Popular Culture Review Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 2011 | Page 37

Comic Books and The New Literature 33 fiends’^ who abuse their powers and their social recognition to satisfy their most primal instincts and literally get away with rape and murder. The Boys’ task appears therefore more than justified for superheroes obviously constitute a social menace and must be policed, punished, and even sometimes eliminated. It is revealed by The Legend, a comic book store owner who provides The Boys with data regarding “the supes,” that Victory Comics, the comic book publishing company controlled by the powerful Vought-American corporation, has manufactured and promoted false information about superheroes, hence forging an artificial image of morally irreproachable saviors for public use; society has been fooled in believing that it needed superheroes and even the CIA, the main sponsor of the Boys, is reluctant to confront Vought-American directly for fear it would unleash its super-powered maniacs against the agency and the country itself, which is to say that in essence, any superhero is susceptible to be a supervillain. The Boys is not only a comic book narration with particularly welldeveloped characters and a definitely mature tone, it is also the story of a struggle within the industry itself: assisted by a comic-book store owner, the Boys defend the interest of society by fighting against superheroes manipulated by a cold-blooded corporation which happens to have constructed the myth of the superman through the publication of its very own brand of comic books. By adding a meta-fictitious dimension to the narration. The Boys explicitly denounces the corporate structure which has confined the genre to endless repetitions of the same manichean conflict; it is a superhero comic book entirely devoted to free the comic book medium from the domination of superheroes through the systematic destruction of generic, morally viable albeit unsustainable cliches. When one considers the success, both public and critical of Watchmen and of The Boys, as well as the increasing abundance of comic books and graphic novels which altogether exclude superheroes from their narrative universes, it appears that the comic book medium in the United States is in the process of escaping its commercial and thematic limitations, hence becoming more artistically and culturally significant than ever before. Its recipient has grown older, more mature, and more demanding, and the over-extended, somewhat contrived reign of superheroes upon an entire narrative medium is drawing to an end, allowing for renewed artistic creativity, which should ease the enthronization of a much too long disparaged narrative form into the already generically confused canon of literary and cultural studies; after all, comic books are no child’s play. West Virginia University Daniel Ferreras Savoye Notes ‘ The disastrous effects of postmodern theory upon the definition and practice of our discipline are further described in “The Birth of Counter Theory.” ^ Cultural and Popular Culture studies are easy preys for current critical trends