ABSTRACT
Tucked into the pages of Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962), Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s inaugural Spider-Man contains a panel in which teen dweeb Peter Parker feels his body changing at the molecular level. Having undergone that fateful radioactive spider bite and shifting towards the proportionate strength of a spider, he cries out: “What’s happening to me? I feel-different! As though my entire body is charged with some sort of fantastic energy!” That panel got me thinking: about how energy defi nes all superhero bodies in their extraordinary capacity for undulating movement, fl ight, and exertion; about how energy, too, informs genre as a perpetually unfolding signifi cation, loaded with unexpected possibility; and about how energy is a trait associated with the baroque and its illusionistic tensions between stasis and mutability. Indeed, Norman K. Klein’s recent study of baroque special effects suggests that the desire to animate the immobile amounted to a kind of baroque-animated cinema of the seventeenth century (Klein 2004, 61).
