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Most readers think that superheroes began with Superman’s appearance in Action Comics No. 1, but that Kryptonian rocket didn’t just drop out of the sky. By the time Superman’s creators were born, the superhero’s most defining elements—secret identities, aliases, disguises, signature symbols, traumatic origin stories, extraordinary powers, self-sacrificing altruism—were already well-rehearsed standards. Superheroes have a sprawling, action-packed history that predates the Man of Steel by decades and even centuries. On the Origin of Superheroes is a quirky, personal tour of the mythology, literature, philosophy, history, and grand swirl of ideas that have permeated western culture in the centuries leading up to the first appearance of superheroes (as we know them today) in 1938.

From the creation of the universe, through mythological heroes and gods, to folklore, ancient philosophy, revolutionary manifestos, discarded scientific theories, and gothic monsters, the sweep and scale of the superhero’s origin story is truly epic. We will travel from Jane Austen’s Bath to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars to Owen Wister’s Wyoming, with some surprising stops along the way. We’ll meet mad scientists, Napoleonic dictators, costumed murderers, diabolical madmen, blackmailers, pirates, Wild West outlaws, eugenicists, the KKK, Victorian do-gooders, detectives, aliens, vampires, and pulp vigilantes (to name just a few). Chris Gavaler is your tour guide through this fascinating, sometimes dark, often funny, but always surprising prehistory of the most popular figure in pop culture today. In a way, superheroes have always been with us: they are a fossil record of our greatest aspirations and our worst fears and failings.

Examining the deep philosophical topics addressed in superhero comics, authors Gavaler and Goldberg read plot lines for the complex thought experiments they contain and analyze their implications as if the comic authors were philosophers. Reading superhero comic books through a philosophical lens reveals how they experiment with complex issues of morality, metaphysics, meaning, and medium. Given comics’ ubiquity and influence directly on (especially young) readers—and indirectly on consumers of superhero movies and video games—understanding these deeper meanings is in many ways essential to understanding contemporary popular culture. The result is an entertaining and enlightening look at superhero dilemmas.

How does a comics reader understand that a certain race is assigned to a character? In The Color of Paper, Chris Gavaler establishes a formal approach for analyzing racial representations in comics, demonstrating that the ink-on-paper materiality of comics reveals the illogic of metaphorical colors as racial categorizations. Analyzing images by a wide range of comics artists and colorists, including Emilee Denich, Jaime Hernandez, George Herriman, Jack Kirby, and Ben Passmore, Gavaler goes beyond pigment and gradient to explore the formal and material elements of page backgrounds and the negative space of gutters that literally frame race in comics. He surveys major and independent publishers to assess how industry trends and evolving coloring techniques affect racial representation. And, breaking from subjective and overgeneralized analytical norms, Gavaler grounds his analysis in quantitative research on viewers’ responses. The centuries-old relationships between drawn racial markers and assumptions about their meanings continue in a white-dominated culture that benefits from and therefore preserves illusions of their natural accuracy. Denaturalizing racial depictions through formal visual analysis potentially alters racial thinking in ways that extend beyond works on paper and into daily lives.