ABSTRACT
When Frederick Jackson Turner declared the close of the frontier in 1893, he likewise established the traits of a hegemonic masculinity within US society and culture that would persist into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Though not always seen as a part of this promulgation, superhero comics translate the conditions and traits of the frontier, and thus the masculine ideology they encode, into a modern, urban, and technologically advanced context that at first seems inconsistent with them. Superhero comics allow for a similarly unfettered movement despite being set in cities, and generalized masculine traits around which Turner’s conglomerate also function to perpetuate and, at least in some cases, start to challenge this hegemonic form of masculinity.
