TONY STARK, ODYSSEUS, AND THE MYTHS BEHIND MARVEL

Ancient myths live on.

Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and their cohort stand as fantastic incarnations of great heroes from the past. Stories of strength and hubris, ingenuity, and craft live on in comics. Meineck, a professor of classics at New York University, invites us to find new meaning in these myths. “In these times of increasingly accelerating technological advancements, when the algorithm is by now certainly out of Pandora’s jar, myths can offer us a path back to our humanity. They can show us what happens when we get too close to the sun and, like Odysseus, remind us that for all our inventiveness, we are only as strong as the earth we live on and where we chose to plant our oar.” Each chapter addresses a character and a legend. We find Helen of Troy and Achilles. We hear the pantheon of Norse Asgard behind Thor and Loki. We remember tales of Atlantis behind Black Panther. We smell the berserkers in Wolverine. There is the legacy of Joseph Campbell in this book—the hero with a thousand faces prompts reflection on just why so many superheroes wear a mask. “Masks are one of the most mythic elements of the Marvel universe,” Meineck writes. “They connect us cognitively and viscerally to the ancient traditions of mythic performance that are found in all our cultures. Masks transport, transform, and take hold of us in ways that sometimes seem to defy explanation.” Our modern comics grant us purgation and catharsis—the emotional and moral goals of tragedy and epic, the feeling, truly, of being a mere mortal, yet capable of great deeds and greatheartedness.

A lively introduction to world mythology, read through the lens of modern Marvel heroes.