The Enemy Is The Centre: The Dilemma of Normative Masculinity in Darwyn Cooke’s <i>DC: The New Frontier</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article explores Darwyn Cooke’s 2004 comic DC: The New Frontier as a retrospective history for DC’s comic book characters of the 1950s; though this history takes into account certain problematic aspects of 1950s American culture—in particular the problem of racism and fear of the minoritized other—the comic does not in any way produce a critique of normative American masculinity. Making use of a critical framework that discusses white masculinity, nostalgia, and the “falling” man, and the conceptual work of scholars such as Sally Robinson, Michael Kimmel, Elizabeth Anker, and Hamilton Carroll, this article argues that Cooke’s comic recenters the white male adventurer/hero not only as a product of nostalgia but also as a post-9/11 response to the idea of the “falling man.” Cooke promotes a fraternal code as a way to resolve the problematics of diversity, constructs the flyboy as a falling man, whose rehabilitation as an everyday hero reflects the text’s idealization of retrograde masculinity, and transforms narratives about othering into celebrations of colonialism and American manifest destiny.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".