Last year at HILT, I pitched a project (as part of the “Community Keynote” series of lightning talks) examining images of New York City in the Marvel Universe, and I got a lot of good feedback from the people in attendance. I’ve been juggling a million things between then and now, but today I finally found time to create (and start to populate) New York City and The Marvel Universe, a Tumblr “work-in-progress” research blog tied to this research. I hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you think!
The blog will mostly be excepts from particular comics and research materials and some thinking out loud about various topics. I’ve decided to start with Daredevil (The Man Without Fear!) because he’s explicitly connected to a particular part of NYC (Hell’s Kitchen) and many creative teams have set their stories in interesting (and weird) versions of New York City over the years. I’m also particularly drawn to Daredevil because of the Netflix TV show and its ever-expanding Hell’s Kitchen, so I imagine my work will also look at those images of the city eventually. I’m looking at the early days of the character: the above image is from 1964’s Daredevil #2, a particularly nutty issue that I talk a bit about over at the blog. But I’m also reading across time periods to bring images and creative teams into conversation with one another (here’s an example of that).
Beyond Daredevil, I’ll be looking at the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Punisher, Ghost Rider, The Avengers, and some other NYC-centric books (like Power Man and Iron Fist, Hawkeye, and Damage Control, among others).
I’ve been a comics nerd for a long time, and as someone who was born and raised in Brooklyn I’ve always been fascinated by the uses of the city in these stories. For various reasons I haven’t done much work with comics in academic contexts, but I’m excited to finally have a project that dovetails with my professional life a bit. While I wouldn’t say this work will be explicitly driven by digital humanities methodologies and approaches, I’m currently building some (rough) datasets and I’m thinking about how I might visualize and otherwise make use of this material on this site and in other forms of traditional and not-so-traditional scholarship. I’m also working with various editions (print and digital) of comics and thinking a bit about the material conditions of these sites of publication, circulation, and reception. This work is also very much informed by my various experiences with online comics fandom, a long history of engagement that began on Prodigy bulletin boards, continued into the blogging boom of the early aughts (I’ve buried my old Blogger site, sorry guys), and lives on via my “unprofessional” Twitter account and in @CK1Blogs, long may he blog.
Stay tuned, True Believers!