ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the porous relationship between the heroes and monsters world by surveying three elements common to each genre: fantastic bodies, conflicted identities, and distressed worlds. As Aldo J. Regalado and Chris Gavaler have noted, one small component of the modern superhero’s D.N.A. comes from the nineteenth-century’s weird and fantastic tales of gothic horror. Nothing signifies the interconnected worlds of heroes and the undead as much as the presentation of their fantastic bodies. While heroes and their undead counterparts share similar bodies and comparably tortured identities, these tales often express divergent political orientations: a difference mapped onto each genre’s distinct imagination of worlds-under-threat. The superheroes’ defining action is to save the world from the threat posed by increasingly potent supervillains. Indeed, the imagining of society in extreme danger is a necessary pretext demonstrating the corresponding need for heroic action.
