A Historian’s Homage to Spider-Man

May 18, 2022 Leonardo Ambasciano

Fig. 1. A selection of Spider-Man masks, 1963-2011. Unskillfully retraced after the original artworks by Leonardo Ambasciano. Sources and authors listed in the Appendix. Fair use disclaimer: the images are used as the irreplaceable source of data discussed in the article for academic purposes. Spider-Man™ © 2022 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In 1979, palaeontologist and historian of science extraordinaire Stephen J. Gould (1941-2002) published a thought-provoking cultural evolutionary analysis dedicated to Mickey Mouse. In 2013, I tried to replicate his results with Spider-Man, and now, nine years too late and a whopping forty-three years after Gould’s groundbreaking essay, I’m finally able to present my efforts in English. Here goes nothing!

My J. Z. Smith is a pheneticist (sort of)

April 30, 2022 Leonardo Ambasciano

“Linnaeus gave us a way of talking about the diversity of grasses” (Jonathan Z. Smith in Sinhababu 2008). Title page of the 10th edition of Systema naturæ (1758) by Carl Linnaeus. Göttingen State and University Library, signature <8 H NAT I, 7105 <10>:1>. Source: Wikipedia.

In late 2018, less than a year after historian of religion extraordinaire Jonathan Z. Smith had passed away, I submitted an abstract to an interesting conference organized by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, entitled “When the Chips are Down,” It’s Time to Pick Them Up: Thinking With Jonathan Z. Smith. This post tentatively provides an account of what I might have come up with provided that my submission were accepted (which, alas, was not).

Religion 101: How I Would Design a Kick-ass Course

July 7, 2021 Leonardo Ambasciano

Exchange Building, University of Nottingham. Source: Wikipedia; author: mattbuck. — Exchange Building, University of Nottingham. **Source**: Wikipedia; author: mattbuck.

Introduction to the Critical and Interdisciplinary Study of Religion 101: A work in progress.

The mythological machines of Homo sapiens

January 15, 2021 Leonardo Ambasciano

We are eminently social primates highly susceptible to power dynamics, individual status, and social hierarchies, to the point that we spend a considerable amount of our time and resources in obtaining prestige goods, following charismatic individuals, and accessing or owning places deemed special, sacred, or relevant by our in-group. If you don’t believe me, just have a look at all the pop items auctioned for jaw-dropping sums of money, from vintage comic books to sport and cinema paraphernalia. In 2003, for instance, comic book artist and creator Todd McFarlane bought baseball player Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball from 1998 for $3 million. Today, Golden Era comic books in good conditions are worth millions of dollars.

Plus ça change... From scary stories around the campfire to horror hyperreality

December 11, 2019 Leonardo Ambasciano

Original poster for the Spanish 1966 horror movie El sonido de la muerte (“The Sound of Horror”, dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde). All rights reserved. Source: IMDb — Original poster for the Spanish 1966 horror movie El sonido de la muerte (“The Sound of Horror”, dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde). All rights reserved. **Source**: IMDb

Perhaps no other cinema and literary genre has already experienced the same exploration of genre variations as horror. Giant ants, blobs, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, humanoid monsters, shapeshifting creatures, living dead, living meteors, interdimensional demonic books, mind-controlling aliens, bloodthirsty hounds from hell, televisions as infernal gateways, invisible bloodthirsty dinosaurs… yes, you read that right: El sonido de la muerte (“The Sound of Horror”, Spain, 1966) features an invisible prehistoric reptilian creature hatching from a fossilized egg after being inadvertently awakened by controlled explosions carried out by a group of archaeologists. Given enough time and a competitive environment, every cinema genre is set to exploit a mind-blowing number of variations of its own tropes, but horror truly stands out. Is there anything that has not been thrown at the wall by horror producers to see if it sticks? Is there a limit to what can be literally thought of? And, most interestingly, why are we so addicted to horror?

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