Category: Philosophy
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UPDATE: See new publication and ordering details—new post coming soon with new cover! It's finally here, my long-promised book on Marvel Comics' Civil War storyline and my initial foray into self-publishing with Amazon's Kindle Direct, publishing on February 3 and available now for pre-order: is now being published by Ockham Publishing in print and ebook formats…
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Marvel's current crossover event, AXIS, involves various characters having their ethical orientation "inverted": heroes become villians and vice versa. A deceptively simple premise that has been used throughout the history of superhero comics—but rarely on this scale—it has potential for interesting stories (as well as culminating in "things will never be the same" changes to…
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Imagine you’re a leader in your community, fighting on behalf of a principle for which you are personally willing to sacrifice anything. Your own well-being is of no concern to you as long as your actions are protecting and promoting the ideal in which you believe so strongly. One day, however, you notice that your…
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I was surprised to see The Virtues of Captain America up on Google Books several weeks before it's released, but on the bright side, the preview does contain the introduction, which I encourage anybody interested in this book to read. (And don't forget the first chapter is available at Wiley Blackwell's site for the book.)…
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It's almost here! Just a few weeks until The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero is released, and the fine folks at Wiley Blackwell have posted PDF files of the table of contents, the index, and the first chapter, which provides some basic ethical background for the…
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Well, it's time to let the Cap out of the bag… I'm very pleased to announce my next book, The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero, which will be published by Wiley-Blackwell next March ahead of the film sequel Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier. (If you're…
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As Zap2It reported early this morning, part of Grant Morrison's sprawling DC Comics series Multiversity will tell the story of a stranger from another planet landing in Nazi Germany rather than Smallville, Kansas: "Imagine you're Superman and for the first 25 [years] of your life you were working for Hitler," Morrison says, "And then you…
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While preparing my nearly-monthly update to my personal blog, I noticed that Wiley has made my Superman and Philosophy chapter, "Moral Judgment: The Power That Makes Superman Human," available for free at its website. In this chapter, I explain how Superman's powers don't make him immune to the need to make difficult moral choices that…
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At The Atlantic today, Noah Berlatsky of the Hooded Utilitarian argues that Superman has not wandered far from his historical roots in racist fascism, which is even more reason to be concerned that anti-gay writer Orson Scott Card is writing Adventures of Superman. I won't comment on his spurious links between the Ku Klux Klan…
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It's been a long wait–for me, at least!–but the cover to Superman and Philosophy is finally available (and visible to your right). As I said on my personal blog after I first saw it, I love how it parallels the Batman and Philosophy cover in general layout and title font, since the two volumes bookend my…
Mark D. White 