Page - 61 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

The Problem of Evil | 61www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 59–74 exhaustive studies already exist on the subject.6 three tendencies in the evolu- tion of the superhero genre since the 1940s stand out: a more realist approach in characterization, an internalization of the hero’s conflict, and an exacerbated pessimism. the heroes introduced during the Golden Age of comics (late 1930s to mid 1950s) were largely perfect and infallible. Most of the modern superheroes ar- chetypes and prototypes were developed, but they remained monochromatic – the first versions of Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, for example. in the silver Age of comics (late 1950s to mid 1970s), the superheroes were de- picted in a realistic way: often tormented, they had to face extraordinary chal- lenges as well as daily and domestic problems. it was the age of spiderman, the superhero in the midst of a teenage crisis, or the X-Men, who symbolically illustrated the anxieties of stigmatized minorities within a context of civic and social protest. in a book on Marvel’s universe – Marvel was DC Comics’ main competitor – Anthony Mills, an American theologian, talks about a “turn to reality” in 1960s comics:7 the characters became anchored in a concrete reality and were more recognizable, more “organic”. this new “turn” distanced them from the values of the American monomyth, a contemporary adaptation in U.s. literature of a concept introduced by Joseph Campbell:8 in comparison to the more individu- alistic, agnostic hero of the monomyth, the silver Age hero was more dynamic, interactive, and interdependent. Mills is able to identify decidedly evangelical features in this new kind of hero. But this period contained in embryonic form all the next period’s excesses: while the Silver Age hero’s conflicts were more internalized, creating more nu- anced characters, the hero’s “humanization” was replaced in the 1980s by ex- istential crisis, with the hero calling into question his teleological ethics. from perfect hero to realist hero (undermined by his own demons), the superhero was finally confronting an imperfect and fallible world that underlined the vani- ty of his actions. in the wake of this new reality a new superhero appeared, with pronounced nihilistic tendencies – in a medium still criticized, strangely enough, for its childish naïveté. How does this “revisionist” turn, which defines the Iron Age of comics, mod- ify the genre’s syntax? the conception of the main heroes has been completely modified, but above all, this new tendency emphasizes a meta-narrative dimen- sion of the genre, allowing a meditation on the story and formal mechanisms of the medium and on its main syntactic elements. Like myth, the genre raises questions that lead to “labyrinths” (a term borrowed from Leibniz) in which 6 see Darowski 2016, 3–16. 7 Mills 2013, 97–98. 8 see Campbell 2013, 25–45.