Review: Robert Moses Peaslee & Robert G. Weiner (eds.), The Supervillain Reader (2020)

Fig. 1 - Robert Moses Peaslee & Robert G. Weiner (eds.), The Supervillain Reader (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2020).

It seems fair to suggest that, right now, there is just a bit of cultural interest in the figure of the superhero. Thanks to the efforts of DC and the MCU in particular, the superhero film has arisen out of its somewhat middling status amongst Hollywood production schedules throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to reach a status comparable only to that once enjoyed by the classical western or musical. The on-going effects of COVID-19 notwithstanding, studios continue to churn out as many superhero films as humanly possible, the genre dominating the yearly release schedules amongst multiplexes around the world, not to mention the on-going popularity of the perhaps less high-profile but equally ubiquitous comic books, animated series and serial dramas that collectively make up these sprawling transmedia worlds. Pairing comic-inflected narratives with the latest in CGI innovation, such media outlets offer audiences extended encounters with a collection of heroes, the make-up of which (white, male, straight) has sparked a number of prescient debates over the gendered, racial and ablest manner In which popular culture tends to define and celebrate heroism. However, as aficionados of such franchises will attest, behind every successful superhero there is an equally successful supervillain. For every Batman, there is a Joker. For every Jessica Jones, there is a Kilgrave. For every Avengers there is a Thanos, and for every white, straight man there is an equally fascinating character representing all that is deviant, subversive and illicit. So, as academia continues to respond to the popularity of these texts in order through a wave of studies devoted to comics, popular culture and fandom, Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner’s edited collection asks the simple question:  why not extend the same interest in heroes as we do the villains who, through their antics, make such stories possible?

The Supervillain Reader offers up a set of essays that, collectively, attempts to plumb the philosophical as well as historical depths of the supervillain. Essays tackle subjects as varied as the Buddhist demonic figure of Aṅgulimāla (John N. Thompson, 95-105) to John Milton’s depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost (John Carey, 125-139), whilst allocating plenty of room for discussions of a number of contemporary supervillains including X-Men’s Magneto (Jared Poon, 26-30), Star War’s Darth Vader (Tara Lomax, 214-223) and DC’s Harley Quinn (203-213). Collectively, such analyses highlight the deviant role supervillains play in the structure of comic hero fiction, offering themselves as alternatives to the heteronormative ideology of the narrative in a way that can be both celebrated for its progressive potential and derided for its vilification of difference in equal measure. Readers currently enthralled by the varied iterations of the comic superhero narrative are taken on a fascinating journey into the folkloric and religious origins of contemporary popular storytelling, whilst franchises near and dear to many hearts are likely to be illuminated by the collection’s commitment to how decisions made at the level of characterisation and visual design impacts upon the cultural significance of what is presented.  The main takeaway, if any, is that there are a lot of supervillains spanning across a rich a legacy within popular storytelling traditions around the globe, and they all deserve some degree of attention.

This brings me to the deficiencies of The Supervillain Reader. Like a great number of edited collections before it, the collection is less than the sum of its parts, a critique that is too clichéd to have to mention. Perhaps an inevitable consequence of gathering a series of academic essays together is that they tend to offer hopeful fragments of what might be or could be rather than any substantial conclusion. However, with The Supervillain Reader, there is a sense throughout that Peaslee’s and Weiner’s editorial decisions are inspired somewhat by the grandiose nature of their subject matter, refusing to limit either the methodological or historical dimensions of their project in the services of their far-reaching ambition. This is to be admired to some extent. However, unlike a supervillain, books do have quite practical limitations that should curtail even in the most diabolical of conceptual schemes Most importantly, they are limited by their allocated page count provided by their publishers and the patience of their readers, and it is feels at times that the collection struggling to properly wrestle with both these factors as it considers the best way of addressing the rich legacy of supervillainy across time and space.

Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, 1973).

Offering up 34 essays spread across 4 different sections, the collections often sacrifices depth for breath of engagement. Limiting contributions to approximately 3,000-5,000 words to make their arguments (my estimate based on the page count) has the effect of making many chapters feel more like rushed summaries of a potential rich field of inquiry than opportunities to offer substantial, original contribution to their fields. For example, Lennart Soberon’s all-too-brief consideration of the formal othering of villains within mainstream media sources offer glimpses of new and interesting work, but struggles to say much within the slight length. Likewise, Phillipp Lamarr Cunningham’s work address the provocative and important absence of black supervillains from mainstream media. Yet, it also offers all-too-easy reasons as to why. Arguing that “the absence of black supervillains is inextricably linked to the equal scarcity of black superheroes” (277), the chapter conflates the hero and villain together within an unsatisfying simple equation. Surely, within historically and systematically racist societies such as the US and Europe, the idea of a black villain functioning as an antagonist to a white male seems a perfectly logical by-product, and is indeed evident in films from The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) to Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, 1973) to Superman III (Richard Donner, 1983) (Fig. 2). To suggest that black villainy is only available when countered against black heroism (as in the case of film like Black Panther [Ryan Coogler, 2018]) seems to not only simplify the subject matter for the sense of ease, but to go against the very purpose of the edited collection: to treat the supervillain as a figure of analysis in and of itself.

Such decisions are equally baffling given the number of essays within The Supervillain Reader that are merely reprints of articles in other edited collections or journals, truncations of larger works, of exerts from seminal texts from authors like Vladimir Propp (“Extracts from Dramatis Personae” (1968), 31-35) and Siegfried Kracauer (“Caligari” (1949), 183-189). Offering varying taxonomies of supervillains with little theoretical weight, articulating patterns of villainy across space and time without offering much cultural insight into the stakes behind these representations, the book is guilty at times of performing a largely solipsistic interpretative exercise in convention-spotting across different popular media genres, rather than having the clarity of vision to even speculatively puncture at the heart of its subject matter. Nearly every opening paragraph of each chapter asserts the same premises – that a superhero is nothing without a supervillain, and a superhero narrative is nothing without a super antagonist – but rarely does the collection get at the substance of what these statements mean. The publication will therefore be interest to beginners to this kind of material (it would make a useful starting text for an undergraduate essay, or to readers of Fantasy-Animation.org interested in this material who’d like an accessible starting text). However, for those with even a passingly familiarity with the kinds of debates it raises, it does not say much more than a quick ‘hello’ to the material it seeks to cover. Given how fascinating the collection can be in moments, I am left with the feeling that there is far more to say about the subject matter, and I would probably have preferred the authors within the collection to simply get on with saying it, rather than just remind me it needs saying.

**Article published: July 31, 2020**