Writing Superheroes (1997) by Anne Dyson

When

I read this early in my graduate studies while writing what would eventually become my first peer-reviewed empirical paper related to superheroes.

Why

At the time (~mid-2000s), there was not much scholarship on the topic. So when I found this book, it was like hitting the jackpot. This was one of the first books I read that took both superheroes and the children to engage with them seriously. And my favorite cartoon, X-Men: The Animated Series, was one of the examples of superhero media used in her analysis.

How

Dyson’s examination of how children spoke about, wrote about, engaged in play involving superheroes opened my ideas to the possibility of a scholarly agenda centered on superheroes. I wrote about this influence, particularly in the context of children’s social and moral development in educational spaces, back in 2020.