Guardian book review of Matters of Gravity:

His final chapter is the best: a reading of superheroes in their various urban environments that is studded with lovely aperçus. Bukatman draws an analogy between the 1811 imposition of Manhattan’s grid street system and the rectilinear layout of traditional comic strips which was subsequently exploded and dissolved for artistic effect. The strange fact that superheroes always live in big cities persuades him that the liberating sight of Superman flying, Spider-Man swinging or Batman leaping through the skylines is again an attempt to domesticate the dehumanised concrete sprawl. Superman, Bukatman says, “represented, in 1938, a kind of Corbusierian ideal. Superman has X-ray vision: walls become permeable, transparent. Through his benign, controlled authority, Superman renders the city open, modernist and democratic; he furthers a sense that Le Corbusier described in 1925, namely, that ‘Everything is known to us’.”

(via City of Sound)