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Comics, and especially superhero comics, increasingly assumed a central place in later 20th century SF. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s a new sophistication entered into the world of anglophone comics. In addition to the traditional magazine format comics, there came on the market a new mode known as graphic novels, usually issued in a series of part-formats but later collected together and bound as a single volume. In earlier chapters I argued that the vogue for SF superhero icons expressed, in a popular cultural idiom, one of the root concerns of SF: the role of the Saviour and the status of atonement in a modern, scientific post-Copernican cosmos. Few people nowadays think of these questions in theological terms.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-56957-8_15

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