Not All Supermen has been out for nearly a month now, and THANK YOU to everyone who’s picked up a copy! I’ve heard from a lot of you who enjoyed it, and I’m so glad it seems to be resonating with people. It was also nice to see last weekend, a few weeks after the book’s release, that it hit #1 on Amazon’s “Women’s Literature Criticism” chart:
A niche category, sure, but a) a pretty darn cool niche category, and b) #1 is #1! Thanks again to everyone who’s checked it out!
Speaking of, if you’ve picked up a copy and want to get it signed, I still have a few bookplates left. Just send me proof of purchase (of any kind; get creative if you want!) to timhanley01@gmail.com, and I’ll send you whichever one of these two lovely bookplates you’d prefer, signed and addressed to you, free of charge. I’m starting to run low, so jump on this one!
Thanks as well to everyone who registered for the “Unlearning Toxic Masculinity” panel hosted by LTHJ Global last week! I thought it was a great conversation. Linsdey was a fantastic host, and Ben and Muchingo had wonderful insights and really dug into the topic in compelling, vulnerable ways. I hope my comic book chatter was enlightening, too. If you missed the panel, it’s up now on Youtube:
If you’ve got a copy of the book and noticed the short bibliography at the back, fear not! I’ve posted the full bibliography online if you, like me, are the sort of nerd who likes to scan through the backmatter when you finish a book. We had to do a select bibliography because the endnotes got VERY long. The book covers so many characters, eras, and topics that I ended up citing a ton of stuff. So it was either trim the bibliography or lose a chapter, and that was a pretty easy choice for me. And now the full version is available.
Finally, the Twitter thread exploring characters and comic panels mentioned in Not All Supermen has reached it’s end today. Since I last updated you, we’ve had chats about how Batman went from this to this:
How the Punisher’s murderous ways and gun enthusiasm led to him becoming a mascot for the Blue Lives Matter movement:
And this week we’ve been digging into the She-Hulk! Originally created to be a monstrous being like her cousin, the Hulk, She-Hulk was gradually sexualized over the years. She went from a wild force of destruction in her debut issue to the star of pin-up pages two years later, and this trend continued as time went on:
It’s fascinating to me that a character who was originally noticeably different from the uniform body shape of female characters, in the same monstrous vein as the Hulk, so quickly became hyper-sexualized for the male audience. Fascinating, but not surprising. That’s superhero comics for you. You can follow the full thread on Twitter, or check out the hashtag #NotAllSupermen!
