This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

And we also love to hear your stories.

We feature them routinely.

Send them to Our American Stories.com for some of our favorites.

Jeffrey Johnson is a World War II historian at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii.

He's also the author of Super History, Comic Book

Superheroes, and American Society. He's here to share this story. Let's take a listen.

My name's Jeffrey Johnson. I have a Ph.D PhD in American Studies from Michigan State University.

I was always drawn to comic books since I was, I guess, about 10 or 11.

And then I stopped reading them and then I picked them back up during the late 80s and

the early 90s.

And then when I started my PhD in, I guess, 2004, I started reading them again, and it really just struck me just how

cohesive the narrative is and how I very much speak to the American experience in the way that

King Arthur does for England and Beowulf does for the ancients and the Greek gods do for the Greeks

and the Roman gods for them. I mean, they're this mythological force and they're a narrative driver that, you know,

speaks to these heroes that a certain society needs at a certain time, that speaks to their

hopes and their dreams and their fears.

And they're a real mirror to what is always going on in the greater U.S. mindset and the background of how we live,

which is an amazing thing to have to track basically how that American society changed from 1938 until now,

through these superheroes.

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