Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Killer Bodies: The Rise and Fall of Bad Girl Comics

Killer Bodies: The Rise and Fall of Bad Girl Comics

Crawford, Joseph

Paperback

Literary CriticismGeneral SociologyWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 1978841965
ISBN13: 9781978841963
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: Dec 9 2025
Pages: 206
Weight: 0.73
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

Killer Bodies offers a history of the single most critically derided subgenre in American superhero comics: the bad girl comics of the 1990s, which chronicled the blood-soaked adventures of barely dressed and improbably proportioned action heroines for an audience of adolescent boys. While not in any way attempting to rehabilitate the genre, which for the most part amply deserved its reputation as sexist and borderline pornographic, this book situates it within its original cultural context, as the result of a matrix of influences that included third-wave feminism, neopaganism, girl power, the rise of the internet, the growing popularity of manga, supermodel beauty ideals, and the mainstreaming of pornography. It explores why and how the figure of the antiheroic, physically aggressive, sexually objectified heroine arose within American comics culture, and the commercial and ideological factors that led to the genre's rapid rise and equally rapid decline amidst the crisis-racked comics industry of the mid-1990s.

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