The great question in pop-culture studies is “Why?” Why Star Wars and why baseball? Why The Matrix and why Madonna? Why Sponge Bob and why Big Macs? Why do these things capture our cultural imagination? The “Why?” of comic books was addressed in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable. There he sees language as originating in pictures. Says the Samuel Jackson character:

I believe comics are a last link to an ancient way of passing on history. The Egyptians drew on walls. Countries all over the world still pass on knowledge through pictorial forms. I believe comics are a form of history that someone, somewhere, felt or experienced.

In Unbreakable, Shyamalan offers a theory of myth as a concrete picture language that precedes modern language forms. These images, surviving in a kind of collective human unconscious, intrude into contemporary culture through comic art. What it reveals is an archetypal or universal pattern of the hero, what the great myth theorist Joseph Campbell called the monomyth: a single story being told over and over again in all the stories of heroes from all throughout time.

Think of atoms—those tiny high school chemistry building blocks from which all the physical objects in the universe are made. Certain stories are like that. They’re made up of a series of unchanging elements (like atoms), producing patterns (like molecules) that repeat over and over again. There are atoms of human experience which, when put together, create patterns which C. G. Jung called archetypal. These archetypal patterns are  …