Visiting scholar to talk on 'Sharing the Superhero'

For the past several decades, characters and stories like those of "X-Men" and "Star Trek" have been spun-off into various movie versions, television shows, and video games. While production depends on intellectual property rights, media partners, workers, and users have been sharing in and shaping the course of how these creative resources are being produced.

In a talk titled “Saving the Superhero: Media Franchising, Industrial Cultures, and the Marvel Entertainment Empire” visiting scholar Derek Johnson examines how media franchising has become less a fixed set of corporate structures and practices, and more a shifting, unstable discourse involving multiple players. To explore this shift, he focuses on the case of Marvel Comics and their transformation from publishers of printed superhero stories to producers of blockbuster films, television, and video games.

This event is free and open to the public. It will take place from 3 to 4:15 p.m., April 18, in Wrigley Hall, room 101.

Johnson’s visit to ASU is co-sponsored by the Department of English’s Film and Media Studies Guest Speaker Series, W.P. Carey School of Business, School of Theatre and Film in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and the Institute for Humanities Research in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He is assistant professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. His research focuses on media production cultures, with a particular interest in how creative identities are constructed, managed, and imagined.