El superhéroe de las mil caras

At first, we encountered superheroes in newsstand comics, pulp fiction, and newspaper strips. Nowadays, they are almost ubiquitous on screens big and small, in movies and TV series, in action figures and collectibles… But their origin lies (though we generally forget it) in the gods and goddesses, the heroes and heroines who have populated the mythological tales of Antiquity since time immemorial. Thus, unexpectedly reaping that rich and protean inheritance, the creators of Marvel and DC have become astute dealers, offering us precisely what the spirit of our age has lost after centuries of materialism and rationalism, and yet ardently desires… In this way, mimicking the religious or wisdom-based function of ancient myths, superheroes now populate the Grand Narrative that shapes the heroic archetypes of our time: a torrential collection of interwoven stories of communal creation, comparable in allegorical power and imaginative richness to the sagas of Greek, Roman, or Norse mythology. Starting from this premise, this book is an invitation to delve into a hedonistic and anti-academic, heterodox and playful essay that proposes we rethink the superhero imaginary as a new formulation of the great immemorial myths, which acquires new and interesting psychological, philosophical, social, and political resonances in our time, speaking to us about universes and multiverses, democracy and fascism, capitalism and rebellion, identities and masks, mortality and transcendence… Thus, The Superhero of a Thousand Faces encourages us to address all these themes in the great cycles of superhero narratives, cheerfully dipping into collections, sagas, characters, authors, and decades, mixing essayistic reflection with the most geeky erudition, and the analytical rigor of countless references from “high” and “low” culture with the adolescent pleasure of digging for treasures among tons of comics.