A hero is a figure to look up to and admire. Heroes are brave and often have superhuman powers. The hero embodies traits typically associated with masculinity, such as physical strength, intelligence and fortitude. Heroes appear in some of our earliest written works, including Gilgamesh, Beowulf and the Greco/ Roman tales of Perseus and Hercules. Traditionally, and in Aristotle’s eyes, the tragic hero has a flaw so that, while inspirational, he also has a quality that can bring him low and make him more like us. We see this characteristic in Achilles (invulnerable except for his heel) and Samson (strong until his hair is cut). In modern times, the tragic weakness can be seen in Superman’s kryptonite, Spider-Man’s neuroses and Edward Norton’s alter ego Brad Pitt in Fight Club.
Joseph Campbell (1949) originally described the hero’s journey as consisting of four stages: separation, initiation, return and recognition. Campbell found similarities between the heroes of literature and the figures of great religions. Moses, for instance, is separated from his family and initiated by his realisation of his own Judaism and the Pharaoh’s evil. Ultimately, he returns to Judaism and is recognised as a prophet. In a similar manner, Superman is separated from his world when his father sends him to Earth in a rocket. He is initiated by the Kents, a typical American couple, to accept his role as protector of humanity. His return manifests itself in his assumption of the Superman identity. Recognition comes in the form of approbation from a grateful public. Campbell asserted that the story of the hero is a universal and played out in all forms of media, including popular fiction and film.
In the United States, the availability of cheap newsprint led to the dawn of pop culture in the late nineteenth century and celebrated contemporary figures like William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody and Davy Crockett. The heroes’ quite impressive accomplishments were obscured by the fiction created around them. It is doubtful, for example, that Davy Crockett ‘kilt him a bar when he was only three’ but interesting to note how this story resembles the legend of Hercules strangling two serpents in his crib.
If the cowboy was America’s version of the knight in shining armour, the detectives of the hard-boiled school were the knights of the city. The two most famous detectives were Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, respectively. They were hardly role models, living lonely lives full of drink, cigarettes, murder and cheap women, but they were motivated by a strict, if non-traditional, moral code. Sam Spade was motivated to find his partner’s killer. Philip Marlowe would turn in his best friend if it was the right thing to do. These characters, often referred to as anti-heroes because they practised what they individually considered ‘justice’ rather than necessarily following the law, grew out of the malaise that stemmed from America’s post World War I collective realisation that war was not a great adventure but rather a terrible, ugly business. Mickey Spillane took the violence of the private detective to an extreme degree in his ultra-violent satyr Mike Hammer. His character evolved into the 1980s Reaganera heroes of Rambo and Die Hard’s John McClane.
In the 1930s, the hero pulps—magazines that centred on the adventures of a single character—were an important step in the development of the hero because they reinvented the idea of a main character with greater than normal powers. The obsessively and perfectly trained Doc Savage and the mysterious and elusive detective The Shadow eventually gave birth to the comic book hero and the modern pop culture phenomenon of the superhero in movies and toy stores.
Probably the first true superhero was Superman, created in 1938 by two teenage boys who had grown up steeped in popular culture. Other superhero icons include Batman and Spider-Man. Most superheroes possess powers granted to them by scientific or supernatural forces. Whereas some superheroes gain their powers by accident, such as through the bite of a radioactive spider, others are destined for greatness as a consequence of being born on an alien planet. Despite such exotic imaginary origins, superheroes are a uniquely American creation. Although American audiences do not seem drawn to heroes created in other countries, the United States has exported a huge selection of superheroes, especially through movies and television.
One of the earliest women superheroes was Wonder Woman, an Amazon princess who came to the United States during World War II because of her love for an American soldier. However, many women comic book superheroes, such as Supergirl and Batgirl, were uninspired copies of their male counterparts. As a result of the feminist movement, a new genre of female hero has emerged (Inness 1998). One of the earliest examples was Emma Peel from the British television show The Avengers (herself a refinement of the previous, less approachable Avengers character Cathy Gale, who more clearly resembled the untouchable Amazons of mythology). Although not superhuman, she was a karate-trained secret agent. Other examples of tough women heroes include Ellen Ripley (the only survivor in the film Alien), Xena and Captain Janeway, the first woman starship commander in the longrunning Star Trek franchise. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has proven to be a popular heroine who has also attracted a great deal of attention among scholars and post-pubescents. Because heroism is not considered part of the stereotypic role for women, female heroes often have to navigate between toughness and femininity. As counterpoints, female heroes challenge societal conventions about heroic behaviour as an exclusively masculine domain.
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