Superheroes and Nazis: re-examining the legacy of the Second World War in Eric Kripke’s The Boys

The television adaptation of The Boys, originally a comic book series written by Garth Ennis, has garnered attention for its graphic violence and satirical treatment of the superhero genre. The Boys engages with a number of critiques of the superhero genre and its tropes, one of which is the recurring presence of a Nazi supervillain. This article links The Boys to previous examples of comic books and screen adaptations which feature Nazis or similar fascist organizations, such as Captain America, Superman and X-Men. In particular, it argues that The Boys’s status as a subversive superhero narrative impacts the portrayal of Nazism in new ways, further troubling the distinction between superhero and supervillain and providing insight into contemporary cultural concerns. Through its representation of the superhero origin story and the Nazi character Stormfront, The Boys draws upon the memories of the Second World War in order to condemn the rise of fascism in the twenty-first century. Despite this ostensibly worthy goal, it is also important to consider criticisms of this type of representation of the historically specific atrocities of the Second World War, the role of exploitation and its resulting reception by viewers

Nazi horror, reanimated: rethinking subgenres and cycles

This chapter considers the resurgence of 'Nazi horror' (horror films featuring Nazis as monsters) in the 21st century. It analyses this corpus of films through the lens of genre theory, providing a case study through which to rethink subgenres and cycles. In doing so it provides analysis of particular monsters within the subgenre such as Nazi zombies and werewolves and connects these figures to contemporary social anxieties

Gender and the Jinn in the work of costume designer Phaedra Dahdaleh

This essay considers the importance and marginalisation of Arab costume designer Phaedra Dahdaleh through an exploration of her work in the Iranian horror film زیر سایه‎/Zeer-e sāye/Under the Shadow (2016). Phaedra Dahdaleh is a Jordanian costume designer. Having established her own house of costumes in the country, she takes the role of costume designer in most major films shot in the area. Some well-known films she has worked on are Rosewater (2014), Rogue One (2016), and War Machine (2017). Through an analysis of costume design in the film, we underscore her significant role as a costume designer in the construction of the film’s narrative

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7