ABSTRACT
Umberto Eco's finely crafted semiotic reading of Superman, which originally appeared in Italian in 1962 but became broadly known to English-speaking audiences through its 1972 translation, offered an ideological view of the 1950s Superman as locked in a timeless state that denied the possibility of change. It is fairly easy to determine work that is sociological in nature. Such work tends to be produced by scholars trained in sociology who see in comics a way of discussing social issues of one sort or another. The point is to show that worth in the quality of the study-in the case of comics whether it is, for instance, a formal account of the properties of comic art or a historical study of the social relevance of comics. Trauma also figures as a primary component in the origin stories of superheroes since the genre's inception. For sociohistorical and cultural reasons, comics' representation of disability reflects very different political stakes from those of trauma.
