How to Read Superhero Comics and Why

Geoff Klock is the author of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (Continuum, 2002) a study guided by Harold Bloom's poetics of influence. After getting a Masters degree in English he spent two years studying literature as a night security guard. He was then admitted to Balliol College, Oxford. His doctoral thesis there, Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets, focuses on Romantic poetry and its extensions through the 20th century- specifically poetry's bizarre and idiosyncratic portrayals of historical writers (e.g. Virgil in Dante's Divine Comedy). This work will be followed by a complementary study of the same device in popular culture, (e.g. Johnny Depp's portrayal of William Blake in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man).Geoff Klock is twenty-seven years old, and was raised in Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. For more information visit his website at www.geoffklock.com

• Melancholy and the Infinite Earths; The Bat and the Watchmen - Introducing the Revisionary Superhero Narrative; 'It is with considerable difficulty ' - The Revisionary Superhero Narrative, Phase Two; America's Best Comics - Tracing the (Re)visionary Company; Pumping up the Volume - The Revisionary Superhero Narrative Approaches the New Age; The Superhero as Critic - The Birth of the Modern Age; Epilogue - Pop Comics, Harold Bloom at Harvard, and the Oedipal Fallacy.

"A book like this is way overdue. I'm just glad someone finally had the balls to write it."--Joe Casey, writer of Wildcats and Automatic Kafk