Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- What If? DC's Crisis and Leibnizian Possible Worlds -- Describing and Discarding " Comics" as an Impotent Act of Philosophical Rigor -- "No Harm in Horror" -- Truth Be Told -- Plato, Spider-Man and the Meaning of Life -- Modernity, Race, and the American Superhero -- Deconstructing the Hero -- Jean-Paul Sartre Meets Enid Coleslaw -- Making the Abstract Concrete -- The Good Government According to Tintin -- Drawn into 9/11, But Where Have All the Superheroes Gone? -- Contributors -- Bibliography -- Index.