I just finished a first draft of a book tentatively titled "Brains Beat Brawn Every Time: Superman's Transformation from Superhero to Culture Hero." As far as titles go, it's not quite so smooth as Superman in Myth and Folklore.
I don't let anybody read first drafts. A few months ago I sent the first three chapters and an outline of the rest to the publisher, and they want to see the rest of it. But it's not quite ready. I've put the draft away for the next three weeks so I can work on designing classes for the fall semester and editing a book on Bloody Mary folklore. When that time is up, I'll start at the beginning and revise the whole book--then I'll send it to the publisher.
This book is the opposite of the first one. It's about folklore in comic books rather than comic books becoming folklore. No fieldwork this time. I read a whole bunch of books and then a whole bunch of scholarship on masculinity, history, sovereignty, liberty, heroism, humanism, folktales, metafiction, and other stuff I can't remember. This book has all the stuff about hero myths that people probably expected to be in Superman in Myth and Folklore, to the extent that anybody expected anything from that book.
Chapter 6 nearly drove me to drink.
There's a lot of work to do, but I think the first draft holds together nicely.
