An examination of the art in superhero comics and how style influences comic narratives. For many, the idea of comic book art implies simplistic four-color renderings of stiff characters slugging it out. In fact, modern superhero comic books showcase a range of complex artistic styles, with diverse connotations. Leading comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown assesses six distinct approaches to superhero illustration—idealism, realism, cute, retro, grotesque, and noir—examining how each visually represents the superhero as a symbolic construct freighted with meaning. Whereas comic book studies tend to focus on text and narrative, Super Bodies gives overdue credit to the artwork, which is not only a principal source of the appeal of comic books but also central to the values these works embody. Brown argues that superheroes are to be taken not as representations of people but as iconic types, and the art conveys this. Even the most realistic comic illustrations are designed to suggest not persons but ideas—ideas about bodies and societies. Thus the appearance of superheroes both directly and indirectly influences the story being told as well as the opinions readers form concerning justice, authority, gender, puberty, sexuality, ethnicity, violence, and other concepts central to political and cultural life.

Based on the wildly popular segments broadcast during the Vancouver Olympics, Superbodies explores how genetics and DNA, the brain, muscles, lungs, heart and blood work together in extreme conditions. It’s an inside look that draws on Dr. Greg Wells’ research at Sick Kids Hospital and the University of Toronto and more than fifteen years’ experience working with Olympic athletes. Superbodies is a fascinating explanation of the human body and an easy-to-follow plan that shows how everyone can learn from the pros to improve their health and performance. Dr. Wells explains How the same training techniques that elite athletes follow can be even more effective for most people What’s happening inside your body when you’re exercising, and fighting illness What makes elite athletes such as pro-hockey players successful, and what you can learn from them Why little things can add up, and how simple choices can make a huge difference. Fascinating, easy-to-read and packed with full-colour illustrations and photographs, Superbodies shows how people of all ages and abilities can improve their own health and performance.

This volume is a result of four days in July 2005, where historians, health economists, medical doctors and nurses, anthropologists, writers, sociologists and many more travelled to Oxford, England for the fourth annual 'Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease' conference organised by Inter-Disciplinary.Net.

The fourth title in the best-selling DC Super Heroes concept board books series (in addition to ABC 123, COLORS & SHAPES, and OPPOSITES), this cool and colorful book teaches budding super hero fans about their bodies, actions, and clothing using DC's beloved characters and classic art. From Superman's eyes (with their awesome X-ray vision) to the Flash's fastest-in-the-world feet, this unique concept board book helps little ones to identify all of their powerful body parts. They will also learn about actions (Aquaman swims; Batman swings; Wonder Woman jumps) and items of clothing illustrated by DC's popular super heroes.

This volume discusses fluidity of the post-human bodies on various cultural and social examples – from the cyber relations to others and to self, through fragmented, prosetheticised, monstrous or augmented body, to the dis/utopian fantasies.

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.