Death, Disability, and the Superhero Quotes

“Sympathy once more reveals its limits when faced with madness.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“The multiverse model offers an elegantly postmodern solution to character stasis in a market-driven serial publishing system which privileges constancy over major change.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“Disability fluctuates, growing visible, then invisible, then visible again, becoming both ever-present and haunting. Such a problematizing of physical life added a new wrinkle to the genre's double/secret identity trope: the characters now interact with their shifting bodies as bodies with all the complications involved.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“If someone's personhood is in doubt (or seen as lacking), all the easier to direct death wishes at them. When a tiny minority of them transgresses, their crimes of violence only confirm their abjection from the human [. . .] Anxiety, threat, dread, fear, and prejudice feed into the explanatory mechanisms that construct them as somehow beyond human, beyond mercy.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“We should bear in mind the supercrip stereotype as a figure obsessively, indeed maniacally, over-compensating for a perceived physical difference or lack, since, as we shall see, this aspect ties in quite neatly with the genre specificities and narratival concerns of so much Silver Age superhero literature.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“The stereotype of the supercrip, in the eyes of its critics, represents a sort of overachieving, overdetermined self-enfreakment that distracts from the lived daily reality of most disabled people.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“[In "The Night Gwen Stacy Died"], death took on an existential quality -- the beloved, innocent but weak Gwen is merely a victim, the casualty of a war between superpowered rivals -- and as such the episode proved a turning point int eh genre's depiction of mortality.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“With emancipation comes the opening up of new possibilities for challenging assumptions over women's appearance and, more radically, the gender order itself. Ventura (She-Thing) comes not only to accept her new "intragender" status but to see it as advantageous -- for dealing with her misandry, for personal growth, and even for becoming a person capable of giving and accepting love.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond