For my session at the 2017 Comics Arts Conference at The San Diego Comic Con I worked with my student, Julia Salvatore, to apply a research methodology I used with Batman comics in my 2015 presentation. The earlier presentation was about how lack of archival access impeded comic book research. As part of that research I tried to apply a methodology used in neuroscience research with Asterix & Obelix comics to early Batman comics.

The Asterix & Obelix study counted head injury in their comics. Those comic books are easily accessible through republished editions. My central idea of my 2015 presentation was about how difficult it would be to do that study with Batman comic books, as the oldest comic books have only been reprinted partially, and not in formats that adhere to any logic that would be familiar to an archivist.

I had to access Microfiche for some of it, but I did count how many times Batman and Robin were hit in the head and knocked unconscious in the first five years of the comics. (the difficulty in doing so was the point!) For this 2017 update, Julia with my guidance applied the same methodology to early Spider Man comics.

The results? The quantitative differences are a portrait of the evolution of comic book art and visual storytelling. Batman or Robin would generally be knocked out by a single blow, generally to get them in some sort of trap situation. Spider Man's combat was more cinematic, showing him battling across pages, receiving multiple blows. However Spider Man rarely was knocked unconscious. Julia and I analyzed the first three years of Spider Man comics and found he was only knocked out 3 times, but would get on average two head injuries an issue. Batman was knocked completely unconscious by head trauma 120 times in the first five years of his comic books. 

What's the point? In my youth if a football player was knocked unconscious in the first quarter of a game due to head injury and returned for the third quarter, they were considered heroic. That is unthinkable from a medical perspective, as head injury on top of other head injury does even worse damage. This study documents how the idea that "bouncing back from head injury was heroic" was ingrained into American society. Even young characters like Robin could get knocked unconscious through head trauma dozens of times in a year's worth of issues. The research is intended for people like public health researchers looking for societal attitudes towards head injury.