Super Bodies

An examination of the art in superhero comics and how style influences comic narratives. For many, the idea of comic book art implies simplistic four-color renderings of stiff characters slugging it out. In fact, modern superhero comic books showcase a range of complex artistic styles, with diverse connotations. Leading comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown assesses six distinct approaches to superhero illustration—idealism, realism, cute, retro, grotesque, and noir—examining how each visually represents the superhero as a symbolic construct freighted with meaning. Whereas comic book studies tend to focus on text and narrative, Super Bodies gives overdue credit to the artwork, which is not only a principal source of the appeal of comic books but also central to the values these works embody. Brown argues that superheroes are to be taken not as representations of people but as iconic types, and the art conveys this. Even the most realistic comic illustrations are designed to suggest not persons but ideas—ideas about bodies and societies. Thus the appearance of superheroes both directly and indirectly influences the story being told as well as the opinions readers form concerning justice, authority, gender, puberty, sexuality, ethnicity, violence, and other concepts central to political and cultural life.

Based on the wildly popular segments broadcast during the Vancouver Olympics, Superbodies explores how genetics and DNA, the brain, muscles, lungs, heart and blood work together in extreme conditions. It’s an inside look that draws on Dr. Greg Wells’ research at Sick Kids Hospital and the University of Toronto and more than fifteen years’ experience working with Olympic athletes. Superbodies is a fascinating explanation of the human body and an easy-to-follow plan that shows how everyone can learn from the pros to improve their health and performance. Dr. Wells explains How the same training techniques that elite athletes follow can be even more effective for most people What’s happening inside your body when you’re exercising, and fighting illness What makes elite athletes such as pro-hockey players successful, and what you can learn from them Why little things can add up, and how simple choices can make a huge difference. Fascinating, easy-to-read and packed with full-colour illustrations and photographs, Superbodies shows how people of all ages and abilities can improve their own health and performance.

This volume is a result of four days in July 2005, where historians, health economists, medical doctors and nurses, anthropologists, writers, sociologists and many more travelled to Oxford, England for the fourth annual 'Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease' conference organised by Inter-Disciplinary.Net.

This volume discusses fluidity of the post-human bodies on various cultural and social examples – from the cyber relations to others and to self, through fragmented, prosetheticised, monstrous or augmented body, to the dis/utopian fantasies.

Throughout the history of the genre, the superhero has been characterised primarily by physical transformation and physical difference. Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation explores the transformation of the superhero body across multiple media forms including comics, film, television, literature and the graphic novel. How does the body of the hero offer new ways to imagine identities? How does it represent or subvert cultural ideals? How are ideologies of race, gender and disability signified or destabilised in the physicality of the superhero? How are superhero bodies drawn, written and filmed across diverse forms of media and across histories? This volume collects essays that attend to the physicality of superheroes: the transformative bodies of superheroes, the superhero’s position in urban and natural spaces, the dialectic between the superhero’s physical and metaphysical self, and the superhero body’s relationship with violence. This will be the first collection of scholarly research specifically dedicated to investigating the diversity of superhero bodies, their emergence, their powers, their secrets, their histories and their transformations.

Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin turns to the Epistles of Paul as the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jewish cultural critic and explores what led Paul--in his dramatic conversion to Christianity--to such a radical critique of Jewish culture. "Boyarin's incisive questioning is relevant to cultural clashes in many parts of the world".--Robin Scroggs, PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN.