Title: Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America
Publisher: Continuum
Writer: Matthew J. Costello
Review by: Jason King
Secret Identity Crisis, written by a professor of political science from St. Xavier University on Chicago’s South Side, contextualizes the development of Marvel Comics – though nearly all of this discussion focuses on a very small number of superheroes – through the Cold War. This book’s academic roots are ever-present, and as such the book may prove too lofty for some. This is clear early in the book when one is given a fairly thorough chronology of Cold War America social and intellectual history, with large sections dedicated to less exciting topics. Indeed, comic books and superheroes are so sparse in the first chapter that it is doubtless some readers, more interested in histories of superheroes than in anti-Communist consensus, will find this book very disappointing. (more…)
