Superhero Fiction - Criticism

Criticism

Almost since the inception of the superhero in comic books, the concept has come under fire from critics. Most famously, the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) alleged that sexual subtext existed in superhero comics, and included accusations that Batman and Robin were gay and Wonder Woman encouraged female dominance fetishes and lesbianism.

Writer Ariel Dorfman has criticized alleged class biases in many superhero narratives in several of his books, including The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Mind (1980), and is not alone in doing so. Marxist critics, such as Matthew Wolf-Meyer ("The World Ozymandias Made") and Jason Dittmer ("The Tyranny of the Serial") often point out that not only do the superheroes arguably constitute a ruling class, but by simply defending the world as-is, they effectively keep it from changing, and thus lock it into status quo. Some contemporary critics are more focused on the history and evolving nature of the superhero concept, as in Peter Coogan's Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (2006).