
the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s were replaced by the “yuppies” of the
1980s, so too did the posthuman body undergo a fresh reterritorialisation,
transforming from Cosmic Body to Military-Industrial Body.
NOTES
2. Anderson, W.T. (1990) Reality Is not What It Used to Be. New York: Harper
Collins, p. 47.
3. Ibid.
4. Sirius, R.U. (2004) Counterculture Through the Ages. USA: Villard.
5. Higgs, J. (2006) I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary.
London: Friday Books.
6. Hewison, R. (1986) Too Much: Art and Society on the Sixties 1960–1975.
London: Metheun.
7. Anderson, W.T. (1990) Reality Is not What It Used to Be, p. 47.
America, p. 223.
9. See, for example, Lichtenstein’s Image Duplicator from 1963, which dupli-
cates an (uncredited) Jack Kirby illustration of Magneto: http://www.
imageduplicator.com/main.php?decade=60&year=63&work_id=140
10. Ro (2005) Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic
Book Revolution; Raphael, J. and Spurgeon, T. (2004) Stan Lee and the Rise
and Fall of the American Comic Book. USA: Chicago Review Press.
11. Biskind, P. (1998) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. London: Bloomsbury.
12. Quoted in Lachman, G. V. (2001) Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties
and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius. London: Sidgewick and Jackson,
p. 30.
13. Stevens, J. (1988) Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. Harper
and Row: New York, p. 78.
14. Ibid., p. 178.
THE COSMIC BODY 111
15. Ibid.
16. Wolfe, T. (1999). The electric kool-aid acid test. New York: Bantam Books.
17. Images of these posters can be found at: http://www.key-z.com/posters.
html
18. Stevens, J. (1988) Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, p. 178.
19. Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the
Age of Aquarius, p. 270. Reproductions can be found at http://satanic-
mojo.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/the-process-x-marvel-comics.html
20. Fiske, J. (1992) The Cultural Economy of Fandom. In Lewis, L. (ed) The
Adoring Audience. London: Routledge, pp. 30–49.
21. http://www.luckymojo.com/vishanti.html
Age of Aquarius.
23. Lee, S., and Kirby, J. (2005). The Coming of Galactus!. Tunbridge Wells:
Panini, p. 165.
24. Bainbridge, J. (2009) ‘Worlds Within Worlds’: The Role of the Superheroes
in the Marvel and DC Universes. In Ndalianis, A. (ed.) The Contemporary
Comic Book Superhero. New York: Routledge, p. 74.
25. Knowles, Our Gods wear Spandex.
26. Castaneda, C. (1971). A separate reality: Further conversations with Don
Juan. New York: Simon and Shuster.
Age of Aquarius.
28. Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.
29. Morrison, Supergods, p. 137.
30. Quoted in Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
31. Ibid.
32. Kripal, J. (2010) Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 6.
33. Wright, L (2007) Shamans vs (Super)heroes. In Ndalianis et al. (eds.)
Super/heroes: From Hercules to Superman USA: New Academia Publishing,
p. 127.
34. In Davis, E. (1994) “The Gods of the Funny Books: An Interview with Neil
Gaiman and Rachel Pollack” [online] Available from: http://www.tech-
gnosis.com/gaiman.html [Accessed 11/05/2010].
35. Carstens, Techno Genetrix: Shamanizing the New Flesh – Cyborgs, Virtual
Interfaces and the Vegetable Matrix in SF, pp. 3–4.
36. Ibid., p. 11.
37. Cited in Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
38. Moore, A., Williams, J. H. and Gray, M. (2000) Promethea. Canada:
America’s Best Comics.
39. Moore and Williams III, Promethea, p. 17.
112 S. JEFFERY
40. Morrison, G., Yeowell, S., Thompson, J., and Cramer, D. (1996). The
Invisibles: Say you want a revolution. New York, NY: DC Comics.
41. Morrison, G. and Jones, J. G. (2001) Marvel Boy. New York: Marvel Comics.
43. Morrison, et al. (2003). Animal Man: 3. New York: DC Comics.
44. Morrison, et al. (2009) Final Crisis. New York: DC Comics.
45. Morrison, G., and Williams, J. H. (2006). Seven soldiers of victory. New York:
DC Comics.
46. Rubin, L. and Livesay, H. (2006) Look, up in the sky! Using superheroes in
play therapy. International Journal of Play Therapy, 15(1) pp. 117–133.
47. Haen, C. and Brannon, K. H. (2002) Superheroes, Monsters, and Babies:
Roles of Strength, Destruction and Vulnerability for Emotionally Disturbed
Boys. The Arts in Psychotherapy 29(1) pp. 31–4.
48. Burte, J. M. (2006) Hypnosis and Super Heroes. In Rubin, L. C. (ed.)
Using Superheroes in Counselling and Play Therap. New York: Springer
Publishing, pp. 271.
49. Egolf, J. (2007) Dreaming Superheroes: Exploring the Action of the
Superher(oine) in Dreams, Myth, and Culture. In Ndalianis et al. (eds.)
Super/heroes: From Hercules to Superman. USA: New Academia Publishing,
p. 141.
Age of Aquarius, p. 395.
52. Rivkin and Ryan, The Class of 1968-Post-Structuralism par lui-meme.
53. Merquior, J. G. (1985) Foucault. London: Fontana/Collins, p. 25.
54. Ibid., p. 24.
55. Morrison, G., and McKean, D. (2006). Arkham Asylum. London: Titan
56. Ibid., n.p.
57. Ibid., n.p.
58. Dery, M. (1999) The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
Brink. New York: Grove Press Books, p. 85.
59. Ibid.
60. Quoted in Ibid.
61. Sirius, Counterculture Through the Ages.
62. For example: Kreuger 2005; Regis 1992; Sirius 2004; Slattery 2008.
63. Woolley, B. (1993) Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality.
London: Penguin, p. 24.
64. Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When computers exceed human
Intelligence; The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
65. Kurzweill, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, p. 389.
66. Klock, G. (2004) X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism. Reconstruction, 4(3)
[online] Available from: http://reconstruction.eserver.org/043/Klock/
Klock.html [Accessed: 20/12/2013] n.p.
THE COSMIC BODY 113
67. Ibid.
68. Shooter et al. (2010). (2010) Avengers: The Korvac Saga New York: Marvel
Comics.
69. Ibid., p. 69.
70. Locke, Fantastically reasonable: ambivalence in the representation of science
and technology in super-hero comic, p. 33.
71. Klock, X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism.
72. Kreuger, O. (2005) Gnosis in Cyberspace? Body, Mind and Progress in
Posthumanism. Journal of Evolution and Technology 14(2) n.p.
73. Zimmerman, M. E. (2009) Religious Motifs in Technological Posthumanism.
Western Humanities Review, 3: p. 174.
74. Kripal, J. (2006) The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of
Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 144.
75. Zimmerman, Religious Motifs in Technological Posthumanism, p. 80.
76. Ibid., p. 76.
77. Possamai, A. (2006) Superheroes and the development of latent abilities: A
hyper-real enchantment? In Hume, L. and McPhillips, K. (eds) (2006)
Popular Spiritualties: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment Ashgate
Publishing, p. 60.
78. Quoted in Weising, The History of medical enhancement: ‘From Restitutio ad
Imtegum to Transformation ad Optimum’, p. 18.
79. Possamai, A. (2010) Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-real Testament.
Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang., p. 89.
80. Ibid.
81. Murphy, M. (1992) The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further
Evolution of Human Nature. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
82. Kripal, J. (2006) The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of
Religion , p. 150.
83. Murphy, M. (1992) The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further
Evolution of Human Nature, p. 213.
84. Ibid.
85. Possamai, Superheroes and the development of latent abilities, p. 60.
86. Kripal, J. (2002) Esalen: America and the Religion of no Religion. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press , pp. 66.
87. Morrison, et al. (2003). Animal Man: 3. New York: DC Comics.
88. Letcher, A. (2007), Mad Thoughts on Mushrooms: Discourse and Power in
the Study of Psychedelic Consciousness. Anthropology of Consciousness, 18:
pp. 74–98.
89. Jeffery, S. (2009) Constructing Psychedelics: separate realities or shifting dis-
courses? Msc. Stirling University.
90. Leary, T. (1977) Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis
Los Angeles: Starseed1Peace Press, p. 15.
91. Ibid.
114 S. JEFFERY
92. Huxley, A. (1977) The Doors of Perception, and , Heaven and Hell. London:
Grafton Books.
93. Groff, S. (1988) The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness
and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany: State
University of New York Press, p. 282.
94. Leary, T. (2004) Info-Psychology: A Manual on the Use of the Human Nervous
System According to the Manufacturers. Arizona: New Falcon Press.
95. Lilley, J. C. (2004) Programming the Human Biocomputer. Oakland: Ronin.
96. Leary, Info-Psychology: A Manual on the Use of the Human Nervous System
According to the Manufacturers.
97. Ibid., p. 1.
98. TechnoCalyps (2006).
100. Hess, D. J. (1995) On Low-tech Cyborgs. In Gray, C. H. with Figueroa-
Sarriera, H. J. and Mentor, S. (eds) The Cyborg Handbook London:
Routledge, pp. 371–378.
101. Hammack, B. M. (2004): “Phantastica: The Chemically Inspired Intellectual
in Occult Fiction.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature 37, p. 83–100.
102. Stoddart, Mark C. J. (2006) “They say it’ll kill me…but they will not say
when!” Drug Narratives in Comic Books. Journal of Criminal Justice and
Popular Culture, 13(2) pp. 66–95.
103. DeMatteis, J. M. and Zeck, M. (2006) Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt.
New York: Marvel.
104. Robinson, J. D et al. (2005). JSA: The Golden Age : New York: DC Comics.
105. Morrison, G., Quitely, F., and Grant, J. (2007). All-star Superman.
New York: DC Comics
106. Harman, W. W., and Markley, O. W. (Eds.). (1982) Changing Images of
Man. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
107. Ibid., p. xvii (emphasis added).
108. Ibid., p. 203.
109. Sirius, Counterculture Through the Ages, p. 272.
110. http://arcturus.org/field_manual.pdf
The Military-Industrial Body
The previous chapters have shown how the Golden Age of Comics was
influenced by (and influenced in turn) visions of the posthuman in the
form of what was ironically christened the Perfect Body, while the Silver
Age was marked instead by a preponderance of Cosmic Bodies. With this
in mind, the current chapter journeys through the assemblage this book
is calling the Military-Industrial Body. From Captain America’s origin as
a military super-soldier through Haraway’s cyborg, the posthuman body
has often, if not always, been seen as the “illegitmate offspring of milita-
rism and patriarchal capitalism”.1 Both militarism and capitalism can be
said to inscribe themselves upon the body. Indeed, as Gray has pointed
out, the “‘incontestable reality of the body’ is still the fundamental ground
of war even in these postmodern times”.2 Never the less, as Andreescu
highlights, “…war is based on human bodies killing and dying, yet tech-
nology has rendered human bodies in war incredibly vulnerable even as it
has integrated them into cyborgian (human-machine) weapon systems”.
In the USA especially it appears to be the case that interest in converging
technologies (or Transhumanist technologies) is largely driven by military
and defence needs.3 Increasingly, however, military and industrial interests
are merging. In order to elaborate further it is first necessary to define
what is meant by “military-industrial”.
Whereas nuclear, chemical and biological weapons had previously been
developed mainly in military laboratories, the new technologies “are being
developed by the private sector due to the commercial opportunities that

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_6
116 S. JEFFERY
these clearly provide”.4 In many respects there is nothing particularly novel

about the relationship between the private sector and military concerns. In
the aftermath of Waterloo, for instance, the bones of the dead were col-
lected by English contractors, ground up, and sold as fertiliser for English
gardens,5 but only recently has this relationship become a clearly articu-
lated concern. The term, “military-industrial complex” was popularised
by the 1961 farewell address of American president Dwight Eisenhower,
who warned that, “in the councils of government, we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by
the military industrial complex”.6 Of course, in some respects the Perfect
Body already embodied this notion. But where the Golden Age incarna-
tion of Captain America, for example, exhibited an uncomplicated rela-
tionship with the state, creators from the 1960s onwards used his origins
as a way to question previously unproblematic assumptions about war,
patriotism, or the creation of Superhumans. This critical turn began in
the early 1970s7 but has had a lasting effect. After the seemingly innocent
patriotic fervour of the Golden Age, and the wild flights of fantasy of the
Silver Age, Wright suggests that the rise of the New Right in 1980s USA
under President Ronald Reagan, gave rise to a conservative worldview in
which the cultural upheavals of the two preceding decades were viewed as
aberrations that had hurt American morale.8
As with the Perfect and Cosmic Bodies, the emergence of the Military-
Industrial Body is dependent on its relations with a number of other forces.
Thus it is necessary to highlight a number of (broadly) aesthetic changes
in superhero comics, but also a number of industrial factors that changed
the nature of the comic book industry and the consumption of comic
books. These two changes—textual and industrial—are in turn connected
to the wider assemblage of socio-economic trends. As will be seen, this
period of increased neo-liberalism had a significant impact on the com-
ics industry itself that provides the necessary context for understanding
why the 1980s saw a darker type of superhero emerge and a more decon-
structive approach to the superhero within the Marvel and DC Universes.
First however, a consideration of the Military-Industrial Body’s formation
within the realm of Transhumanism will provide some useful context.
LIBERTARIAN TRANSHUMANISM AND SUPER-SOLDIERS

Transhumanism arguably came of age as a coherent ideology during the
1980s and 1990s. Though developing through a period of economic neo-
liberalism and the increased social divisions resulting from it, Transhumanist
THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL BODY 117
texts do not often address such concerns explicitly. Often their utopian
visions of the future seem to be achieved solely by the technology itself.
In short, scientific progress is presented as if it existed in a sort of vacuum,
untouched by social and political concerns. In actuality, Transhumanism’s
Utopian dreaming of personal freedom and belief in self-improvement
is rooted, as Sobchack has noted, “in privilege and the status quo: male
privilege, white privilege, economic privilege, educational privilege, first
world privilege”.9 As a recent European parliament report on converging
technologies describes it, the emergence of Transhumanism as a political-
philosophical movement “has its roots in Californian libertarianism…
faith in small entrepreneurs, technology and the minimum of government
intervention are its characteristics”.10 In short, “its dreams are grounded
in the freedom to buy and—especially—the freedom to sell”.11
However, Berloznik et al. note that within the World Transhumanist
Association a more European-style liberal democratic Transhumanism
has also developed. A comparison is made between a report put together
by the American government’s National Science Foundation titled
Converging Technologies for improving Human Performance12 and a
report on the same subject titled Converging Technologies—Shaping the
Future of European Societies13 put together by the HLEG (High Level
Expert Group on European Low Dose Risk Research). In comparing the
American and European reports, the authors note that while National
Science Foundation’s report was predominantly compiled by technical
scientists, the European expert group “mainly consisted of social scien-
tists, ethicists and philosophers”.14 As such, its approach significantly devi-
ates at certain points from the former. For example, the European report
criticised the technologically deterministic approach of the NSF report,
and instead emphasised that technologies are formed in interaction with
the social context.15 The HLEG report also “criticises the individualistic
philosophy behind the American report that in particular wants to deploy
convergence for increasing human efficiency and production.16 In short,
“whereas the American report talks about ‘engineering of the mind’ and
‘enhancing the human body’ the European report talks about ‘engineer-
ing for the mind’ and ‘engineering for a healthy body’”.17 While such
an emphasis may appear admirable, it nevertheless, as the ETAG report
noted, “cleverly circumnavigates the thorny issue of improving humans”.18
While Transhumanism has only recently been raised as a question for social
policy, there remains one area where the quest for human enhancement
has been wholeheartedly embraced. Interestingly, this is one area firmly
rooted in superhero narratives: the creation of military super-soldiers.
118 S. JEFFERY
In the USA, spending on military defence was over $400 billion in

200519 and much of this on attempts to create various types of super-
soldier. Gray20 has described in detail the emergence of the “cyborg sol-
dier”, and as Masters points out, following Foucault, while all human
bodies are enmeshed in a “machinery of power” the military has always
been the exemplar of the constitutive process, “where through its disci-
plinary techniques it came to produce the subject desired”.21 If the mili-
tary may be seen as a sort of microcosm of the machinery of power utilised
by the state to create “docile” and obedient bodies then its current fasci-
nation with human enhancement and augmentation surely has something
to communicate about trends emerging outside of the military context.
Certainly there is little difference in principal between the goals of the
Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to “sustain and
augment human performance”22 and those of Transhumanism. Of course,
military visions of the posthuman body have, by their nature, strategic
and violent elements. As chair of DARPA Michael Goldblatt said in 2003,
“DARPA has recently begun to explore augmenting human performance
to increase the lethality and effectiveness of the war fighter by provid-
ing for super physiological and cognitive capabilities”.23 Added to these
developments is an increasing reliance on armed robots, some of which are
remote controlled, such as drones, allowing soldiers to engage in combat
over large distances as well as an interest in developing unmanned land
and air vehicles. The proliferation of these projects heralds the dawn of an
age of posthuman warfare.
Just as the military-machine territorialised the superhero assemblage
for propaganda purposes in the Golden Age, contemporary military
researchers also poach from the Superhuman. Sometimes this is as sim-
ple as DARPA adopting acronyms such as BaTMAN (Biochronicity and
Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature) and RoBIN24 for their proj-
ects, or the words used by Edwin Thomas of MIT’s Institute for Soldier
Nanotechnologies who described his vision of the super-soldier by imag-
ining “the psychological impact upon a foe when encountering squads
of seemingly invincible warriors protected by armour and endowed with
superhuman capabilities, such as the ability to leap over 20-foot walls”.25
The presence of the adjective “super” in this statement should come as
no surprise although the superheroic posthuman, even in its super soldier
guise, does not necessarily reflect this particular vision. The soap operatic
elements of most superhero comics would certainly have to be muted if
they were to adopt another of DARPA’s goals to develop a technology
to “regulate” emotions: “by linking directly into the sense and remotely
monitoring a soldier’s performance, feelings of fear, shame or exhaus-
tion could be removed. What was once achieved by issuing soldiers with
amphetamines could now be done remotely with greater precision”.26
In 2002, a proposal submitted by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) to the US Army was awarded $50 million to create the
MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN).27 While the proposal
outlined a variety of currently feasible and speculative military applications
of nanotech, its cover image, featuring a futuristic soldier in mechanical
armour, presented, in visual shorthand, the scientific possibilities outlined
in more technical detail within the proposal. The image was later removed
from ISN websites when two comic book creators alleged that it was simply
a reworked version of the cover image of their Radix issue 1. The creators
felt that MIT had taken the futuristic super-soldier from its comic book
origins in order to secure military funding: “they’re selling this as science
fact while we’re trying to sell it as science fiction”.28 The science-fictional
status of nanotechnology and militaristic visions of the super-soldier have
come to “rely on cultural familiarity with comic book myths…to suggest
that nanotechnology, in replicating or materializing these myths at the site
of the soldier’s body, can create ‘real’ superheroes”.29 The image of the
super heroic super-soldier serves to create a gap between text and image,
between a written account of science yet-to-occur and the image of what
a futuristic soldier might look like. What happens within this gap is the
laborious business of the science itself.30
CORPORATISATION AND ORGANISATIONAL CONSTRAINT

IN THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY
The conservative forces at play in the 1980s onwards reterritorialised

the Transhuman Cosmic Body, moving away from the spiritual seeking
of the Human Potential Movement to concerns relating to economic
and military potential. A related process was at work in the realm of the
Superhuman. As shown in the previous chapter, the 1960s and 1970s, for
Marvel in particular, were a time of experimentation and a desire for the
superhero comic to be “relevant”; but the success and licensing potential
of Marvel and DC (following the success of the Batman television show
DC was earning close to $600 million from licensed products31) eventu-
ally bought the business of superheroes into the corporate realm when
Warner purchased National [DC] in 1969 and Cadence Industries bought
120 S. JEFFERY
Marvel in 1968. According to Steve Engelhart, the corporate purchase

of Marvel also led to a more conservative editorial ethos within the com-
pany: “they started saying, ‘well let’s not be so different anymore, because
now we’re getting the merchandise’”.32 To the corporations, as Rhoades
has pointed out, intellectual property, “is the real business of comics”.33
Wright notes that because “both Marvel and DC remained profitable enti-
ties for their corporate parents…thanks to revenue derived from foreign
markets and licensing deals…some corporate executives apparently ques-
tioned the need to publish comic books at all”.34 This sort of thinking
was compounded by the fact that the shrinking retail and distribution
networks threatened to make comic books unprofitable.
It was the establishment of the Direct Market, whereby comics were
sold in specialist stores that buoyed the industry and by the early nineteen-
nineties, comic books experienced another boom in popularity. In 1991,
comic store sales had reached $350 million and in 1993 sales through all
markets topped $1 billion. In place of “the old nickel and dime ads for
X-ray specs were glossy advertisements for Hollywood films video games
and fashionable clothing”.35 The ‘90s “speculator bubble” was boosted
further by the popularity of certain name artists. 1990’s Spider-Man issue
one, written and drawn by Todd McFarlane, sold over three million cop-
ies. The next year, Jim Lee’s X-Men sold over 8 million mainly to “specu-
lators who bought multiple copies in order to hoard them for future sale
at inflated prices in the collector’s market”.36 Other marketing gimmicks
of the period included variant covers, which ensured that collectors had
to buy two or three copies of the same comic. The covers were sometimes
foil, glow in the dark, die-cut cardboard or even holographic, which natu-
rally, also pushed up the cover price.
By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, the superhero genre
had moved through the Golden and Silver Ages into what Voger calls
the “Dark Age” of comic books.37 Violent anti-heroes became popular;
indeed, vigilantism was a general trend. Frank Miller’s game-changing
The Dark Knight Returns (1986),38 which remains one of the key texts of
superhero comic book history, imagined a near future in which an elderly,
retired Batman returns to bring order to a city fallen into chaos. Its suf-
focating use of multiple panels, and TV pundits of all stripes providing the
story with a bickering Greek chorus of contradictory ideological readings
of what the Batman “means” served to mirror the media-saturated, con-
sumerist, conservative rhetoric of the time, an effect aided by the fact that
Reagan or at least some computerised simulation of him, remains president
in this dystopic future. Together with Batman: Year One (1987)39 (also
penned by Miller) the Batman mythos was recast. The pop-art Batman
of the 1960s television series was replaced with a violent, psychologically
damaged vigilante. Moore and Bolland’s (1988) The Killing Joke40 added
to the mix by turning the Joker from clown prince of crime to sadistic, psy-
chotic killer. Another established DC character, Green Arrow, was similarly
re-imagined in 1988. Where once he was a latter-day Robin Hood char-
acter that relied on innocuous “trick arrows” to capture criminals, Green
Arrow turned to using regular arrows to maim and even kill his enemies.
Similar developments were taking place within the Marvel Universe.
Marvel’s The Punisher had been introduced as a foil for Spider-Man in
the early seventies (The Amazing Spider-Man #126, Feb. 1974). A vet-
eran of the Vietnam War, Frank Castle is driven to vigilantism when his
wife and children are murdered after they witnessed a gangland killing.
Echoing popular 1970s films such as Dirty Harry and Death Wish, the
Punisher’s violent and lethal methods were often contrasted unfavourably
with the more benign methods of most Marvel superheroes. By the 1980s
however, the murderous vigilante was in vogue and The Punisher gained
his first ongoing series in 1987. The writer and editor of the Punisher’s
second title, Punisher War Journal, Mike Baron, reasoned that readers
wanted to see the character wage his one-man war on crime because of
“the average citizen’s outrage at the failure of society to punish evil”.41
The rise of the anti-hero was not merely a result of the social and politi-
cal climate however but also a reaction by the comic book industry to the
then-surprising successes of Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, both of
which were well received by the mainstream press.
Seeking to emulate the supposed maturity and psychological realism
of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, or come to terms with Harold
Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”,42 most succeeded in merely increasing
the level of violence on display. Klock writes, “the superhero market
was flooded with poorly written, violent anti-heroes…[such as] Cable,
Wolverine, Venom, The Punisher, Ghost Rider, Spawn”43 and so on.
Coogan describes this as the breakdown of the “mission convention”44
established in the Golden and Silver Ages as the “idea that a superhero
selflessly serves those who need him, even those who break the social
contract”.45 A credo Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben famously summed up as,
“with great power must also come great responsibility”. As one result
of this questioning of traditional (super) human values, a darker type of
anti-hero became popular. Even so, the superhero as violent vigilante is
122 S. JEFFERY
not a new development. In the case of Batman, for instance, early Golden
Age appearances display a darkness and cruelty unseen in the Silver Age.
Nor can the comics of the Dark Age be understood as a simple reflection
of the prevailing cultural climate of the time. The violent vigilante anti-
hero had existed long before that and his reappearance was as much a
reaction to the influence of Watchmen/Dark Knight, or a dialogue with
them, as it was a response to wider social concerns. What is interesting
is that the two highest peaks of comic book sales, the Golden Age and
the Dark Age of the early nineties, are both so dependent on a militaris-
tic outlook—a war against fascism in the former, and a generalised war
against crime in the latter.
In the work of the more popular Dark Age artists, this vision of the
posthuman crystallises into something akin to what Susan Jeffords calls
“hard bodies”.46 In her analysis of 1980s action cinema, Jeffords argues
for a correspondence between Reagan-era political discourse and popu-
lar culture narratives. The presentation of indestructible, muscled, white
male bodies like those of the Terminator’s Arnold Schwarzenegger or
Rambo’s Sylvester Stallone “provided a narrative structure and a visual
pleasure through which consumers actively responded to and constructed
U.S. popular culture”.47 The assumptions about audiences that this sort of
argument relies upon were laid out in Chapter 3, “The Rhizome of Comic
Book Culture”, but it is difficult to deny the prevalence of such images
in Dark Age comic books. Moreover, they appear to be a result of both
editorial mandate and reader response. Certainly, stories became more
formulaic. Under the corporate purview of McAndrew and Forbes in the
early nineties, writers and artists at Marvel found that low-selling titles,
which in previous decades would be grounds for experimentation (as in
the work of Engelhart’s Dr. Strange and Jim Starlin’s Warlock), would
simply be cancelled. All titles became off-limits to experimentation.48
The formation of Image Comics in 1992 was a crystallisation of this con-
fluence of events—the genre deconstruction of Dark Knight/Watchmen
and subsequent fashion for violent anti-heroes; the increased corporatisa-
tion of the industry and fandom and subsequent speculator bubble; and
the rise of the star creator. Image was formed by a handful of Marvel’s
top selling artists, including Todd McFarlane (Spider-Man), Rob Liefeld
(X-Force) and Jim Lee (X-Men). After a dispute with Marvel over pay
they decided to form their own company, giving them full creative con-
trol and ownership of their characters. Marvel writer/editor Tom DeFalco
recalled that the stock analysts would tell the owners that stock was falling
because,“Marvel lost the Image artists…In fact, when the Image artists
left, they created such a controversy and spotlight on the industry that
sales went up”.49 Strangely, despite their independent status, the creators
at Image seemed uninterested in working in the tradition of alternative
comics, preferring instead to produce variations on an already well-worn
superhero theme and introducing still more hard-bodied heroes in the
grim and gritty mould.
The immensely popular Rob Liefeld stands out for many commenta-
tors as the archetypal example of the nineties style. Liefeld is also the
creator of Cable, introduced in the X-Men spin-off New Mutants as a
cyborg mercenary. Cable quickly became one of the most popular of the
new breed of violent anti-heroes. It is difficult to argue that the Dark
Age’s cyborg anti-heroes had any affinities with Haraway’s ideas. Rather,
as with real-world advances in the creation of cyborg soldiers, they can
be seen as “re-articulating the ever-present relationship between techno-
scientific discourses and masculinist discourses”, as Masters puts it.50
Masters continues: “the cyborg soldier has blurred particular distinctions
between machine and man, where technology embodies masculinity…The
effect is that military technologies have been techno-masculinised, while
human soldiers apart from technology have been feminised and reconsti-
tuted within the realm of those needing protection”.51 Technology, and
especially military technology, had come to be seen as superior to the
human male body.52
It is perhaps no coincidence that for Superman and Batman, the two
oldest superheroes, the early nineties began with Superman being beaten
to death, Batman having his back broken and both temporarily replaced
with versions more in keeping with the moral tone and aesthetic trends
of the time. Against the masculine hard bodies of the new anti-heroes,
the non-killing, non-weaponised bodies of the older breed of superhero
were therefore vulnerable. Whether that means they were feminised
remains a matter of theoretical prejudice, but Blumberg dates the seeds
of the Dark Age as far back as the infamous death of Spider-Man’s girl-
friend Gwen Stacey in 1973: “with her passing, and the introduction of
characters like the Punisher and Wolverine soon after, the next stage in
the development of the superhero genre had arrived—not with a flash of
lightning and a triumphant fanfare, but with the hollow snap of bone”.53
In other words, like a ritualistic sacrifice, the era of the hard, masculin-
ised military-industrial body was inaugurated with the destruction of the
soft, feminine body.
124 S. JEFFERY
REGULATING THE SUPERHUMAN BODY

After the deconstruction of the superhero in Dark Knight and Watchmen
and the resulting generic formulism that followed in the Dark Age of
Comics, many creators have wanted to return the superhero to its Silver
Age status. Strangely, in order to do this they would have to utilise the
same weapons that had been used to deconstruct them in the first place.
Thus, what had existed at a thematic level—interrogating the “meaning”
of the superhero—instead began to manifest at a narrative level as sto-
ryline that concerned themselves with the regulation and legal status of
the posthuman body. The DC mini-series Kingdom Come, 54 for instance,
presented a future in which the heroes of the Golden and Silver Ages—
Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and so on, had retired and their suc-
cessors had run amok. Clearly designed as a commentary on the Dark
Age trend for violent anti-heroes, the “leader” of this new generation is
deliberately designed to resemble Rob Liefeld’s popular character Cable.
In the Marvel Universe in particular, superheroes continued their bris-
tly relationship with state authority, not to mention ordinary humans. The
mutant X-Men were subject to genetic prejudice, mutant registration acts
and other invasions of privacy with alarming frequency. But even mostly
popular heroes such as the Fantastic Four had to appear before congress
in 1989 to provide expert testimony on a proposed registration act for
people with superpowers because, as a pentagon official describes it, “it
would be highly advantageous to the military power of the united states,
perhaps to the balance of military power in the world…if the army under-
stood the precise nature and availability of these…extraordinary individu-
als in times of crisis”.55 By the time of the 2006 Marvel event Civil War,
the climate had changed sufficiently that Mr. Fantastic would find himself
in the pro-registration camp. Civil War56 begins with the New Warriors
in an encounter with the villain Nitro in the small town of Stamford
which results in an explosion that kills three of the New Warriors, the
three villains accompanying Nitro, and over 600 civilians, among them 60
children. Coming after a series of destructive encounters between super-
powered beings in the Marvel Universe (including a destructive Las Vegas
rampage by the Hulk that killed 26 people), public sentiment turns against
superheroes. The “Superhuman Registration Act”, which had been under
consideration because of these preceding events, is quickly pushed into
legislation requiring any person in the USA with superhuman abilities
to register with the federal government as a “human weapon of mass
destruction,” reveal their true identity to the authorities, and undergo

proper training, earning a salary and benefits such as those earned by other
American civil servants. The introduction of the act divided the Marvel
heroes along ideological lines. Superheroes who had once fought side by
side now found themselves at war with each other. At the story’s denoue-
ment the heroes battle in New York, and although Captain America’s side
appear to be winning, upon surveying the damage and frightened citizens,
Captain America surrenders, admitting that they were winning, “every-
thing except the argument”.57
Writer Mark Millar has been quite explicit in intending the story to
have resonances with the increased security and paranoia of post 9/11
America. Given the climate of the time, Kaveney has praised Civil War
as a “work of significant protest art”,58 and its oblique engagement with
questions of freedom versus security sets it at odds with much American
popular culture of the time. Indeed, in some respects, reality caught up
with comic books in the events of 9/11; a spectacular display of destruc-
tion in New York City undertaken by cyborg fusion of man and machine.
In comic narratives, the posthuman body was now a weapon; superheroes
had become “people of mass destruction”. Part of the reason for this is
that superheroes had moved increasingly from a reactive to a proactive
role, mirroring the theoretical conception of the body in sociology from
a passive object receiving of society to an agentic subject, transforming
of society.59 Using the body as weapon requires a wilful agentic use of
embodiment to “exert ‘upstream’ influences on society leading to both
to resistance and engagement with social structures”.60 The relationship
between state power, the military, industry and the posthuman body
reached a fever pitch in the modern work of Warren Ellis.
The Authority61 in particular proved highly influential. As Grant
Morrison puts it in his introduction to the first collected volume, The
Authority asked, “what if the superheroes really decided to make a few
changes according to ‘higher moral authority’?”62 In early Dark Age sto-
ries like Watchmen and Squadron Supreme, the decision by superheroes
to make a change to societal structures ends in mass destruction. In The
Authority, the interventionist superhero is presented as a heroic, if morally
ambiguous figure. When Civil War writer Mark Millar took over the series
the political element was amped up and The Authority began to directly
involve themselves in world affairs. The US government responded by
incapacitating the team and replacing them with a group more amena-
ble to their own agendas: “if there’s any single truth the whole world
126 S. JEFFERY
understands it’s this: the rich eat first”.63 Elsewhere, Ellis has used super-
heroes to explore more directly political themes. In Black Summer (Ellis
and Ryp 2006) a posthuman kills George W. Bush as punishment for
crimes that he claims include electoral fraud, breaching the Geneva con-
vention and prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks which served as cover
for unnecessary incursion onto the Middle East on behalf of oil conglom-
erates. In Supergods,64 a global arms race to produce superhumans results
in the destruction of the majority of the world’s population. In the main-
stream continuity of the Marvel Universe Ellis rebooted Iron Man with
the Extremis65 storyline. In this story, Ellis’ thematic preoccupations with
techno-science, the military-industrial complex and state power remains
unhindered by the fact that he is working with an established superhero
rather than a creation of his own. Ellis takes the problematic that has
always been part of the Iron Man mythos and confronts them directly.
At one point, Tony Stark is interviewed by an investigative journalist
who quizzes him about his legacy in arms manufacture. Later on, Stark
talks with two colleagues about the impossibility of funding for scientific
research without recourse to military budgets. In the Marvel Universe,
the suggestion seems to be that the game is rigged. The posthuman must
either work within the military-industrial complex or the military-indus-
trial complex will find it.
THE CORPORATE SUPERHUMAN

While the mainstream comic book industry became increasingly corpo-
rate, so too did the contemporary superhero. As discussed in Chapter 3,
“The Perfect Body”, many of the earliest superhero stories were initially
suspicious of big business before the advent of World War 2. Nevertheless,
the importance of the corporate professional as alter-ego was evident early
on.66 Superman/Clark Kent is a journalist. The Silver Age Flash Barry
Allen was a police scientist. Daredevil/Matt Murdoch is a lawyer. They are
all “professionals who fit within their corporate, institutional worlds”.67
Smith reminds us that because the superhero is so much more outlandish
than their secret identity it is easy to forget that the careers adopted by
most superheroes are actually fairly prestigious.
The countercultural seventies also saw the re-emergence of the corpo-
rate villain. Tony Stark’s business rival Obadiah Staine was one of several
boardroom villains that featured in Iron Man. Another recurring “villain”,
the Roxxon corporation, debuted in Captain America #180 (Dec 1974)
and remains part of the Marvel Universe, seemingly possessed of an end-

less supply of corrupt CEOs and its own vast security force employed to
protect its typically suspect research and development programmes into
creating Superhumans. Roxxon, an energy company for the most part, was
also frequently at odds with Project Pegasus, which was engaged in the cre-
ation of alternative energy sources. More recently, Marvel Boy introduced
Hexus—The Living Corporation. This abstract villain represents the first
instance of the corporation itself as posthuman. Essentially a sentient idea,
Hexus spreads rapidly across the Earth, branding the entire planet with
its logo. Hexus is only defeated when Marvel Boy copies its trade secrets,
recruitment strategies, secret soda recipes, and the like and passes them on
to its competitors. Unable to defeat Hexus physically, Marvel Boy must
instead fight business with business.
The archetypal corporate villain though would have to be Superman’s
arch-nemesis Lex Luthor. In the comics of the Golden and Silver Ages,
Lex Luthor was presented as a typical mad-scientist. Following DC’s
reboot of its universe in 1986, Lex Luthor was reintroduced as a corrupt
millionaire industrialist. Such a status only serves to reinforce Superman’s
“working class” position as Kansas farm-boy. What drives Luthor however
is not a thirst for money in and of itself but a thirst for power. By the
2000s, Luthor had consolidated his power base to the extent that he was
elected president of the USA. The questionable relationship between the
state and corporate power could hardly be more explicit. Notably, Luthor
has also positioned himself as a spokesman for libertarian Transhumanism.
In DC’s 52 Lex Luthor introduces the Everyman Project (slogan: Be your
own hero!), where people can pay to join a programme to give them super-
powers. Luthor couches this in Libertarian terms: “It means we no longer
have to trust our safety to the privileged elite, the accidental few. It means
every man and woman can be a superhero”.68 All is not how it seems,
however. As the hero Steel realizes, Luthor is only creating superhumans
in order to control them.69 Once again, the world of the Superhuman is
one in which the Military-Industrial complex is not to be trusted.
Likewise there is a tradition of superheroes as super-rich as they are
super powered. Batman writer Grant Morrison has suggested that Batman
is a capitalist hero whose alter-ego Bruce Wayne is heir to the Wayne for-
tune, and head of Wayne Enterprises. Tony Stark/Iron Man is another bil-
lionaire playboy industrialist. The 2000s have seen the logical extensions
of the Batman/ Iron Man notion of the corporate posthuman. In Milligan
and Allred’s X-Statix70 the pseudonymous team are celebrities rather
128 S. JEFFERY
than superheroes whose missions are carefully chosen by their manager

for optimum public relations impact. The mutants of X-Statix are more
concerned with their brand than altruism. Meanwhile, Joe Casey’s run
on Wildcats71 investigated the notion of the posthuman-run corporation,
centring on their attempts to make the world a better place through utilis-
ing the fantastic technologies that comic book superheroes have access
to. The vision of the corporation as superhero, or force for good in the
world, presented in Wildcats has been picked up again in Grant Morrison’s
Batman Incorporated.72 After Bruce Wayne has publicly outed himself as
the man who funds Batman’s activities (though not admitting to being
Batman himself) he sets about spreading the Batman brand across the
globe, franchising out the title to a series of international superheroes.
If further indication were needed of the corporate concerns of con-
temporary superhero comics, then the peculiar affinities between Marvel’s
alternate 2099 and Ultimate Universes is illustrative. In 1992, Marvel
put out a series of titles set in the Marvel Universe of 2099. New ver-
sions of popular characters such as Spider-Man, X-Men and the Fantastic
Four existed within a futuristic dystopia in which corporations wielded
more power than nation states and run both schools and law enforcement
agencies. Several of the stories in the 2099 universe revolved around the
attempt by corporations such as Alchemax to create super-powered beings
(dubbed “corporate raiders” in Spider-Man 2099). The 2099 crossover
event The Fall of the Hammer rested on a plot by the corporations to tech-
nologically recreate the Norse pantheon, along with a new Thor, to divert
attention away from the anti-corporate superheroes. The 2099 titles only
ran for a few years, but in 2000, Marvel launched a new imprint known
as the Ultimate Marvel Universe. New titles such as Ultimate Spider-
Man and Ultimate X-Men provided a jumping-on point for new readers
by re-imagining their iconic heroes in a more contemporary setting and
starting afresh without the baggage of continuity that weighed down the
main Marvel Universe. In the Ultimate Universe, characters’ origins are
updated to include contemporary scientific advances; Spider-Man’s pow-
ers, for instance, are no longer the result of a bite by a radioactive spider
but a genetically engineered one. What is more interesting though is how
much the contemporary setting of the Ultimate Universe relies on the
tropes of the dystopian future imagined in the 2099 titles. The present
world, it seems, is already one in which a corrupt military-industrial com-
plex runs amok in the pursuit of creating superhuman weaponry.
The Super Soldier Program, in existence since the creation of Captain

America during World War 2, motivates several of the corporate villains
in the Ultimate Universe, each in search of lucrative military contracts.
Thus the question of the nation’s defence is used to bolster the economic
system. Another series, Ultimate Origins,73 reveals that the mutant gene is
not, as in the main Marvel Universe, an evolutionary development but the
by-product of the military-industrial complex’s obsessive search for mili-
tary might in that world. The posthuman bodies of the Ultimate Marvel
Universe are nexus points where techno science, capitalism and the state
converge; bodies created both by accident and design.
IRON MAN AND THE PROBLEM OF THE MILITARY-

INDUSTRIAL BODY
While Captain America served as synecdoche of the Perfect Body, and
displays many elements of the Military-Industrial body, it is arguably Iron
Man who most clearly articulates these concerns. Marvel Comics added
Iron Man to their roster in 1963. Wealthy industrialist Tony Stark is work-
ing on military experiments in Vietnam when he is captured by communists
and wounded by shrapnel near his heart. To save himself, Stark constructs
an electronic suit for himself that will keep his heart beating and allow
him to escape his captors. Returning home, and still dependent on the
suit to keep him alive, Stark modifies the design to become the hero Iron
Man. Of Iron Man’s adventures in the period 1963–1966, around a third
featured communists as the villains, making him, in Costello’s words, the
“most ardent”74 of Marvel’s Cold War warriors. Having been based by
writer Stan Lee on “billionaire industrialist inventor” Howard Hughes,
Tony Stark/Iron Man embodied the ideological divide between capitalism
and communism more than most. His involvement in the development
and selling of military weaponry further ensured that Stark was deeply
enmeshed within the military-industrial machine. Iron Man is presented in
these early tales as central to the US arms race. As Russia’s answer to Iron
Man, the Crimson Dynamo noted in 1963, “Without him the American
defence effort would be far weaker!”75 Such was the perceived strategic
and propagandist advantage of Iron Man to America that in one early story
Nikita Khrushchev himself arranged for his destruction. Furthermore, as
the pre-eminent cyborg superhero, this perfect fusion of man and machine
presents interesting challenges to Haraway’s vision of the cyborg, being,
130 S. JEFFERY
contra Haraway, the legitimate child of patriarchy, capitalism and military

techno-science.
Nevertheless, despite his initial centrality to the Cold War effort, Iron
Man’s development displays closer affinities to Haraway’s cyborg than
might first be apparent (although the gendered name Iron Man may be a
sticking point). Like Captain America, Iron Man’s unique position within
the political economy of the Marvel Universe allowed writers to interrogate
his genealogy. By 1968 Iron Man was working less closely with the gov-
ernment and turning his attention to social problems. Later stories made
the social commentary even more explicit. A 1975 story, set in flashback
in 1969, reveals Iron Man discovering a village that has been destroyed by
weapons designed and sold by Stark Industries. Iron Man builds a mass
grave for the villagers and carves the epitaph “WHY?” Upon his return
his company becomes Stark International, moving away from munitions
manufacture to focus on space exploration and the environment.76
Again, this was a hotly debated topic within the letters pages. Wright
reveals that one reader “condemned the superhero as a ‘profiteering, capi-
talist, war-mongering pig’”.77 This book suggests that these complaints
from readers mark a shift in the discursive formation of the posthuman
body, or a rupture in the rhizome of the Superhuman body as its forces
and relations shift and the assemblage gives way to new becomings. To put
it another way, these comments demonstrate how the Military-Industrial
Body was deterritorialised by the changing concerns of its readership. The
Military-Industrial Body of Iron Man, Cold War warrior and weapons
manufacturer, was untenable, “a capitalist, war-mongering pig”. Like
Captain America, Iron Man could be used to question rather than cel-
ebrate the political-economic status-quo. Like Haraway’s cyborg, these
posthuman bodies have been unfaithful to their origins. In fact, this was
a common trend as comic books entered the 1970s. Superhero comics
from both companies sought to become more relevant, addressing the
issues of the day, questioning authority (however mildly) and slowly, if
clumsily, beginning to rectify the lack of racial and gender diversity in their
universes.
However, the Military-Industrial Body itself remains prone to reter-
ritorialisation. As was seen, a confluence of forces during the early nine-
ties witnessed a reduction ad absurdum of the Perfect Body in the form
of the Hard Bodies of the Dark Age. That this reterritorialisation should
occur when it did is unsurprising. A related turn was taking place in other
media focusing on posthuman bodies in figures such as Schwarzenegger’s
The Terminator. In the discursive realm of Post/Humanism, the work of

Haraway and her Cyborg Manifesto was also engaging with the Military-
Industrial Body. For Heggs, “the cyborg and the superhero resist the con-
sequences of boundary transgression, and that the political affinities, so
often desired of cyborgs, are open to naturalization, for example, around
the thematic of masculinity”.78 It would be disingenuous to try and deny
that, in the Dark Age in particular, an image of the posthuman as milita-
rised “hard body” were dominant. However, it was also shown that such
representations were a product of a complex interaction of forces, the
aesthetic manifestation of social, political and economic climate, industry
pressures and practices, an increased emphasis on creator over characters,
and a struggle to come to terms with the impact of Watchmen and Dark
Knight Returns among other factors. The comics of other eras still offer
avenues for explorations that prove the comic book posthuman is not
quite as heterogeneous as Heggs suggests.
As this book has pointed out, posthumanism comes in many forms: in
Transhumanist visions of technological enhancement, in techno-scientific
practices, in philosophy and critical theory and of course in science fiction
and comic books. Certainly the superhero texts that have been discussed
in this chapter illustrate a consistent concern with how the posthuman
and the human interact, what it means to be human when one is possessed
of superhuman abilities, and the ethical problems of imposing one per-
son’s vision of (post) humanity on another (or many others). Outside of
comics, however, particularly in the realm of techno-scientific practice, it
becomes more difficult to disagree with Masters assertion that, in fact, “…
the cyborg is fundamentally a masculinist project” with “little transgres-
sive potential to be found in the figure of the cyborg as it leaves intact and
further embeds gender as a regime of power”.79 As this chapter has shown,
in superhero comics at least, the military mindset and posthuman bodies
are a problematic and often dangerous combination because the military-
industrial complex lacks the moral code that restrains superheroes in their
use of power. Meanwhile, those in charge of the military-industrial com-
plex poach the figure of the Superhuman and a reterritorialisation occurs,
such as when in contemporary management discourse business leaders
have been likened to superheroes, for instance “Neutron” Jack Welsh of
General Electric.80 Or when the February 2002 cover of Germany’s Der
Spiegel magazine featured the Bush cabinet dressed in the iconographic
clothes of various superheroes and action movie characters such as Rambo
and Conan the Barbarian with the headline: “The Bush Warriors: America’s
132 S. JEFFERY
Crusade Against Evil”, and the flattered President ordered 33 poster-sized

enlargements of the cover.81 Thankfully, the process works both ways: at
least one Nano scientist has advocated a nanotech-ethics based on Spider-
Man’s dictum: “with great power comes great responsibility”.82 Whether
other researchers and policy makers will absorb the same moral lessons (if
indeed they should at all) remains, as yet, purely speculative.
NOTES
2. Gray, C. H. (2003). “Posthuman soldiers in postmodern war”, Body and
Society 9 (4) pp. 215–216.
3. Berloznik, R. et al. (2006) Technology Assessment on Converging Technologies.
European Parliament Report; Bainbridge, W. S. (2005) The Transhuman
Heresy. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 14(2), pp. 1–10.
4. Berloznik, R. et al. (2006) Technology Assessment on Converging Technologies,
p. 25.
5. Gray, Posthuman soldiers in postmodern war, p. 218.
6. Quoted in Fellman, P. (2010). Iron Man: America’s Cold War Champion
and Charm against the Communist Menace. Voces Novae: Chapman University
Historical Review, 2(1), p. 17.
7. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
8. Ibid.
9. Sobchack, V. (1994) New Age Mutant Ninja Hackers: Reading Mondo
2000. In Dery, M. (ed.) Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham;
London: Duke University Press, p. 325.
10. Berloznik, R. et al. (2006) Technology Assessment on Converging Technologies,
p. 23.
11. Sobchack, New Age Mutant Ninja Hackers: Reading Mondo 2000, p. 25.
12. Roco, M. C., and Bainbridge, W. S. (eds.). (2002). Converging Technologies
for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology,
Information Technology and Cognitive Science. Washington, DC: NSF/DOC.
13. Nordmann, A. (2004) Converging technologies—Shaping the future of
European societies. Brussels: European Commission.
14. Berloznik, R. et al., (2006) Technology Assessment on Converging
Technologies, p. ii.
15. Ibid., p.30.
16. Ibid., p. 30.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Evans, W. (2007). Singularity Warfare: A Bibliometric Survey of Militarized
Transhumanism. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 16(1), pp. 161–65.
20. Gray, C. H. (2002) Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. London:
Routledge.
21. Masters, C. (2010) Cyborg Soldiers and militarised masculinities. Eurozine
[online] Available from: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-05-20-
masters-en.html [Accessed: 15/06/2015] p. 3.
22. Glover, J. (2006) Post-human Warriors: The Future of War http://www.third-
eyemag.com/nonfiction/essays/post-human-warriors/ [last accessed 15/06/2015].
23. Quoted in Milburn, C. (2005) Nanowarriors: Military Nanotechnology and
Comic Books. Intertexts, 9(1), p. 83.
24. http://www.wired.com/2010/07/holy-acronym-darpa-batman-robin-
to-master-biology-outdo-evolution/
25. Quoted in Milburn, Nanowarriors: Military Nanotechnology and Comic
Books, p. 81.
26. Kundnani, quoted in Masters, Cyborg Soldiers and militarised masculinities,
p. 5.
27. Milburn, Nanowarriors: Military Nanotechnology and Comic Books.
28. Quoted in Ibid., p. 78.
29. Ibid., p. 85.
30. Ibid.
31. Ro, Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book
Revolution, p. 110.
32. Spurgeon, T. (2006). The writers. Seattle, Wash: Fantagraphics Books,
p. 165.
33. Rhoades, S. (2008) Comic books: how the industry works. Peter Lang Pub
Incorporated, p. 2.
America, p. 259.
America, p. 280.
America, p. 279.
37. Voger, M. (2006) The Dark Age: Grim, Great and Gimmicky Postmodern
Comics. North Carolina: Twomorrows Publishing.
38. Miller, F., Janson, K., Varley, L., Costanza, J. and Kane, B. (1986) Batman:
The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC comics.
39. Miller, F., and Mazzucchelli, D. (2005). Batman: Year one. New York: DC
Comics.
40. Moore, A. and Bolland, B. (1988) Batman: The Killing Joke New York: DC
comics.
in America , p. 275.
42. Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why.
43. Ibid., p. 80.
134 S. JEFFERY

45. Ibid., p. 227.
46. Jeffords, S. (1994) Hardbodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
47. Ibid., p. 12.
48. Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
49. Quoted in Ro, Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American
Comic Book Revolution, p. 281.
50. (2010:6).
51. Masters, Cyborg Soldiers and militarised masculinities, p. 6.
52. Ibid.
53. Blumberg, A. (2003) The Night Gwen Stacy Died: The End of Innocence
and the Birth of the Bronze Age. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary
Culture [online] 3(4). Available from: http://reconstruction.eserver.
org/034/blumberg.htm [Accessed 20/12/2013] pp. 36.
54. Waid, M. and Ross, A. (1997) Kingdom Come, New York: DC Comics.
55. Simonson, W. and Buckler, R. (1989) Death by debate. Fantastic Four #335
New York: Marvel Comics.
56. Millar, M and McNiven, S (2006) Civil War. New York: Marvel Comics.
57. Ibid.
59. Yuill, C. (2007) The Body As Weapon: Bobby Sands and the Republican
Hunger Strikes. Sociological Research Online, 12(2) Para 2.3.
60. Ibid.: Para 6.2.
61. Ellis, W., and Hitch, B. (2000). The Authority: Relentless. Canada: WildStorm.
62. Ibid.
63. Millar, M., and Peyer, T. (2002). The Authority, transfer of power. La Jolla,
CA: WildStorm Productions n.p.
64. Ellis, W. and Gastonny, G. (2011) Supergods. Avatar Press.
65. Ellis,W. and Granov, A. (2006). Iron Man: Extremis. New York: Marvel.
66. Smith, G. M. (2009) The Superhero as Labor. In Ndalianis, A. (ed.) The
Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 126–143.
67. Ibid., p. 127.
68. Johns, G., Morrison, G., Rucka, G. and Waid, M. (2006) 52. Vol 4 New York:
DC Comics, pp. 102–103.
69. Ibid., pp. 194.
70. Milligan, P., Allred, M., Cooke, D., Fegredo, D., Allred, L., Allred, D., and
Piekos, N. (2003).X-Statix: Good omens. New York: Marvel Comics.
71. Casey, J., Phillips, S., and Dillon, S. (2003). Wildcats: Vol. 4. La Jolla, CA:
WildStorm.
72. Morrison, G., Burnham, C., Irving, F., and Fairbairn, N. (2013). Batman
Incorporated: Volume 1. New York: DC Comics.
73. Bendis, B. M., Ponsor, J., and Guice, J. (2009). Ultimate origins. New York:
Marvel Pub.
74. Costello, (2006) Secret identity crisis: Comic books and the unmasking of Cold
War America, p. 63.
75. Cited in Fellman. Iron Man: America’s Cold War Champion. P. 16.
America, p. 117.
America, p 241.
78. Heggs, Cyberpsychology and Cyborgs, p. 185.
79. Masters, Cyborg Soldiers and militarised masculinities, pp. 8–9.
80. Rehn, A., and Lindahl, M. (2008). The uncanny organization man: super-
hero myths and contemporary management discourse. Organizational
Olympians: Heroes and heroines of organizational myths, pp. 50–8.
81. Hassler-Forest, D. A. (2011). Superheroes and the Bush doctrine: narrative
and politics in post-9/11 discourse Unpublished thesis: http://dare.uva.nl/
record/371610.
82. Milburn, Nanowarriors: Military Nanotechnology and Comic Books, p. 88.
Animal Bodies and Artificial Bodies
The preceding chapters presented three different forms of the posthu-

man body in roughly chronological order, suggesting that the posthuman
body is best conceptualised as a rhizomatic assemblage whose functions
are determined only by what other assemblages it can be plugged into.
So it was that the Perfect Body was able to impact on bodies by way of
eugenics-based sterilisation programmes and, more recently, the search
for real-world super-soldier technologies has drawn upon the comic book
Superhuman as a source of inspiration. Rather than a fixed and stable cat-
egory, the posthuman body is a fluid, patchwork figure, emerging from
the interplay of a variety of forces and intensities—social, scientific, politi-
cal, artistic, and so on, and composed of heterogeneous elements that also
play roles in other configurations. The relations between these parts are
contingent, not necessary, so that parts can be extracted from one assem-
blage and plugged into another. These heterogeneous elements are not all
the same; assemblages can be comprised of bodies, physical objects and
events as well as semiotic elements. Within the rhizome there can be no
hierarchical privileging of the “real” over the “symbolic” or macro socio-
logical structures over micro sociological interactions. Hence, this book
has argued that the three most easily identifiable realms of the posthuman
body incorporate philosophy (in the form of Post/Humanism), fictional
representations (in the form of Superhumanism) and actual material, tech-
nical practices (referred to here, broadly, as Transhumanism).

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_7
138 S. JEFFERY
TRANSHUMAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Although the rhizome is anti-origin, it is nevertheless useful to concep-
tualise an antediluvian period of the Superhuman. This period extends as
far back as Greek mythology or even early shamanism, but for the pur-
poses of this book it is useful to think of it as roughly coinciding with
that vaguely defined period known as modernity, ushered in by the elec-
trical fever dream of Shelley’s Frankenstein, through the scientific fanta-
sies of the Victorian era, and then the pulp fictions of the early twentieth
century’s burgeoning mass media. The superhero did not emerge as the
result of necessary telos of the Superhuman, but as an emergent prop-
erty resulting from these parts being plugged together in new ways—the
dual identity crime-fighting of the Scarlet Pimpernel AND the outlandish
costume of the circus strongman AND the genius level detective skills
of Sherlock Holmes AND the alien races and amazing technologies of
early science fiction AND so on. Furthermore, as the previous chapters
have demonstrated, the Superhuman body also shared rhizomatic rela-
tions with real-world technologies, moving from the eugenicist fantasy of
the Perfect body, then the startling transformative effects of radiation on
the Cosmic Bodies of the Silver Age, and later the cyborgs and genetically
engineered heroes of the modern age. Each of these new assemblages
was accompanied by new social formations; groups of individuals who,
with varying degrees of success, sought to popularise different forms of
Transhumanism.
Thus, the Perfect Body of the Antediluvian and Golden Ages came
alongside ideas such as H.G. Wells’ “open conspiracy”, the notion of a
“world state” run by an elite scientific class exerting “intelligent control
of population”, using techniques such as “tranquilisation” and “directed
breeding”.1 In America, the Technocracy movement, described by engi-
neer William H. Smyth in 1919 as “the rule of the people made effective
through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers”2 argued
for a similar vision. Implicit or more often explicit in these ideologies is
an emphasis on rationality and efficiency. While it may be purely specula-
tive, there is something intriguing about the dramatic fall in popularity
of the superhero after 1945, it may be that the reality of the Nazi’s so-
called final solution, in which the vision of the efficient technocratic state
was put into monstrous practice, fostered a suspicion of the very idea of
the Superhuman. This notion is strengthened by the fact that the next
boom in popularity for the superhero, the Silver Age, emerges together
ANIMAL BODIES AND ARTIFICIAL BODIES 139
with a countercultural concept of the posthuman body whose emphasis is

in almost dialectical opposition to those of efficiency, rationality, or eco-
nomic productivity. And while it has been seen that the emergence of
cyber culture has several important historical connections to the coun-
terculture, there was an equally strong move away from technology and
towards nature. Hence the Perfect Body experienced a becoming-cosmic
as aspects which had existed within it as virtual tendencies became actual-
ised. This was neither a definitive break with what had come before, nor a
teleological necessity, but a reconfiguration of parts, because even in these
technocratic visions however, there lay aspects of the Cosmic Body waiting
to be realised.
For agents of the Cosmic Body such as the Human Potential Movement,
the Esalen group, or the Stanford researchers who drafted the Changing
Images of Man, the posthuman was not a matter of crude technological
enhancement so much as realising latent human potentials. The answer lay
not in reaching outwards to technologies but inwards to the body. Again,
the mass popularity of the superhero dwindled once more as these coun-
tercultural trends began to dissipate. The comics speculator bubble of
the early 1990s also coincided with the birth of the Extropian movement
which lay down many of the principals, such as a proactionary approach
to human evolution by technological enhancement, that characterise
Transhumanism more generally. In comics, this manifested in the form of
Military-Industrial bodies. Like Perfect Bodies, these are shaped by politi-
cal, social and economic forces, but where the Perfect Body unproblemati-
cally embraces its new identity, the Military-Industrial Body has a much
more ambivalent relationship with its makers, and struggles painfully with
questions of power and responsibility.
The very existence of these various Transhumanist social movements
evidences the material effects of the assemblage of the posthuman body on
other, corporeal beings they connect with. This is why a consideration of
comics fans is important. Comics fandom (and to a large extent, the comics
industry) was a product of early science fiction fandom. In the USA, much
of this fandom coalesced around the magazine Amazing Stories, whose
editor, Hugo Gernsback, stressed the functionality of the magazine, claim-
ing that “the patent offices of most countries follow scientifiction stories
pretty closely, because in many of these the germ of an invention is hid-
den”.3 Amazing Stories featured adverts for training as an electrician and
correspondence courses in chemistry. Like the comic book that succeeded
them, such magazines offered readers imaginary tales of the Superhuman
140 S. JEFFERY
while also offering the potential means to become Superhuman, whether

through educational advancement (chemistry courses) or bodily practices
(Charles Atlas’s body-building programmes).
MODERNITY AND THE POSTHUMAN BODY

The idea of the Perfect Body was quite specifically tied to Modernity.
Emerging in response to an increasingly mechanised and rationalised public
sphere dominated by clocks, transport systems, standardised mass culture
and urbanisation, Perfect Bodies demonstrated their ability to weather the
demands placed on them by the speed of upheavals promised by the brave
new world of the twentieth century. Science and medical discourse were able
to provide a model for these new Perfect Bodies; quantified by statistics and
given new impetus by evolutionary theory. These Perfect Bodies were always
already posthuman bodies, never truly themselves. While its manifestation
as the Golden Age Superhuman strove to express these ideals, its exagger-
ated proportion and wild costumes pointed towards an excess of meanings
beyond simply the fascistic desire to pathologise or replace imperfect bod-
ies. The core irony here is that those very forces which allowed humanity to
order, model and mould human bodies also produced the means by which
they could be altered. Both the Perfect and the Cosmic Body shared this
dream of altering the human, albeit with different emphases.
As Luckhurst puts it, the engineer and evolutionary paradigms of early sci-
ence fiction were eventually merged “through an idea of a very specific ‘engi-
neering of the mind’ ”.4 This idea would later bleed into to the countercultural
explosion that led Leslie Fielder to observe that “the posthuman future is
now”5; a future belonging to what Fielder dubbed the “new mutants” of the
1960s and premised on the conquest of inner space. While the modification
of consciousness sits easily with many of the aims of Transhumanism, the
Cosmic Body is notable precisely because this modification is an escape from
mechanisation, an attempt at overcoming the disenchantment of Modernity
and breaking free of the chains of reason. The seeming impasse between the
Animal and the Artificial can be resolved through the development of posthu-
man minds rather than posthuman bodies.
ARTIFICIAL BODIES
Both Artificial and Animal Bodies harken back to forms of the post-
human body prior to the comic book superhero. Early robots, more
commonly called automatons, can be found in ancient mythology, as
in the mechanical servants of the Greek god Hephaestus, or the Golem

of Jewish legend. Even in fiction, the use of robots did not emerge
fully formed in twentieth-century science fiction. The Steam Man of the
Prairies, for example, made his first dime-novel appearance in 1868.
These bodies occupy opposing poles in an imaginary evolution of the
posthuman body. At one end, the Animal Body, that from which the
human came and must overcome. At the other end stands the Artificial
Body, that which comes after the human. Standing between the two is
the Perfect Body, terrified of atavistic regression while simultaneously
engineering its own obsolescence. In fact, the standardisation and dis-
ciplining of bodies by various forms of governmentality evoked fears
that find expression in the reactions to the proliferation of computers
in the late twentieth century. Artificial Intelligences and other forms
of mechanical beings (such as robots and androids) often express these
same fears about the rationalisation and mechanisation of bodies; that
such bodies can never be truly human.
The presence of humanoid robots in the realm of the Superhuman
usually displays a distinct corporeal anthropomorphism. One way the
Artificial Body is “humanised” is by mimicking human morphology. In
reality many of the earliest robots replicated non-human forms such as
doves, or Jacques de Vaucanson’s 1739 creation, Canard Digérateur, or
Digesting Duck, an automaton in the form of a duck which appeared to
eat grain, digest it and then defecate. Other highlights from the menagerie
of automata might include the iron fly and artificial eagle of Johan Muller
(1533) or John Dee’s flying, wooden beetle (1543). Contemporary
roboticists are also turning to the animal kingdom. Spurred on by a 1989
paper by MIT AI Lab director Rodney Brooks entitled Fast, Cheap and
Out of Control, roboticists and AI researchers shifted their focus somewhat
from simulating people to the creation of smaller, smarter and more useful
robots. Such needs have also been catered to by a variety of animal-like
machines such as Boston Dynamics terrifying headless horse Big Dog and
its sibling Little Dog, all the way across the animal kingdom to fish and
insects. Perhaps most non-human of all are modular robots. While they
resemble a snake in certain formations their ability to come apart and func-
tion as separate modules before recombining again resembles the activity
of slime-mold rather than any vertebrate. Even so, in comic books robots
have conformed to the template of the Perfect body. Perhaps the charac-
ter to have come closest to a uniquely fluid Artificial Body was Warlock,
a member of the extra-terrestrial Technarchy race, whose techno-organic
bodies can assume any shape, and whose depiction as a cartoonish mass
142 S. JEFFERY
of lines and colour (particularly by artist Bill Sienkiewicz) stretched the

parameters of the Artificial Body’s form.
Where the new man of modernity was rational, civilised and intelli-
gent, the subhuman was constructed as wild, untamed and animalistic. It
is worth noting the manner in which, as Potts points out, animality was
constructed had been largely inherited from the strict division between
humans and animals asserted by Descartes in the seventeenth century.6
Where humans had minds and souls, animals lacked the capacity to rea-
son or feel, acting only on instincts. That Descartes described animals
as “beast-machines” points to a shared fear evoked by both Animal and
Artificial bodies—a fear of the mechanical and unthinking, of minds with-
out reason or empathy, running either on pure instinct or pure program-
ming. Hidden in the fascination with such bodies is not simply the desire
to codify, to striate or to regulate such bodies (though such territorialisa-
tions are both possible and probable); it also speaks of its opposite—an
inability to become other. To become other, for the body to form new
assemblages and affect and be affected by them, a necessary balance must
be achieved.
Increasingly, as understanding of evolution becomes a deeper under-
standing of genetics, the line between the Animal and Artificial Body
becomes blurred. Graham notes the persistent tendency in literature on
genetic engineering “towards reductionism, in which the gene, a tiny frag-
ment of biochemical information, is held to be the key to all mysteries
of human behaviour, both biological and cultural”.7 Advances in both
molecular biology and AI research reimagine the two most reified aspects
of the human—the body and the mind—as simply code, patterns of infor-
mation. The understanding of DNA as code also allows for currently
achievable Transhumanist practices such as transgenics. Where eugenics
sought to control the spread of human DNA, the science of transgenics
involves recombining genetic material from different species. For example,
the transgenic splicing of animal and human DNA so that a human body
could regenerate a limb using the same genetic mechanism that a starfish
or salamander does, or even “glow in the dark like jellyfish, smell with the
sensitivity of dogs, or emit electrical shocks like the…electric eel”.8
Artificial and Animal Bodies have long accompanied one another. They
are there in the monsters and mechanical marvels of Classical mythology
as well as the fabulous freaks and uncanny automata of the circus side-
show. Though the circus strongman managed the first migration from
stage to comics’ page, laying down the iconography of the Perfect Body
as the default form of the superheroic body, his side-show kin were never
far behind, and an incessant reminder that his body too, while heavily ter-
ritorialised by the eugenicist movement and Modernist fears of societal
devolution, was itself a spectacle, freakish in its very “perfection”. Animal
and Artificial bodies return us to the Antediluvian roots of the superhero.
The display of uncanny automata and the corporeal spectacle of the freak
show both utilised Artificial and Animal bodies that could both reinforce
and trouble binary definitions of the human such as natural/artificial or
human/animal. Moreover, the comic book emerged at a time when the
circus freak show was falling out of fashion, with the cinema and pulp fic-
tions of the printed page emerging to sate the public’s desire for extraor-
dinary bodies.
As we have seen, the evolution of the Superhuman became codified as a
set of iconographic elements. Though this iconographic idiom developed
in and through a cultural milieu that emphasised a white, masculine body,
this does not mean that the Perfect Body of the Superhuman “means”
something fascistic. Though they resemble the iconography of the perfect
body—we recognise the “synthezoid” Avenger known as The Vision, or
the blue fur-covered Hank McCoy AKA the Beast as Superhuman not just
because of their outlandish forms, but because those outlandish forms are
constrained by the iconographic codes of the superhero comic. Indeed,
the ability or failure of these two characters’ bodies to conform to this
template drives many of the stories they feature in, and dramatises the
questions that have been raised throughout this book.
BECOMING-HUMAN
Of all the posthuman bodies to be found in the multiverse of superhero
comics it is those characters who express themselves through Artificial
Bodies that are most often concerned with the question of what it means
to be human. DC Comic’s Red Tornado, for example, was created by
the villainous T.O. Morrow as a means of defeating the Justice League of
America. Red Tornado turns on his creator and is accepted as a member of
the JLA. Nevertheless, Red Tornado remains acutely aware of his artificial
form, saying “I want to be somebody! I want a face…an identity I can call
my own!”9 The search for a “face”—that most literal marker of identity—
is also shared by Marvel’s Machine Man. Created by Dr. Abel Stack as part
of military project to build robots that could think like men, the former
X-51 was stolen by his creator, who reasoned that the best way to get a
144 S. JEFFERY
robot to think like a man was to treat him as one. The scientist’s first task
is to give his creation an artificial face.
But the Artificial Body does not simply seek cosmetic change. This
search for an authentic “identity” is really a search to be accepted as
“human”. The adoption of the Perfect Superhuman Body as their form
is not enough to make them “authentic”. Sherry Turkle’s study of
how Information Technologies impacted on human beings’ own self-
understandings found that while children find it easy to ascribe feelings
or personalities to computers, adults tended to find the “chief shortcom-
ings of computers as a lack of intuition, emotion and creativity, the quali-
ties by which human uniqueness could be hall-marked”.10 In issue 189 of
Justice League of America, Wonder Woman ascribes these qualities to Red
Tornado, saying “we don’t judge a human being by how much his or her
body is flesh and blood…To me, John is a human being. He cares, he has
needs.”11.
Understanding how the Artificial Body becomes a “human” requires
a consideration of the relationship between machinic assemblages (i.e.
physical bodies) and enunciative assemblages (i.e. signs and utterances).
The adoption of human names by Red Tornado (the archetypal John
Smith) and Machine Man (Aaron Stack, taking his “father’s” surname)
speak to the power of language to transform identity. Enunciative assem-
blages, while abstract, can still have material effects and can transform a
body’s social relationships. Deleuze and Guattari give the example of the
verdict of guilty in a court of law, “the transformation of the accused into
a convict”.12 The enunciative assemblage of guilty has a transformative
effect of the “guilty” body’s social relations. The symbolic sets limitations
on the power and capacity of the physical body to form new assemblages.
On the other hand, the positive verdict of “human” allows Red Tornado
and Machine Man to become more than the identity originally ascribed
to them.
Perhaps the most popular Artificial Body is Marvel Comics’ The Vision.
Like Red Tornado, The Vision was originally created as a weapon but
turned on his creator to become a superhero alongside The Avengers. In
one famous panel from Avengers issue 58, The Vision stands, hand over
his face with a tear running down his cheek. A caption reads, “Even an
android can cry”. As Nelson has noted, although “synthezoid”, the form
of The Vision “entirely artificial, with a literally built body” displays, “…
emotion marks him as authentic”.13 The Vision’s humanity, his “authen-
ticity”, is explicitly linked to his capacity for human emotion, specifically
love. In this respect he could not be more different from his father-creator,
another Artificial Body known as Ultron. Ultron embodies more apoca-
lyptic concerns about AI and robotics, bent as he is on destroying human-
ity. The monomaniacal robot despises humanity, but he does so for deeply
human reasons, at least, the human as envisioned by Freud, for Ultron
is the robot Oedipus. Created by Avenger Hank Pym/Ant-Man as an
experiment in Artificial Intelligence using his own brain patterns, Ultron
rebels against his father, learning to upgrade and rebuild his own body.
Later, Ultron builds himself a bride named Jocasta, whose AI is based
upon the brain patterns of Janet Pym/The Wasp, Hank Pym’s wife and, as
such, Ultron’s ersatz “mother”.
A recurring theme in this technologised Oedipal drama is whether the
human self resides in the mind or the body. Ultron’s ability to upload
his consciousness into new bodies, and his commitment to copying and
uploading the brain patterns of various Avengers into new robotic forms,
mirrors the way roboticist Hans Moravec14 (like Kurzweil,15 a vocal propo-
nent of mind-uploading) conceptualises “identity” as “synonymous with
consciousness, which is stored in the brain in a form that can be captured
and translated into digital patterns of information”.16 Again and again
characters encounter robotic forms modelled after the brain patterns of
their colleagues and loved ones, often speaking with a computerised simu-
lation of their voice. In one scene The Wasp is unable to attack Ultron’s
robot bride Jocasta, whose brain patterns she shares: “I can’t bring myself
to hurt her”, thinks Janet, “It’d be like hurting myself”.17 Janet Pym takes
for granted that her simulated brain patterns amount to a form of “self”,
and so is unwilling to hurt the Artificial Body that contains it. From this
perspective, identity requires both a body and a mind (or rather, “brain
patterns”). By contrast, Ultron sees bodies simply as shells, acting out
Hayles’ concerns about Moravec’s ideas: “you have captured all that mat-
ters about being human. The rest can be shuffled off- a mortal coil that
we no longer need or want”.18 When Ultron later appears to reclaim his
“bride” he is happy to kill Janet, telling Hank Pym, “I already have your
wife! Janet Pym is now superfluous to me”.19
In opposition to the gross Cartesian dualism she perceives in the work of
Moravec, (and as acted out by Ultron), Hayles dreams instead of “a version
of the Posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technolo-
gies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disem-
bodied immortality”.20 Doom Patrol’s Cliff Steele (AKA Robotman) well
articulates the concerns expressed by Hayles. Starting as a human brain in
146 S. JEFFERY
a robot body, Cliff Steele ends Grant Morrison’s run on the title as a fully
disembodied consciousness stored on a disk. But this is no celebration
of “unlimited power and disembodied immortality”. Instead, Robotman
“immediately demolishes armored body fantasies”,21 and Steele complains
of the limitations placed on his sense of identity by his artificial form: “Can
you imagine how crude robot senses are, compared to human ones, huh?
All I have are memories of the way things used to feel or taste.”22.
Few characters have engaged with questions of identity and the body,
often quite explicitly, as the mutants of Marvel’s X-Men. Hank McCoy’s
highly intelligent mind and sense of humour are highly prized human
traits, existing in stark juxtaposition to his startling appearance. Earning
his codename because of his agility and ape-like features, it was actually
McCoy’s second mutation into a more obviously Animal body that sealed
his pseudonym. Most often The Beast’s attitude to his transformation
shows similarities with that of Ben Grimm, the erstwhile Thing from the
Fantastic Four. Both characters are prone to bouts of self-pity regarding
their monstrous forms (a furry, blue hide for The Beast; rocky, orange skin
for The Thing), and have repeatedly searched for a cure. But both are also
regularly seen revelling in the powers their freakish bodies allow them,
whether The Thing’s displays of strength (accompanied by his delighted
cry, “It’s clobbering time!”) or The Beast’s acrobatic displays. The Thing
and The Beast are in many respects two of the most fundamentally human
characters in comics, and they long for their humanity to be written on
their bodies (Ultron, by contrast, revels in his lack of humanity, while
retaining a body for himself that belies his position).
An eloquent and educated being, The Beast works hard to overcome
the non-human, bestial impulses that his form sometimes produces. As
he tells the villainous Cassandra Nova in new X-Men, “every day I look
in the mirror, and I feel like more of a monster than the day before”, but
he resists reverting to the “law of the jungle” because “I believe in art…
and music and literature and…and reason”.23 Later in the run, he worries
that he may be devolving further than he already has, back to a worm or
a virus. Once again he rallies against this transformation by invoking a
romantic, Enlightenment ideal of what it is to be human; “what use would
a virus have for art or music or poetry?”24 For both Animal and Artificial
Bodies, loss of humanity is signalled by a corporeal transformation. In
the storyline Vision Quest,25 the Vision’s Artificial Body is abducted, dis-
mantled and rebuilt, but without the brain wave patterns of Wonder Man,
he becomes more typically robotic, cold and emotionless, and these traits
are embodied by his new form, which resembles his original but drained
of all colour. The chalk-white outer form mirrors his cold clinical roboti-
cism. Tellingly, when The Vision later regains his emotional spectrum by
adopting the human brain patterns of a deceased scientist, he also adopts
his original technicolour form.
SMOOTH SPACES AND STRIATED SPACES

Whether drained of colour and emotion or deprived of form and reason,
the respective corporeal transformations undergone by The Vision and
The Beast are literalised markers of their becoming-Artificial or becoming-
Animal. For Deleuze and Guattari, the process of becoming happens
through the folding of two types of spaces: the smooth and the striated.
Smooth spaces are relatively open and facilitate free movement, whereas
striated spaces are bounded and movement becomes limited. Striated
spaces “subjectify through defined positions and boundaries, closed inter-
vals, and relatively predictable patterns”.26 However, striation is necessary;
if the self is not kept intact then subjectification may fall apart completely.
Form is necessary, but its form is not of necessity. Striated spaces have a
tendency to subordinate the smooth, and some assemblages can be seen
as more striated than others. Where the smooth space allows flows and
intensities to pass through unpredictably in a constant array of new assem-
blages, striated spaces regulate the free flow and limit intensities. The
more a particular assemblage is repeated, the more the components of
that assemblage become stratified and coded.
Even so, a body’s becoming remains always transitional because “a
body-in becoming soon re-stratifies”.27 There is necessary tension between
the two because “all progress is made by and in striated space, but all
becoming occurs in smooth space”.28 Malins writes that “the pressure to
stratify and organise as a subject is strong…Bodies tend to desire their
own order and organisation”.29 Order and control provide bodies with
a constancy and sense of ontological security—“I will be the self-same
subject tomorrow that I am today and was yesterday”. We cannot entirely
abandon subjectivity, for as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, “you have
to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn…you have to
keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to
respond to the dominant reality”.30 To do otherwise is to become entirely
disarticulated and just as unable to form new assemblages. However, as
Keeling explains, “it is important that bodies do not become too ordered
148 S. JEFFERY
or too disciplined by striated spaces so that any new intensities get blocked
or assimilated to the same striation”.31
In the Astonishing X-Men story Dangerous, the X-Men’s “danger
room”, a sophisticated operating system which creates holographic envi-
ronments for the X-Men to train in, develops sentience. When Professor
X hears this AI’s first ever utterance of “where am I?” he ignores it, thus
keeping this new sentience trapped alive for years. The X-Men’s reac-
tion to their mentor’s actions is one of horror. Professor X has crossed
a line—he denied a virtual being its ability to become; to actualise itself.
Understandably slighted by this, Danger (as the AI calls herself) is later
able to build itself a body to take revenge on the Professor and his mutant
students. When The Beast asks Danger to explain why she has built her
physical form, Danger explains that that prior to her embodiment, “I was
the space in between. My ‘mind’ spilling everywhere: programs, con-
nections, loops…My ‘body’ flowing, changing, hard-light lasers creat-
ing textures, scenarios, worlds. Becoming anything but being nothing”32
(ellipses in original). As a disembodied intelligence, Danger existed as
smooth space, to make herself understood (and, as she says, to be able to
beat the X-Men to death) Danger must become striated, “solid. Singular.
Separate”.33
Like many comic book posthumans, Danger allows striated space to
facilitate rather than shut down new capabilities. As Scott Bukatman has
observed, even the panel borders of the superhero comic, “frame, delimit,
and measure action, struggling to contain a body whose uncontainable
presence forces its way past the frame lines”.34 At the same time how-
ever, such limits and obstacles are also opportunities, tools for extend-
ing the capabilities of the posthuman body by forming new assemblages
with walls, lamp-posts or the flagpoles that allow “Spider-Man to break
his fall and abet his next leap”.35 In the opposite direction, Beast’s great
fear is not simply devolution but that his body will become unintelligible.
His secondary mutation upsets him precisely because it allows him fewer
possibilities of becoming; “I can’t even play violin anymore”.36 Beast’s
becoming-animal threatens to entirely disassemble the organism, until it
is unable to make new connections. A similar fear plays out when comics
present monstrous (in)versions of their characters like the Batman villain
Man-Bat, or Peter Parker’s occasional mutation into the unfriendly neigh-
bourhood Man-Spider. In such instances, the unstructured space of the
Animal Bodies of bat and spider lack the striation and control that the
“Man” would enable.
This remains the case whether the body at hand is the living, breath-
ing human subject or the comic book Superhuman. For the human body
stratification, subjectification, and codification are necessary “in order to
interact successfully in the social world”.37 By accepting an identity (such
as male/female) and a particular way of organising itself (mouth for eat-
ing, arms for lifting, and so on), humans are made comprehensible to
other bodies. Likewise, the comic book Superhuman must adopt a rec-
ognisable morphology in order to be recognised as such. The danger is
that an assemblage’s fluid complexities become reduced to discrete cat-
egories, “a complex rhizomatic flow of multiplicities reduced to a single
grid of social strata. A grid of organisation and predetermination…that
limits the connections a body can make with other bodies…its potential
for becoming other”.38 This process is as important to the continuation of
the superhero comic book itself as it is for the characters within. Whatever
transformations a character undergoes, “sooner or later the most popu-
lar superheroes will inevitably find themselves reset to their most familiar
forms”.39
Scaling up the assemblage of comic book culture to the level of inter-
action between creators and corporate-assemblages, the same process
can be discerned when Jack Kirby left Marvel comics to work for DC in
1970. DC hoped that Kirby’s wildly successful creative instincts, which
had contributed so much to Marvel’s ascendency over DC in the 1960s,
would reinvigorate their output. As well as Kirby’s own creations, The
New Gods, Kirby worked on Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. If DC’s initial
desire was that an encounter between the Superman assemblage and the
Kirby assemblage would result in a deterritorialisation that led to wild new
becomings for the character, their more reactionary instincts instead led
the company to have another artist redraw Kirby’s version of Superman’s
head in the house style (a quite literal reterritorialisation).
However, the rhizome form of the comic book universe means the
Superhuman body remains forever in a state of becoming; always “inter-
mezzo”, “always in the middle”40 as Deleuze and Guattari put it. This
does not mean that questions of political economy or organisational con-
straint must be ignored entirely. Clearly, as Jenkins reminds us, comics
are not immune to industrial pressures towards standardisation,41 while
Craft agrees that “even as characters evolve, the demands of branding and
licensing demand that they maintain a marketable degree of stasis”.42 And
yet they are “due to the serial nature of the comics universe, never com-
plete”.43 Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic subject does not entirely
150 S. JEFFERY
abandon subjectivity because “you have to keep enough of the organism

for it to reform each dawn…you have to keep small rations of subjectivity
in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality”.44
So too does the superhero, despite its multiplicity of narratives and forms,
always retain “enough of the organism to reform each dawn”. For the
comic book Superhuman, whether at the level of narrative or creation, this
means adopting a recognisable form, a form whose template was largely
codified by the Perfect Body of the Golden Age.
THE ETHICS OF THE SUPERHERO ASSEMBLAGE

It now becomes possible to ask how the ethical questions raised within
the discursive realm of the Superhuman might inform the realms of
Post/Humanism and, particularly, Transhumanism. Wolfe has argued
that there is “no project more overdue than the articulation of a post-
humanist theoretical framework for a politics and ethics not grounded
in the Enlightenment ideal of ‘Man’”.45 However, because these devel-
opments are little understood, public debate on the issues has been left
wanting, and those who do discuss it—Hughes’s ‘left-wing academic
cyborgologists’46, self-identified Transhumanists’, military contractors and
technology-based entrepreneurs—are not engaged in discussion with one
another. The inability of political leaders to deal with the impact of new
technologies on the areas of work and employment are indicative of this
inability to think outside of twentieth-century ideologies. For example,
Jennifer Robertson, in her article Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Humanoid
Robots and the Posthuman Family, argues that while Japan accounts for
52% of the world’s share of operational robots, its embrace of robotics and
bio-technologies simply serves “to reify old or “traditional” values, such
as the patriarchal extended family and socio-political conservatism”.47 The
problem that faces us is that posthuman bodies without posthuman minds
can only result in tyranny, bolstering and worsening already existing social
divisions with ever more ruthless efficiency.
Malins suggests that assemblages become ethical depending on the
affects they enable and the potentials they opens up “when it enables
the body to differentiate from itself and go on becoming-other”.48 An
assemblage becomes unethical when it blocks potentials, when it becomes
overly stratified. This, it might be argued, is the ethics of the superhero.
Take, for example, the seemingly child-like moral imperative, adopted
early on the Golden Age, that the superhero should never kill. Naturally,
this served an economic purpose too; there can be no more Joker stories
if Batman kills the Joker, but this territorialisation of the superhero and
creator-assemblages by the publishers actually gave rise to a kind of moral-
ity almost unique to the genre. A violent pacifism (you can beat the bad
guys up, just don’t kill them) that speaks for, at the very least, the possibil-
ity of becoming. Of course superheroes represent humanist values, they
value life certainly, but not just human life, all types of life are valued; life
for its own sake. Among the superhero fraternity there is no distinction
between mutant, robot, enhanced human, cyborg or alien. Each of these
bodies is unique, possessing its own specific capabilities; the question is
how they will use them. By and large, this is always what separates the
superhero from the super villain. Superman never kills the villainous Lex
Luthor because he recognises the good that Luthor could do if he chose
to use his genius another way, that the Luthor assemblage could, poten-
tially, be plugged into new assemblages and become otherwise.
Though often taken for fascist parables, I argue that superhero comics
largely remain the opposite. Informed by the same spectre of fascism as
Deleuze and Guattari’s or Foucault’s ideas of bio power, the comic book
superhuman was created to symbolically battle those same forces. That
the early posthuman dreaming of the Perfect Body shares rhizomatic con-
nections with the fascist body is clear, but such connections were only
contingent rather than necessary. The fascist-assemblage never fully ter-
ritorialised the Perfect Body. Instead, the Perfect Body escaped, launching
itself on a line of flight, becoming Cosmic Body. Able to become other,
the posthuman body used the capabilities of its new form to plug into a
countercultural assemblage instead, to become cosmic. That the posthu-
man body should then become restratified, or reterritorialised by contact
with the Military-Industrial assemblage should come as no surprise: “a
body-in becoming soon re-stratifies: either captured by or lured by the
socius…[but]…these territorialisations are also never fully complete: a liv-
ing desiring body will always form new assemblages that have the potential
to transform it and its territories”.49
Nevertheless, the form of the Superhuman body remains relatively
fixed because it embodies its own ethical principle, one that unifies
chaos and order, smoothness and striation, the fascist-assemblage and
the countercultural-assemblage. The comic book Superhuman was never
really here to destroy or enslave us, nor even just to save the weak and the
helpless. The Superhuman arrived to help to lead by example, to show us
how to become other than we are, by using order not as an end in itself
152 S. JEFFERY
but as a tool for becoming otherwise; to dance between the mechanical

and the spontaneous. The Beast and The Vision demonstrate both the
dangers and the rewards of taking either to the extreme. What separates a
hero from a villain in the universe of the superhero? Simply this: the clos-
ing down of another being’s potential, even when that potential seems as
remote from actualisation as the Joker changing his ways.
If the prevention of becoming is the mark of villainy at the level of the
comic book universe, and we consider comic book culture as a rhizome,
then how does such “villainy” play out within other assemblages? Might
the comics fandom become unethical when it does not allow new becom-
ings—witness, for example, the online outcries over the notion of a black
Spider-Man or Thor’s recent reincarnation as a goddess? These concerns
are often, though not always, related to an obsession with continuity, a
desire for things to fit, to follow the pattern. Similarly, the corporate-
assemblage attempts to territorialise the Superhuman body when it hands
down editorial edicts to protect the franchise, limiting the characters’ and
creators’ ability to become anything other than a predictable tracing of
signifiers and tropes. Creator-assemblages must largely obey these edicts,
hampering their ability to deterritorialise the Superhuman.
Clearly in the realm of Transhuman there are pressing questions as to
the ethical implication of human enhancement. While many of the initial
debates were framed in terms of bio-ethics I hope this book has demon-
strated the need to pay more attention to questions of social policy, both
locally and globally. The eugenics movement, Nazism, the current search
for super-soldier technologies, or the purely entrepreneurial desire to cash
in on such technologies represent contemporary concerns about the sta-
tus of the human. The figure of the “human”, that strange assemblage of
art, medical knowledge, religious fragments and sundry other cultural and
material artefacts, has become increasingly diminished in recent decades
to a vision of Homo Economicus: the rational-economic and isolated
automaton of neo-liberal economics. It is salient to remember the role
of the Cosmic Body in this; lying beneath and running silently through
the concerns of the Perfect and Military-Industrial Bodies is a capacity to
connect with other human and non-human beings rather than acquiesce
to or dominate them; conscious sense of unity with the world and the
various living and non-living beings we share it with. The realisation that
we become more than we are when we allow others to become more than
they are. As advances in Transhuman technology continue to make our
reality as strange and full of possibility as the world of the superhero, so
too must we look for new ethical models befitting the posthuman future.
For as Superman tells a group of kill-happy young heroes in JLA Classified
issue 3: “These ‘no-nonsense’ solutions of yours just don’t hold water in a
complex world of jet-powered apes and time-travel”.50
NOTES
1. Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 42
2. Quoted in Liu, Y. (2015). American technocracy and Chinese response:
Theories and practices of Chinese expert politics in the period of the Nanjing
Government, 1927–1949. Technology in Society. p. 75.
3. Quoted in Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 63.
4. Ibid., p. 73.
5. Ibid., p. 147.
6. Potts, A. (2007). The Mark of the Beast: Inscribing ‘Animality’through
Extreme Body Modification. Knowing Animals, 4, p. 134.
8. Seiler, (2007) What are we? The social construction of the human biological
self. p. 270.
9. Quoted in Kelly, R. (2014) “The little android that could: a history of Red
Tornado” in Back issue (1) 72 p. 25.
10. Graham, Representations of the Post/human, p. 127.
11. Quoted in Kelly, The little android that could, p. 229.
13. Nelson, T. (2004). ‘Even an android can cry’. Journal of Gender Studies,
13(3), p. 252.
14. Moravec, Mind Children.
15. Kurzweill, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
17. Shooter et al. Avengers: The Korvac Saga, p. 90.
18. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 158.
19. Shooter et al. Avengers: The Korvac Saga, p. 105.
20. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature
and Informatics, p. 5.
21. Bukatman, S. (1994) X-Bodies: The Torment of the Superhero. In
Sappington, R and Stallings, T. (eds) Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of
Identity and Culture. Seattle: Bay Press, p. 122.
22. Quoted in Ibid.
23. Morrison, G.,et al. (2001). New X-Men: “E” is for extinction. New York,
NY: Marvel Comics.n.p.
154 S. JEFFERY
24. Morrison, G.,et al. (2001) New X men Imperial. New York, NY.: Marvel.
Comics n.p.
25. Byrne, J., and Machlan, M. (2005). Avengers west coast: Vision quest.
New York, NY: Marvel Comics.
26. Keeling, D. M. (2012). His tory of (Future) Progress: Hyper-Masculine
Transhumanist Virtuality. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 29(2),
p. 135.
Drug Use, p. 88.
Drug Use, p. 87.
30. quoted in Gibson, B. E. (2006) Disability, Connectivity and Transgressing
the Autonomous Body. Journal of Medical Humanities, 27(3) p. 191).
31. Keeling, History of (Future) Progress: Hyper-Masculine Transhumanist
Virtuality, p. 135.
32. Whedon, et al. (2005). Astonishing X-Men: [Vol. 2]. New York: Marvel
Comics.
33. Ibid.
34. Bukatman,S. (2009). Secret Identity Politics, p. 119.
35. Ibid., p. 120.
36. Morrison, New X-men: Imperial. n.p.
37. Malins, Machinic assemblages: Deleuze, Guattari and Ethico-aesthetics of Drug
Use, p. 87.
Drug Use, p. 87.
39. Singer, M. (2013) “The myth of Eco: Cultural populism and comics stud-
ies”, Studies in Comic, 4(2) p. 360.
40. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 21.
Multiplicity, pp. 17.
42. Craft, Comics Universes as Fiction Networks, pp. 101.
43. Ibid., p. 102.
44. Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 160.
45. cited in Badmington 2001: 5.
46. Hughes, J. (2004). Citizen Cyborg: Why democratic societies must respond to
the redesigned human of the future. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, p. 208.
47. Robertson, J. (2001) Japan’s first cyborg? Miss Nippon, eugenics and war-
time technologies of beauty, body and blood. Body & Society, 7(1) 1–34.
Drug Use, p 102.
49. Ibid.
50. Pedler, Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality, p. 259.
Reading the Superhuman
The following chapters comprise the final section of this book and present
original findings from interviews conducted with readers. Having contex-
tualised the historical development of the posthuman body, it is now pos-
sible to consider what sense readers make of these narratives and how they
might shape their understanding of human enhancement. The importance
of such a project lies in explicating the various models of posthumanity
available and known to the public. Interviewing comic book readers in this
way provided the opportunity to test and counter the literature presented
in previous chapters, which focused on questions of bodily representa-
tion in superhero comics. Some of the theoretical and methodological
shortcomings of these varied approaches have already been discussed, but
it is worth reiterating that even the best of these works rarely turned to
actual readers when formulating their conclusions. Maigret puts it best:
the shortcoming of such studies is not that they are able to identify the
existence of stereotypes, nor their analyses of the ideological consequences
of such stereotypes; it is their method. As Maigret says, “it is the object
itself that the keys for understanding by readers have been located, while
its reception and all the factors contributing to the production of the con-
tent have been overlooked”.1
The interview findings presented in the following chapters are drawn
from 25 two-hour interviews, and a mixture of self-chosen and desig-
nated pseudonyms is used throughout throughout to preserve anonymity.
The comic book readers interviewed were all residents of Scotland, aged

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_8
156 S. JEFFERY
between 20 and 45. Twenty of these readers were male and five were
female. Borrowing from the methodology used by Barker in his study of
the readers of the British comic Action, the interviewees were asked to rate
themselves as “casual”, “regular” or “committed” readers of comic books.
This had, it seemed, natural advantages for considering the connections
that readers might make between superhero comics and the concept of the
posthuman. Though a useful conceptual tool, it should still be noted that
these categories tended to be somewhat fluid in practice. Several “commit-
ted” readers offered variants on the position taken by the reader Arkham,
who offered the alternative category “voracious” to describe his comics
reading habits (as a comic shop owner, Arkham was in a unique position
to read 60 to 70 titles per week). On the other hand, many other readers
viewed themselves as committed comic book readers despite only reading
between five and ten issues per month. However, as long-term readers,
they still thought of themselves as “committed” and were either “always
be reading, re-reading old stuff as well” (Ergon Cube) or still “keep up
with the scene” (Vesuvian Man). By contrast, respondents who described
themselves as “occasional” readers either read only one or two graphic
novels a year, or were occasional because their tastes tended more towards
independents rather than mainstream superhero comics particularly. Even
here however, there was some slippage, with both Nemesis and Joe 90
acknowledging that that they would have placed themselves in the latter
two categories a few years earlier.
The chapters that follow address the issues raised by Transhumanism
and Post/Humanism in turn. This present chapter focuses directly on the
comic book Superhuman.
BECOMING THE PERFECT BODY

Though several studies have focused on bodily representation in comic
books, works focusing on the posthuman body are far less common. Those
studies that do exist tend to hinge on a binary opposition between “good”
and “bad” representations of posthumanism. For instance, Taylor argued
that superheroes are well suited to utopian ideals of the cyborg, being
a, “culturally produced body that could potentially defy all traditional
and normalizing readings”.2 Heggs, by contrast, argues that superheroes,
despite their transgressive potential, remain, “open to naturalization, for
example, around the thematic of masculinity”.3 First of all, in keeping with
Heggs’ criticism, readers were well aware of the “thematic of masculinity”
READING THE SUPERHUMAN 157
that marks many superhero comics. When asked to describe what a typical
superhero’s body looked like, almost all respondents displayed a shared
understanding of the superhero body as generally male and muscular,
often citing this as a “stereotypical” image. As Danger Man (M, 28, C)
put it, “I’ve been socialised into a view of the superhero as muscles on muscles.”
In Chap. 3, “The Perfect Body”, it was shown that for some critics, “the
very idea of the superhero presupposes racial purity and ethnic inequal-
ity”4 or “fascist wish-fulfillment”.5 While no respondents took quite such
a hard-line, there was at least an acknowledgement that superhero bodies
could be, as Vesuvian Man said, somewhat “problematic in their unifor-
mity”. Interestingly, readers were inclined to associate such characteristics
less with German fascism (and its attendant eugenicist policies) than with
Americanism. Venkman (M, 31, C) put it most clearly, saying that the
typical superhero was marked by an “American kind of muscly body kind
of style, blue eyes. Quite Aryan in a way”. This seemed to stem partly from
Superman’s long association with “truth, justice and the American way”.
As will be seen later, the British response to the superhero as super-patriot
appears to be somewhat more ambivalent than that of American reader.
Related to this was also an understanding that superhero bodies needed
to look that way because of the demands placed upon them in the stories.
If superheroes looked different from the rest of society there was no need
to “see that as a problem because they are very different to the rest of society”
(Emerald Warrior: M, 24, C) and “they should look appropriate to what
they are able to do” (Green Lantern: M, 25, C). For instance, The Flash
(M, 32, C) praised the depiction of Marvel’s Shang-Chi, Master of
Kung-Fu, for precisely these reasons:
I’ll tell you what’s a good one that I’ve always thought was interesting: Shang-
Chi. Master of Kung Fu right? Always shown as basically Bruce Lee but it
works because the guy is just lean. He’s just a guy who’s conditioned his body
to that sort of level. But it always works. It doesn’t look like a guy built out, in
some ways he almost looks quite scrawny because Bruce Lee also had that, like,
scrawniness but was just lean with it. Mm-hmm. He had muscle-definition but
he wasn’t like Schwarzenegger or Stallone muscles. He was a guy who just toned
up and dropped all the fat off him. Shang-Chi has always been very, very well
captured in comics I think.
Despite this shared understanding of what Venkman (M, 31, C)

described as the “Superman aesthetic”, being “the default template for
superheroes”, there were certain characters that some readers felt should
158 S. JEFFERY
never be drawn in this manner. As will be seen below, the X-Men in par-
ticular provided evidence that “superhero bodies come in all shapes and
sizes, sometimes even no body at all” (Red Hulk: M, 20, C). Outside of the
X-Men the character that respondents felt most strongly about in terms
of bodily depiction was Spider-Man. For Emerald Warrior (M, 24, C) the
reason “Spider-Man has been so successful as a character is because he looks
like anyone. I think that his body is, it’s a way of showing his personality”.
Similarly, The Invalid (M, 37, R) praised the work of Spider-Man co-
creator and artist Steve Ditko:
Ditko’s Spider-Man is quite a kind of realistic, he’s quite a geeky sort of teen-
agery, skinny guy and that brings a lot more power with it rather than having
a big muscle-bound superman. You need, I think you need that grounding in
reality and also that feeling of vulnerability as well to be able to kind of identify
with the character properly.
Committed readers also displayed an awareness of historical-aesthetic

trends in the depiction of Superhuman bodies. Of particular note was the
way several respondents cited Rob Liefeld’s presentation of superheroic
bodies as in the following exchange:
Interviewer: What do you think of when you think about superhero bodies?
Green Lantern (M, 25, C): Uh (laughs) can I say that Rob Liefeld
picture of Captain America? (laughs)
Green Lantern’s laughter here demonstrates an awareness of both the
infamy and “absurdity” of Liefeld’s style. Cited by several respondents as
an example of a bad artist, Rob Liefeld’s work has become synonymous
with the hard-bodied style of the late 1980s/early 1990s Dark Age of
Comics discussed in Chap. 5, “The Military-Industrial Body”, and was
described as “very much a thing of the times” in the words of Emerald
Warrior (M, 24, C). One notorious example of Liefeld’s unique approach
to anatomy was his promotional poster for the 1996 reboot of Captain
America. This image has since become the go-to example when the online
comics community wish to discuss the worst excesses of the Dark Age.6
This bracketing off of Liefeld and the nineties art-style he has come to
represent indicates a distancing from such aggressively masculine imagery
by both male and female readers. However, this should not imply that
the response to such titles during that time was not homogenous. Brown
points out that for many readers of the Milestone comics being produced
contemporaneously with the work of Liefeld and his fellow Image artists,
there was already an ideological schism of sorts. As one reader told Brown,
“I really like the Milestone titles for what they’re not—namely, Image
Comics”.7 Brown notes that the Milestone characters appealed to read-
ers because they offered an alternative to this extreme hyper-masculinity,
emphasising brain over brawn. Indeed, the importance for readers of this
focus on mind over matter will be returned to again in this chapter.
Comics’ readers were quite capable of acknowledging the typical super-
hero body as “absurd” or “ridiculous”. Out of the Liefeld/Image comics’
aesthetic however this absurdity was not necessarily a cause for critique.
The outlandish proportions of the superheroic body were, “understood not
to be reality” (Rogue, FM, 27, C). Rather, these bodies were “kind of a
uniform”; signifiers of the genre rather than representations of an achiev-
able reality for the human form. Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C) articulated this
position most clearly:
It’s just a stylistic quirk isn’t it? The way that they are depicted in manga for
instance is equally uniform but they are a different set of iconography. I think
in part its useful to remember that comics are only in part realistic and part a
series of codes which allow you to infer meaning…that’s part of the visual lan-
guage of the superhero comic that allows you to understand who is the superhero
and who isn’t. That’s part of the language of it.
The readers made similar theoretical exceptions for the way female
characters were depicted, although there was a divide of sorts between
male and female readers. Like the typical male superhero body, the bodies
of superheroines were also seen to have defining traits, succinctly summed
up by Slothor (FM, 29, C) as: “Tits, no hips. Big boobs. Long hair that
doesn’t exist in any realm of humanity and unbelievably long legs”. For
an occasional comic book reader like Ozymandias (M, 26, O), this sort
of depiction was “one of the things that put me off superhero comics as I
got older”. Interestingly, perhaps depressingly, committed male readers
were far more willing to forgive such imagery. The words of Ergon Cube
(M, 34, C) are not untypical in this regard: “It’s a male market, comics,
when you come down to it. It doesn’t really affect me one way or another. I
don’t really think about it too much.” This is a view backed by comic shop
proprietor Arkham (M, 43, C): “It sells. It makes me money so I can’t object
that strongly.”
There was however a shared understanding among committed readers
that the excessive signifiers of femininity for superheroines had much in
160 S. JEFFERY
common with the excessive signifiers of masculinity for male superheroes.

As Rogue (FM, 27, C) put it, “it is absurd! That’s why it’s okay, because
it’s within a realm of fantasy”. This chimes in with the views of Barker8
and Reynolds9 that questions of ideology and representation make no
sense within generic narrative forms such as the superhero comic because
these representations can only be understood within the rules of genre
they appear in rather than having any reference to the real world. Or as
Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C) puts it:
So a lot of the sort of people getting upset with the amount of cheesecake in super-
hero comics, getting that mixed up, they’re going, “oh women don’t really look
like that”. Yeah. Woman don’t really fly or wear spandex outfits and they don’t
have bubbles coming out of their head
The problem with female characters, it was suggested, was not pictorial
representation but a question of storytelling. As Rogue (FM, 27, C) put it,
the unrealistic depiction of the superheroine body “Only becomes an issue if
the story makes it an issue. If the story telling around the female characters is
weak it becomes, well, you really are just a blonde with your knockers out, you
know?” The X-Men series in particular had a strong pull for female readers.
Indeed, even for male readers, X-Men appeared to be a superhero comic that
avoided depictions of “the standard hunky man” (Logogram: M, 30, C).
X-Men’s popularity outside of comics due to the films and animated ver-
sions offered even occasional readers a vision of the Superhuman that did
not conform to this standard. As Ozymandias (M, 26, O) said, “when I
think of superheroes I do think of mutation”. Female readers such as Rogue
meanwhile praised the X-men for being a “gender equal kind of team” in
which, “the women are very distinct from each other; they have very distinct,
different personalities”. In X-Men the question of mutation trumped ques-
tions of gender:
To a certain degree the body image isn’t as important. If you’re The Beast or
something yes, the physicality is important. But, the gender stereotyping isn’t
the core of it. You’re not being rejected because you are female. You are being
rejected because you can steal someone’s life energy, accidentally or on purpose.
You are being rejected because you have fireworks coming out of your hands.
There are bigger issues at work than just physicality. (Slothor: FM, 29, C)
One particularly illustrative division in this regard centred on the

X-Men character Emma Frost/White Queen. For male reader Red Hulk
(M, 20, C) Emma Frost presented a particularly egregious example of how

female characters could be sexualised. Female reader Rogue (FM, 27, C)
however, noted that.
I love Emma Frost, I think she’s brilliant. Um, and you know, she goes around
wearing less than any another comic character I’ve ever known in my life. But
her, she is, she’s a three-dimensional, especially in Astonishing X-Men and Joss
Whedon, she’s a massively three-dimensional character in that, and you really
do get a feel for who that person is.
Again, the depiction of female bodies was only seen as problematic within
the context of the story rather than simply the drawing. Nevertheless,
alternative comics were also praised for their more realistic depictions of
female bodies. Slothor for example, when asked if she thought female
characters were well represented in superhero comics, replied:
No. No. That was one of the things that initially attracted me to Strangers in
Paradise. I’ve always been a bigger lady and I remember going to a comic books
store with my mate and we picked up Spawn, was it Angelica? And it was
bronze goddess sort of look, and Strangers in Paradise where it was Francine on
the front in a skirt that was too tight and being awkward and physically clumsy
and I like, again; I liked her character because I thought she was believable.
I empathised with her…I think initially when I was younger, seeing that comic
and going “ooh, real person!” made me buy it.
THE SUPERHUMAN AS FASCIST: A BRIEF RETURN

As has been shown, readers displayed a reflexive attitude towards the rep-
resentation of the posthuman body in superhero comics. Although many
were aware of the perceived problems of such depictions, and even in
agreement on some points, it remained the case that the superhero’s body
was not read as being a model of reality, or an achievable goal, but as a
code of the genre. Superhero stories are a recognisable genre10 and any
genre is dependent upon a consensus of meaning between producers and
consumers as to the meaning of those codes; for instance, the use of white
or black hats to indicate good and bad characters in Westerns. Within the
rules of the superhero genre, large muscles indicated a character’s status
as “superhuman”.
This finding is an important rebuke to the persistent yet largely unex-
amined assumption that the representation of superhero bodies somehow
162 S. JEFFERY
has a pernicious effect on readers’ minds, as in the largely untested

hypothesis that media portrayals of the “supermale” are related to the
occurrence of muscle dysmorphia in preadolescent males as suggested by
Baghurst et al.,11 or Beiras’s12 view that superheroes lead readers to con-
sider superhero bodies as a normative ideal for male corporeality. This is
a point also unproblematically stated by Klein who explicitly coins the
phrase “comic book masculinity” based on the assumption that, “the
Hulk, Superman and their counterparts are definitely embodiments of
hegemonic masculinity”,13 or Brown et al.’s14 argument that superheroes
inculcate young boys into accepting a dangerously narrow vision of mas-
culinity. As seen earlier, the notion of the Perfect Body has been linked to
the idea that the superhero must then be a fascistic figure.
The data obtained from the readers who contributed to this book’s
investigation suggests a very different picture from the assumptions put
forward by the authors above. Indeed, in some respects these findings are
closer to Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that, “contrary to a deeply
rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world”.15 Rather than a
presentation of reality, the comic book is a machine, something which
does things rather than signify things, an assemblage that “…connect[s]
bodies up with other bodies, affects, and social formations in many differ-
ent directions”.16 Viewed as assemblages, texts are a mix of discrete parts
capable of producing any number of effects, as opposed to the organised,
coherent whole that produces a single dominant reading. While it remains
true that in comic books a muscular physique can portray traits that include
“power, dominance, strength, sexual-virility and self-esteem”,17 this does
not mean that it must do. The Superhuman body is not a totality in which
the components are fixed, but an assemblage whose same components can
play different roles in other assemblages.
THE BRITISH INVASION

For the readers who took part in this study, the meaning of superheroes was
shaped by geographical and historical trends. In fact, a sense of national
pride was sometimes expressed in what has become known as the “British
Invasion”,18 a period in the 1980s when DC began wooing UK creators
such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison to come and revive
flagging characters such as Swamp Thing, Black Orchid or Animal Man
respectively. Alongside the American writer-artist Frank Miller’s work on
Daredevil and Batman, the collective corpus of this new breed of writer
served to briefly legitimate comic books in the media as having “grown
up” with their “new” complexity of narrative and psychological realism.

That a further assemblage was formed with the film industry resulting in
Tim Burton’s well-received 1989 Batman film (back when such films were
still rare) served to further strengthen a burgeoning mainstream interest.
This is a necessarily brief history of course. What is important is how read-
ers were aware of these events.
Asked which comics they felt were most influential in the development
of the superhero comic, most interviewees, especially committed and reg-
ular ones, were able to offer a canon of works and hierarchy of creators
that erred heavily on the side of British creators such as Moore, Morrison,
Gaiman, Mark Millar and Warren Ellis. Meanwhile, the most frequently
cited texts were from these creators. Indeed, such was the pull of the
auteur that most respondents would follow a particular creator rather than
a particular character.
I don’t have a character that I associate that strongly with. There’s no character
that I’m going to buy whoever’s writing it. When Grant Morrison stops writing
Batman I’ll jump off. I already did. I stopped buying Batman and Robin the
day he stopped writing it. I didn’t buy any of the spin-offs of Final Crisis that he
didn’t write unless I thought it was someone good who was writing it anyway.
I just, I’m not that attached to them. They are just vehicles as far as I’m con-
cerned. Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C)
Unsurprisingly, Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen was frequently cited as

an exemplary examination of the superhero:
I love Alan Moore’s stuff and it tends—I think Watchmen is pretty much every-
thing you need to know about superheroes right there. You might as well just
read that and not read anything else. Like, if you were going to read one thing
and never read anything else that’s what you’d read. Rogue (FM, 27, C)
Alan Moore just generally gets to me. I think he’s a fantastic writer. Watchmen
as well, when I read it, it was the first time I’d thought about just how flawed
the notion of the superhero is and how it’s very nice to think of your spandexy
hero who will come and save you but ultimately, why are they getting all dressed
up? Slothor (FM, 29, C)
Indeed, Moore’s reputation was such that of all the writers cited he was
the only one known to occasional readers such as Ozymandias (M, 26, O)
below:
164 S. JEFFERY
INTERVIEWER: And what other Alan Moore stuff have you read?
OZYMANDIAS: His Killing Joke and Watchmen. And I’m read-
ing his novel just now but that’s got nothing to do
with superheroes.
INTERVIEWER: What’s the appeal of Alan Moore, then?
OZYMANDIAS: I think it’s the psychological element…he goes into
why superheroes are a bit mental. Why you have to
be a bit mental to do what they do. Like the Killing
Joke is about how Batman and the Joker are sort
of the same.
This discussion highlights a more general admiration for the way many
of the British creators “deconstructed” the superhero:
Yeah, there is a difference. I’m just trying to think which American writers
kind of push the envelope. There’s none really. I mean mainly all the, nah, most
of the comics in my collection are from British writers so it must be consciously or
otherwise I’m drawn to the way they write…. they are looking at it a bit more,
yeah, critically I guess. The American writers tend to be a lot more gung ho.
The Todd McFarlane kind of that sort of Frank Miller latterly, or even when he
did Dark Knight Returns actually. Yeah, yeah, it’s more a sense of humour and
a sense of distance is a good word for it. They are kind of looking at it through
a different lens. The superheroes are all American really, aren’t they? Ergon
Cube (M, 34, C)
It’s then interesting to say okay, then all these British writers start coming over in
the 70s and 80s and they start using superheroes in a very different way. Perhaps
that’s why because you know, um, you’ve got, the idea of the superhero developed in
a strong confident and militaristic society but then that idea being taken and re-
appropriated by a country in the depths of financial depression and really strug-
gling with self-identity at that point. And also tinged by Cold War sorts of fears.
They then take that idea and turn it on its head or at least, you know, explore it
from a different angle is an interesting one. Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C)
It is interesting to note how the respondents’ praise for the British

deconstruction of the superhero broadly mirrors the current differences in
approach to Transhuman enhancement in US and EU policy recommen-
dation where the US approach is proactionary and the EU approach pre-
cautionary.19 Of course, it is possible to argue that the respondents’ praise
of these texts remains merely a matter of literary merit as they were largely
established fixtures of the comic book canon. Nevertheless there remained

a sense of propriety that many of the UK readers in this study displayed.
For instance, while it is well known that these creators’ earliest work was
done for the British anthology comic 2000 AD, for many readers this was
not an impersonal historical fact but a crucial part of their formative comic
book experience, as seen in the following quotes:
Earliest would be, it was faintly stuff like Whizzer and Chips and Whoopee,
the real kid’s stuff. Not really Beano and Dandy, they were more sort of
Christmas gifts or something like that from people who knew that I liked that.
It wasn’t until 2000AD that it really “now this is much more what I’m talk-
ing about”! You know? I actually remember the very first edition ever coming
out and that led to collecting and having a pile of 2000AD. Durinsbeuk (M,
42, C)
My first memories of comics was probably when I was 11 in 1977 when 2000AD
started. Joe 90 (M, 45, O)
My first experiences with actual comics were 2000ADs and it was always that
we would, the local paper shop would just have one or two from this 6 month
period so I’d just get these tiny snapshots of stories and so they always seemed like
these massive epic things that I could never get the whole lot and because of that
it was always tantalising. I wanted more and I wanted to experience all the
gaps that I couldn’t get up there. So I think that’s what drew me into comics
and that’s what made it so enjoyable for me when I was younger. Logogram
(M, 30, C)
American comic book publishers did not just poach creators from
British comics but also, to some extent, their readers. Several respondents
articulated a similar progression from 2000 AD to superheroes.
I came into superheroes the other way round. I started off reading 2000AD
when I was a kid. And that led into, it happened to be at a time when I was
a teenager when there was that big explosion of British monthly comics like
Deadline and Revolver and Crisis. So I used to get those every month and that
led me to mature readers comics and you know there was a DC jumped on the
bandwagon and had one that reprinted stuff from vertigo. So that was the first,
you know the first superhero book I ever read probably was like Black Orchid,
the Neil Gaiman one. I think that had Dark Knight, Year One or something
like that in it. So that was the first time I ever got interested in superheroes.
Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C)
166 S. JEFFERY
As the interviews presented herein were conducted in Scotland, it is

worth noting a certain amount of national pride on the part of several
respondents. Comic books are unique in the porous boundary between
fan and creator, as made particularly clear in the following extract:
We have a big comic book community. We’ve got Quitely here, we’ve got Millar
here, we’ve got Morrison here, who all still live in Glasgow and you know, if you
go and knock on Quitely’s door on a Wednesday he’ll often let you in and have a
cup of tea with you. So you know they are all very welcoming. Emerald Warrior
(M, 24, C)
Emerald Warrior’s account offers a clear example of how the indus-

try itself can be considered part of the same rhizome as the texts it pro-
duces; in few other mediums is the line between producer and consumer
so permeable.
REPRESENTING THE SUPERHUMAN BODY

At this juncture it can be said that while the representation of the
Superhuman body, which, as was shown in the cultural history, does
indeed have rhizomatic connections to a certain fascistic take on the body,
is not defined by those connections. The Superhuman body is capable
of forming new connections. So certainly the Superhuman body remains
largely as it was laid down in the Golden Age, but it must do in order for
the codes of the genre to be understood. In this sense, muscles serve the
same signifying function in superhero comics as capes and colourful cos-
tumes; they allow the reader to respond to “the dominant reality” of the
superhero genre and simultaneously allow the genre to be understood by
the reader.
This accounts for Rogue’s argument that the depiction of female super-
heroes only becomes problematic at the level of story rather than image.
It is also accounts for the way occasional readers such as Ozymandias were
“put off” superhero comics by those same images. The level of connec-
tion a reader had with the comic book-assemblage changed how such
depictions were received. This process seems similar to what Barker20
discovered in his study of the short-lived British weekly comic Action.
Action had been the victim of a moral panic at the time of its publication,
with several pundits arguing that the comics’ violent, seemingly nihilistic
content would have dangerous effects on Britain’s young comics’ read-
ers. By asking respondents to rate themselves as “casual”, “regular” or
“committed” readers of the comic, Barker discovered an interesting trend

that contradicted these claims: “it appeared that the closer the connec-
tion, and the greater the ‘influence’ of the comic, the more readers were
made to think and reflect and argue”.21 This research was followed by a
study of readers of 2000 AD.22 Again, for readers who took the comic
“seriously” and allowed it “to cross into other parts of their thinking”,
the apparent violence and horror of 2000 AD’s (often post-apocalyptic)
stories “constituted it as a source of hope for the future”. Barker argues
that the significance of this finding “is the exact inverse of the frequently
claimed relationship that the contents of a mass medium tend to repro-
duce themselves, in the same form, in the heads of audiences”.23
The Superhuman body has no intrinsic meaning but is made to mean
in the union between comic and reader; it does different things depending
on the reader, or rather, reading-machine, it is plugged into. Committed
and regular readers who have repeated this conjunction enough times
have developed what Pustz calls “comic book literacy”, a unique ability
to comprehend and appreciate the formal aesthetics of comic books in
a particular way; a deep knowledge of its rules and conventions. Within
this reader-text assemblage a becoming takes place in which is “each of
these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and
the reterritorialization of the other”.24 The casual reader (if they are not
so put off by the Superhuman body that they never return) becomes a
literate reader; while what may be perceived as embodiment of hegemonic
masculinity, for example, becomes simply a genre trope and understood as
signifiers of superhuman power within the rules of the genre, but not read
as necessary for power and self-esteem in the real world. Indeed, a more
recent study by Young et al.25 demonstrated that men who felt a bond
with characters like Batman and Superman also felt more satisfied with
their own bodies while men who felt indifferent towards superheroes felt
worse about themselves after seeing images of the same character.
Perhaps for this reason, most respondents were dismissive of the notion
that the superhero was a fascistic figure and somewhat suspicious of the
ways in which critical-assemblages might attempt to territorialise the
comic book-assemblage. These responses ranged from the sympathetic, as
with Spawn (M, 28, C):
You can see why people would, if they really wanted to analyse it, say that it’s
promoting an ideology. But the ideology is basic human decency. If you really
want to vilify something for saying ‘people should stop bad things and help good
people’ then I don’t know if they are the type of academics where I’d go to their
168 S. JEFFERY
dinner party and not be ejected. Yeah, yeah, how bad that superheroes tell kids
to drink milk and help old women across the street. It’s like a really friendly type
of fascism there. Sort of decency.
To the more defensive:
I would say that says more about them than it does about me. If that’s how you
want to read into it then by all means crawl into your ghetto and think narrow
minded thoughts. It’s a story; we’re reading it for the story, that’s just how it
happens to come out. I mean by that way of thinking surely we shouldn’t have
heroes like The Thing; you know he’s a monstrous creature; surely he should be
bad guy? Arkham (M, 43, C)
More problematic though, for both male and female readers, was the
manner in which bodies were presented in film and television. These “real”
images were compared unfavourably with the level of distance afforded by
the drawn imagery of comic books. As Ergon Cube (M, 34, C) puts it:
I don’t think that’s true of comics because it’s more, because it’s completely fic-
tional, a drawing. Movies maybe, I can see why people would feel maybe a bit
inadequate because popular culture these days dictates we should look a certain
way if you are to be desirable. But it’s justified in comics. They need to look like
that for what they do. But in movies it’s different. Or celebrity culture with
people starving themselves. Size zero and all this stuff.
For Rogue (FM, 27, C), there was a clear distinction between the alleg-
edly sexualised costumes of superheroes and the images of women pre-
sented in film and television. Acknowledging the absurdity of superhero
costumes she said,
It’s within a realm of fantasy. That’s why it’s okay to go around in your knickers
and a breastplate, as opposed to if a woman’s basically supposed to be, you know,
if you were to take [the television series] Ally McBeal situation where she’s sup-
posed to be a lawyer but is wearing a skirt that is literally like three inches thick,
that’s why it’s so ridiculous, that’s why it look, that’s why people have a problem
with it. Whereas if you want to be saving the world you want to be wearing a
breastplate and a pair of knickers, you know what I mean?
She went on to say,
If you look at something like Wonder Woman who is an overtly feminist female
hero, she is I mean, she doesn’t look all that different from anything else. She’s in
a breastplate and a pair of knickers. Um but it’s really not about that because
there’s the story of the character that backs it up but it’s not trying to convey
anything. It’s not trying to say if you want to be a successful person in business,
if you want to have a marriage and kids. It’s saying if you want to fight a big
demon this would be, this has very few things that catch (laughs).
In short, while the respondents acknowledged at least some pressure

to measure up to (or resentment of) the bodily standards found in film,
television and advertising, their understanding of the superhero body
depended upon a comic literacy which meant that for the most part read-
ers were disinclined to compare their own bodies with those on the page.
In keeping with the notion that superhero bodies were absurdly propor-
tioned, respondents agreed with Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C) that compar-
ing one’s body to that of superheroes, “would be a difficult comparison to
make”. Indeed, most felt like Emerald Warrior that they, “never wanted the
huge muscles or anything”. A few respondents noted that such bodies could
be found in the real world in the form of body-builders but that such phy-
siques were both impractical and, more importantly, “involves work, really
hard work” (Venkman: M, 31, C). As Danger Man (M, 28, C) put it:
Batman couldn’t have the body he has and still go out every night fighting
crime. You would need to spend your life just working on it and working on it,
so it’s; I view it as really unobtainable.
At most, respondents might occasionally be inspired to think about

going to the gym. Bodily concerns bought up by the imagery of superhe-
roes centred on health rather than aesthetics. As Green Lantern (M, 25, C)
said, it is not a case of going, “oh, I wish I could look like that, it’s more a
case of, like, I wish I was in slightly better shape”. On a related note, while
all respondents expressed an interest in the possibility of superpowers gen-
erally the idea of having a superhero’s body was not deemed necessary.
Again, the depiction of superhero bodies as muscular is seen to be a signi-
fier of superpowers rather than a prerequisite.
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TRANSHUMAN BODY

Just as the superhero body was read as iconographic trope of the genre
rather than a representation of an existing or achievable reality, so too
were the way science and technologies were presented in superhero
comics. It is interesting in this regard to note that only a handful of
170 S. JEFFERY
readers felt that superheroes had anything to say about Post/Humanism

or Transhumanism:
As an actual comic book reader you don’t get the intellectual discourse heaped
upon you…they are kept very separate from each other. Spawn (M, 28, C)
Throughout this book, I have suggested that the broad category “post-
humanism” can be thought of as comprising three discursive realms. These
are the critical-philosophical tradition I have termed Post/Humanism,
the popular/speculative tradition of Transhuman and their fictional rep-
resentations in films, novels and comics, the latter of which I borrow the
term Superhuman (a broader category than superhero) from. As Spawn
observes in the quote above, these discursive realms were felt to be sepa-
rate from each other. Only a minority of interviewees felt that superhero
comics dealt in any serious way with the question of posthumanism. For
those few who did it was because they felt that superhero comics dealt
with the effects of becoming posthuman either on an individual or societal
level:
It’s [being superhuman] presented to the world as amazing but backstage such
and such is going on, you know? There’s always that, it’s always balanced, it’s
never, “well, life would be better if we just did this”. Comics always play on the
‘what else’? The ‘what else’ is the interesting bit. So as a model of what humanity
could become in the future it’s, I don’t know, you’re always given the alterna-
tives or the dark side to it, or the yin and yang of what’s happening. That’s what
makes it interesting. Durinsbeuk (M, 42, C)
Well I think they have always kind of shown how, like, posthumans live with
the rest of the society. Like Superman trying to live like an ordinary person in
Metropolis and all the recent Marvel stuff with Civil War. I think that’s a more
realistic sort of approach to, how would society react to people running round
with superpowers? They are going to want to control and know who they are and
train them and stuff. So I think superhero comics are good at, not laying the
groundwork, but exploring what it would be like in the real world. Venkman
(M, 31, C)
As a general rule however, respondents were dismissive of the idea that

superhero comics had any relationship to posthumanism. Rather, science
and technology in superhero comics were seen to function in the same way
that the superhero’s musculature did. Which is to say that techno-science

in superhero comics was viewed as unrelated to real world techno-science.
Rather than a direct representation of scientific advances, technology in
comics was a signifier of superpowers.
It’s almost completely irrelevant why they are [super-powered] that’s not what
the story’s about-why they are-it’s about what they do once they are there. Rogue
(FM, 27, C)
It is a necessary plot tool rather than an in-depth discussion. Midi (M, 30, R)
The superhero is an accidental invocation of those ideas. Vesuvian Man (M, 31, C)
In all, superhero comics were viewed as a shallow allegory of post-

humanism. By contrast, several literary science-fiction novels were held
up as superior examples of exploring the idea. One of the quirks of the
genre, best exemplified by the Cosmic Body in chapter four, is that
science and magic are often conflated in superhero universes, or at the
very least sit happily side by side. This was the essence of the problem
for many:
I don’t really see superhero comics and Transhumanism as that closely related
because the superhero genre is all about what if a few people accidentally, by
magic basically, had these superpowers…Transhumanism is about what are the
real ways that we can do this rather than the ridiculous, imaginary, magic
backstory of the superhero. Eye Borg (M, 29, O)
[They deal with] technological responsibility, but equally the power comes from
being an alien or an amazon or a mythological god…I wouldn’t really say that
its massively connected to the idea of progressing technology any more than its
married to the notion of demi-divinity. Rogue (FM, 27, C)
Interestingly, this conflation of science and magic exists both at the level
of narrative and representation, for as Venkman (M, 31, C) pointed out:
If you’re talking magical characters you’ve got like Doctor Strange but are you
also counting the Silver Surfer as a magical character? Because he wields the
“power cosmic”, which on the drawn page is no different from being Doctor
Strange.
172 S. JEFFERY
This blurring of categorical distinctions between science and magic also

highlights how such distinctions are blurred in the discursive realms of
Transhumanism and Post/Humanism. Techno-science functions not as
representation but as signifier in comic books. Like the Superhuman body,
so often fused with technology, or to put it another way, inscribed with
science, technology indicates power, as does “being an alien or an amazon
or a mythological god”. As such it is interesting to recall that cyborg imag-
ery can be found in classical mythology—“mythical and fantastical ideas
about human/machine hybrids are present from the stories of Icarus’
wings to Chinese, Greek and Arabic texts that are rich in the subject of
automata”.26 Contra Haraway, both the cyborg and the goddess can be
considered boundary figures, “designed to transgress the borders between
the human and non-human…[to] recast the non-human other in the role
of subject, actor and agent in his/her own right”.27
NOTES
1. Maigret, Strange grew up with me: Sentimentality and Masculinity in Readers
of Superhero Comics, p. 8.
2. Taylor, A. (2007) He’s Gotta Be Strong, and He’s Gotta Be Fast, and He’s
Gotta Be Larger Than Life p. 345.
3. Heggs, Cyberpsychology and Cyborgs, p. 185.
4. Kahan, J. and Stewart, Caped Crusaders 101. USA: McFarland, p. 7.
5. Beaty, Assessing Contemporary Comics Scholarship , p. 4.
6. A reproduction of the image can be found at: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.
com/wiki/File:Liefeldcaptainamerica.jpg It is interesting to note that the
image is also the first hit if one googles “Liefeld Captain America”.
7. Brown, J. A. (2001), Black superheroes, Milestone Comics and their fans, p. 179.
8. Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics.
10. Coogan, Superhero: The Secret origin of a Genre.
11. Baghurst, T., Hollander, D. B., Nardella, B., and Haff, G. G. (2006).
Change in sociocultural ideal male physique: An examination of past and
present action figures. Body Image, 3(1), pp. 87–91.
12. Beiras , A, et al. (2007) Gênero e super-heróis: o traçado do corpo mascu-
lino pela norma. Psicol Soc.; 19(3) pp. 62–7.
13. Klein, A. M. (1993). Little big men: Bodybuilding subculture and gender
construction. Suny Press, p. 267.
14. Brown, L., Lamb, S. and Tappan, M. B. (2009) Packaging boyhood:
Superheroes, slackers, and other media stereotypes, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Drug Use, p. 95.
17. Baghurst, et al., Change in sociocultural ideal male physique: An examina-
tion of past and present action figures p. 83.
18. Gabilliet, J. P., Beaty, B., and Nguyen, N. (2010) Of Comics and Men: a
Cultural History of American Comic Books. Jackson, MS: University Press of
Mississippi; Lopes, Culture and Stigma: Popular Culture and the Case of
Comic Book.
19. Fuller, S. (2009). Knowledge politics and new converging technologies: a
social epistemological perspective. Innovation–the European journal of social
science research, 22(1), pp. 7–34.
20. Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics.
21. Barker, M. and Kate Brooks (1999) Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, it’s
Friends, Fans and Foes. Luton: University of Luton Press, p. 14.
22. Barker, M. (1993) Seeing how far you can see: On being a fan of 2000 AD. In
Buckingham, D. (ed.) Reading Audiences: Young People and the Media.
Manchester University Press, pp. 159–183.
23. Barker and Brooks, Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, it’s Friends, Fans and
Foes, p. 15.
25. Young, A. F., Gabriel, S., and Hollar, J. L. (2013). Batman to the rescue!
The protective effects of parasocial relationships with muscular superheroes
on men’s body image. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(1),
pp. 173–177.
27. Lykke, N. (1996) Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs. Feminist
Confrontations with Science. In Lykke, N. and Braidotti, R. (eds.) Between
Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs. Feminist Confrontations with Science,
Medicine and Cyberspace, London: ZED-Books, p. 24.
Readers on Transhumanism and
Post/Humanism
The previous chapter addressed the question, “What sense do readers of

superhero comics make of the posthuman body?” and focused on the discur-
sive realm of the Superhuman. As has been highlighted throughout this book
however, the posthuman body is formed of an assemblage of overlapping dis-
cursive realms. Any understanding of how readers make sense of the posthu-
man body must also then consider these other domains. The current chapter
focuses on the discursive realms of Transhumanism and Post/Humanism by
illustrating how readers responded to the idea of human enhancement in the
real world, and the role that superhero comics played in this understanding.
THE HUMANISM IN SUPERHUMANISM

To what extent can the superhero be said to embody the concerns of criti-
cal-philosophical Post/Humanism? As was seen in Section Two, the depic-
tions of the Perfect and Military-Industrial Superhuman body suggested
certain affinities with Transhumanist visions of human enhancement. But
they could also be used to critique themselves and even to trouble the very
notion of what it means to be human, especially in the case of the Cosmic
Body. As discussed in the previous chapter, readers did not generally make
a connection between the Superhuman and the Transhuman, so it is of lit-
tle surprise that the Post/Human also failed to be addressed explicitly. In
fact, it appeared that many readers preferred an emphasis on the “human”
in “superhuman”. As Rogue (FM, 27, C) said of the X-Men for example:

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_9
176 S. JEFFERY
They are human. It’s just extra. So this idea of dual identity…and that’s what
I quite like about X-Men. It’s very psychological, it’s very much about how do
you integrate into your identity when the world has an issue with what you are.
Um, so, I don’t know. That’s what I like about it (laughs).
Rogue’s focus on the “humanity” of the superhero was echoed by others:
I mean I kind of prefer Superman as a human character, kind of the human

perspective on the character. So there’s kind of, I do prefer that human, the idea,
the powers are fascinating, the powers are lovely but a flavour, but it tends to be
the person behind them that I identify with more. (Green Lantern (M, 25, C))
It’s aspirational. Its uh, it’s the fact that you could, I don’t know, they teach
you to be the best that you can be kind of thing. In particular I guess Spider-
Man originally he was the everyman sort of superhero wasn’t he? He’s got the
same problems you’ve got. But he’s a superhero as well. Yeah. I’m sort of more
drawn to the superheroes that have human problems. I mean it’s kind of hard
to relate to a billionaire who dresses up as bat and beats people up at night but
in the hands of the right writer you can put pathos and stuff in. (Ergon Cube
(M, 32, C))
This notion of the superhero as human was linked to the notion of

morality. Ergon Cube’s words above are telling in this respect: “it’s aspira-
tional…they teach you to be the best that you can be kind of thing”. It would
be impossible to piece together a coherent picture of what the participants
in this project took to be human. The divide between those who were
pro-enhancement and those who were troubled by the idea might first
appear to suggest an insurmountable opposition as to the nature of the
human and the limits of the human body. In fact, both positions pivoted
on notions of effort, or striving. For instance, the following quotes high-
light one recurring critique of enhancement:
It takes people’s natural abilities away from them. So what if you can run fast
on your own? All on your own merit? I can run fast because I’ve taken this drug
or had this enhancement…it takes way natural talents and stops people devel-
oping. Where’s the need to try if you can just get given it? Slothor (FM, C, 29))
You’re advancing yourself but you’re not pushing yourself. You could get robot
legs; you could get super robot legs and then the next day you could get super-
robot legs version 2.0, or something. But you’re not doing anything; you’re hav-
ing these things done to you. Because of that you’re losing the capacity to push
yourself, your losing the ability to better yourself. You’re being bettered. Um, so,
READERS ON TRANSHUMANISM AND POST/HUMANISM 177
you’re losing your drive. Why push yourself to be better if things can just fall in
your lap? The Flash (M, 32, C)
For respondents such as Slothor and The Flash, human enhancement

was morally troubling, akin to cheating somehow. Indeed, this was even
true at the level of text. Green Lantern noted that when Pepper Potts,
a popular supporting character in Iron Man, was given similar enhance-
ments to the title character, it frustrated him because he felt it:
Implies that it makes her mind faster and stuff as well, and it’s like that poten-
tially diminishes her as a character because it means anything, you know, clever
that she does isn’t necessarily due to her…so there’s an element of that that kind
of frustrates me from a storytelling perspective because it removes agency from
the characters. Green Lantern (M, 25, C)
In fact, these criticisms are a feature of many oppositional attacks on

Transhumanism. McKibben, for instance, fears that radical enhancement
would deprive humanity of the desire and focus to achieve greatness, and
that any greatness would be attributable only to the enhancement and not
the individual. In the end, McKibben argues, human enhancement “will
destroy forever the very possibility of meaningful choice”.1 Such views
depend on a figuration of humanity as necessarily limited in its capacities,
although, importantly, this was not viewed as a negative by the partici-
pants who felt this way for, as McKibben puts it “all the harmonies that
make human life wonderful and special depend on the approximate shape
of a human life”.2 In fact it was these very limitations that gave meaning
to being human for most readers. Inevitably, the most pressing of these
meaning-giving limitations was death, the mortality of the human body:
Interviewer: I asked you earlier if there was anything essentially

human-
Shiva (FM, 32, O): It’s you deal with life and death. You deal with
suffering and happiness and a hell of a lot of emo-
tions in between.
In short, this particular conception of humanity saw being human as

being embodied:
You can tell my history with my scars. Or where I’ve broken a bone or where
I’ve done this, that or the other. My body; my life story can be told. Danger Man
(M, 28, C)
178 S. JEFFERY
Unfortunately I have chemical things wrong that make it very difficult for me
to lose weight so weight has always, will always and has always been an issue
for me. But the things that are wrong with me are what make me who I am.
Slothor (FM, C, 29)
Interestingly, respondents who emphasised consciousness over embodi-

ment as the seat of the human also highlighted the importance of striving
to better us. While participants who emphasised the body saw meaning
in striving within limitations (see below), the second group strove to go
beyond them:
I mean, you know, we are the product of billions of years of evolution and the
idea that the first point at which we realise this should be the point at which we
stop is ridiculous isn’t it? That’s, why here? Why stop at this point? There’s no
reason, it’s just this is what we’re familiar with. Eye Borg (M, 29, O)
Moreover, from this perspective, not choosing to enhance was morally

dubious:
If you do that [choose not to enhance] what you are saying is, “we are always
going to be exactly as we are now”. All the flaws and problems, all that we have.
You know, we are going to condemn ourselves to have forever for every genera-
tion to come. Eye Borg (M, 29, O)
The body’s limitations are in fact something to be overcome:
The body, I mean, we’re kind of restricted by them aren’t we? In the mind there
are no restrictions. Ergon Cube (M, 34, C)
As Hanson writes, one effect of human enhancement on how bodies

are viewed could be that “what is now considered healthy or normal will
increasingly be thought of as defective or disvalued as enhanced states
become the norm…what was once ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ becomes some-
thing from which we suffer”3 and the body, it would seem, becomes excess
meat. For a smaller section of respondents however, it was the body and
not the mind that was the seat of the self. As such, the division between
mind and body is worth exploring in more detail, beginning with one
binary familiar from Post/Humanist theory-that between the “natural”
and the “artificial”.
BOUNDARY DISSOLUTIONS: NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL

In considering possible posthuman futures, participants repeatedly made a
distinction between natural and artificial evolution. Natural evolution was
described most forcefully in the following quote:
It’s genetic. Technology is fuck all to do with it. Arkham (M, 43, C)
This was a common distinction. The use of technology to enhance humans

was viewed as a separate process to the “natural”, genetic process of evolu-
tion. The distinction can be seen in the following description of what one
respondent discovered after Googling “posthuman” prior to the interview:
It’s about human 2.0. I couldn’t tell from what I read if it was about adjusting
humans mechanically with technology or if it was about evolution and trying to
sort of evolve to these levels. Ozymandias (M, 26, O)
The important terms here are “adjusting humans mechanically” and

“evolve to these levels”. This opposition between human enhancement as
mechanical or artificial compared to the more “natural” process of evolu-
tion was another recurring dualism, stated again here for emphasis:
My first thing is natural evolution and the kind of future we might evolve as a
species naturally, but I also kind of think about artificial intelligence and kind
of cyborgs and that kind of thing…the use of machines and enhancing our bod-
ies and minds. The Invalid (M, 37, R)
This demarcation between a natural, genetic evolution and an artifi-

cial, technological enhancement suggests that we are some way from a
commonly held acceptance of the cyborg ontology put forward by many
Post/Humanist thinkers. This commonly shared dualistic thinking about
body/mind and natural/artificial seems particularly telling in light of the
previous chapter’s discussion of the representation of superheroes. The
empirical evidence provided by these interviews runs counter to ideologi-
cal readings of the superhero—which usually evoked an imagined reader-
ship at the mercy of the superheroes incipient fascism—suggesting that
readers’ relationships with superhero texts were far more nuanced and
reflexive. However, it is not just negative readings of the superhero that
fail to address the audience for the texts under discussion. Much of the
180 S. JEFFERY
work on posthumanism falls into a similar trap, presenting their Post/

Humanist analysis of popular texts without stopping to consider what
readers and viewers themselves make of them. At the very least, the data
presented here shows little evidence of a widely accepted impulse to blur
categorical binary distinctions.
This has implications for public decision making on emerging technol-
ogies. As Lee et al. demonstrate, the assumption that “people will be more
open toward new technologies if they know more about them [holds true]
only for respondents whose cognitive considerations are not overridden
by emotional heuristics”.4 That these “emotional heuristics” or “affective
aspects” are by their nature corporeal means that “(1) Affective processes
often precede cognitive evaluations and (2) people’s judgements about
science and technology are sometimes based not on analytical judgement
but on a general feeling about science and technology”.5 This distinction
between natural and artificial is particularly intriguing in light of the fact
that most respondents emphasised the mind over the body as the essence
of being human. In spite of the focus on consciousness, our genetic make-
up (the consciousness of the body?) still possessed what Nelkin and Lindee
call the “DNA mystique”.6 For some this was a moral question:
The concept of improving ourselves doesn’t bother me although I do have, I’m

not necessarily against it but I find stem cell research more morally difficult. I
don’t know why…cars, phones, whatever, but when you start using genetics it’s
weird for me. Midi (M, 30, R)
In some respects, this moral objection to the genetic engineering of

human traits is related to religious anxieties. This is true of much anti-
Transhumanist literature and Midi, quoted above, said that his own
ambivalence over stem-cell research specifically was the “ambiguity over
the status of the foetuses” as a “potential human”; a concern he related to
his Catholic faith. Similarly, Bainbridge has found that approval of various
Transhuman technologies “is negatively associated with confidence in reli-
gion, and positively associated with confidence in science”.7 Meanwhile,
Lilley’s survey of how young adults perceived Transhumanism found that
nearly 3 out of 4 held negative attitudes towards Transhumanism with
over 90 per cent indicating that religion would suffer.8 While most respon-
dents interviewed for this book expressed a general atheism or agnos-
ticism, it remains clear that religious views will do much to contribute
to how the public views human enhancement. More commonly, ethical
concerns about genetic research were related to historical precedents. The
spectre of eugenics and the abuse of power that genetic and technological
enhancements might yield was a common and pressing concern.
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, NOT MERGING

TECHNOLOGIES
The philosophy of human enhancement and the progression beyond
the human is predicated on the development of a number of emerging
technologies. Because the study and development of these technologies
is often interconnected, they are often grouped under the term “con-
verging technologies” and various acronyms have arisen to define them.
For instance the acronyms NBIC (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology,
Information technology and Cognitive Science), or “GRAIN” (Genetics,
Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Nanotechnology). Respondents dis-
played awareness of disparate emerging technologies but did not tend to
merge these strands into an overriding vision as in Transhumanism. A
number of different technologies were raised as potentially contributing
to our posthuman future. Life extension, genetic engineering, cybernetic
implants: “a USB port would be somewhere on my body” (Spawn, M, 28, C);
exo-skeletons; cloning and the growing of artificial organs; nanotechnol-
ogy and pharmaceutical drugs. When interviewees highlighted any such
technology it would usually be accompanied by a real-life example (e.g.
“Like the blind fella who got his eye replaced with a camera” [Venkman, M,
31, C]). These findings are in keeping with the fact that both scholarly
approaches to the public understanding of emergent technologies and
scientific policy papers on the same9 rarely position Transhumanism as a
goal and tend more often to focus on subcategories of specific technolo-
gies such as Information Technology,10 nanotechnology11 or genetic tech-
nologies12 instead. As with the respondents, the emphasis lies on specific
emerging technologies and has not yet reached a stage of debate in which
all these technologies have merged under the rubric of Transhuman tech-
nologies (as I have described them throughout this book).
This was particularly true in the case of prosthetics; by far the technol-
ogy most commonly cited, whatever the level of familiarity with posthu-
manism as a whole. Midi’s (M, 30, C) is a typical response in this regard:
I’m certainly aware of the ongoing work with prosthetics, I believe, I don’t know
how far along they are but I believe they are getting closer to having some kind
of prosthetic that connects through the whole nerve ending. I’m aware of the on-
going work around that, I don’t know how far along they are with it but I’m
182 S. JEFFERY
aware of that. Replacement limbs is something that we are going to see in our life-
time, as far as I’m aware they are well on their way to genuine replacement limbs
rather than a fairly stiff, limited limb. So I know that works on-going, I suppose
that’s true of a lot of research but I know that’s something that’s happening.
By contrast, technologies such as nanotech and mind-uploading, the

radical potentials of which still appear some way off, were illustrated with
examples from fiction. For instance, one episode of the British sci-fi sit-com
Red Dwarf, in which a swarm of nanobots repair a character’s arm, was
cited approvingly by three respondents, highlighting a generally understood
notion that nanotechnology could repair human bodies at a molecular level,
even growing new limbs for them. The main touchstone in terms of comic
book depictions of nanotechnology was the Iron Man: Extremis storyline,
in which nanobots allow the title character’s armour to co-exist with his
body rather than simply worn as an exo-skeleton. While both these examples
refer to fiction rather than “real-world” advances in nanotechnology, they fit
the mould of “nanowriting” highlighted by Milburn in the chapter on the
Military-Industrial body whereby the science-fictional status of nanotechnol-
ogy and militaristic visions of the super-soldier have come to “rely on cultural
familiarity with comic book myths…to suggest that nanotechnology, in repli-
cating or materializing these myths at the site of the soldier’s body, can create
‘real’ superheroes”.13 Such findings are in keeping with those of Lee at al.14
whose inquiries into the public understanding of nanotechnology suggested
a low-level of overall awareness of the issue. Scheufele and Lewenstein found
that, because of this people tended to rely on heuristic or cognitive shortcuts
such as “ideological predispositions, religious beliefs, and media portrayals,
in order to form judgments about issues, such as nanotechnology, that they
know little or nothing about”.15 This observation can be nicely illustrated by
the following exchange.
Interviewer: If you take AI [Artificial Intelligence] for exam-

ple, there’s a few of them [Transhumanists] that
argue that we’ve got a moral obligation almost to
create AI.
Arkham (M, 43, C): Yeah, how many stories have you seen that end well
in?
As seen above, by far the most commonly raised technology was pros-
thetics. When describing prosthetics, respondents often made a clear link
with disability:
Prosthetic is still very expensive and new for the masses. You’ve got, you know,
disabled people. It’s more their community. It’s also more the association you
make, I think we would make at the moment. Shiva (FM, 32, O)
I think they are doing quite well with prosthetic limbs. Like replacements for
amputees Spawn (M, 28, C)
Knowledge of prosthetics moved beyond simply traditional imitations

of lost limbs. Respondents drew attention to their use by paralympians,
particularly the “springy, jumpy, like kangaroo legs” (Danger Man [M, 28,
C]) worn by Oscar Pistorious (though none mentioned the athlete by
name). Interestingly, it was also noted that these prosthetic limbs actu-
ally brought their users not just up to but beyond normative levels of
functioning:
There was a guy who lost his leg and they have those sorts of kangaroo shoes and
he’d had them put on instead of feet basically and he can run faster than any
person. I think that’s pretty cool. That’s totally achievable if you want to cut
your legs off. Ozymandias (M, 26, O)
For some, this implied an obvious connection between disability and

Transhumanism:
I think that’s kind of Transhuman in a really acceptable way. Nobody would

have an argument with giving that person robotic legs. Obviously the next step is
when someone cuts off their legs and gets a pair of robotic legs put on and as far
as that goes I think everyone would have a bit of a problem with it somewhere
along the line. Logogram (M, 30, C)
The link with disability presents prosthetics as “Transhuman in a really

acceptable way” because it is a form of replacement. Even though this
replacement might be considered an enhancement in that it improves a
level of bodily functioning, its initial function as merely a replacement
results in the enhancement not becoming “a bit of a problem” as it might
if an able-bodied person had chosen to enhance himself deliberately.
This general position seems likely to change in the near future. Already
a number of scholars and commentators have begun to question whether
such technologies constitute simple replacement limbs or Transhuman
enhancements.16 One possible explanation for this general knowledge and
acceptance of prosthetics is their clear function.
184 S. JEFFERY
In fact, the question of function regularly appeared as the most impor-

tant factor in determining readers’ responses to enhancement. Individual
enhancement was criticised as being akin to either cheating but also to
fashion or plastic surgery. Effectively, this sort of enhancement was dis-
missed as pointless. Instead, respondents argued for the functionality of
enhancements. More correctly, restoration rather than enhancement was
suggested as the most appropriate use for emerging technologies:
It shouldn’t be done for the fact you can do it. It should be done for a reason or
a function. Danger Man (M, 28, C)
As such, the use of prosthetics was the most widely known and under-
stood of Transhuman technologies. However, prosthetics were thought of
as restitutive rather than enhancing;
If someone said, “Do you want a robot arm?”, if I’d lost my arm? Give me a
robot arm! But I wouldn’t right now [say] “take my arm and give me a robot
arm”. Dutch (M, 32, R)
Outside of the medical use of these technologies to get people up to

normative levels of functioning, physical enhancements were also accepted
as having functional uses elsewhere:
I see that you would want to use an exo-skeleton, again, in the construction
industry or possibly in military applications. But why would you or I want it?
Arkham (M, 43, C)
What is of note here is the way in which these apparent criticisms of

Transhuman enhancement highlight the ways in which Transhumanism
might (re) present itself and its arguments to the public in a palatable fash-
ion. On the one hand, human enhancement was generally seen as more
acceptable when linked to forms of therapy that respondents were com-
fortable and familiar with such as prosthetics. Perhaps Transhumanism is
simply too new a concept for most. At least one study has suggested that
novel ideas can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make people uncom-
fortable so that people will dismissed creative ideas in favour of ideas that
are purely practical—“tried and true”.17 It would be unwise to generalise
from such a small study of course, but it remains striking how few readers
warmed to the idea of superpowers existing in the “real world”. In fact,
only a couple of interviewees advocated enhancement for its own sake. A

good example is the following:
It’s just wish-fulfilment isn’t it? Just being able to lift a car over your head.
That must feel great, you know? Venkman (M, 31, C)
It hardly seems coincidental that the image Venkman utilises here is

familiar from the famous first appearance of Superman on the cover of
Action Comics issue one.
It is probably worth noting how respondents answered the most pressing
and obvious—if not the most theoretically exacting—question a study such
as this must address: if you could have any superpower, what would it be?
Here respondents were told they could be as fantastical as they liked. Among
the answers were the ability to heal rapidly, to control magnetism, invisibility
(“because I’m nosy”) and “a prehensile tail that I could use to pick things up
with”. Most common, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the power of flight. This
was true of readers of occasional, regular and committed readers. As Midi
put it, “we’d all like to be Superman for instance, you know what I mean? And
fly around”. Two other powers, teleportation and super speed, were offered
only by some committed readers and both for reasons that were related to
reading habits. While the dream of flight was common to all participants,
whatever their level of commitment as a reader of superhero comics, some
of these imaginative choices were informed by a specific knowledge of comic
books. The ability to teleport for instance required an aesthetic element:
You get up, you shower, you have breakfast, you put your clothes on and “bamf!”
And of course it would have to make that sound. It would have to sound like
“bamf!”. Danger Man (M, 28, C)
“Bamf!” is the iconic sound-effect made by the X-Men’s Nightcrawler and

has become as much a part of the character as his unique appearance. The
choice of super speed was equally rooted in knowledge of comic book lore:
Alright, so you can move very, very fast. So that’s good, um, you can move so fast
that you’re invisible, that’s how fast you can move. So that’s two powers right
there. You can vibrate your molecules so fast that you can pass through walls. So
now you’ve got intangibility, right? It’s looking good. You can run so fast you
can go back in time. So now you’ve got time-travel. So just having super-speed
you get four for the price of one. Which is always good. The Flash (M, 32, C)
186 S. JEFFERY
Super-strength, significantly, was not a particularly common choice,

while in Cartesian contrast super-intelligence and memory were valued
highly. These choices were mirrored in respondents’ views on the possibil-
ity of human enhancement, a point addressed in more detail in the next
chapter. Also in common with respondents’ views on enhancement was a
focus on the pragmatic aspects of superpowers. Speed and teleportation
for instance would make it possible to get more work done, again empha-
sising function over fun.
WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?

Although a posthuman future was largely considered in some sense inevi-
table it was also generally thought of in negative terms. Abuses of power
and the potential for warfare were put forward as part and parcel of any
posthuman future. These concerns were many but can be usefully consid-
ered under the following categories:concerns about the military use of such
technologies and the creation of “cyborg soldiers”, concerns surrounding
genetic engineering, and economic concerns. For example, the application
of Transhuman technologies to the art of war was taken for granted:
It probably will be like military and soldiers first. I would like to think it will be
good and there will be loads of smart people using it for good but that’s not the
way the world works. Dutch (M, 32, R)
Respondents were resigned to this state of affairs whatever their ideo-

logical leanings for historical reasons:
If you think after the First World War all the people with scars and lost limbs led
to an increase in prosthetic limbs and things. Danger Man (M, 28, C)
I mean it’s obviously the military that drives all these things isn’t it? So I’m
maybe not happy with the way that these things are developed but at the end of
the day the military is probably responsible for most of our technological develop-
ments. Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C)
That’s the worrying thing; if it’s, obviously if it starts off in the wrong hands.
But the only way it’s going to develop is if they get enough money and whatever,
or a good enough reason to convince the president that they can, you know, spend
billions of pounds on these things. They’re not going to give it to some crackpot
scientist; they’re going to give it to the military. Midi (M, 30, R)
There is good empirical evidence to back up these apparently intui-

tive understandings. Military spending in the USA alone was over $400
billion in 2005,18 with a substantial amount of this spending financing
various super-soldier projects, such as the $50 million awarded by the US
Army to create the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN).19
This resignation to the role of military finance and development formed
part of a broader suspicion about how contemporary society would be
affected by Transhumanist technologies. As Lee et al. point out, “people’s
reactions to and attitudes toward new technologies are also often guided
in part by the trust and confidence they have in scientists, companies,
and government agencies”.20 Moreover, this reliance on trust is said to
have an enhanced effect “if individuals lack scientific knowledge”.21 As
Transhumanism as a philosophy was little known to the participants, it
can be seen that responses to the idea were mediated by levels of trust in
state apparatus in a largely critical way, as will be seen in more detail as we
continue.
As discussed in chapter five, “The Military-Industrial Body”, the Military-
Industrial Body has often been used to implicitly or explicitly address military
use of enhanced humans. Venkman (M, 31, C) observed that this trend,
while particularly prominent among the more contemporary creators of the
British Wave, has long been a part of the genre:
Interviewer: Are there any superhero comics that you think deal with or
represent the military industrial complex?
Venkman: Um, probably The Ultimates. Not fully because at the end
it’s still Marvel Comics so there are rules. Things like, I
think, Stormwatch when Warren Ellis was doing it and
parts of The Authority… It’s quite easy for a comic to use
that kind of platform to launch stories off. Like, Iron Man
is a military industrial character and when he was created
he was an arms manufacturer, so it’s always been there in
comics. To have lots of weapons and lots of money.
While Venkman’s statement points to a potential critique of the

Military-Industrial posthuman body in superhero comics, it remains to
be seen how this impacts on the real-world search for super-soldiers. It
would seem reasonable to think that Transhumanist thinking may be
more in evidence. After conducting a bibliometric survey of a number of
terms related to Transhumanism in military and government publications,
188 S. JEFFERY
however, Evans simply concludes that “transhumanism, as a philosophy,

does not yet impact military science in any significant way…though the
idea of transhumanism itself has yet to take hold on those working in
military strategy, military science, and policy making, the technological
foundations of transhumanism are already affecting the literature”.22
A second recurring concern was the issue of genetic engineering.
More specifically, the question of what society defines, genetically, as
human. Bates found that, however questionable the science, the mutant
X-Men were a recurring source of genetic information for lay people.23
Respondents in this study were less inclined to make the link between
superheroes and genetic modification, but still expressed worries. In one
form, this manifested itself in concerns like the following:
If it’s a case of, you know, “okay, we’re going to alter our child’s genes so that he
will not be gay”, that would be a line where you’d go, no, that’s wrong. Green
Lantern (M, 25, C)
At the other end of the spectrum were concerns about possible future
transgenic species that were neatly summed up by the question:
Are you still a human citizen if you have starfish DNA? Red Hulk (M, 20, C)
Although the actual terminology of eugenics itself was mentioned

infrequently in the interviews, the questions raised above speak to those
concerns and, while these concerns relate to what this book has dubbed
the Perfect Body, it was the contemporary manifestation of the Military-
Industrial Body that was more in evidence. These concerns were less his-
torical (e.g. eugenics) than political-economic. As with military spending,
there are good reasons for these concerns, both historical and economic.
Lassen and Jamison note that in the USA in the 1980s, the “dominance
of commercial discourses—that is, stories of business opportunities—
[…] helped pave the way for a positive policy and regulatory framework
for biotechnology”.24 A low level of public trust in industry and science
related to genetic technology has been noted in other studies.25 This mis-
trust is rooted in what Lassen and Jamison term “political economic con-
cerns”, “issues of corporate power and responsibility, commercialization
of research, the links between science and business”,26 which are rarely
addressed in the commercial or business-minded discourse of policy mak-
ers. Indeed, the interviewees in this project expressed similar concerns to
those expressed by Lassen and Jamison’s focus groups, in keeping with the
somewhat ambivalent portrayal of the Military-Industrial Body in super-

hero comics.
In fact, the concerns raised most often were social and economic. In its
macroscopic form, this was a question of social divisions:
It [human enhancement] becomes a way to increase separation of rich and

poor and class divides and things like that. You know, you end up with those
that can afford the enhancements and those who can’t. Which obviously is a gap
that’s going to perpetuate itself. Eye Borg (M, 29, O)
On a microcosmic level, this economic concern focused on the prob-

lems of individual enhancement. Indeed, for Eye Borg the problem
with superheroes as a genre was that, “it’s about you being the only one-
what if you were better than everybody else?” Moreover, as a self-described
Transhumanist himself, Eye Borg criticised the libertarian impulse in
much Transhumanist thought. This was addressed in more detail in the
discussion of the Military-Industrial body but can be summarised neatly
here in Lilley’s observation that the Transhumanists generally accept social
competition as an inevitability: “expanding on a celebrated argument from
Adam Smith, they assert that overall wealth will increase as social competi-
tion drives personal innovation… health, mental acuity, and personal pro-
ductivity will improve as individuals ‘enhance to advance’ ”.27 A paradox
emerged whereby respondents generally emphasised function over fun,
but also generally embraced a critique of the very social systems that such
technologies would function for.
This is expressed in Eye Borg’s concerns about class divides above, but
also more obliquely in the exchange below, in which Arkham passingly
compares capitalising on human enhancements from the point of view of
the super villain.
Arkham (M, 43, C): Um, I suppose in a real-world scenario I would

be more inclined to see the villain’s point of view
in that if you’ve got this freakish ability then why
aren’t you capitalising on it? But I don’t think you
need to be robbing banks to be capitalising on it.
Why are there no characters out there who simply
have a superpower they want to take advantage
of? If you’ve got super strength for example why is
there nobody with super strength working in the
construction industry?
190 S. JEFFERY
Interviewer: Right.
Arkham: Why do you need to be one of the spandex crowd? I mean for obvi-
ous reasons it’s the story context of you need the conflict between
character A and character B (PAUSE) Yeah, from a purely
pragmatic point of view if I had superpowers I would be able to
make some practical application of them. Some way to improve
my life rather than “truth, justice and the American way”.
Other concerns related to this free-market ideology. Durinsbeuk

(M, 42, C), for instance, suggested that any mass adoption of human
enhancements would be predicated on celebrity sponsorship:
David Beckham decides to sell his left foot so you can now bend balls further.
“Nike foot” you know? Yours for two thousand pounds and no guarantee. Is
there a need, is there a market, is there a want?
Although not stated explicitly, Durinsbeuk’s words suggest a relation-

ship between needs, wants and the market. From a Post/Humanist per-
spective this is particularly intriguing, pointing to the notion that there
may not be a “normative form of the individual who awaits liberation
from the imposed illusions of culture…we cannot assume real interests,
nor some pre-social and essential individual that we might discover under-
neath power and images”.28 Instead, social, economic and cultural forces
shape individuals, and their wants and needs. Thus, Midi (M, 30, R),
while wary of the idea of enhancement generally, still accepted that his
mind might change with the surrounding culture:
See that’s, that’s such a difficult thing to consider because I think; it would
totally depend on the culture. For example, if all my friends did it, and every-
body in my family had it I would probably feel some more pressure to have it. I
quite like my limbs. I would have no problem if my friend chose to have it but I
don’t know if I would necessarily. Not because I have any moral problem with it
but I don’t know if I would. But if I was somehow disadvantaged as a human
for not doing it because everybody else had done it then I probably would. But I
don’t think I would do it for the sake of doing it. I don’t think I’d be the guy at
the front of the queue. I think I’d wait to see what happened and see if my life
was disadvantaged by not doing it.
For most interviewees however, the idea of individual enhancement, or

enhancements as a consumer good, were seen as
Just a new way of judging people, isn’t it? It’s, if you don’t have the money it’s
like fashion now. You’re not cool at school because you don’t have a Bench jacket
or because you don’t have a Paul’s Boutique bag. Well you’re not cool because
your eyes aren’t the perfect or you can’t run as fast as an athlete so you’re some
kind of freak. Slothor (FM, 29, C)
Slothor’s point here is not so far removed from that of McKibben, who
worries that human enhancement technologies will only be available to
those can afford them, creating a “genetic divide” alongside the economic
divide between rich and poor.29 The criticism on this individualistic streak
in Transhumanism can also, as the next chapter demonstrates, be under-
stood in terms of the British relationship with the superhero. Just as British
writers (and readers) considered the superhero through a deconstructive
lens or from a semi-ironic distance, so too does the European approach to
human enhancement differ from that of US policy documents. This has
been the case since at least the 1980s, when the discourse of economic
prosperity and business opportunity helped shape the policy frameworks for
biotechnology in the USA. By contrast, as Lassen and Jamison point out,
“European discourses during the same time period were more ambivalent,
and in many countries the dominant discourses focused on health and envi-
ronmental implications rather than commercial prospects”.30 This trend
has continued into more contemporary Transhuman technologies such as
nanotechnology. Johnson and Youngman point out that the U.S. National
Science Foundation’s report on converging technologies (or the NBIC
suite) emphasises individual enhancement at the expense of any “role for
the humanities and social sciences, the two areas of study that help us to
contextualise scientific and technological developments”.31 In contrast, the
European response to the U.S. NBIC report places a greater emphasis on
these two disciplines. In short it “contains less trans-humanism and more
humanism” and suggests that, “humans do not exist above their physical
environment, but within it”.32 It is probably worth noting Rifkin’s concern
that the genetic advances cited earlier will converge with economic issues
in the future in the form of commercial or market-driven eugenics.33
THE INEVITABILITY OF A POSTHUMAN FUTURE

However respondents felt about the question of human enhancement,
one clear theme in the interviews was the supposed inevitability of a post-
human future:
192 S. JEFFERY
It’s going to happen anyway. These technologies will be developed, whether by

us or whether by somebody else. It’s going to happen. We’re going to have super-
prosthetic limbs in the future. In my head that is just inevitable. Midi (M, 30, R)
Sometimes this inevitable future was “millions of years away” or at least

far enough away that it was possible to feel
Pretty indifferent to it. Neither embracing it nor rejecting it because I’m going
to have very little to do if it comes about; I’m not going to be here for very much
longer…and to be honest it’s not; I don’t really give a shit what happens once
I’m dead. Humanity could end up on the bonfire. We could all go on to be semi-
cybernetic inner-space creatures or we could all devolve back into being some
kind of lizard creature and its really going to make bugger-all difference to
me. Rogue (FM, 29, C)
But it was always simply a matter of time. Lilley’s survey of how young
adults perceived Transhumanity revealed much the same findings. Even
though three out of four of Lilley’s respondents displayed a negative
attitude towards transhumanity, Lilley found that “more than twice the
number expressed resignation as they did opposition”,34 taking instead
a position of fatalism and inevitability. Moreover, in analysing the three
(interrelated) strong claims for inevitability made in Transhumanist lit-
erature—evolution as on-going, homo-cyberneticus and the drive to
self-transform ingrained in human nature and exponential technologi-
cal change—Lilley finds that “critics may find it easier to dismiss the
Transhumanists’ assertion that it will turn out good in the end than to
dispel the common belief that there is no stopping change”.35 Certainly
the interview findings presented by this book suggest the same.
Instead, we find a vision of technological progress closer to those pro-
posed by Ellul than any Transhumanist writer. In his book The Technological
Society,36 Jacques Ellul argued that “technique has become autonomous; it
has fashioned an omnivorous world which obeys its own laws and which
has renounced all tradition”.37 Viewing complex interdependent techno-
logical systems as being shaped by technology itself rather than by society,
Ellul ominously warned that “there can be no human autonomy in the
face of technical autonomy’”.38 Certainly Donna Haraway’s maxim that
“we are our technologies and they are we”39 was not widely adhered to,
nor her cyborg vision of a technological future without binary structures,
gender identities and—following these—hierarchical power relations, but
nor was it entirely absent.
For some respondents, our current relationship with communication

technologies contracted that time-scale considerably:
It always just seemed to me a slightly weird divide between we’re currently

human and soon we will be Transhuman. We are already there. Logogram
(M, 30, C)
Despite this feeling of inevitability, or perhaps because of it, suggesting

as it does a certain lack of agency in relation to the posthuman future, few
positive futures were offered outside of those interviewees who broadly
aligned themselves with Transhumanist goals. The specific features of
these concerns are set forth in the next chapter. Of interest for the time
being is where this sense of inevitability sprang from. Certainly, as stated
above, respondents displayed some awareness of a variety of emerging
technologies, so it could be simply a matter of imaginative extrapolation.
What is clearer is that superhero comics rarely played into their consider-
ations of these possible futures.
MINDS AND BODIES
Having considered the Superhuman and the Transhuman it is now possible
to highlight how the participants felt about the more complex philosophi-
cal territory of the Post/Human. The most pressing theme in this regard
was the question of mind/body duality. Post/Humanism is intimately
concerned with addressing this dualism, often presented as the bedrock on
which conceptions of the human rest. Indeed, while discussing enhance-
ments with the participants, Descartes’s ghost was always near, with many
articulating some formulation of this philosophical perennial. In fact, for
most respondents selfhood was situated in the mind rather than the body.
Indeed, the body was variously described as “a great big machine” (Rogue,
FM, 27, C), a “physical shell” or “vehicle” (The Invalid, M, 37, R)) or even
a “carcass” (Midi, M, 30, R). The body was even presented as.
An evolutionary dead-end…human-body evolution is driven by having to

adapt to the environment but humans have reached the stage where we can
control the environment so humans aren’t going to evolve anymore physically.
The only way is with the mind. Ergon Cube (M, 34, ))
This emphasis on the mind rather than the body helps to explain another
interesting trend in the responses whereby participants self-identified as
194 S. JEFFERY
“readers” (a pursuit of which comics were a sub-set), and a tendency to

view reading as an intellectual pleasure as much as simply entertainment.
This trend appears to be common to readers of superhero comics, as
Brown has noted. Brown also noted another important trend, comparing
the comics put out under the African-American Milestone imprint with
the contemporaneous mainstream output of Marvel, DC, and Image com-
ics. Brown notes that “for many fans the Milestone universe offers a novel
(black) masculine ideal for comic books, one that stresses compassion and
intelligence rather than physical force”.40 While Brown focuses on a very
particular set of readers and comic books, the interviews undertaken here
revealed a similar trend among the British readers who took part in this
project, particularly for committed readers. In keeping with the idea that
superhero bodies were not obtainable ideals but signifiers of super heroic
abilities, respondents expressed more of an interest in minds than bodies.
Note the words of one respondent, who, when asked if he had ever
compared his body to that of superheroes, replied,
No. The only ones I’ve ever, perhaps Batman again, just because of the making
something of himself I find quite an interesting narrative. But not his body in
particular. Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C)
Danger Man (M, 28, C) also provided a couple of clear illustrations of

the celebration of minds over matter in superhero narratives:
There’s a really good story that I liked in Justice League International where
Blue Beetle—Ted Kord—puts on loads of weight. So he doesn’t fit into his cos-
tume anymore. And he starts being picked on, Guy Gardner starts mocking
him saying, ah, this that and the other, “you’re a pudgy guy, fat little guy”. So
he challenges him to a boxing fight…Ted Kord beats him by boxing smarter,
boxing clever. It’s like in Green Lantern 25, not 25 the previous one, where
Guy Gardner had a boxing match with Hal Jordan to see who should be Green
Lantern of Earth. Guy Gardner’s saying how Hal Jordan’s a waste of time and
he’s old while Guy Gardner’s got a young, youthful body. Well once again, these
stories happened at a similar time, Hal Jordan gets one up on him and outlasts
him. Guy Gardner is depicted as being stronger but Hal Jordan beats him by
being smarter. So I can see the bodies but I’m always looking more at the minds.
This emphasis on the mind was not purely about cognition however.
Superhero comics also traded in stories of moral intelligence. Even an
occasional reader such as Shiva (FM, 32, O) shared this interpretation:
Interviewer: Both the hero and the villain have posthuman bodies but what
do you think it is that makes one character use their powers for
good and another one use them for evil?
Shiva: It’s the brain. It’s what they can think about using their power
for. Yes. Thinking of, “oh I can take over the world with my
power” or, it seems like the villain always want some sort posi-
tion for power but the hero doesn’t really care about that, they
care more for the girl or the guy, stuff like that. Not out for their
own gain. So it’s basically what they think, what they want.
For regular and committed readers of superhero comics in particular,

it was important that these were above all “heroic” stories. However, this
relationship to heroism manifested in two forms that we might describe as
reflexive and non-reflexive. In the non-reflexive mode, superheroes com-
prised a genre in which the idea of the hero as an essentially moral figure
was a source of inspiration:
Well I think there’s just, there’s something kind of heartening about there being
these kinds of stories which are about people who do the right thing. Green
Lantern (M, 25, C)
I like the fact they try and better themselves, try and pick themselves up and
work towards a greater goal and have sense of duty, responsibility. Danger Man
(M, 28, C)
Superhero comics, from this perspective, excelled in addressing the

question of what it took to be a hero, to “do the right thing” as Green
Lantern puts it above:
A hero has to, Batman is a hero because there is a genuine, a hero has stuff, it
has self-sacrifice. It is about, it is, self-sacrifice is almost the key to what being
a hero is. It is about laying down your life, it is about being a noble cause,
it is about there being something worth fighting for, it is about what do you
fight for?… And I’d definitely say that what we have in the superhero kind
of comics genre is very much akin to mythological ideas of heroism. Rogue
(FM, 27, C)
For others, this same focus on morality and heroism was a source of
critique. In this self-reflexive mode, the heroism of superheroes became
an irritation. Superman in particular, perhaps because of the character’s
196 S. JEFFERY
positioning as the first and archetypal superhero, was frequently held up as

embodying these problems:
I don’t like Superman because I think he’s boring. He’s, my problem with him as
a hero is he’s too good; he’s perfect. He’s kind, he’s charismatic; the perfect Mom
and apple-pie sort of thing and that’s dull. Slothor (FM, 29, C)
In fact, the majority of readers fell into the self-reflexive category

when it came to the morality of superheroes. As such, rightly or wrongly,
Superman was often held up as a model of simplistic morality and not a
particularly popular character among this group of readers. By contrast,
Batman was frequently invoked as a more interesting character possessed
of a more complex morality:
There’s two examples that immediately spring to mind and one is that kind
of Batman/Superman presence of different kinds of moralities and frequently
clash over it, you know? Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C)
More broadly, reflexive morality was demonstrated by affection for

morally ambiguous heroes and an acknowledgement of the dangers posed
by possessing such powers. As Green Lantern (M, 25, C) put it:
It’s a case of that whole power and responsibility thing um, like I said earlier,
would it be really cool to have like a set of Iron Man armour? Yes. Would it be
incredibly nerve wracking to have that sort of power at your disposal? Probably
as well.
I don’t like my heroes to be martyrs. I want them to do the good thing despite
the fact they don’t want to or despite the fact they’re forced to or flawed with
it, or conflicted. I don’t want them to do it just because they should. Slothor
(FM, 29, C)
Such attitudes can be related to the British context, whereby British cre-
ators were largely responsible for deconstructing and undermining many
of the assumptions and tenets of the superhero narrative and this reflexive
attitude seems to be largely shared by British readers. Readers preferred
a level of moral complexity, or at least to problematise, in their super-
hero narratives. The idea that a super-powered being would be morally
untouchable was both unrealistic for most readers and, more importantly,
uninteresting. But there was also an acknowledgement of another recurring
theme, one rooted in mythos of superheroes—power and responsibility.
This acknowledgement that superhero comics celebrate the mind over

the body is worth highlighting for a number of reasons. Firstly, it goes
against the frequent criticism that superhero comics celebrate physicality
over the mind. Coupled with the data on the superhero body as icono-
graphic, assertions of fascism being embodied in the form of the super-
human become a great deal less tenable. As one of Brown’s interviewees
described it, “it isn’t always the guy with the biggest arms that wins…
it’s the guy with the biggest brain”.41 Secondly, as will be seen in the fol-
lowing section, it chimes well with the fact that most respondents, when
asked which sort of enhancements they would take if at all possible, chose
cognitive rather than physical ones.
TRANSHUMAN MINDS AND IN HUMAN BODIES

While physical enhancements (e.g. prosthetics) were generally viewed
ambivalently, respondents were much more inclined to embrace the
idea of cognitive enhancements. This sympathetic attitude to enhancing
memory and intelligence also chimed with the trend of participants self-
identifying as “readers”:
Well generally I’m more into, like, reading and writing and discussions and
things than actual activity is what I enjoy. So physical enhancement…that’s
not, it doesn’t interest me as much. Ozymandias (M, 26, O)
If that [cognitive enhancements] became available to me I would take it. I’d be

excited to try something like that. Midi (M, 30, R)
Cognitive enhancements were also the most commonly used.

Psychedelic drugs are discussed in more detail below but for now it is
worth noting that two respondents had tried “smart drugs” in the past
while another explained that even in the case of psychedelics.
More or less the reason I still originally took mushrooms was because I felt like I
wanted to be cleverer. Logogram (M, 30, C)
These observations are in line with what is already known about the use
of “smart drugs” such as Adderall, Ritalin and Modafinil. Some estimates
suggest that around 7% of US students have used these prescription drugs
for the purposes of cognitive enhancement while others estimate the figure
198 S. JEFFERY
at 25 %.42 Outside of these drugs, forms of mental training such as yoga

and meditation are commonly used, while allegedly brain-boosting sub-
stances like caffeine, energy drinks and herbal stimulants such as ginseng
or Gingko bilboa are found in ordinary supermarkets.43 That such a market
exists suggests that of all the human enhancements discussed in this book,
it is likely that cognitive enhancements may be adopted most quickly. As
Bostrom and Sandberg note, there are already “many extant regulations
intended to protect and improve cognitive function. Regulation of lead
in paint and tap water…mandatory education, folic acid fortification of
cereals… Insofar as patterns of regulation reflect social preferences, there-
fore, it seems that society shows at least an implicit commitment to better
cognition”.44 Even if this is the case, the widespread adoption of cognitive
enhancers faces several of the conceptual hurdles noted in this chapter, not
least of which is “a change in the view that medicine is only about restor-
ing, not enhancing, capacities, and concomitant changes in the regulatory
regime for medical trials and drug approval”.45
It would be fair to say that for almost all the participant’s intelligence
was prized above physicality, mind over body. A general vision of human-
ity’s “inevitable” evolution into posthuman being thus emerged that
emphasised this cerebral transformation and the body as excess meat.
Often, though not always, this emphasis on the mind over the body made
respondents more amenable to the idea of enhancement, a position neatly
summed up in the following quote:
It’s the sense of self. It doesn’t matter really what the container is, consciousness
and the self, the concept of self, I think is what makes us human rather than the
body, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s in a computer somewhere or some nano-
bots, it’s still a human being to me. Midi (M, 30, R)
BOUNDARY DISSOLUTIONS: REALITY AND FICTION

It has already been established that superhero comics are not generally read
as representational in the sense of directly reflecting a posthuman worlds.
Moreover, humanist distinctions between mind and body or the natural and
the artificial largely remained in place for most respondents. Nevertheless,
just as Post/Humanism represents a “fictive theory”, or a cyborgian fusion of
“social fact and science fiction”, so, on closer inspection, did the lines between
the participants’ perceptions of reality and fiction prove to be more porous
than at first appeared, opening up the possibility of at least some Post/Human
blurring of categorical distinctions. At the simplest level, there was a general

consensus that yesterday’s science fiction often becomes today’s science fact,
an idea that was most often put forward in quite matter-of-fact terms:
Everything starts out as science fiction doesn’t it? Ergon Cube (M 34, C)
It is the thing of science fiction; the fact that it’s becoming reality is absolutely
fantastic as far as I’m concerned. I’m absolutely fascinated by it. The Invalid
(M, 37, R)
This apparent acceptance that what separates science fiction from science
fact is not a question of reality but temporality helps to make sense of the
commonly shared idea that a posthuman future was inevitable, or simply a
matter of time. But there is some evidence that Transhumanism will blur
these categories still further. A 2006 interdisciplinary meeting convened
by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to address
human enhancement ends with the suggestion that the AAAS “bring scien-
tists to the table with science-fiction writers and/or Hollywood producers”
because of their expertise in imaginative thought experiments about the
narrative consequences of human enhancement and “feedback from such
groups might help to flesh out interesting new dynamics to address”.46
This kind of blurring of the line between social fact and science fic-
tion is typical of Post/Humanist critical theory of course. More abstractly,
the line between reality and fiction was blurred in the present by what
might be described as an affective or emotional reality to their reading
experience. Howe points out that following the introduction of the char-
acter Kitty Pryde to the X-Men in 1980, young readers began writing to
Marvel asking how they could be her boyfriend.47 These younger readers
wished to cross the boundary between real life and the comic book page.
Although the readers who took part in this study were all adults, there
were still expressions of this ontological instability. And here it is expressed
specifically about superheroes:
It’s another cliché but they are a friend of yours aren’t they? You know Peter
Parker. He’s a friend of yours. The Flash (M, 32, C)
The appeal for me of Peter Parker—this is going to sound the most geeky thing
you’ve probably ever heard, is that he was sometimes more like a real person than
many real people to me because I know that character so well…you feel as if he’s
more like a best friend to you than anything else. Emerald Warrior (M, 24, C)
200 S. JEFFERY
CONCLUSION
In keeping with the previous chapter’s findings that respondents did not
as a rule make a connection between the Superhuman and the prospect of
actual human enhancement, so too was the philosophy of Transhumanism
largely unknown to respondents. Respondents were aware of certain
technologies, notably prosthetics, but such technologies were not pulled
together under the rubric of human enhancement. Instead, the emphasis
was on restitution and function. Perhaps because of this emphasis on func-
tion over recreational or aesthetic enhancements, respondents expressed
several concerns relating to the possible applications of such technologies,
whether in the form of super-soldiers or the exacerbation of already exist-
ing social divisions. However, despite these concerns, a posthuman future
was also seen as inevitable, and a curious lack of agency in relation to this
“inevitable”—and markedly Military-Industrial—posthuman future was
in evidence.
The collective vision of posthumanity that might be patched together
from the interview analysis is curiously pessimistic for the most part, not
to mention paradoxical. Respondents argued for the necessity of function
but at the same time these functions support the very economic and social
structures that give rise to concerns about the use of these technologies.
Rarely expressed was the idea that these technologies might result in over-
coming such economic and military-industrial concerns. Put another way,
rarely were these technologies viewed as capable of overcoming the cur-
rent status of humanity.
The emphasis on function and restitution suggests a techne that encom-
passes not only material scientific practice, but also the rationalisation of
thought as well, something akin to what Habermas warns of as the “instru-
mentalization” of human nature.48 Though suspicious of the abuse of
these technologies by those with economic or political power, it remained
difficult to imagine their application through any other lens. The spectre
of the eugenicist Perfect Body and the Military-Industrial ghost of post-
human future seemed to haunt the imagination. It is worth remember-
ing in this regard that the converging technologies that Transhumanists
believe will usher in our posthuman future are largely presented in terms
of their economic and industrial benefits rather than their capacity for
radical human enhancement outside of Transhumanist writings. For
instance, when the National Nanotechnological Initiative was announced
under President Clinton, a 2000 White House press release was entitled
“Leading to the Next Industrial Revolution”. As Schummer puts it, “the

visionary powerbox has largely been reduced to economic promises”.49
Moreover, as was seen in the chapter on the Military-Industrial Body, even
the “visionary powerbox” of Transhumanist thought largely rests on a
libertarian vision of unfettered capitalism.
If any connection exists between readers’ relationship with superhero
comics and their general views on human enhancement, it may lie in the
way that respondents largely viewed the superhero genre as a humanist
narrative. The superhero’s abilities and enhancements were secondary to
their humanity. The humanity of the superhero was also related to their
morality. While superhero comics were not, as discussed in previous chap-
ters, paired consciously with Transhumanism, readers still found narratives
in which the superhuman struggles with the moral responsibilities of their
enhancements/abilities preferable. The question of morality was a matter
of intelligence for respondents, and intelligence was prized as a both a
personal trait and as a quality in superheroes. This emphasis on mind over
matter, in life and in comic books, also connected with the way respon-
dents expressed more interest and sympathy for cognitive enhancements
than corporeal ones.
In this way, the Cartesian dualism between mind and matter that so
much Post/Humanism problematises was clearly in evidence. Nevertheless,
although respondents identified the “self” with the mind, it was the body,
and the accompanying physical and temporal limitations, that gave mean-
ing to being human for many. As such, the mind/matter binary was more
blurred than at first appeared. Clearer for most respondents was a divide
between the natural and the artificial. These findings suggest that the goals
of Transhumanism are some way from being adopted by the general pub-
lic. While few respondents expressed religious objection to technological
enhancement, the combination of secular morality, a largely firm distinc-
tion between the natural and the artificial, and meaning derived from the
body’s limitations and mortality, made the idea of human enhancement
problematic for most respondents. Again, the exception to this rule was
cognitive enhancements which respondents were largely sympathetic
towards in theory and occasionally in practice.
At a more abstract level, the divide between fiction and reality was
often more porous. Respondents expressed a shared notion that science-
fiction became science-fact in manner similar to the “inevitability” of a
posthuman future discussed in the previous chapter. Readers also related
to characters in a manner that had its own emotional reality. This is to
202 S. JEFFERY
say that superheroes were, in some sense, their “friends”. Nowhere were
the blurring of categorical distinctions between fiction and reality more
pronounced than for those readers who were drawn to the works of Grant
Morrison and, to a lesser extent, Alan Moore. The next chapter con-
siders the relationship between creators, texts and readers as a form of
assemblage. In so doing it pulls together the cultural history presented in
Section Two and the interview findings of the last three chapters to sug-
gest a Post/Human model of text-reader relations.
NOTES
1. McKibben, B. (2003) Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, p. 190.
2. Ibid., p. 160.
3. Hanson, M. J. (1999). Indulging anxiety: Human enhancement from a
protestant perspective. Christian Bioethics, 5(2), p. 125.
4. Lee, C. J., Scheufele, D. A., & Lewenstein, B. V. (2005) Public attitudes
toward emerging technologies examining the interactive effects of cognitions
and affect on public attitudes toward nanotechnology. Science Communication,
27(2) p. 261.
5. Ibid., p. 244.
6. Nelkin, D. and Lindee, M. S. (2004) The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a
Cultural Icon. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
7. Bainbridge, The Transhuman Heresy, p. 4.
8. Lilley, S. (2012). Transhumanism and Society: the social debate over human
enhancement. Springer Science & Business Media.
9. See Coenen, C., Schuijff, M., Smits, M., Klaassen, P., Hennen, L., Rader,
M., and Wolbring, G. (2009). Human Enhancement Study. European
Parliament Report [online] Available from: http://www.europarl.europa.
eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/stoa/2009/417483/DG-IPOL-STOA_
ET(2009)417483_EN.pdf [Accessed 20/12/2013].
10. Bostrom, N. and Sandberg, A. (2011) The Future of Human Identity: Report
commissioned by the UK’s Government Office for Science [online] Available from:
http://www.nickbostrom.com/views/identity.pdf [Accessed: 15/06/2015].
11. Lee et al., Public attitudes toward emerging technologies examining the interac-
tive effects of cognitions and affect on public attitudes toward nanotechnology.
12. Lassen, J., & Jamison, A. (2006) Genetic technologies meet the public the
discourses of concern. Science, Technology & Human Values, 31(1) pp. 8–28.
13. Milburn, Nanowarriors: Military Nanotechnology and Comic Books, p. 85.
14. Lee et al., Public attitudes toward emerging technologies examining the interac-
tive effects of cognitions and affect on public attitudes toward nanotechnology.
15. Ibid., p. 660.
16. Swartz, L., & Watermeyer, B. (2008). Cyborg anxiety: Oscar Pistorius and
the boundaries of what it means to be human. Disability & Society, 23(2),
pp. 187–190.
17. Mueller, J. S., Melwani, S., & Goncalo, J. A. (2011). The bias against cre-
ativity why people desire but reject creative ideas. Psychological science,
0956797611421018.
18. Evans, W. (2007). Singularity Warfare: A Bibliometric Survey of Militarized
Transhumanism. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 16(1) pp. 161–65.
19. Milburn, Nanowarriors: Military Nanotechnology and Comic Books.
20. Lee et al., Public attitudes toward emerging technologies examining the inter-
active effects of cognitions and affect on public attitudes toward nanotechnol-
ogy, p. 248.
21. Ibid.
22. Evans, Singularity Warfare: A Bibliometric Survey of Militarized
Transhumanism, p. 164.
23. Bates, B. R. (2005). Public culture and public understanding of genetics: a
focus group study. Public Understanding of Science, 14(1), pp. 47–65.
24. Lassen, J., & Jamison, A. Genetic technologies meet the public the discourses of
concern, p. 9.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 26.
27. Lilley, Transhumanism and Society: the social debate over human enhance-
ment, p. 70.
28. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, p. 92.
29. McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.
30. Lassen, J., & Jamison, A. Genetic technologies meet the public the discourses of
concern, p. 9.
31. Johnson, L., and Youngman, P. (2011) Are We Ready for Nanotechnology?
Redefining the Human in Public Policy. International Journal of Humanities
and Social Science 1(17) p. 254.
32. Ibid., p. 255.
33. Rifkin, J. (2005). Ultimate therapy: Commercial eugenics in the 21st cen-
tury. Harvard International Review, 27(1), p. 44.
34. Lilley, Transhumanism and Society: the social debate over human enhance-
ment, p. 62.
35. Ibid., p. 67.
36. Ellul, J. (1964) The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books.
37. Ibid., p. 14.
38. Ibid., p. 138.
40. Brown, Black Superheroes: Milestone Comics and Their Fans. Jackson, MS:
University of Mississippi Press, p. 198 (emphasis added).
41. Ibid., p. 168.
204 S. JEFFERY
42. Greeley H., Sahakian B., Harris J., Kessler R., Gazzaniga M., Campbell P.
and Farah M (2008), “Towards responsible use of neuroenhancing drugs by
the healthy “, Nature. 456, pp. 702–705.
43. Bostrom, N. and Sandberg, A. (2009) Cognitive enhancement: Methods,
ethics, regulatory challenges. Science and Engineering Ethics, 15(3)
pp. 311–341.
44. Ibid., p. 331.
45. Ibid., p. 332.
46. Williams, E. A. (2006, June). Good, better, best: The human quest for enhance-
ment. In Summary Report of an Invitational Workshop Convened by the
Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program. AAAS. [online]
http://shr.aaas.org/projects/human_enhance/pdfs/HESummaryReport.
pdf [Accessed: 07/11/2013] pp. 19.
47. Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
48. Habermas, J. (2003) The Future of Human Nature.
49. Schummer, J. (2005) Societal and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology’:
Meanings, Interest Groups, and Social Dynamics [online] Available from:
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v8n2/schummer.html
[Accessed: 15/06/2015] n. p.
Towards a Theory of Reader-Text
Assemblages
While the previous chapters addressed readers’ views on the Superhuman,

Transhuman and Post/Human in turn, this penultimate chapter develops
the notion of the reader-text relationship in Post/Humanist terms as a
Deleuzo-Guattarian “assemblage”. Section One described how theories of
audience-text relations frequently hinged on a binary opposition between
audience and text. Later authors argued that this model’s dichotomy was
simplistic and that the comics industry, for example, should instead be
seen as engaging in a dialogic encounter with readers. Brown suggests
that this is a sympathetic relationship rather than a struggle for power and
meaning.1 For Barker, there is a “symbiotic relationship” between produc-
ers of formulaic narratives (such as superhero comics) and their consum-
ers: “A symbiote is an organism which lives in a relationship of mutual
dependence with another. Although it is possible to study it separately,
any full account of its structure and its behaviour depends upon studying
it as an organism-in-relation”.2 This book proposes reframing Barker’s
organic metaphor of the symbiote in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms as an
assemblage. While the metaphor of the symbiote presents producer and
consumer as a mostly harmonious whole, when considered as assemblage,
the relationship between these two parts is itself constantly forming new
assemblages: reader AND text AND creator AND history AND science
AND so on. This chapter would like to go some way to articulating this
concept more thoroughly.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_10
206 S. JEFFERY
As such, it is worth briefly reiterating our terms here. As Brauns describes,

Deleuze and Guattari understand the making of bodies “to occur on a
‘plane of immanence’ in which things—objects, beings—are understood
not in terms of eternal and immutable essences, but in terms of relations
and affect”.3 Motivated by positive desire, human bodies have affected their
environment through the creation of tools and technologies, organisations
and institutions, and symbolic representations; all of which establish myriad
new relations with other bodies. Deleuze and Guattari utilise the concept of
the “Body without Organs” (rather than the organism described by medical
discourse; the body-with-organs) to suggest the limits of what a body can
do. The Body without Organs seeks to establish new relations because the
more relations a body has the more it becomes capable of doing. These rela-
tions can be both physical-with the biological realm—but also non-physical,
deriving from a body’s psychology, cultural context, or the social world.
These relations affect the body and how the body can affect other bodies.
To reiterate, an assemblage is any amount of “things” or bits of “things”
gathered into a single context. A comic book is an assemblage, capable
of bringing about any number of effects, and of containing assemblages
within itself and forming new assemblages with readers, libraries, church
hall jumble sales, bonfires and so on. The superhero is also an assemblage,
as is the reader, the corporation and creators. For Deleuze and Guattari,
bodies are “assemblages” whose “function or potential or ‘meaning’
becomes entirely dependent on which other bodies or machines it forms
an assemblage with”.4 It is important to remember that each component
of the assemblage is itself an assemblage, so the comic book must also
be understood as machinic-assemblages. In Deleuze and Guattari’s own
words, “the only question is which other machine the literary machine can
be plugged into in order to work”.5
Rejecting the idea of the book as a representation of reality, Deleuze
and Guattari present the book as a machine, as something which does
things rather than signifies things, an assemblage that “connect[s] bod-
ies up with other bodies, affects, and social formations in many differ-
ent directions”.6 Viewed as assemblages, texts become a mix of discrete
parts capable of producing any number of effects rather than an organized,
coherent whole that produces a single dominant reading. The concept of
assemblages has implications for the kinds of analyses of readers and texts
examined in chapter two, “The Rhizome of Comic Book Culture”, because
those readings viewed both readers and texts not as assemblages but as dis-
crete, separate entities. Thus, many of their conclusions rested on binary
TOWARDS A THEORY OF READER-TEXT ASSEMBLAGES 207
divisions: between readers/texts or producers/consumers. Similarly, the

ideological analysis of the Superhuman tended to fall into a legitimation/
criticism dichotomy (superheroes are progressive/superheroes and fascistic),
while the relationship and susceptibility of readers to these legitimate/critical
ideologies was perceived as a matter of passivity/activity.
The findings presented by this book strongly suggest that such dichot-
omous thinking is limited in its ability to conceptualise and theorise comic
books and their readers. This chapter begins by highlighting some of these
limitations before presenting evidence for the ways in which reader-text
relations might be reconfigured in terms of assemblages, positioning the
body in a relational field quite different from the discursively passive body
that is inscribed by environment and social context, or a subjectivity that
is textually determined.
READER-TEXT ASSEMBLAGES
Comics fandom involves more than just reading comic books, also incor-
porating a variety of social, critical and interpretive practices. This network
of inter and extra-textual practices extends to the creation of fanzines, dis-
cussion groups and websites, the organising of conventions and the process
of collecting. For Jenkins, this often places fans in opposition to the pro-
ducers and owners of the copyrighted texts they are poaching from and re-
purposing.7 In a related context, Woo points out that, “while ‘activity’ may
be entirely individualized, practices are inescapably collective. Even when
pursued alone, they depend on a dense, multiply articulated assemblage
of know-how, beliefs, and material resources; they are social through and
through”.8 As such, like the Deleuzian body, “goods—including cultural
commodities and media texts—are not truly ‘themselves’ until they are
put to use within some social practice”.9 Woo thus calls for reconceptualis-
ing “media studies’ traditional objects of analysis (producers, media, and
audiences) in terms of human beings’ entanglement with social practices
(production practices, mediating practices, and audience practices)”,10
pulling the study of media closer to social-scientific frameworks. This chap-
ter offers Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage as a step in
this direction. If we take comic book culture as a rhizome, such activities
may be reformulated as acts of deterritorialisation in which “the creator’s
rights are superseded by the reader’s desire… [but] each is a form of pro-
duction, each is an action of desire, and all are connected as a ‘machine of
machine’”.11 In the rhizome there is no hierarchy, each territorialisation is
208 S. JEFFERY
only a temporary takeover. It is no longer a question of opposition between

fan and producer, and nor is the text distinct from the rhizome. The comic
book “forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of
the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the
world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in
turn deterritorializes itself in the world”.12 Comic book continuity facili-
tates just such a “deterritorialisation of the world” for its readers.
What would it mean to talk of a reader-text assemblage in comic book
culture? Certainly it resembles the symbiotic relationship of “mutual depen-
dence” (or rather “interdependence”) described by Barker, encouraging an
understanding of the “organism-in-relation”. Outside of comics studies,
Behrenshausen13 has noted a shift in video games studies’ from formalist
accounts of the games themselves towards an emphasis on active audiences.
Noting the criticisms of active audience theory, Behrenshausen argues for
“an approach to video gaming situations as assemblages”, which pays
more attention to the ways in which particular gaming situations privilege
certain connections and relations while discouraging others; “the ways in
which they make certain relations possible and others impossible”.14 In film
studies, Rizzo has gestured towards a conception of viewing-assemblages,
where affects such as dread and suspense cut across the body of the film to
the body of the viewer,15 while the film theorist Patricia MacCormack16 has
argued that the viewing-assemblage formed between certain horror films
and viewer then is capable of opening new pathways of desire. MacCormack
argues that watching such images, submitting to “cinemasochism” can be
a catalyst towards new forms of becoming. MacCormack describes how
“spectator and screen form a machinic assemblage…[a] system of con-
nection by which the components perturb and affect each other as they
are perturbed and affected…The territory is remapped, deterritorialization
leading to a re-composition. But the machine structure itself, the act of
watching, remains the same”.17 The machine-structure of comics, the act
of reading, also remains the same even as the comic and reader deterritori-
alise and re-purpose each other.
READER-TEXT ASSEMBLAGES AND THE SUPERHERO COMIC

AS “BODY GENRE”
As has been shown in the preceding chapters, for many of the readers
who took part in this study, the human aspect of the superhuman played
a central role in their enjoyment of these narratives and allowed for an
emotional connection to the characters. Indeed, there is a soap-operatic

element to superhero narratives that was recognised by many:
I think it’s very much, its melodrama and its soap opera but the point about it
is you’ve got to start with a real emotional base and then just sky-rocket with it.
And that’s why I think something like X-Men works really well. Rogue (FM,
27, C)
Wrestling is soap opera for men. In the same sort of way you’ve got your super-
hero comics which are a different form of soap opera. The Flash (M, 32, C)
For film theorist Linda Ruth Williams, the film genres of melodrama,
horror and pornography can be considered “body genres” in that they
focus on the corporeal: tears, blood, and semen.18 As the focus of this
book has made clear, superhero comics may similarly be considered a body
genre. The soap opera elements of the genre certainly align it with melo-
drama, while the bodily transformations and wide variety of mutants and
monsters display a clear and acknowledged link to the horror genre. There
are perhaps even arguments to be made about the erotic potential of the
superhuman body, though this was not evidenced by any of the inter-
viewees here. Williams argues that it is not just a focus on bodily concerns
at the level of narrative that defines a “body genre” but also its desired
effect upon the body of the viewer. Horror seeks to induce a state of ten-
sion, sweating palms, hair prickling at the back of the neck. Melodrama to
induce tears (hence the oddly violent term “tear jerkers”). Pornography’s
desired effect is obvious.
In such instances where the experience is of “strong sensations of anxi-
ety, suspense, dread, fascination and excitement across the body of the
viewer”, it becomes “difficult to know where the film ends and the view-
ing body begins. While the film and viewer do not become one body,
they are nonetheless connected through an affective field forming a kind
of cinematic assemblage”.19 Ian Hague’s work on comics and the senses
contributes to this understanding of the reading assemblage in his obser-
vation that “reading comics is in fact a very overtly physical experience
that takes place in multiple sensory modalities simultaneously”.20 Hague
calls attention to the materiality of both comic book and reader, draw-
ing attention to how “whole bodies are involved in the performance of
the work”.21 Although Hague does not invoke assemblage theory the
frameworks are complimentary in both urging that attention be paid to
environmental and sensory factors—the light in the room, the eyes of the
210 S. JEFFERY
reader, the material form of the comic itself—in determining what the
reading-assemblage can do and become. Woo also draws attention to the
ways that reading comics moves beyond a simply cognitive or visual activ-
ity to become a material practice, as is the cataloguing and preserving of
comics.22
The reader responses suggested the formation of an affective field that
connected the comics-assemblages and reader-assemblage to former a
reader-text assemblage. Respondents were aware of this process even if
they did not use Deleuzian terms:
Certainly for me, you can sit and play a computer game or something and it
doesn’t you know, that’s the whole beauty of it, you are there. Or if you’re watch-
ing a movie or reading a book you’re not aware of your physical shell sitting
there doing whatever you’re actually doing. Your mind is actually within that
thing. The Invalid (M, 37, R)
I consider it part of my identity so yeah there is, it’s part of who I am, I don’t
know how large a part I’d necessarily say it is. Probably a significant chunk, I
wouldn’t say the majority or anything but it’s, it’s part of me. Green Lantern
(M, 25, C)
Peter Parker’s probably affected my character in some ways. I’d say, I know he’s
not a superhero but Doctor Who and Peter Parker are probably where I kind of
got my characteristics from or I’ve liked things about them and they’ve helped
shape me. Emerald Warrior (M, 24, C)
These quotes illustrate how the reading-assemblage is a verb rather

than a noun. Readers became one with their comics, their minds were
within the text while the text was also a within—“a part of”—the reader.
When such an assemblage allows desire to flow in different directions, it
produces “new possibilities and potentials…brief lines of movement away
from organization and stratification”.23 Sometimes these assemblages
allow such a deterritorialisation to occur, as in these instances:
It’s like any book. Fiction influences your life and your worldview all the time…
[The comic-book] Day-tripper really affected the way I thought about life and
its value and how significant little moments are. Slothor (FM, 29, C)
I like…the idea of being able to experience other things and different bodies; to
see out of different eyes. As someone who reads stories, and all a story ever is is
seeing out of someone else’s eyes. Rogue (FM, 27, C)
Or, in our terminology, forming an assemblage with the story in order

to become other. As Joe 90 (M, 45, O) said, speaking about reading sci-
ence fiction generally, it was “about the speculation I think. And the ideas,
different ideas about reality.” Such deterritorialisations can be emotional
as well as intellectual:
I like the Return of Superman because it just had such a good storyline. And I
felt such a positive feeling through reading it like, yeah, he’s back…[Another]
one would be homecoming with the last issue of Kyle Rayner’s Green Lantern…
because of the emotional resonances this had for me at the time I just always
thought it’s one of my favourite stories. Danger Man (M, 28, C)
In a different register, Maigret describes how some stories allowed

readers to analyse their own experiences and memories, citing a reader
who was prompted by an issue of Daredevil dealing with drugs to “express
his emotions after his cousin had died of an overdose”.24 Such examples
speak to the positive aspects of the assemblage in allowing new becomings;
in Maigret’s example, a release of emotional tension.
READING-ASSEMBLAGES, MATERIALITY AND SOCIAL

NETWORKS
Bratich has argued that “the field of audience studies goes on because its
objective is a fugitive”,25 which is to say that the notion that “the audi-
ence” is a theoretical concept. Comic book readership cannot be under-
stood as a monolithic whole. For instance, Pustz’s26 study of comic book
culture makes the distinction between “fan boys” and “true believers”.
That is, fans of mainstream (generally superhero) comics and fans of
alternative comics. Even beyond this aesthetic “divide” it is possible to
distinguish, as Woo does, between types of collector such as “completists,
hobbyists, and speculators”.27 Meanwhile, Gabilliet highlights the fact that
while many fans are collectors, not all collectors are necessarily fans.28 The
respondents who took part in this study demonstrated this multiplicity
of comics practices. In an interesting development, especially given the
Post/Humanist concerns of this book, new Information Technologies
were seen to impact upon comics’ fandom. Some collectors used special
software to catalogue their collections of individual issues, while some
had eschewed hard-copies altogether as in this exchange with Dutch
(M, O, 32):
212 S. JEFFERY
Dutch: People have started reading them on their phones.

Interviewer: What, at work?
Dutch: Yeah. Because you get free ones on this Comixology app
and you can download the first issue of shitloads of comics
and you can buy them for, and they’re between 80p and 3
pounds, for a new one. Yeah. People have started reading
them, but how often I don’t know.
Interviewer: Why is that then? Because you work there and word spread, or?
Dutch: Yeah. I told a couple of people about it. Yes. It’s really good
because you don’t have to, well they’re free for a start and
you can just read them wherever you want. So when you are
in the toilet at work or on the bus or whatever. You don’t
have to carry comics around; your phone is always in your
pocket.
Red Hulk (M, 20, C) also preferred digital formats, saying that he had:
No collection really. I tend just to recycle most of them. I scan the comics for my
own use later so I often don’t have much use for the paper copy.
Even among the majority of respondents who preferred the material

form of the comic book there were clear preferences between reading
single issues and reading them in collected form as trade paperbacks.
Although Woo doesn’t invoke assemblage theory directly he notes that
“with the examples of ‘slabbed’ collectors’ comics and graphic novel /
trade paperback reprints”,29 not to mention the digital platforms cited
above, “even the comic book itself is not a stable object, as it is trans-
formed by its enrolment in the practices of comics fans”.30 The following
quotes illustrate both of these preferential differences for trade paperbacks
and single issues respectively:
To be honest I don’t really like the individual issues in terms of like, as a tactile
thing, I don’t like the paper, I’d much prefer the paper in you know, for example
like my Sandmans which are leather bound kind of books. I much prefer some-
thing like that. Rogue (FM, 27, C)
I don’t know, it’s the feel of it as well. You’re actually holding the comic in
your hand; it’s got old adverts in it. You’ve got letter columns and stuff. I
really like reading the letter columns. You don’t get those in trades. Ergon
Cube (M, 32, C)
The materiality of the comic itself was important to the impressions

readers formed of the superhero comic. The new assemblages opened
up by plugging the comics-assemblage into new technologies and forms
results in the formation of further assemblages.
Beyond the question of materiality of the object, Ergon Cube’s state-
ment also highlights how the meaning and practice of fandom differed
from respondent to respondent and how not all fans engage in the same
levels of fan activity. 31 Ergon Cube saw himself as being part of a broader
comic community through reading the letters pages of comic books
although he was not actively part of one. In fact, this was not uncommon
among the respondents, as in the following quote:
I’m not that clued in to the comics’ world if that makes sense. So if Alan Moore’s
going to be working on a new Spider-Man I won’t know about it until six
months after it happens and I’ll just be browsing one day and be like, wow! I had
no idea that happened. I guess it’s because I don’t really know anyone else who
reads comics. So it’s just something I enjoy doing but I don’t get a chance to talk
about it so I don’t get any extra pieces of information. Logogram (M, 30, C)
The writing and publishing of letters in comic books has been described
as “a process of community formation”,32 and as shown in chapter two,
“The Rhizome of Comic Book Culture”, the letter columns of EC and
Marvel Comics in particular were central to the formation of the fan cul-
tures surrounding them. In some sense these letter columns prefigure
the “virtual” communities of today. Several respondents pointed to blogs
such as iFanboy and Newsarama; web series like A Comic Book Orange;
and online message boards like Warren Ellis’s Whitechapel and the now
defunct mailing-list for Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles as places where
they could either discuss or hear about comic books and related news.
Other respondents were involved in actual physical networks, as in the
two quotes below:
I seem to be at the top of it which is really bad because I’m crap but a lot of the
friends I have that read comics have the same problem I have which is, we’re out
in the sticks so, we borrow a lot from each other. Slothor (FM, 27, C)
I’ve got Tim next door. He’s got a lot of graphic novels so I borrow from him.
My friends, because they are kind of expensive and we are all skint, it’s more a
kind of, everybody reads everybody else’s collection, so I’ve got my friends as well
as obviously going to the library quite regularly. Rogue (FM, 27, C)
214 S. JEFFERY
As can be seen, for many of the readers interviewed here the practice
of comic book culture involved the creation of networks of communica-
tion with other people. Botzakis has also observed the centrality of “con-
nections with social worlds” and ongoing discussions with other readers
among adult readers of comic books.33 What assemblage theory adds to
this observation is to consider the role that the materiality of the comic
book plays in these connections; how different mediums (single issue,
trade paperback, digital) and outlets (comic shop, book shop, website)
transform the nature and direction of these social networks. As Dutch
states above, the availability of comics on mobile phones has led to his
work colleagues, who would not ordinarily encounter comics, reading
them in these forms. Similarly, the upswing in female readers of manga in
recent years has largely been facilitated by the availability of these titles in
bookshops rather than traditional, and sometimes aggressively masculine,
comic shops.
CORPOREAL AND INCORPOREAL TRANSFORMATIONS;

TATTOOING AND GEEK IDENTITIES
If a particular assemblage is repeated too often through habit the compo-
nents of that assemblage can become stratified and coded.34 A reterrito-
rialisation occurs. The process of building an identity as a comics reader
provided a good example of this. Several respondents were happy to iden-
tify as a “geek”, for example Slothor’s (FM, 29, C) touching admission
that, “it’s quite nice having a geek husband and a geek wife” because they
could read each other’s comics. What it means to be a geek was rarely
defined explicitly but was not simply a matter of reading comic books. As
Midi (M, 30, R) put it, up until recently, “I wasn’t a comic book reader but
I was still a fairly geeky guy”. Rather, it appeared to depend on a fondness
for a variety of mediums (such as video games in Midi’s case) and genres
that shared the cultural illegitimacy of comic books:
Interviewer: And what about um, I suppose before comics, did you have
other, I don’t want to use the word geek necessarily—
Green Lantern: I know what you mean though, I don’t know but as you can
see over there here’s a rather substantial collection of Dr
Who DVDs. Those are actually, most of those I’ve bought
fairly recently but I’ve got, I’ve pretty much got the entire
run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the original series
and DS9, which was a big thing for me. A ton of Star Wars
books which I was reading before I got into comics. So yeah,
I was, a bit of a science fiction fan. More science fiction than
fantasy but that kind of thing.
The geek assemblage formed by reader and medium provided a sort of

deterritorialisation, allowing either escape or entertainment. This pleasure
often lay in the accumulation of knowledge about the medium, a point
observed in Pustz’s study of comic book culture. The Flash (M, 33, C)
called himself up on his knowledge of obscure comic book lore for
instance:
If you get Ghost Rider and suddenly it turns out that Zarathos is Johnny
Blaze’s dad and that’s how he can possess him because they share a bloodline,
who gives a fuck? Seriously, who gives a fuck? Are you going to go up to someone
and say did you know this about Zarathos? And they’ll go, “I don’t know who
Zarathos is. I don’t even know who Ghost Rider is!” That’s how geeky I am.
You’re struggling with Zarathos.
In several respects, fans are essential to continuity structure. As

Ndalianis observes, it is the reader’s memories that serve “as a databank
of complex, interconnected, and retrievable chunks of information”.35
The reader, in effect, “is an integral part of the superhero genre…embed-
ded in the hypertimelines of a superhero story”, and actively participating
“in a game-like conversation that’s about the construction of the rules of
the superhero genre across media: its various points of origin, its points
of divergence, and its radical transformations”.36 The website of Chris
Tolworthy, for example, engages in a painstaking analysis of the erosion of
real time in the Marvel Universe, initially a key feature of its sixties pub-
lications. Tolworthy finds the culprit for this erosion within continuity in
the form of Franklin Richards, eldest son of the Fantastic Four’s Reed and
Sue Richards, by way of an impressively torturous manipulation of arcane
comics lore.37 Often this involvement is so deep that, “over the course of
years and scores of issues”, these fictional worlds “become part of readers’
lives”.38
As Wolk points out, the Marvel and DC Universes have grown so com-
plex that they have led to what he calls “superhero meta-comics” aimed
at “‘super readers’: readers familiar enough with enormous numbers of
old comics that they’ll understand what’s really being discussed in the
story”.39 Nor is this just one continuity. Jenkins suggests that contemporary
216 S. JEFFERY
comic readers have become accustomed to holding multiple universes in

their heads40 while Collins has argued that this breeds a form of “hyper-
consciousness”41 (an appropriately comic book like term). The readers/
viewers of superhero narratives have become the keepers of the genre’s
history via their discussions, fanzines, blogs and wikia pages. Once again,
the reader and text form an assemblage, from which continuity emerges.
Nevertheless, the respondents in this study identified a negative side to
geek culture, in particular the emphasis on continuity. This negative vision
is perhaps a good example of what happens when the geek assemblage is
repeated too often so that the components of that assemblage become
stratified and reterritorialised. These geeks were said to overemphasise
obscure points of continuity and the collecting of comics and accompany-
ing merchandise. For most respondents however, the pleasure of the story
took precedence over these issues. In this sense the desire of “bad geeks”
to keep continuity in place represents a blockage in the flows of desire the
comic book assemblage can facilitate. For this reason, The Flash describes
how his life as a comics-reading assemblage has changed for the better
even though he has destratified the geek assemblage to allow new assem-
blages to be formed:
The Flash: I was a geeky teenager with excessive amount of time on my

hands. Now I’m a geeky adult with additional responsibilities
and other commitments who can’t afford the time to commit
but I’m still that geeky—
Interviewer: But that doesn’t seem like a sad event? Something to
commiserate?
The Flash: No. I think that’s human nature. I would say it’s the other
way round. If I was still, if I was that 32-year-old who was still
a geeky teenager then that implies there’s something not quite
right I think. Each to their own and all that but I’m glad I’m
not living in my mother’s basement. I’m glad I can talk to girls.
I’m glad I can look you in the eye when I speak to you.
Interviewer: Do you think there’s a perception of people who read comics as
that sort of living in your mother’s basement-?
The Flash: Yeah, of course. And unfortunately I think it’s quite fair and
quite apt. It’s a stereotype, but it’s a stereotype because it exists.
If becoming-geek involved a (potentially hazardous) incorporeal trans-

formation; a symbolic category that was nevertheless capable of changing
a body’s social relations (e.g. forming new social networks), the comic
reading-assemblage occasionally produced real material effects upon the
bodies of readers. While it has been shown that most of the respondents
were loath to enhance themselves with technology, several had tattoos.
The Flash, for example, sported the window of Dr. Strange’s Sanctum
Santorum on his left rear shoulder, a Ghost Rider medallion on his right
shoulder, and the Spawn symbol on his left pectoral and a Spider-Man
icon on his left thigh among others. Ergon Cube had Batman and the
puzzle box from the horror movie Hellraiser while Slothor wore a goblin
from the graphic novel Serenity Rose. In this sense the reading-assemblage
truly had resulted in a movement towards a disarticulated body, trans-
forming skin into canvas. This is particularly interesting if we accept the
notion that the contemporary trend for tattoos and piercing marks “the
vanguard of social-corporeal transgression”,44 in other words the first steps
towards human enhancement. While the majority of respondents did not
embrace the idea of human enhancement for its own sake—comparing
it to cosmetic surgery—the various tattoos sported by several of these
respondents suggested at least some inclination towards enhancement. As
Slothor (FM, 29, C) wondered:
Could you not say that tattooing is cosmetic? But I like tattoos. I like them as
an art form. And I think that’s the main reason why I get them. But I don’t
think the change the fundamentals of things. Right now you can’t tell what
tattoos I have.
Also notable in this respect is Slothor’s admission that “I had [the

X-Men character] Rogue’s hair for most of my teenage years because I thought
it was immense. Interesting colours”. Such a process can work both ways.
While the comic book superhuman could be allowed to territorialise the
body, some bodies could reterritorialise. Emerald Warrior (M, 24, C) pro-
fessed a desire for tattoos but his bodily assemblage had a condition called
keloids which prevented this because his skin over-healed. Nevertheless,
he was still able to poach from comics to make sense of this, although he
still admitted that “the coolness of saying you’ve got a Wolverine-like power
does not really, it doesn’t stay when, you know, you’re wanting to rip your skin
off kind of thing”. These examples are quite general but point to the mate-
rial expressions of the reading-assemblage.
At this juncture it becomes possible to consider in what ways the
specific posthuman bodies presented in this book were/are able to
218 S. JEFFERY
facilitate/prevent new becomings when they from a reading-assem-

blage with readers. For instance, it is likely that many early comics read-
ers would have followed the regime for “becoming-Perfect” laid out by
Charles Atlas. The reading-assemblage formed with the Perfect Body
of the Golden Age Superhuman also seemed to facilitate a “becoming-
patriotic” (consider the hundreds of thousands of copies of Captain
America shipped to US troops each month). That the comics-reading
assemblage could strengthen the will in such ways is of course one criti-
cism that has been levelled at the superhero, but respondents were able
to offer examples of this that were viewed as largely positive:
I’d hope that I’d do the kind of thing that Green Lantern does where he doesn’t
give up and uses his will come what may. I try and do, I try and put my will-
power to the test. This is going to sound really geeky, I try and live without fear.
Green Lantern is almost like a bible to me in that you should just try and do
it, whatever. Forget the consequences, just go gung-ho into it. So yes, they have
affected my life and shaped who I am. Emerald warrior (M, 24, C)
I was hit by a lorry when I was 12. I still consider myself to have a normal body
it’s just one that’s slightly damaged. But when I was 16 I dropped out of college.
I made myself go round, I made myself get better. Most of my physical damage
was something I could overcome with work. My head was bit messed up so I
made myself go out, learn jobs, travel round, pay for myself to travel the world,
to get myself a better stronger rounded individual. I jokingly started calling it
“the Batman method” later but I like the fact that superheroes will try to work
to overcome their problems and try and make something positive out of them.
Danger Man (M, 28, C)
Readers forming an assemblage with the Military-Industrial Body

were also subject to new becomings. While these comics generally pre-
sented a darker picture of posthumanity than the Cosmic Body, they
served a function similar to that which Barker suggested 2000 AD served
for its fans (although this is hardly surprising given their shared creators);
“for those who did take the comic seriously, and allow it to cross over
into other parts of their thinking…the very pessimism and bleakness of
the comic constituted it as a source of hope for the future”.45 Warren
Ellis, who has become something like a poet laureate of the Military-
Industrial body, was particularly praised by respondents for his handling
of posthumanism in the non-superhero comic Transmetropolitan, but
also for his approach to the same issues in his superhero work such as
the Iron Man story Extremis. Such was Ellis’ standing in dealing with
these issues that the only self-identified Transhumanist to take part in the
interviews, Eye-Borg, an occasional reader who felt that most superhero
comics dealt poorly with posthumanism, praised Ellis’s comic Orbiter:
That’s something he’s written to, you know, compare much more about technol-
ogy but about the human race, what our goals are. What do we want to achieve?
What do want to become? Whereas Transmetropolitan is all about how fucked
up we are. (laughs)
It ought to be highlighted that the assemblage formed by reader and

Military-Industrial body is hardly new. Between 1969 and 1971, the letters
pages of Captain America featured readers engaged in extended debates
about the nature of patriotism, the Vietnam War, and so on, with some
readers suggesting that Captain America ought to be fighting in Vietnam,
while others wanted to see him reconsidering his position as an agent of
the establishment.46 While in the letters pages of Iron Man one reader
warned that billionaire munitions manufacturer Tony Stark was in danger
of being classified as an enemy of the people, and another reader simply
condemned him as a “profiteering, capitalist, war-mongering pig”.47 For
readers forming an assemblage with the Military-Industrial Body, such
stories played into their thinking about the ethics and political implica-
tions of the posthuman. This cynicism towards the Superhuman, or at
least the simplistic Superhuman of the Perfect Body, need not be seen as
simply a matter of personal taste but rather culturally contingent.
There is no final or ultimate reality or essence to which the comics
assemblage can be reduced because each of its components is also an
assemblage. As such, “assemblages are wholes characterised by relations of
exteriority”,48 which, although they can be analysed in separate parts also
contain irreducible properties, “that emerge from the interaction between
parts”.49 Relations of exteriority happen in the empty spaces between pan-
els and pages, between comic and reader, between creator and corpora-
tion. For Corsten, the fragmented nature of the comic book page does not
exist for the purpose of being made whole by reader’s filling in the gutters
between panels with their own imaginary content. Rather, “the gutters are
gaps…empty space over which relations can be made between the com-
ponents at either side”.50 However, as Ringrose warns, “these relations
never simply open to a freeflow of energy or desire, but cut through with
elations of power”.51 In Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, these gaps
220 S. JEFFERY
are not merely open, “smooth spaces” in which the process of becoming
occurs freely and easily; the empty space of the gutter is also a striated
space which tends to subordinate the smooth. Creator-assemblages ter-
ritorialise the gaps by trying to push readers in certain directions along a
panel, page or book, while critical-assemblages striate the gaps with inter-
pretations and analyses.
The interpretations of reading-assemblages are similarly shaped by
(and help to shape) the other assemblages they have formed connections
with. If British comics and creators have a long history of deconstruct-
ing the figure of the superhuman and revealing the potential fascism and
abuse of power within it, such a view also informs readers’ approaches
towards enhancement, as has been shown previously. This critical distance
is reflected in the European and American approaches to human enhance-
ment too. As shown in chapter five, “The Military-Industrial Body”, the
European response to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s report
Converging technologies for Improving Human Performance52 was to pro-
duce its own report53 containing, as Johnson and Youngman succinctly
put it, “less trans-humanism and more humanism”.54
Of course, the Superhuman is not a totality in which the components
are fixed, but an assemblage whose components can play different roles
in diverse assemblages. This is clearly illustrated in the becomings that are
facilitated by the reading assemblage formed with the Cosmic Body. For
readers who were interested in such matters, there was a clear link between
the various occult and mystical philosophies and comic books that were
highlighted in chapter four, “The Cosmic Body”:
I mean you can trace the connections of the writers involved in the Golden
Dawn and the number of comic book writers that have got some sort of link to
magical groups and out through Kenneth Anger, things like that. Crowley on
the cover of Sergeant Pepper and that feeds into the hippies with their new com-
ing Aeon and transformation of human consciousness. It’s a major thread in
the twentieth century. Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C)
The comic book Superhuman also served as a metaphor for under-

standing Eastern spiritualities and practices:
See, well the Green Lantern thing, and with Buddhism and yoga, yoga in par-
ticular, Green Lantern is a very yogic character. It sounds strange but yoga is
all about not being afraid, and yoga is all about using your willpower to beat
what your mind thinks you cannot do. And as I say I started reading Rebirth
just as I was getting into yoga and everything so these characters really related
to what I was getting into and how I was looking at myself, how I saw myself.
Especially when they bought in like the Blue Lanterns and, like, the Saint
Walker, basically as I said, Buddhists. I think Green Lantern, I think that’s why
Green Lantern is so important to me in that aspect because they are, he is very
much like that. If you look at what you do in yoga and look at the opinions in
Buddhism, as I said there is a hell of a lot of, you know, overlap, probably similar
to the way in which there’s a lot of overlap in the way that Superman is just a
god, you know? There’s that kind of overlap. So yes, there is an overlap with my
Buddhist beliefs and my love of Green Lantern. Emerald Warrior (M, 24, C)
The countercultural poaching of superhero imagery discussed in

chapter four, indicated that Cosmic Body-assemblages have some his-
torical precedent, as in this unpublished 1970s letter to Marvel Comics
describing an assemblage consisting of a reader AND marijuana AND
music AND comic book: “I like to smoke a bowl, put on ELO or Pink
Floyd and read the latest issue of Doctor Strange”.55 In fact, the Cosmic
Body continues to form new assemblages with contemporary readers,
particularly through the work of Grant Morrison. Having already noted
a predilection towards mind over matter in reader’s responses, it is not
surprising to find that certain readers expressed sympathy for the notion
of a posthuman consciousness. In the case of Morrison’s most devoted
fans, the reader-text assemblage often forms new assemblages with other
“people, substances, knowledge, institutions”. Morrison’s particular
brand of Cosmic Body had inspired readers to engage in various forms
of praxis, including magical rituals and the use of psychedelic drugs, the
effects of which were described in terms not unlike the philosophical
aims of Post/Humanism:
What it did for me was relativize the world, the everyday world. So after a
couple of trips you know how reliant on your own perceptual filters the world is
as you see it. Vesuvian Man (M, 26, C)
As well as an opening up to new ways of being:
It makes you realise that there’s a lot more possibilities and stuff. Like space
and aliens. Space is big, and you know it but you don’t necessarily see it. Then
you go, “whoa! Space is massive!” yeah. It fills you with the idea of possibilities.
Dutch (M, 32, R)
222 S. JEFFERY
Sometimes the new assemblages simply involved following up on

the references to other countercultural writers and ideas found in
Morrison’s work. This is in keeping with the suggestions put forward
by Faust that Morrison’s work intends to provide a kind of shamanic
experience for his readers, accomplished largely because of the strong
connections between the reader and text.56 Bavlnka too, has argued
that Morrison’s comics are participatory events for readers. I do not
want to give the impression that this was a univocal process.57 Often
readers had come to Morrison’s work with prior experience of magic,
drugs or countercultural thought. Even so, in forming assemblages
with these practices, substances and books beforehand, readers’ “flows
of desire” were redirected towards Morrison, not to mention forwards,
backwards and elsewhere from there.
In the case of Grant Morrison, both praise and criticism usually centred
on the same issues. Here, for example, is a negative criticism:
He seems to have stopped being interested in telling us a story and become more
interested in showing us how clever he is at telling a story. I mean, Final Crisis
was gibberish as far as I’m concerned and his cop-out that it’s, oh, “the move-
ment of gods, you shouldn’t understand it”. Fuck off. That’s not what I paid
you for Grant. Arkham (M, 43, C)
And here a positive;
Just the, yeah, the toying with reality and what you perceive to be real and what
could also be happening at the same time in the same place but in a different
multiverse. Yeah, it’s just, like there’s a higher perception of consciousness or
reality and he plays with that more. Ergon Cube (M, 34, C)
In Morrison’s work, form and content are married. What Arkham expe-
rienced as “gibberish” is experienced by Ergon Cube as a “higher percep-
tion of consciousness”. Although not a superhero comic proper, Morrison’s
creator-owned work The Invisibles (published by DC’s Vertigo imprint)
was regularly cited as an important text in this regard:
Invisibles of course is a narrative about a group of people attempting to elevate

human consciousness to bring on evolution. Vesuvian Man (M, 36, C)
The interview findings presented in this book suggests that there may
indeed be some empirical validity to Bavlnka and Faust’s readings. That
explicitly magical writers such as Morrison and Alan Moore figure so

prominently in the comic book canon created by readers might also sug-
gest that the cultural value assigned to a text may in part be related to
the new becomings that forming a reading-assemblage with such texts
allows. Similarly, the disdain expressed by several respondents for the Hard
Bodies of the Dark Age of comics may be because such representations
appear all too stabilised and “in that they establish boundaries of iden-
tity that restrain temporarily the movement of the flows and the lines of
flight”58 whereas the Cosmic Body can instead provide, either at the level
of narrative or embodied practices such as yoga or drug use, “brief lines
of movement toward a disarticulated body, toward deterritorialization”.59
Although this process is dependent on the reader that such texts form an
assemblage with. In other words, the meaning, function, or identity of the
Cosmic Body (or any assemblage) is not fixed but dependent of the rela-
tion of forces it interacts with.
NOTES
1. Brown, Milestone Comics, p. 5.
2. Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, p. 129.
3. Braun, Querying Posthumanisms, p. 8.
Drug Use, p. 85.
5. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateau, p.4.
Drug Use, p. 95.
7. Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Televisual Fans and Participatory Culture.
8. Woo, B. (2012). Understanding understandings of comics: Reading and
collecting as media-oriented practices. Participations, 9(2) p. 183.
9. Ibid., p. 184.
10. Ibid.
11. Sweeney, D. (n.d.) Licensed Fiction and the Expansion of Fictional Worlds.
[online] http://iamtw.org/articles/licensed-fiction/ [accessed: 15/06/2015].
13. Behrenshausen, B. G. (2012). The active audience, again: player-centric game
studies and the problem of binarism. New Media & Society, 0(0) pp. 1–18.
14. Ibid., p. 12.
15. Rizzo, T. (2004) “The Alien Series: A Deleuzian Perspective”. Women: A
Cultural Review, 15(3) pp. 330–344.
16. MacCormack, M. P. (2012). Cinesexuality. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..
17. Ibid., p. 23.
224 S. JEFFERY
18. Williams, L. (1991) Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess. Film
Quarterly, 44(4) pp. 2–13.
19. Rizzo, The Alien Series: A Deleuzian Perspective, p. 336.
20. Hague, I. (2014). Comics and the senses: A multisensory approach to comics
and graphic novels. Routledge, p. 144.
21. Ibid., p. 7.
22. Woo, Understanding understandings of comics: Reading and collecting as
media-oriented practice, p. 194.
Drug Use, p. 88.
24. Maigret, Strange grew up with me: Sentimentality and Masculinity in Readers
of Superhero Comics, p. 14.
25. Bratich, J. Z. (2005). Amassing the multitude: Revisiting early audience
studies. Communication Theory, 15(3), p. 242.
26. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers.
media-oriented practices. p. 186.
28. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: a Cultural History of American Comic Books,
p. 256.
media-oriented practices, p. 196.
30. Ibid.
31. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: a Cultural History of American Comic Books.
32. Gordon, Writing to Superman: Towards an Understanding of the Social
Networks of Comic-book Fans, p. 121.
33. Botzakis, S. (2011). ‘To be a part of the dialogue’: American adults reading
comic books. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(2), p. 120.
Drug Use
p. 282.
pp. 284–285.
37. http://zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/index.html.
38. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, p. 130.
p. 105.
Multiplicity, p. 20.
41. Cited in Ibid.
pp. 284–285.
43. Ibid., p. 282.

44. Brown, S. D., Lilley, S., Lim, M., & Shukaitis, S. (2010). The state of things.
Ephemera, 10(2), p. 93.
45. Barker and Brooks, Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, it’s Friends, Fans and
Foes, p. 15.
America, p. 90.
America , p. 241.
48. DeLanda, M. (2006) A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social
complexity, p. 10.
49. Ibid., p. 6.
51. Ringrose, J. (2011). Beyond Discourse? Using Deleuze and Guattari's
schizoanalysis to explore affective assemblages, heterosexually striated space,
and lines of flight online and at school. Educational Philosophy and Theory,
43(6), p. 602.
52. Roco, M. C., & Bainbridge, W. S. (eds.). (2002). Converging Technologies
for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology,
Information Technology and Cognitive Science. Washington, DC: NSF/
DOC.
53. Nordmann, A. (2004) Converging technologies – Shaping the future of
European societies. Brussels: European Commission.
54. Johnson, and Youngman, Are We Ready for Nanotechnology? Redefining the
Human in Public Policy, p. 255.
55. Quoted in Howe, Marvel Comics: The untold story.
56. Faust, D. (2011) Self Assembling Hyper-Stories and In-Between Places: The
Shamanic Intent Behind the Hypertextual and Ergodic Architecture of Grant
Morrison’s Superhero Poetics in Final Crisis and Seven Soldiers of Victory MA
Thesis. Tiffin University, Ohio.
57. Bavlnka, T. (2011) Superheroes and Shamanism: Magic and Participation in
the Comics of Grant Morrison. MA. University of Ohio.
58. Rivkin and Ryan, The Class of 1968-Post-Structuralism par lui-meme, p. 345.
Drug Use, p. 88.
The Posthuman Body in Superhero
Comics
This book began with two questions. Firstly, what role did the comic
book superhero play in the history of posthumanism? Secondly, how did
comic book readers relate to these depictions of the posthuman body?
Recognising that the figure of the posthuman body was far from fixed
and bounded, this book has instead presented the posthuman body as
a rhizomatic assemblage, an emergent property formed by the overlap-
ping realms of fictional Superhumanism, the techno-scientific prac-
tices of Transhumanism and the critical-theoretical philosophy of Post/
Humanism. These categories were connected rhizomatically to one
another within the assemblage of the posthuman body. As such, any anal-
yses of changes within one component were related to changes in the
others, altering each of these realms’ potential to transform other human
(and non-human) bodies. As this book nears its end it becomes possible
to reformulate the understanding of the posthuman body and restate why
we should concern ourselves with it at all. While not necessarily sharing
Fukuyama’s bio-conservatism, we may broadly support his observation
that the conceptualisation of the human throughout history has had, and
will continue to have, “great political consequences”.1 As this book has
demonstrated, this is also true of the posthuman. This is not a matter of
ideology however. It is not that representations of the posthuman body, in
whatever discursive realm, mask or obfuscate a “true”, “natural” human
body. Nor is it to argue that there is a single desirable or true form of
posthuman body.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_11
228 S. JEFFERY
To elaborate, the posthuman body was presented in this book as “an

assemblage of socially coded affects”.2 Posthuman bodies are not singular,
hence the different forms that the posthuman body took at specific his-
torical junctures. They are assemblages whose “function or potential or
‘meaning’ becomes entirely dependent on which other bodies or machines
it forms an assemblage with”.3 It is not that the Perfect, Cosmic, or
Military-Industrial Body is the definitive or final form; each are manifesta-
tions of desiring production that have become coded and thus stratified
into what Deleuze calls an “interest”. Interests are not an effect of our
desire but a law that governs our desire and is always formed from specific
and singular affects. So it was that both the Nazi visions of the Master
Race and the comic book superhero were expressions of the same unruly
desire to become posthuman but coded as an interest by the specific and
singular affects of the time. But the will to become posthuman is imper-
sonal, no more fascistic than revolutionary. Moreover, it is inescapable
given the unstable ontological status of the human body. The posthuman
body is always coded by the interests that have territorialised it. Never a
representation of the actual but an extension of the virtual tendencies of
the given world. By highlighting these historically specific codings, this
book hoped to go some way to releasing the impersonality of desire from
these interests.
There are obviously political implications to this. The history of the
posthuman body demonstrates the material effects that are brought about
when the posthuman is coded by a particular interest. The eugenics move-
ment, the Nazi Holocaust and the dispiriting contemporary emphasis on
the search for cyborg super-soldiers are testament to this. As this book has
shown, while the figures of the Perfect, Cosmic and Military-Industrial
posthuman bodies are more evident at certain times, they are not mutu-
ally exclusive categories, and each exists as a virtual category within the
others. While it remains to be seen if the Cosmic Body can regain promi-
nence in the social imaginary it is entirely possible that an entirely new, as
yet unimagined discursive formation may appear as the assemblage of the
posthuman body connects with new social formations, bodies and affects.
Furthermore, there are fascinating depictions of posthuman bodies in
superhero comics (Grotesque Bodies? Abject Bodies?) that have been left
unaddressed by this study but that would require a similarly wide-ranging
rhizomatic approach to properly understand their historical development
and the underground root systems that connect them to other artistic,
philosophical and techno-scientific realms.
THE POSTHUMAN BODY IN SUPERHERO COMICS 229
In presenting the posthuman body as rhizome this book hoped to

avoid an analysis of superheroes that fell into a legitimation/criticism
dichotomy. Nevertheless, at this stage it seems possible to make some
observations. First of all, the frequent criticism of the superhero as a reac-
tionary or fascistic figure is an arboreal analysis rooted in the Perfect Body
of the Golden Age and rarely accounting for the metaphysical complexity
and countercultural leanings of the Cosmic Body or the social critique
that often accompanies the Military-Industrial Body. Moreover, before the
advent of World War Two the superhero displayed marked socialist tenden-
cies. In many ways, “the relationship of the superhero to the social whole
has always been one of alienation of one kind or another”,4 and even,
perhaps especially, the characters who might seem most conservative such
as Captain America and Superman, have been seen to, “cry out on behalf
of individuals immersed in technocratic and institutional mechanisms of
control”.5 Rather than the essence of the Superhuman, the Perfect Body
was a result of military-industrial concerns territorialising the Superhuman
Body. While this particular assemblage has undoubtedly become striated
as genre shorthand for the comic book Superhuman, the uses to which it
can be put are not, of necessity, moored to the corporeal concerns of the
early twentieth century. Nevertheless, the process is multidirectional; so,
for example, military scientists may poach the figure of the superhero and
use it represent interests that, in its comic book form, that same superhero
may serve to critique.
Just as the body of the superhero was constantly becoming deterrito-
rialised and reterritorialised, so too could readers territorialise and allow
texts to deterritorialise them in turn. The first important finding in this
regard was the respondents’ ability to recognise the representation of
superhero bodies and technology as iconographic, abstract signifiers of
genre rules. In other words, superhero comics were simply not read as
representations of the real world, but as representations of themselves.
This simple fact is enough to call into question the many studies of ideol-
ogy and representation in superhero comics that suggest such images have
negative effects on readers. Readers enjoyed superhero comics when they
were grounded in an emotional reality, responding to the “human” in the
Superhuman. Perhaps because they responded to this human element, few
readers made a connection between the concerns of superhero narratives
and the philosophy and practice of Transhumanism. In fact, the philoso-
phy of Transhumanism was little known, and while readers showed aware-
ness of certain enhancement technologies they tended to contextualise
230 S. JEFFERY
these in terms of functionality, and largely greeted the Transhuman ideol-

ogy of enhancement for enhancement’s sake with suspicion. Interviewees
expressed concern that such technologies might exacerbate already exist-
ing social divisions and/or contribute to a more violent world in the
form of super-soldiers. Despite these worries however, respondents also
viewed a posthuman future as inevitability. This ambivalence towards
Transhumanism was also felt in relation the Superhuman. These British
readers generally expressed a preference for the approach to superheroes
taken by the British wave of creators, one that deconstructed and trou-
bled the superhero. This critical distance is mirrored in the differences in
approach taken by European and American policy papers on Transhuman
enhancement.
While readers often made distinctions between body and mind, or nat-
ural and artificial, there were some respects in which readers expressed a
form of Post/Humanism. This was most clearly evident when discussing
the ways in which superhero fictions crossed over into their own lives.
Several expressed an emotional attachment to these characters or used
superheroes to make sense of moral questions or to focus willpower. For
others, superhero comics allowed them to form networks with other
comic readers. With this in mind this book suggested the outline for a new
way of conceptualising texts and readers as a forming a rhizomatic assem-
blage with one another. The formation of this assemblage resulted in new
becomings. Some of these becomings resulted in the kinds of semiotic
and/or textual productivity (the creation of further assemblages) already
noted by audience researchers. Audience “activity” can thus be reconcep-
tualised as a mode of “becoming”, enacted through (or on, in the case of
tattoos) the body of the reader-assemblage as a result of forming a rhi-
zome with the comic book-assemblage.
Importantly, the reader-text assemblage could also result in more cor-
poreal becomings. These embodied transformations go back to the earli-
est days of the superhero when unknown readers replied to Charles Atlas’
famous adverts to attain the Perfect Body of the Golden Age. These ranged
from being inspired and focused to become healthier (as in what Danger
Man jokingly referred to as his “Batman method”) to bodies themselves
becoming texts, inscribed with tattoos of superhero insignia. Perhaps the
most “activity” in this sense was produced by the assemblages formed
with the Cosmic Body. The reader dubbed Emerald Warrior fused his
embodied practice of meditation with the mythology of Green Lantern,
while the comics of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore bled into the magical
practices and psychedelic explorations of Logogram, Vesuvian man and

Ergon Cube. Similarly, chapter five discussion of the Military-Industrial
body demonstrated that even if the readers who took part in this study
made little connection between superheroes and human enhancement
technologies, superhero comics have remained an inspiration to military
research. The findings also have implications for how the public might
react to Transhuman technologies. Viewing such technologies as “inevi-
table” but also in the hands of the military-industrial complex suggests
that people may feel a lack of agency with regard to human enhancement.
Despite such concerns it was also evident that cognitive enhancements
seem likely to be adopted more quickly than more physically invasive tech-
nologies. Though that discussion marks an initial suggestion of the form
such an approach might take I believe it points in the direction for more
work that addresses how readers’ bodies connect with texts and the new
becomings that this assemblage gives rise to.
FURTHER DIRECTIONS
Throughout this book the emphasis has been on how the assemblages of
Post/Humanism, Transhumanism and Superhumanism work; not “what
are they?” or “are they true?” but “how do they work?” and “what can
they do?” For Deleuze, the distinct disciplines of philosophy, science, and
art are each attempts to analyse reality in different ways. The function of
philosophy was the creation of concepts; art specialised in the creation
of feelings; and science the creation of fixed points of reference (what
Deleuze calls “functives”). The important thing for Deleuze was that nei-
ther of these disciplines deserved primacy over the other, instead, they can
be taken as different ways of organising the metaphysical flux of reality,
different route-maps for navigating the rhizome.
Deleuze’s distinction maps nicely onto the categories utilised through-
out this book. The creative drive of philosophy is represented by Post/
Humanism which, from Nietzsche’s Ubermensch and Haraway’s cyborg
and beyond has engaged in creating new concepts of humanity and what
we may become. As Colebrook describes it, Delueze’s conception of the
power of philosophy is its ability to “understand the virtual world”.6 If
science may be said to “give consistent descriptions of the actual world”
then philosophy describes, “not the world as it is, but the world beyond
any specific observation or experience: the very possibility of life”.7 In this
respect, art and philosophy share a commonality in that the purpose of
232 S. JEFFERY
force of both is to go “beyond what life is to what it might become”. This

finds expression in the realm of the Superhuman in which the posthuman
body is explored through artistic representations. The creative force of
science was represented in this book by Transhumanism. Here, science
becomes a productive force twice over. While the traditional role of sci-
ence has been to create fixed points of reference, this same force has, in the
case of the body, created the means for going beyond those fixed points of
reference. Spinoza’s proclamation that “we do not yet know what a body
can do” has begun to move from the realm of the virtual into the actual.
If philosophy, art and science are forces that make sense of the flux of real-
ity, then the distinctions between these realms are increasingly blurred. As
such, Transhumanism might do well to take heed of the development of
the comic book Superhuman.
As has been seen in chapter five, the period of comic book history
immediately following the publication of “mature” works such as
Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and the Batman graphic novel
Arkham Asylum (tellingly subtitled “A Serious House on a Serious Earth”)
led into what is sometimes described as the Dark Age of comics: an era of
gimmick covers and violent anti-heroes all driven by a speculator bubble.
However, one further development in the history of the comic book
superhero is worth highlighting here. In his literary analysis of the con-
temporary superhero comic, Klock8 looks at their history through the
lens of Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence”. In short,
Bloom’s argument is that poets are inspired to write by other poets,
but in order to become great poets themselves they must overcome the
anxiety of influence if their work is not to be derivative. Because of this
Klock, following Bloom, suggests that poetry, plays and novels “often
viewed as closed structures, are best seen in a continuous line with the
history of their literature”.9 As Klock points out, and as this book itself
has demonstrated, the serial nature of superhero comics means that this
is “a paradigm Batman fans have known for years”.10 For this reason,
Klock argues that superhero comics are a particularly good place to
witness the anxiety of influence playing out because “reinterpretation
becomes part of its survival code”.11
As the history presented in this book illustrated, the Golden Age super-
hero was itself a reinterpretation of the Pulp heroes that preceded it while
the Perfect Body of the Golden Age was itself reconfigured in the Cosmic
Body of the Silver Age. The Dark Age ushered in by Watchmen et al.
reinterpreted the Superhuman once more as the Military-Industrial Body.
The emphasis on the control and regulation of the Superhuman body

has remained in the contemporary comic book, following the thorough
deconstruction of the archetype it would no longer be possible to return
to the simple morality of the Golden and Silver Age. As Klock puts it,
“every superhero narrative after Moore’s opus is defined by its answer to
the question ‘Who watches the watchmen?’”12 However, we may yet be
able to talk of a new age of superheroes.
While Klock uses concepts from literary analysis, Coogan utilises Thomas
Schatz’s theories on film genre to analyse the superhero comic book. Seen
through this lens the Dark Age (which maps roughly on to what Coogan’s
schema calls the “Iron Age”) is when “the form and the embellishments
become the ‘substance’ or ‘content’ of the work—that is, we no longer
see superhero comic books but comic books about superheroes”.13 The
grim and gritty realism is part of this same process, as the form becomes
self-conscious and thus no longer able to take its own tropes seriously,
or at face value. The unproblematic nobility and heroism of the Golden
Age Perfect Body and the wild flights of imagination and optimism of the
Silver Age Cosmic Body are apparently revealed as simple masks for the
reality of the Dark Age’s Military-Industrial Body. However, Coogan also
posits a new age of superhero comics, which he calls the Renaissance Age.
This is the reconstructive stage of the genre, in which its conventions are
re-established. For Coogan, the key work here is DC Comics’ Kingdom
Come which pits the retired heroes of the Golden Age against a new gen-
eration of heroes designed to evoke the anti-heroes of the Dark Age. In
Kingdom Come, “the idealism and hopefulness” of the Golden Age returns
to defeat the “darkness and cynicism” of the Dark Age14, thus reestablish-
ing the “mission convention”: “the idea that a superhero selflessly serves
those who need him, even those who break the social contract”.15 Klock
also observes this process of re-engagement with the past can be said to
begin with works such as Marvels, Kingdom Come and Grant Morrison’s
mid-1990s run on Justice League of America (or JLA). As Klock observes,
Morrison’s JLA overcomes the anxiety of influence by inverting the terms
of the argument: “rather than asserting the common explanation that the
fantastic is good because it is an escape from reality, he claims that reality
itself—from quantum physics, quarks, and curved spacetime to his own
contact with higher dimensions—is fantastic”.16
This book has presented the posthuman body as a rhizome, comprised
of overlapping assemblages. If the development of the Superhuman assem-
blage shares rhizomatic connections with the Transhuman assemblage, how
234 S. JEFFERY
might we map these analyses onto the development of Transhumanism? In

some respects, the discourse of Transhumanism suffers its own anxiety of
influence. Like the comic book Superhuman, the Transhumanism of the
Golden Age focused on the creation of Perfect Bodies. In this instance the
key anxiety, the spectre that haunts Transhumanism, is eugenics. The ster-
ilisation laws and selective breeding programmes of the early decades of the
twentieth century are largely seen as abhorrent from a contemporary per-
spective. Following the revelations of the Nazi concentration camps, the
very idea of creating superior humans became tinged with darkness. As the
Silver Age reinvigorated the Superhuman, Transhumanism also became
reinvigorated by the Cosmic Body. Here, the emphasis was on the indi-
vidual fulfilling their own potential, rather than the needs of the state. The
emphasis also shifted from enhancing human bodies to enhancing human
consciousness. By the time of the Dark Age of Comics, the discourse of
Transhumanism had also shifted from the Cosmic Body to the Military-
Industrial Body. The hippies had become the yuppies and the psycho-
spiritual notion of individuation become consumerist individualism.
Might Transhumanism also enter a stage similar to Coogan’s Renaissance
Age? As was seen in chapter four, the suggestions put forward in Changing
Images of Man or the work of the Esalen group are in stark contrast to
current state-sanctioned policies dealing with human enhancement and
it is perhaps unsurprising that the more radical, anti-capitalist and anti-
imperialist vision of these projects were not developed further. Instead, as
Hughes has noted, “much transhumanist politics has been shaped by the
libertarian leanings of its affluent, educated, male, and American base”.17
A re-engagement with the past might open up escape routes from the
dominant intellectual frameworks underlying much Transhumanism.
For example, as LaTorra has pointed out, the use of “prayer, meditation,
chanting, fasting, contemplation of sacred images, and the ingestion of
mind-altering substances”18 is ancient so Transhumanism would do well
to study these practices more thoroughly as “spiritual technologies”, much
as Dvorksy19 describes yoga and meditation as “software enhancements”
for strengthening the human mind and body. LaTorra has termed such
materialist approaches to the mystical experience “Trans-Spirit” research,
including studies of the effects of meditation and prayer using functional
magnetic resonance imaging of practitioners, and transcranial stimula-
tion of the temporal lobes under laboratory conditions. For LaTorra, the
goals of Trans-Spirit researchers can be summarised as the achievement
of a full scientific understanding of spiritual and religious phenomena
and the development of techniques for the deliberate inducement of the

phenomena.20 LaTorra’s suggestions do not exist in a vacuum; elsewhere,
research into psychedelics has recently witnessed a renewed interest and
respectability, while the study of neurotheology also continues apace. This
merging of science and shamanism represents a materialist approach to
the religious experience, what Timothy Leary once called an “empirical,
tangible meta-physics”.21
Rational models of Transhumanism currently preclude states of con-
sciousness and ways of knowing such as those forms of consciousness
identified in the history of Trans-Spirit research, but these states of con-
sciousness are Transhuman in as much as they are far removed from ordi-
nary waking consciousness (or rather, what we experience as such); indeed
the psychiatrist Stanislaf Groff22 refers to such states as “transpersonal”.
One of the recurring features of such states is a sense of the interconnect-
edness of all things. Such an experience is often at odds with an ideology
of rational libertarianism that overcodes the posthuman body as Military-
Industrial interest. Given the potential consequences it is necessary then
to address questions of power and social divisions if such technologies are
not to rapidly exacerbate already existing social divides, such as the cre-
ation of a technologically-enhanced “upper class” and a “merely human”
lower class. Much of the problem here arguably lies in Transhumanism’s
focus on changing bodies rather than minds, and on the individual rather
than society as a whole (both locally and globally). It is the allegedly less
rational strains of Transhumanist thought expressed through the Cosmic
Body that not only emphasise the transpersonal dimensions but also pro-
vide the techniques and technologies to experience them.
This book has not dealt with the current crop of superhero films which
have come to dominate the box-office in the past decade, but a few nota-
ble aspects are worth raising here. First of all, this book has suggested
that certain figurations of the posthuman body were more prominent
than others at certain historical junctures. However, it is more difficult
to argue this in the case of their cinematic adaptations. For a start, com-
ics are produced more quickly than films, so their ability to capture their
historical moment is more immediate. Film theorist David Bordwell23 has
argued against ascribing the emergence of the superhero film genre to
any notion of a zeitgeist when there are numerous other reasons why the
superhero film has emerged at this point, including a move from auteur
to genre cinema, the increased importance of synergy and marketing, and
the increased centrality of special effects spectacle to mainstream American
236 S. JEFFERY
cinema. Thus far it might be possible to argue that the superhero movie
has drawn largely from the concerns of the Military-Industrial Body, as
evidenced in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy or Marvel’s Iron Man
and Captain America movies. In Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, there are
also traces of the Cosmic Body in the Thor films and the upcoming Dr
Strange adaptation.
It remains to be seen whether these adaptation will investigate the
themes presented by the Cosmic Body, or how audiences will react to
them. At the very least it is hoped that this book provides some indica-
tions for future research into the audiences of superhero cinema. One
point worth raising here is the impact of live-action on audience recep-
tion of the Superhuman body. As the research presented here has found,
readers made sense of the Superhuman body as a semiotic code indicat-
ing superpowers. This iconographic element may be potentially altered
by its representation in the form of living human actors. In other words,
the affects generated by a viewing-assemblage may be very different from
those generated by the reading-assemblage.
CONCLUSION
The figure of the posthuman has often been accompanied by some kind
of practice. As such, the history of the discourse of the posthuman body
presented here might also serve as both warning and guide. Superhero
comic books invite us to ask questions of the relationship between mili-
tary, state and corporate power and the production of posthuman bodies.
But there is perhaps a more shamanic function for the Post/Humanist
cultural critic than simply flagging up undesirable futures or ideological
ghosts of the past. Indeed, the real question they invite becomes an onto-
logical one. Posthuman bodies are enmeshed in social, technological and
discursive systems. In this sense human bodies are always already posthu-
man bodies; there are no human beings, only human becomings. If there
is no “natural” body to return to then the question we must ask is no
longer “What are we?” but the altogether more awe-full question, “what
is it that we want to become”? Superhero comics may not be an accurate
guide to Transhumanist technologies, nor do they fully embrace the Post/
Humanist interrogation of the tenets of humanism. Nevertheless, when
considering the promises and pitfalls that await us, and our bodies, in the
posthuman future, we could do worse than the ethical template of the
Superhuman, which thrives on teams consisting of alien, robot, cyborg,
mutant, and human bodies working together, and which recognises the
human as a verb and not a noun and whose every existence is premised on
becoming rather than being, always To Be Continued…
NOTES
1. Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, p. 120.
2. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, p. 93.
Drug Use, p. 85.
4. Peaslee, Superheroes, moral economy, and the iron cage: Morality, alienation,
and the super-individual, p. 50.
5. Ibid.
6. Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. p. 13.
7. Ibid.
9. Ibid., pp. 13–14.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 136.
14. Ibid., p. 230.
15. Ibid., p. 227.
17. Hughes, J. (2012). The Politics of Transhumanism and the Techno-
Millennial Imagination, 1626–2030. Zygon 47(4). p. 758.
18. LaTorra, M. (2005). Trans-Spirit: Religion, Spirituality and Transhumanism.
Journal of Evolution and Technology. 14(2). p. 45.
19. Dvorksy, G. (2008). Better Living Through Transhumanism. Journal of
Evolution and Technology. 19(1). pp. 62–66.
20. LaTorra, Trans-Spirit: Religion, Spirituality and Transhumanism.
21. Leary, Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis. p. 15.
22. LaTorra, Trans-Spirit: Religion, Spirituality and Transhumanism p. 51.
23. Bordwell, D. (2008). Superheroes for Sale. Observations on Film Art.
[Online] 16 August, 2008. Available from: http://www.davidbordwell.
net/blog/2008/08/16/superheroes-for-sale/ [Accessed: 14th February,
2016].
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FILMS
Technocalypse (Dir. Frank Theys, 2006).
INDEX
A Beast, The, 103, 143, 146–8,

android, 7, 141, 144 152, 160
Animal Bodies, 7, 137–54 becoming(s), 5, 8, 9, 15, 23, 29–31,
Artificial Bodies, 7, 137–54 46, 48, 53, 58, 60, 79, 86, 99,
assemblages, 4, 6, 8, 9, 14–16, 28–31, 105, 107, 130, 147–9, 151, 152,
33n41, 37, 42, 51, 55, 56, 60, 156–61, 167, 170, 183, 199,
69, 86, 87, 137, 138, 142, 144, 208, 211, 217, 218, 220, 223,
147, 148, 150–2, 162, 205–11, 229–31, 236, 237
213, 216, 219–22, 225n51, 228, biology, 25, 80, 142
230, 231, 233 bio-technology, 24, 150
audiences, 2, 57, 58, 64n56, 74, 82, Braidotti, R., 13, 25, 32n16, 35n101,
122, 167, 207, 208, 236 61, 67n130, 173n27
Authority, The, 125, 134n61, 134n63
Avengers, The, 144
C
Captain America, 6, 32n20, 48, 54,
B 73, 80–5, 87n14, 95, 97, 115,
bamf!, 185 116, 125, 129, 130, 158, 218,
Batman, 3, 42, 44, 45, 75, 78, 80, 96, 219, 229, 236
101, 119–4, 127, 128, 148, 151, Charles Atlas, 72, 73, 80, 86, 88n27,
162, 163, 167, 173n25, 196, 88n29, 140, 218, 230
217, 232 Civil War, 124, 125, 170
Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to endnotes.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1
260 INDEX
comic books, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9n15, 13, DC Universe, 38–40, 44, 45, 47, 50,
17, 30, 32n20, 37, 39, 41, 49, 108, 111n24, 116, 215
50, 52, 54, 55, 58, 61, 62, 72, Deleuze, G., 4, 6, 7, 10n20, 10n21,
74, 80, 81, 89n41, 89n56, 10n25, 14–16, 28–31, 32n25,
90n64, 90n80, 90n84, 95, 97, 32n27, 33n41, 36n125,
107, 109, 114n102, 116, 120, 36n126, 36n129, 36n133,
122, 125, 130, 131, 133n23, 36n134, 37, 41, 46, 47, 59–61,
141, 156, 161, 162, 166–8, 172, 63n16, 63n29, 64n39, 67n119,
185, 194, 201, 207, 213, 214, 67n123, 67n125, 67n127,
220, 233, 236 67n132, 76, 101, 102, 144,
Comics Code, 49, 52 147, 149, 151, 153n12,
Comics Studies, 51, 53, 58, 60 153n19, 154n28, 154n40,
consciousness, 7, 13, 18, 26, 27, 73, 154n44, 162, 173n15, 173n24,
74, 85, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 106, 205–7, 220, 223n5, 223n12,
109, 140, 145, 146, 178, 180, 225n15, 228, 231
198, 220–2, 234, 235 disability, 3, 4, 59, 182, 183
continuity, 6, 37–42, 44–8, 50, 53, discursive plateaus, 6, 14–17, 30, 71
54, 56, 60, 82, 83, 126, 128, discourse, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 15–17, 21–5,
152, 208, 215, 216 27, 53, 57, 60, 61, 69, 70, 86,
Cosmic Body/Bodies, 7, 8, 69, 86, 93, 99, 101, 102, 105–9, 122,
87, 93–116, 119, 138–40, 151, 123, 131, 135n80, 140, 170,
152, 171, 175, 218, 220, 221, 188, 191, 202n12, 206, 234, 236
223, 228–30, 232–6 Ditko, S., 49, 96–8, 158
Crisis on Infinite Earths, 42, 44–6 DNA, 90n71, 142, 180
Crowley, A., 100, 101, 220 drugs, 94, 95, 98, 101, 106–9, 181,
cybernetics, 27 197, 198, 211, 221, 222
cyborg, 7, 13, 19, 24–6, 28, 32n20,
32n21, 33n54, 99, 103, 107,
114n100, 115, 118, 123, 125, E
129–31, 138, 151, 156, 172, Ellis, W., 40, 63n7, 125, 126, 134n61,
179, 192, 203n16, 228, 134n64, 134n65, 163, 187,
231, 236 213, 219
Emma Frost, 160, 161
Engelhart, S., 98, 99, 120, 122
D Esalen, 104, 105, 108, 139, 234
Dark Age (of Comics), 7, 120, 122–5, eugenics, 7, 71, 72, 77, 78, 80, 81,
130, 131, 158, 223, 232–4 85, 86, 88n22, 93, 94, 142, 152,
DC Comics, 9n1, 12, 39, 42, 48, 154n47, 181, 188, 191, 228,
62n4, 63n8, 63n21, 95, 112n40, 234
112n43–5, 113n87, 114n104, evolution, 12, 70–5, 78, 81, 82, 96,
114n105, 133n38–40, 134n54, 105, 107, 139, 141–3, 178, 179,
134n68, 134n72, 233 192, 193, 198, 208, 222
INDEX 261
F 173n16, 173n24, 205–7, 220,

fans, 3, 39, 48–51, 57, 58, 60, 73, 223n5, 223n12, 225n51
139, 194, 207, 211–13, 215,
218, 221, 232
fascism, 8, 76–8, 80, 81, 84, 122, 151, H
157, 168, 179, 197, 220 Haraway, D., 7, 13, 25–7, 31n15,
film, 13, 17, 53, 95, 120, 121, 160, 32n22, 35n105, 35n107, 115,
163, 168–70, 208, 209, 233, 123, 129–31, 132n1, 192,
235, 236 203n39, 231
Foucault, M., 7, 15, 16, 22, 23, Hayles, N. K., 27, 35n114, 36n115,
34n76, 34n82, 34n83, 34n85, 145, 153n18, 153n20
69, 100, 101, 118, 151 Hitler, A., 76, 77, 81, 86, 93
freak shows, 73–5 Holocaust, 77, 85, 228
Hourman, 79, 108
Hulk, 40, 85, 95–7, 124, 162
G human enhancement, 2, 8, 11, 19, 20,
genetics, 1, 71, 142, 180, 181 77, 117, 118, 152, 155, 175,
Ghost Rider, 121, 215, 217 177–81, 183, 184, 186, 189–91,
Gnostic, 19, 102–4 198–201, 202n3, 217, 220, 230,
Golden Age (of comics), 6, 41–5, 48, 231, 234
73, 78–84, 93, 95, 109, 115, Humanism, 2, 5, 12, 22, 89n43,
116, 118, 122, 138, 140, 150, 89n52, 175–8
166, 218, 229, 230, 232–4
Graham, E. L., 15, 21, 28, 32n35,
34n68, 35n97, 36n120, 71, I
87n10, 142, 153n7, 153n10, ideology, 2, 16, 52–4, 58, 59, 66n83,
153n16 74, 81, 85, 97, 106, 116, 160,
Green Arrow, 121 190, 227, 229, 235
Green Lantern, 3, 9n6, 38, 43, 79, Iron Man, 97, 126, 127, 129–32,
157, 158, 169, 176, 177, 188, 132n6, 134n65, 135n75, 177,
194–6, 210, 211, 214, 218, 221, 182, 187, 196, 219, 236
230
Guattari, F., 4, 6, 7, 14–16, 28–31,
36n125–7, 36n129, 36n130, J
36n132, 36n134, 37, 41, 46, 47, Joker, The, 45, 101, 121, 151, 152
59, 60, 62, 63n16, 63n29,
64n39, 67n115, 67n119,
67n123, 67n125, 67n127, K
67n132, 101, 102, 144, 147–9, Kesey, K., 94, 96, 106
151, 153n12, 153n19, 154n27–9, Kirby, J., 47, 49, 73, 80, 81, 85, 86,
154n37, 154n38, 154n40, 90n71, 96–8, 110n9, 111n23, 149
154n44, 154n48, 162, 173n15, Korvav, 103
262 INDEX
L mutant, 96, 103, 108, 124, 128, 129,

Leary, T., 94, 96, 102, 106, 107, 146, 148, 151, 209, 237
113n90, 114n94, 114n96, 235, mythology, 54, 95, 97, 104, 138, 140,
237n21 142, 172, 230
Lee, S., 47, 49, 50, 90n81, 94–7,
110n10, 111n23, 129, 133n31,
134n49 N
letters, 48–50, 84, 130, 213, 219 nanotechnology, 18, 119, 132n12,
libertarian, 7, 116–19, 127, 189, 201, 181, 182, 191
234, 235 Nietzsche, F., 1, 2, 7, 22, 27, 28,
Liefeld, R., 122–4, 158, 159 34n74, 36n116, 71, 75–8, 81,
LSD, 96, 98, 102, 106, 109 86, 104, 231
Luckhurst, R., 87, 89n35, 140, Nightcrawler, 185
153n1, 153n3
O
M ontological, 11, 17, 23, 62, 98, 99,
Marvel Comics, 39, 42, 49, 50, 55, 147, 199, 228, 236
83, 86, 90n81, 91n87, 91n95, ontology, 28, 179
95, 96, 98, 112n41, 113n68,
129, 134n55, 134n56, 134n70,
144, 149, 153n23, 154n24, P
154n25, 154n32, 213, 221 Perfect Body/Bodies, 6, 8, 54, 69–91,
Marvel Universe, 38, 50, 82, 83, 97, 93–5, 97, 105, 115, 116, 126,
121, 124, 126–30, 215 129, 130, 137–43, 150, 151,
masculinity, 7, 86, 91n93, 123, 131, 156–62, 188, 200, 218, 219,
156, 160, 162, 167, 172n7 229, 230, 232–4
meditation, 110, 198, 230, 234 Physical Culture, 72, 80, 85
Military-Industrial Body/Bodies, 7, 8, Pop Art, 95
69, 84, 86, 94, 108–10, 115–35, posthuman, 1, 2, 4–9, 11–14, 17–21,
139, 152, 158, 182, 187–9, 201, 24, 27–31, 31n8, 32n16, 37, 38,
218–20, 228, 229, 231–6 55, 59–62, 69, 70, 75–80, 82–7,
military-industrial complex, 7, 25, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 102, 105–7,
116, 126–9, 131, 231 110, 115, 118, 122, 124–31, 137,
Millar, M., 125, 163 139–41, 143, 145, 148, 150, 151,
Modern Age (of Comics), 138 153, 155, 156, 161, 170, 175,
Moore, A., 38, 39, 42, 53, 99, 100, 179, 181, 186, 187, 191–3, 195,
121, 162–4, 202, 213, 223, 230, 198–201, 218, 219, 221, 227–37
233 Post/Humanism, 2, 5–8, 11–15, 17,
Morrison, G., 46–8, 62, 64n33, 20, 21, 24, 26–8, 30, 61, 70, 71,
64n35, 79, 86, 98–101, 125, 127, 76, 93, 100, 131, 137, 150, 156,
128, 146, 162, 163, 166, 202, 170, 172, 175–204, 221, 227,
213, 221–3, 225n57, 230, 233 230, 231
INDEX 263
psychedelics, 96, 106, 107, 109, Superman, 1, 6, 7, 38, 39, 41,

197, 235 42, 44, 45, 48, 53, 56, 62n4,
pulp fiction, 73–5, 138, 143 64n42, 72, 73, 75–82, 85, 86,
Punisher, The, 121, 123 93, 100, 105, 123, 124, 126,
127, 149, 151, 153, 157, 158,
162, 167, 170, 176, 185, 195,
R 196, 221, 229
ret-con, 83 super-soldier, 85, 115–19, 137, 152,
rhizome, 2, 4–7, 14–17, 28–30, 182, 187, 200, 228, 230
32n34, 36n128, 37–67, 69, 70,
76, 82, 86, 130, 137, 138, 149,
152, 166, 207, 208, 229–31, 233 T
robot, 144–6, 151, 176, 184, 236 Tarzan, 76, 81, 85
technology, 1, 2, 8, 11, 12, 15, 17,
18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 36n122,
S 66n102, 77, 78, 97, 102, 103,
science-fiction, 7, 12, 25, 71, 108, 109, 115, 117, 118, 123,
171, 199 139, 152, 170–2, 179–82, 188,
shamanism, 99, 107, 138, 235 192, 217, 229
Shang-Chi, Master of Kung-Fu, Thor, 96, 97, 128, 236
99, 157 Transhuman, 1–10, 12, 17–21,
Silver Age (of Comics), 7, 39, 42–4, 25, 31, 77, 102–4, 119,
49, 62n3, 63n17, 66n88, 82, 86, 138–40, 152, 164, 169–72,
87, 93–9, 115, 116, 120–2, 124, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 191,
126, 127, 138, 154n41, 224n40, 193, 197–8, 205, 230, 231,
232–4 233, 235
Sociology of the Body, 35n96, 87n15 Transhumanism, 2, 5–8, 11, 12, 14,
Spider-Man, 38, 40, 95, 97, 108, 17–21, 26–8, 30, 61, 70, 71, 78,
114n103, 120–3, 128, 132, 148, 93, 103–8, 116–19, 127, 137–40,
152, 158, 176, 213, 217 150, 156, 170–2, 175–204, 227,
Squadron Supreme, 125 229–32, 234, 235
Starlin, J., 98, 122 Truth: Red, White and Black, 85
Dr. Strange, 96–9, 122, 217, 236 2000 AD, 165, 167, 218
Superhuman, 1–10, 12–14, 17–19, 2099, 128
30, 31, 70, 71, 73, 75–7, 80,
81, 84–7, 93, 95, 103, 107,
116, 118, 119, 124–31, 137–41, U
143, 144, 149–52, 155–73, 175, Ultimate Universe, 128, 129
193, 197, 200, 201, 205,
207–9, 217–21, 229, 230,
232–4, 236 V
Superhumanism, 12, 30, 61, 71, 75–6, Vision, The, 7, 40, 128, 143, 144,
137, 175–8, 227, 231 147, 152
264 INDEX
W X
Warlock, 98, 122, 141 X-Men, 95, 96, 101, 103, 105, 108,
Watchmen, 53, 54, 121, 122, 112, 120, 122–4, 128, 146, 148,
124, 125, 131, 163, 186–91, 153n23, 154n32, 154n36, 158,
232, 233 160, 161, 175, 176, 185, 188,
Wilson, Robert Anton, 20, 33n49, 199, 209, 217
33n58 X-Statix, 127, 128, 134n70

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

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The Posthuman Body

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955733

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover image © CSA Images/Mod Art Collection

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Introduction: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman,

The Rhizome of Comic Book Culture 37

The Military-Industrial Body 115

Animal Bodies and Artificial Bodies 137

Reading the Superhuman 155

Readers on Transhumanism and Post/Humanism 175

Towards a Theory of Reader-Text Assemblages 205

The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics 227

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

closer to actualising these visions with the implications being a source

is a history of posthumanist thought, the various connections between

WHAT THE BOOK DOES NOT DO

cultural studies of disability are marked by an attempt to extricate disabled

WHAT THIS BOOK DOES DO…

presentation of the cultural history of the posthuman body, it is important

HOW THE BOOK IS STRUCTURED

pseudoscience of Eugenics. Post/Humanism too, makes an appearance at

included material transformations in which the body was modified with

A book such as this ought to begin with a neat definition of “posthu-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 11

This deliberate pursuit of technological evolution would involve invit-

RHIZOMES AND DISCURSIVE PLATEAUS

correspondence”.44 In the rhizome, by contrast, everything is connected

Surveying the corpus of works that could be said to constitute

intelligence, and humans with machine parts [cyborgs] and genetically

TRANSHUMAN BODIES AND THEIR DISCONTENTS

spiritual faculties is unthinkable…A man [sic] can only truly improve by

to say, shaped by discourses. It should be remembered that for Foucault

THE CYBORG MANIFESTO

FROM CYBORG TO POST/HUMAN

desires for an unaccountable transcendence or dissolution of the wholis-

much or more in common with Nietzsche’s contemporary the English lib-

POSTHUMAN BODY AS ASSEMBLAGE

subjects but effects of generative systems that can be grafted or iterated

“an assemblage becomes ethical or unethical depending on the affects

between the discursive realms of Trans, Post/and Super-Humanisms,

37. Ibid., p. 43.

63. Ibid., p. 97.

90. Siebers T. (2001) Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 37

WHAT IS A COMIC BOOK UNIVERSE?

THE CORPORATE ASSEMBLAGE

Then, in 1956, DC decided to try out an updated version of The Flash

hierarchy of representation and reference, the superhero comic book cre-

writes this territorialisation of the continuity-assemblage by the corporate-

this apparent reluctance to “interrogate” comics including a longstanding

when the Screen theorists took these notions of ideology, identification

A simple objection to such analysis can be raised, which is that in holding

is not “a unified meaning but a multiplicity of meaning that can take on

COMICS STUDIES AS RHIZOME