Psychology Today: The Superheroes Blog

For those of you interested in superheroes, you can also find me blogging monthly about superheroes on Psychology Today's website (click here to go to that blog). Sometimes the post on this blog will overlap with my Psych Today blog, and sometimes the post here will be unique to this blog. When the post is the same on both blogs, I'll note that at the end of a post here. My post currently on the Psych Today website is NOT included in Psychablog.

Have a good week, and I'll post about WonderCon next week.

April Is a Busy Superhero Month--Comic Conventions

April will be a busy Superhero month. In case you’re planning to attend either WonderCon in San Franscico or C2E2 in Chicago (Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo) stop by at these panels:

At WonderCon in San Francisco, Saturday, April 3^rd, 3:00 P.M.

Panel: It All Began When…: Making Meaning of Superhero Origin Stories

Psychologist Robin Rosenberg (Psychology of Superheroes) and comic book writers Steve Englehart (DC, Marvel, Max August) and James Robinson (DC, Marvel) discuss why the origin story is important, ways that the origin story hems in a character, and why and how the origin story is tweaked (or rebooted) by subsequent writers. We’ll also discuss how both fans and writers make meaning of a superhero origin story.

At C2E2—Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo:

Panel #1: Are Supervillains Evil? Understanding Evil in the Superhero World; Friday, April 16, 4:15 P.M.

Psychologists Robin Rosenberg (Psychology of Superheroes) and Mikhail Lyubansky (University of Illinois), and attorney Amy Martin explore the nature of evil and how different supervillains’ life experiences and personal characteristics indicate various pathways to criminal behavior. The panel will also explore the implications that these various paths have for our notions of justice-- and therefore--how we think about the actions of the superheroes who fight the villains.

Panel #2: Forging Iron Man: The Psychological Construction of Iron Man's Origin Story; Saturday, April 17, 12:15 P.M.

Psychologist Robin Rosenberg (Psychology of Superheroes) and others examine Iron Man's various origin stories and reveal what they tell us about Tony Stark and his decision to become Iron Man.

Why Are Superheroes All the Rage?

When talking about superheroes, I sometimes get asked why I think that superheroes have become so popular and part of the mainstream culture. As part of my answer, I list the impact of 9/11 on the American psyche—and perhaps on the psyche of people in other countries: That 9/11 led Americans to feel acutely vulnerable—on our soil—in a way we hadn’t before.

In the aftermath of 9/11, I hypothesized, we began to yearn for larger-than-life protection from the ever-present concerns about threats to safety. Superhero stories fulfill that yearning, at least temporarily. (I include the television show 24 in this category, although Jack Bauer is neither from another planet nor a mutant—that we know of. He is a superhero in that: (1) he has the superabilities of being able to keep going in the face of inordinate amounts of pain, and without being a psychopath he is able to inflict pain on others without, apparently, much of an emotional cost; and (2) he is portrayed as acting heroically, against impossible odds, repeatedly making enormous personal sacrifices to save others. I could go on about this, but it’s a tangent to the topic of this blog post.)

To support my hypothesis, I point to the phenomenal success of (super)heroic shows and film that aired soon after 9/11:

• 24 (first aired 11/6/2001),
• Smallville (first aired 10/16/2001), and,
• the first Spiderman film (released May, 2002).

My view is that our affinity for superheroes generalizes to all things super--even to the use of the adjective or prefix, super. I wanted to collect some data to support this hypothesis. I predicted that the use of the prefix super (e.g., Super Jumbo, super quiz, super transit) increased after 9/11. So, I did a Google News Archive Search for the term super* from 1937 to 2010. The results are below (and here in your browser).

This set of data doesn't seem to support my hypothesis. However, if you look at the data more closely (in your browser, looking at each decade in detail), you may notice, as I did, that there is always a huge spike in January of each year. I investigated further—turns out those were articles on the Super Bowl. Looking closely at the decade by decade data, there are also spikes related to Super Tuesday, super collider, and Super Mario. So, I tailored my search to omit results that included bowl, Tuesday, collider, and Mario. The results are below (and you can peruse them yourself in more detail by clicking here.)

Okay, looks good for my hypothesis. I then examined the decade 2000-2009 in more detail, as you can see below (and here in your browser). Sure enough, my hypothesis was correct, although the month-by-month bar graph suggests that it took about a year or two for the use of the term to increase reliably and persistently.

Unfortunately, this Google News Archive Search doesn’t provide numerical data, but it at least provide confirmation of a trend, and of my hypothesis. For more information about Google New Archives Search, click here.