Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain the World

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Description

An exploration of the artistic and pop culture concepts of sequels, remakes, retcons, and rejects, this book applies them to the ways in which we understand, reinterpret and revise real-world history and current events. Free from such sequence, novels, comics, films, and TV shows continue previous events (sequels), reveal previously unknown events (retcons), or restart events (remakes), and audiences can still ignore any of these revisions if they chose (rejects). But what if these revisionist tropes adopted by popular media now provide us with the essential tools and rhetoric for understanding the nature of the real world and how we discuss it Deriving revision types from those present in fictional franchises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and the Marvel comics, Chris Gavaler and Nate Goldberg apply them to events and debates in U.S history, politics, law, science and culture to explore how storytelling frames our engagement with historiography, metaphysics, society and current events. Covering case studies such as the reversal of Roe vs Wade, identity politics, the discoveries of Copernicus, memory, cancel culture, supreme court rulings, revisionist history, critical race theory, paradigm shifts and much more, this book makes our perceptions of the world and their relation to an ever-changing reality accessible and coherent.

Reviews

Scholar-author Chris Gavaler takes us through the history of superhero comics in a way that is accessible for any reader, and academically considered enough for any erudite. Gavaler traces the genre from the beginning, commenting on how comic books and graphic novels reflected the culture and events around them, including war and eugenics. * Praise for Superhero Comics authored by Chris Gavaler, JD DeHart, Reading and Literature Resources *
This would make the perfect textbook for a class on the history of comics. Its great for comic fans who want to go beyond the pages of the latest DC or Marvel adventure to understand and appreciate how these stories evolved and what were their origins. * Praise for Superhero Comics authored by Chris Gavaler, Artistic Bent *

Author Bio

Chris Gavaler is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, USA. He is also the author of On the Origin of Superheroes: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1 (2015) and Superhero Comics (2017) and Creating Comics (2021) and The Comics Form (2022), all published by Bloomsbury. Since 2021, he has been series editor of Bloomsbury Comics Studies. Chris is the author of two novels: School for Tricksters and Pretend Im Not Here. Nathaniel Goldberg is Professor of philosophy at Washington and Lee University, USA. He is the author of Kantian Conceptual Geography (2014). and co-author, with Chris Gavaler, of Superhero Thought Experiments (2019) and Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith (2022).