Killer Bodies
The Rise and Fall of "Bad Girl" Comics
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Rutgers University Press
Published:31st Dec '25
Should be back in stock very soon
Killer Bodies offers a history of the single most critically-derided subgenre in American superhero comics: the ‘bad girl’ comics of the 1990s, which chronicled the blood-soaked adventures of barely-dressed and improbably-proportioned action heroines for an audience of adolescent boys. While not in any way attempting to rehabilitate the genre, which for the most part amply deserved its reputation as sexist and borderline pornographic, this book situates it within its original cultural context, as the result of a matrix of influences that included third-wave feminism, neopaganism, ‘girl power’, the rise of the internet, the growing popularity of manga, supermodel beauty ideals, and the mainstreaming of pornography. It explores why and how the figure of the anti-heroic, physically aggressive, sexually objectified heroine arose within American comics culture, and the commercial and ideological factors that led to the genre’s rapid rise and equally rapid decline amidst the crisis-racked comics industry of the mid-1990s.
"Addressing a neglected but fascinating cultural moment, Killer Bodies emphasizes the varying complexity and clichÉs of Bad Girls and the surprising diversity of the people who made them. As sharp as a sai or a Witchblade, Crawford's analysis cleaves through preconceptions to reveal myriad reasons its deadly subjects are worth revisiting." - Anna F. Peppard (editor of Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero)
"Weaving together cultural and political commentary, Crawford examines the historically fraught duality of the 'good girl' versus 'bad girl' paradigm. Not content to simply call out the male gaze and its prurient surveillance of the female body, Crawford unapologetically critiques why even superheroes cannot escape fetishization." - Monalesia Earle (author of Writing Queer Women of Color: Representation and Misdirection in Contemporary Fiction and)
"Since the heyday of 1990s American 'bad girl' comics, their hypersexualization, extreme violence, and postfeminist story lines have served as a source of embarrassment for many media scholars. But what if we took the question, 'What were they thinking?!' more seriously? In Killer Bodies, Crawford does exactly that and demonstrates the odd yet compelling ways U.S. comics history, concurrent feminist politics, and shifting transmedia trends informed the rise and fall of 'bad girl' comics." - Sam Langsdale (author of Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics)
"The 'bad girls' phase of superhero comics began with big feminist energy and quickly went horribly, stupidly wrong. Crawford's success here is his decision not to try to rescue a fad best forgotten but to leverage it to help us capture the nuances of a deeply conflicted feminism too rich to forget." - Joe Sutliff Sanders (author of Batman: The Animated Series)
ISBN: 9781978841963
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 15mm
Weight: 454g
206 pages