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Abstract
Understanding Superheroes: Scholarship, Superman, and the Synthesis of an Emerging Criticism reviews six major pieces of comic book scholarship—Umberto Eco and Natalie Chilton's "The Myth of Superman," Richard Reynolds' Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Geoff Klock's How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Julia Round's "Fragmented Identity: The Superhero Condition," Peter Coogan's Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, and Terrence Wadtke's introduction to The Amazing Transforming Superhero!—in order to coalesce their methodologies into a viable approach to the superhero narrative. Combining Klock's tropology with A. J. Greimas' system of actants and actors, the author develops two basic classifications for the material transmitted between comics: actantial tropes, which are the ideas authors borrow from other sources, and actorial tropes, which are the established characters whose narrative authors continue. Writers fashion new characters after the actants of previous superheroes to ensure their new creation's placement within the superhero genre, but add new actants to distinguish their work. As these new characters become successful, the writers working with established characters incorporate the new actants into ensuing actorial tropes, adding complexity to the superhero genre through the accretion of these new actantial tropes. The interplay between actantial and actorial tropes ultimately causes superhero narratives to function similarly to medieval romance due to the emphasis on revisionary storytelling over suspense that this structure creates.
