ABSTRACT
Myth emerges from the depths of what we usually associate with the human imagination, arising de profundis in word and image embodied as ritual, which is to say that myth is verbal, visual, and visceral. Whatever other names, epithets, and actions we attribute to them, heroes, superheroes, and their tales always contain verbal, visual, and visceral elements. As mythic manifestation, the superhero exists not in transition but as transition. As transition or liminality, then, the superhero beckons us to that region Henri Corbin calls the mundus imaginalis, the very real imaginal world that is neither intellect nor imagination but both: the region of ‘and.’ Yet to conceive of this world, to participate in it, one need not dwell solely in ephemeral theory, nor solely in reality as we know it. One must enter both worlds simultaneously. Myth does not speak about transformation within that region; myth is transformation within that region of ‘and.’ Born of the future and memory, Neil Gaiman (writer) and Dave McKean’s (artist) Black Orchid (DC Comics 1991) operates as vision and re-vision within this imaginal space.
