Suiting up, taking off: movement, special effects, and superheroes

Superheroes have been moving between comics and film since the earliest days of the genre, and this long and uneasy process of reciprocal adaptation reveals affordances of the moving image that are completely inaccessible to the still images on a comic book page. The gaps between juxtaposed images in comics – governed by the mental processes gathered under the term ‘closure’ – are smoothed over within the continuity of the moving image. In this formal transit between stillness and movement, the superheroic body reveals or hides its aspects like a faceted stone rotating in the light. Moments of thematized physical transformation, which are inherently discontinuous on the four-color page, become live enactments enabled or stymied by the historical contingencies and formal affordances of film technology. These transformations, represented in this article by the quick-change suit up and the effect of continuous flight, do not only capture the tension between superhero comics and superhero movies, but also weigh the stakes and ideals carried within the superhero body.