Il superuomo che invecchia: la terza età nei fumetti di supereroi

In relation to our culture, superhero comics constitute a corpus of myths in the technical sense, being subject to those constant rewritings and reincarnations that, with Lévi-Strauss, characterise myth as pure content plane. The origins of the heroes in tights are subject to actualisation and reinvention; their precarious cosmos is subject to periodic apocalypses. This happens because of a preterition: the superhero cannot grow old. The superhero's competence is embodied in most cases by his athletic and muscular body; this happens even when his 'special' abilities are eminently intellectual. What superhero comics remove is not exactly death (the good death of the superhero is a ubiquitous topos). More precisely, repression regards life in a body that is no longer functional and erotic. Generally speaking, in this genre of comics, characters do not age, or are condemned to an eternal old age, of which they render an oleographic image. Some stories, outside the usual serial continuity, exploit the ageing of the superhero. Works such as The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, The Story of Our Lives of Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four lend themselves to a study of the narrative functions attributed to the elderly: a sender who guarantees the transcendence of values; a subject struggling against a “not-being-able to do” embodied in his own body; a non-antisubject who redeems himself and discovers interpersonal relationships of a different quality. The life/death value opposition selects the different thematic and attitudinal roles associated with the old person. They are also assigned either a euphoric or a dysphoric value, depending on whether the elderly person is able to compensate for the loss of know-how to do through a know-how to be, by making changes in his or her lifestyle. In this way, the comic strip organises the issues related to old age by contrasting models and anti-models.