Killer Bodies
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€33.99
A01=Joseph Crawford
Author_Joseph Crawford
Category=DSK
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBCT
Category=JBSF11
Category=XA
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eq_fiction
eq_graphic-novels-manga
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Product details
- ISBN 9781978841963
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 09 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Killer Bodies offers a history of the single most critically-derided subgenre in American superhero comics: the ‘bad girl’ comics of the 1990s, which chronicled the blood-soaked adventures of barely-dressed and improbably-proportioned action heroines for an audience of adolescent boys. While not in any way attempting to rehabilitate the genre, which for the most part amply deserved its reputation as sexist and borderline pornographic, this book situates it within its original cultural context, as the result of a matrix of influences that included third-wave feminism, neopaganism, ‘girl power’, the rise of the internet, the growing popularity of manga, supermodel beauty ideals, and the mainstreaming of pornography. It explores why and how the figure of the anti-heroic, physically aggressive, sexually objectified heroine arose within American comics culture, and the commercial and ideological factors that led to the genre’s rapid rise and equally rapid decline amidst the crisis-racked comics industry of the mid-1990s.
Joseph Crawford is an associate professor of English at the University of Exeter, in the UK. He is the author of five books, including The Twilight of the Gothic and Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry.
