Comics Arts Conference Session #16: Super-Traumatized Childhoods: Youthful Superheroism as Trauma Reconciliation in the Transnational, Post-War Imaginary

In times of social and political instability, childhood performance of superheroic feats provides unifying cultural fictions for individual, family, and community to reckon with national trauma. Koni Zhang (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) examines the Japanese manga Barefoot Gen, an atomic bombing survival tale that adopts superhero visual elements and narrative structure yet denies individual salvation, arguing that survival and witness—not triumphalist victory—constitute true…