All New, All Different?

Winner, John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2019
MPCA/ACA Book Award, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association, 2020

Taking a multifaceted approach to attitudes toward race through popular culture and the American superhero, All New, All Different? explores a topic that until now has only received more discrete examination. Considering Marvel, DC, and lesser-known texts and heroes, this illuminating work charts eighty years of evolution in the portrayal of race in comics as well as in film and on television.

Beginning with World War II, the authors trace the vexed depictions in early superhero stories, considering both Asian villains and nonwhite sidekicks. While the emergence of Black Panther, Black Lightning, Luke Cage, Storm, and other heroes in the 1960s and 1970s reflected a cultural revolution, the book reveals how nonwhite superheroes nonetheless remained grounded in outdated assumptions. Multiculturalism encouraged further diversity, with 1980s superteams, the minority-run company Milestone’s new characters in the 1990s, and the arrival of Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-American heroine, and a new Latinx Spider-Man in the 2000s. Concluding with a discussion of contemporary efforts to make both a profit and a positive impact on society, All New, All Different? enriches our understanding of the complex issues of racial representation in American popular culture.

Allan W. Austin is a professor of history at Misericordia University. He is the author of two previous books, Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917–1950 and From Concentration Camp to Campus: Japanese American Students and World War II. In addition, he served as co-editor of Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia and Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television.

Patrick L. Hamilton is an associate professor of English at Misericordia University. He is the author of Of Space and Mind: Cognitive Mappings of Contemporary Chicano/a Fiction. He has also published on Los Bros Hernandez, The Walking Dead, and Westworld.