Amir Bogen

A’Ziah King was known to her family and friends by the nickname “Zola” and to patrons of a Detroit nightclub as one of the more successful strippers on staff. But over one day in October 2015, King gained coast-to-coast exposure thanks to a dizzying series of 148 tweets that described, in real time, the wild, unpredictable and frightening scenario she found herself in with three strangers who seemed friendly. At first.

After roughly 15 years of unchallenged dominance by Marvel Studios and DC Comics over American commercial cinema and its television offshoots, and against the backdrop of their films’ spectacular recent decline at the box office, it is now possible to declare that the superhero genre’s bluff has been exposed. Superhero characters and their backstories have thrived for years in comics, and on screen too, but not because of a winning formula rooted in the genre’s narrative and visual conventions.