Tuesday 24 May 2011

‘Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe’ published in Super Kritische Berichte



Details concerning the latest edition of Kritische Berichte from Jonas Verlag have just been posted online. This special issue, given the one-off title ‘Super Kritische Berichte’ but is also numbered more prosaically 1.2011, has been edited by Joseph Imorde and Jörg Scheller, who organized the conference on Superheroes, Supermen and Ubermensch at which I gave a talk in Siegen last May. The journal’s contents - predominantly presented in German but with occasional Anglophone outbreaks - reflect developments from and reflections on that memorable exchange – two papers I particularly enjoyed were Henry Keazor’s ‘“Up and Atom!”’ Superheroes in the Simpsons’ (in English) and Roland Meyer’s ‘Im leeren Zentrum der Netze’ (very much in German) on the cycle of Mabuse films.

My own essay ‘Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe’ expands upon my lecture ‘The Purple Death’, first given at ‘Kill Your Timid Notion’ in 2007, connecting Flash and Ming with Ludwig II, Walter Benjamin, John Carter of Mars and Andy Warhol. Anyone whose German is up to it and has a weakness for figuring out what the hell The Joker, Anthrax and the X-Men  are actually about should immediatelty use their Bat Computer and Decoder Ring to order up a copy online – I mean how many back issues of Watchmen can you get for 12 Euros these days?

Note: a recording of my original lecture ‘The Purple Death’ as delivered at ‘Kill Your Timid Notion’ in 2007 can be accessed by clicking here.

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