For more on the Critical Code Studies Conference, co-organized by Mark Marino, see the series of essays and discussions posted under ebr’s First Person thread.

Moore’s Promethea, on the other hand, is something akin to a theoretical text which gives a great deal of attention to Moore’s metaphysical views. Promethea starts as a superhero story, but quickly turns into a meditation on the relationship between reality and representation. In a way, it reminds me of Yeats’ Golden Dawn years, but without the pretension… and it offers further insight into the meaning of an under language. In Promethea, the under langauge is not simply a technique that is available to the comic book writer, but it fits with some primordial sense of what language is and what… continue

The film version of Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder, was released in 2009.

Take a look at M. Wolf-Meyer’s “The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference” in The Journal of Popular Culture 36.3 (Mar 2003). Wolf-Meyer discusses the restrained nature of the superhero relative to their superpowered abilities. In a way, I think this argument might resonate with some of the radical possibility that is open to us in the digital age. We have free reign to generate representations with great range, reach, and capacity, but they must subsist on some terrain of intelligibility. Wolf-Meyer discusses this from a Marxist… continue

In a recent response to Walter Benn Michaels’ “Neoliberal Aesthetics,” Michael Clune ponders the political consequences of the gap between actual economies and the “economic fictions” described in American Literature and the Free Market.