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Podcast: What Mad Universe?!?
Episode: Chapter Eighty: Earth's Mightiest Mortal!
Description: As long as there have been superheroes, people have been making fun of them, but the deconstructionist satires of superheroes really kicked into gear in the 80s. A precursor to stuff like Watchmen and Squadron Supreme, though, wasn't a comic at all--it was a novel, SUPERFOLKS! by Robert Mayer. In riffing on superheroes and their place in pop culture in the alienated post-Watergate US, it was a weird, silly, exuberant, and often tasteless--just like superhero comics themselves.
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