Manuel Herrero-Puertas2022-08-082022-08-082021-03“Super Whitman 1855.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 47:1 (March 2021): 298-331.1729-6897https://scholars.lib.ntu.edu.tw/handle/123456789/616324https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85129486034&doi=10.6240%2fconcentric.lit.202103_47%281%29.0013&partnerID=40&md5=9e1a915d0e8ed1f806a9f2fe4cc36ad9This article tracks several thematic, formal, and political confluences between Walt Whitman’s poetry and the superhero genre. To that end, I read the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) through the optics of the popular superhero, a staple of US culture that Whitman proleptically announced and whose interpretive frame, I argue, revitalizes Whitman’s democratic vision. Whereas this vision has often been dismissed as naïve, if not outright jingoistic, its re-articulation as a superhero narrative opens up a non-complacent democratic culture attentive to deliberation, dialogue, and dissent. For instance, despite Whitman’s self-fashioning as a proto-vigilante superhero, his poems evince superheroes’ uneasy fit—as extralegal defenders of the law—in a democratic society. After locating this tension between individual and popular sovereignty in political theory, superhero studies, and Whitman’s early works and influences, I confirm the democratic usefulness of a superhero-inspired return to Whitman by examining a comics adaptation of Leaves of Grass: Robert Sikoryak’s Song of Myself! (2013). Through an aesthetic borrowed from Marvel’s comics of the Silver Age (1956-1969), Sikoryak unearths unexpected connections between Whitman’s poetry, superheroes, and a deliberative public sphere—an experimental collision worth considering in light of rising populisms and disaffection.enDemocracy; superhero; Walt Whitman; Leaves of Grass; deliberation; flesh; Robert Sikoryakjournal article10.6240/concentric.lit.202103_47(1).0013WOS:000644716000013https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85129486034