Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture (CRPC) invites renewed engagement between religious studies and media studies, anthropology, literary studies, art history, musicology, philosophy, and all manner of high-level systems that under gird the everyday and commercial. Specifi cally, as a series, CRPC looks to upset the traditional approach to such topics by delivering top-grade scholarly material in smaller, more focused, and more digestible chunks, aiming to be the wide-access niche for scholars to further pursue specifi c avenues of their study that might not be supported elsewhere.

This article analyses Marvel Comics’ Marvel Noir franchise, published between 2009 and 2011. Taking as its starting point the promise in a 2008 press release that in the comics, Marvel superheroes would ‘meet’ film noir in a new continuity set in the ‘roaring 30s’, the article considers the advertised ‘meeting’ from three different angles: (1) Marvel Noir’s relationship to ‘classic’ film noir; (2) intertextuality in Marvel Noir; and (3), the franchise’s engagement with space and history. In the first instance, drawing on recent film noir scholarship, the article argues that for historical reasons, Marvel Noir manages only to evoke a pastiched ‘image’ of noir drawn from a popular conception of what noir is. Second, it highlights how the heterogeneity of the franchise’s intertextual orbit further defers the ‘meeting’ and that, ultimately, because it builds upon and anticipates the seriality of regular superhero fictions, the real content of the stories is neither film noir nor other historical popular culture, but rather earlier Marvel stories. Third, it looks at how space and history are figured. Although a few exceptions that deal with racial formation are discussed, space appears as largely anonymous ‘images’ that deepen the image of noir while history is generally connoted through a vague sense of ‘pastness’. By way of concluding, the article notes that the postmodern depthlessness of the franchise’s ‘meeting’ with film noir is to be expected, given the style’s historical progresses. Rather, while Marvel Noir perhaps represents an attempt to escape the present through a postmodern play with nostalgia, intertextuality and surfaces, the choice of setting and the recurrent confirmation of the superhero genre’s primacy betrays a return of the repressed, in which the past becomes an unuttered hope for the future.

The X-Men, created by Jewish American comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, is a team of mutants, a class of human being first introduced as people that "possess an extrapower…one which ordinary humans do not!!" (EUX1 #1: 8 ii). Especially after the introduction of the mutant-hunting robot Sentinels in X-Men #14 (Nov. 1965, EUX1), Marvel Comics' mutants have been increasingly inscribed with allegorical Otherness. They have been subject to many of the prejudices that have historically plagued marginalized minorities, including, among other things, forced and voluntary segregation, slurs, persecution, and genocidal campaigns, and , conspiracy theories about their aims as a group. Because Otherness and persecution have become central to the series, the idea that X-Men is an allegory of racial tolerance has been "resoundingly universally accepted," writes comics critic and advocate Julian Darius; through repetition, "it's become an article of faith" (Darius). Although the claim is overstated in its focus, Darius makes an important point. Analysis has focused almost exclusively on identity, alternatively claiming disability politics (Ilea; Chemers), sexuality (DiPaolo chap. 8; Dussere), race (Pierce), and ethnicity, commonly read as Jewishness (e. g. Weinstein chap. 8; Fingeroth chap. 8; A. Kaplan chap. 16; Malcolm), as the "most forceful" or "primary" metaphor. This article will confront some common claims in X-Men commentary to suggest that writing on comics and identity is vulnerable to strong confirmation bias, "a type of cognitive bias in which one tends to look only for evidence that confirms one's beliefs and to ignore or pay less attention to evidence that contradicts one's beliefs" (Sullivan 100). The literature, which includes both popular and academic writing, is open to criticism on several levels: essentialist perspectives are often applied to both characters and their creators; fallacious comparisons sometimes elide important historical and contextual The Mutant Problem: X-Men, Confirmation Bias, and the Methodology of Comics a...

This article discusses Fantastic Four #52-53 (July-August 1966), in which Black Panther, Marvel's first black superhero, premiered. It argues that the character as he appeared in these issues is best read as an example of 'white on black' representation, or white images of blacks centered on white interests, filtered through Marvel's then-prevalent Cold War focus. The article first looks at the Fantastic Four as Cold Warriors to contextualize Black Panther. It then goes on to look at how Wakanda, Black Panther's tribe, and Klaw, the storyline's villain, are configured in relation to this context, in order to highlight the importance in the story of Cold War conceptions of and fears about the process of decolonization that was taking place on the African continent. Finally, it argues that Black Panther is rhetorically 'Americanized,' to better fit with US self-conceptions and to alleviate worries about what Africa's then-recent decolonization might mean for United States of America.

The Siljan region hosts Europe's largest impact structure. The high-relief landscape, with a central granite dome bordered by lake basins, contains an array of glacial and shore-level landforms. We investigated its deglaciation history by mapping and analysing landforms on high resolution LiDAR (light detection and ranging)-based digital surface models coupled with well-dated sediment successions from peat and lake sediment cores. The granite dome and bordering areas are characterized by streamlined terrain and ribbed moraine with a streamlined overprint. These suggest an iceflow direction from north-northwest (NNW) with wet-based thermal conditions prior to deglaciation. During its retreat, the ice sheet was split into thinner plateau ice and thicker basin ice. Sets of low-gradient glaciofluvial erosion channels suggest intense ice-lateral meltwater drainage across gradually ice-freed slopes, while 'down-theslope' erosion channels and eskers show meltwater drainage from stagnated plateau ice. Thick basin ice receded with a subaqueous margin across the deep Siljan-Orsasjön Basin c. 10,700-10,500 cal. BP. During ice recession the ingression of the Baltic Ancylus Lake led to diachronous formation of highest shoreline marks, from $207 m in the south to $220 m above sea level (a.s.l.) in the north. Differential uplift resulted in shallowing of the water body, which led to the isolation of the Siljan-Orsasjön Basin from the Baltic Basin at c. 9800 cal. BP. The post-isolation water body the 'Ancient Lake Siljan'was drained through the ancient Åkerö Channel with a water level at 168-169 m a.s.l. during c. 1000 years. A later rerouting of the outlet to the present course was initiated at c. 8800 cal. BP, which led to a lake-level lowering of 6-7 m to today's level of Lake Siljan ($162 m a.s.l.). This study shows the strength of an integrated methodological approach for deciphering the evolution of a complex landscape, combining highly resolved geomorphological analysis with welldated sediment successions.