Earliest recorded stories of the humankind tell the tales of the brave and the fallen. Oftentimes, such narratives introduce extraordinary strength, astonishing with, and miraculous abilities. Importantly, superheroes, villains, and their deeds do not merely entertain but also have impact on the audiences’ day-to-day lives. Besides religious accounts, myths or fairy tales, superheroes and their villain counterparts live on through popular culture. While comic books and their readers were first brushed off as a niche, the global commercial success of franchises as Marvel, DC, and Star Wars among others proves the enduring allure of the superhumans. Notably, contemporary superheroes are not always white, heterosexual men; increasingly they represent diverse backgrounds and identities. As the number of fans of Black Panther, Superman, and different iterations of Spider(wo)man from across the Spider-verse grow around the world, we invite scholars to consider how audiences receive, process, and make sense of the contemporary superheroes.

Independent of how improbable and fictional the storylines of superheroes and villains are, media users seem to be able to engage, and even identify with certain aspects and traits of these characters. While the heroes can serve as role models, their antagonists are equally important for the narratives and thus play a role in audience involvement. Superhero characters from diverse backgrounds have existed for a long time already (e.g. Black Panther in 1966, Fanthoma, 1940, Northstar, 1979), however, their global visibility and inclusion in mainstream audiovisual narratives is more of a recent phenomenon. Diverse representation matters, however, we do not understand the full impact of different styles of representation on certain audiences. Possibly, mood management, attitude change, empowerment or even therapeutical effects can result from character engagement. Furthermore, individual audience members characteristics such as gender, sex, race, sexual orientation, cultural background, personality traits among others guide the reception and engagement with both the heroic and villainous characters. Next to the classic comic books, movies, TV shows, video games, virtual environments, as well as role playing games (what is a cross over as a medium?) are spaces where superheroes and villains’ narratives might engage and affect the audiences. Finally, we define the superhero in a broad sense, encompassing any character that displays extraordinary abilities in realistic, fantasy, or sci-fi setting.

We are interested but not limited to contributions on the following topics:
1. How does the audience engage with superheroes and villains;
2. Who are the audiences of superhero narratives;
3. Representation and engagement of superhero and villain characters in games;
4. Superheroes narratives and diversity;
5. Diversity in production teams working on superhero content aka representation behind the curtains;
6. Development of diversity storylines within franchises;
7. Empowerment via superheroes and villains;
8. Coping and mood-management via character engagement;
9. Avatar construction based on superheroes and villains;
10. How do audience characteristics impact engagement with superheroes and villains
11. Media effects of superhero engagement
12. Surprise us with your own topic! Excelsior!

We encourage submissions including a variety of methodological approaches (case studies, experimental designs, survey studies etc.) as well as theoretical contributions.

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Frontiers in Psychology

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