El mito de la masculinidad y su evolución a lo largo del siglo XX en Marvel Comics

Male characters were the main protagonists in Marvel Comics through 20th century. These male characters showed some recurrent characteristics that helped to create a manhood myth. However, this myth evolved since 1961, widening the until then tight masculinity borders. The goals of this article are, first of all, to understand what the manhood myth message was, how affected young, mature and old men, and in what way it changed. In second place, we aim to understand what social, economic and production transformations helped to develop a new manhood myth. To do it, we are going to study one hundred and something Marvel comic books from 1940 to 2000, analyzing archetypes from a Cultural Studies perspective. Between our conclusions we can highlight the existence of a Patriarchal Manhood model which survived without problem until 1960 because a mix of political, economic and productive factors, but this model started to be challenged in 1961 with important changes in the production process in the Marvel Comics bullpen, and was helped by the political, economic and social problems from the 60s and 70s. In spite of this, we cannot say that the manhood myth evolved in an irrevocable and stoppable way. On the contrary, we can observe a struggle between old and new manhood myths.