ABSTRACT
Without doubt, contemporary Western culture is facing the return of spiritual/magical thinking in everyday life that can, among other things, produce a sense of the mysterious, the weird and the uncanny. This is both a response to the disenchantment of modernity and a consequence of the rise of consumer and popular cultures. Hyper-reality is structured via signs and symbols in such a way that it becomes difficult to distinguish the real from the unreal, which in turn encourages people to seek spectacle rather than meaning. Alternative spiritualities and westernized Eastern practices are part of what Bauman calls post-modern religions, and more specifically, consumer religions. The Golden Age of comics in North America began with the debut of Superman in 1938. As a cultural artefact, the Superman character gained an enormous audience, not only in comics but also in other media such as animated cartoons, radio and television.
