ABSTRACT
The poetics and aesthetics of crime, articulated in popular culture, reflect in significant ways wider social sensibilities related to transgression, evil, justice, punishment, vengeance. This chapter enriches the understanding of these cultural dynamics by exploring the configuration of crime, criminality, and justice in the superhero genre. It seeks to map the imaginaries of crime that configure the genre, and in doing so shed light on two inter-related matters firstly, the ways in which the codes and tropes of the superhero reflect and refract popular sentiments about crime; and, the contextual seductions or pleasures that the genre offers its viewers, thereby helping to explain audiences passionate attachment to, and enthusiasm for, such representations. The chapter also provides exercise in criminological poetics. It examines the configurations of crime and justice, good and evil, which circulate through mass mediated popular cultural discourse.
