From comic books to animated cartoon series, digital games, live-action television drama, and blockbuster cinema, to T-shirts, coffee mugs, and cereal boxes, the entertainment industries’ licensing and franchising practices have turned superheroes such as Batman, Spider-Man, or the X-Men into fixtures of our media environment. Such proliferations have, in fact, gone on for quite some time. DC Comics’ Superman, for instance, has appeared in numerous comic books, films, and TV series, inspiring the production of innumerable trinkets, toys, and other kinds of merchandise since his inception in the late 1930s (see Daniels 47–62). In the twenty-first century, superhero figures have entered more high-brow cultural and literary fields as well, turning up in pop-art and high fashion, in auteurist films such as Alejandro G. Iñarritu's Birdman (2014, Fox Searchlight) and acclaimed novels such as Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). This omnipresence attests to superheroes’ remarkable cultural staying power and ability to adapt, transform, and change contexts. Other, older characters from the realm of anglophone mass culture have had similar careers: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his monstrous creation, Bram Stokers’ Dracula, Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, or Ian Fleming's James Bond, for example, have also been reincarnated many times and proliferated across a variety of media. Ruth Mayer discusses such frequently re-invented characters as “serial figures” that “move across media and medial forms” and, in the process, become widely known “cultural icon[s]” (Fu Manchu 9; see Denson and Mayer; Denson, “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein”). The persistence of such figures, Mayer suggests, is linked to their formulaic “flatness” and status as amalgams of easily “recognizable images, [ … ] plots, phrases, and accessories that, once established, can be rearranged, reinterpreted, recombined, and invested with new significance” (Fu Manchu 10, 11). Likewise, iconic superheroes such as Superman or Spider-Man are “in constant flux and yet unchanging,” continuously spreading out into new cultural territories and nonetheless staying recognizably the same (Fu Manchu 3).

This chapter engages with the culture-industrial processes of serial repetition and variation that undergird such proliferations, their place within a larger system of commercial entertainment, and the consequences of popular culture's digitization at the beginning of the twenty-first century.