Superheroes in Indian Comics: Deliberations from Anthropology

There is a prevailing sense that commercial superhero comics cannot be serious objects of academic enquiry. It is the hallowed graphic novel, with its auteur/author, for which serious work is reserved.

This volume presents the work of three publishing houses who publish Superhero Comics in Delhi and Mumbai. It analyses their techniques of narration associated with the serial publication of commercial comics such as open-ended plots, frequent re-boots of the storyline, extended story arcs, and a complex narrative universe to throw into sharper relief the value of superhero comic books as distinct from the graphic novel. Through an exploration of commercial superhero comics, the authors wish to draw attention to a fluidity embedded in Superhero Comics, which is influenced by external pressures of distribution and production that are generally ignored in the desire to view a comic text as a discrete and disembodied whole. Superhero comics then emerge as a post-modern vehicle to test serious socio-political issues in the mode of fantasy.

This ethnographic attempt to understand the contexts of production, circulation, and consumption of superhero comics will be of interest to comics scholars, students of popular culture, sociology, social anthropology, literature and the arts.