Are modern superheroes like Bale's Batman relevant?

[dticov]

I'm doing my university dissertation on how modern superheroes reflect western attitudes and values.

If would like to voice your opinions on the new Batman and superheroes in general, please take my poll on Misterpoll.com as part of my university research.

http://www.misterpoll.com/406004646.html

http://www.misterpoll.com/429624219.html

Thanks!

[The Mirrorball Man]

You're collecting data through "Mister Poll"? Do you really expect to come up with any scientific information that way? Might as well come up with the answers yourself!

[chicagokmc]

it may be helpful to define here (i don't know if you can edit your poll once it is created) what you mean by "modern" vs "classic" in your poll. i have read comic books for over 25 years, and modern to me would start in the 80's, but it may not for younger readers. comics have changed a lot since the 80's so that could be relevant. by the way, are you targeting a specific age range for your research?

[soda]

After looking through your poll, most of your potential answer choices are deeply flawed, I have to say that you probably aren't going to get very much useful information.

Here's the problem. Take any political issue, from the realm of normal human affairs. like, say, peace in the middle east. It's obviously ridiculous to boil it down into just a "yes or no" question, or even to boil it down into multiple choice. You lose a LOT of information doing that, that's because, in real life, there are a million possibilities, and what someone thinks about one thing might not necessarily reflect in the others. Here's what I think your doing. I think you've got about eight, or so, type categories, what you think of as "heroic" and each of these categories has attributes, and a model hero. You want to see how many people are of each type, but that's like picking political parties. The entire spectrum of human political thought doesn't neatly fit into either "democrat" or "GOP".

[Headhunter]

Took the polls, but agree with the previous post that the options are rather limited. I don't think these results are particularly useful for a credible university dissertation.

[The Red Hood]

dticov,

Might I suggest, if you haven't used it already, Academic Search Premier? As part of my Creative Writing Master's, I had the freedom to write a paper on whatever topic I chose. I wrote a twenty-page paper on the origins and significance of Superman and The Batman to the American cultural zeitgeist. I was pleasantly surprised to find a great deal of scholarly comic book work on Academic Search Premier.

I also think this book would be indispensable to your work:The Many Lives of The Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415903475/qid=1122137351/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-6548040-6303943?v=glance&s=books)

Good luck with your work.

The Red Hood