If someone's personhood is in doubt (or seen as lacking), all the easier to direct death wishes at them. When a tiny minority of them transgresses, their crimes of violence only confirm their abjection from the human [. . .] Anxiety, threat, dread, fear, and prejudice feed into the explanatory mechanisms that construct them as somehow beyond human, beyond mercy.

We should bear in mind the supercrip stereotype as a figure obsessively, indeed maniacally, over-compensating for a perceived physical difference or lack, since, as we shall see, this aspect ties in quite neatly with the genre specificities and narratival concerns of so much Silver Age superhero literature.

[In "The Night Gwen Stacy Died"], death took on an existential quality -- the beloved, innocent but weak Gwen is merely a victim, the casualty of a war between superpowered rivals -- and as such the episode proved a turning point int eh genre's depiction of mortality.

Sympathy once more reveals its limits when faced with madness.

The stereotype of the supercrip, in the eyes of its critics, represents a sort of overachieving, overdetermined self-enfreakment that distracts from the lived daily reality of most disabled people.

Disability fluctuates, growing visible, then invisible, then visible again, becoming both ever-present and haunting. Such a problematizing of physical life added a new wrinkle to the genre's double/secret identity trope: the characters now interact with their shifting bodies as bodies with all the complications involved.

The multiverse model offers an elegantly postmodern solution to character stasis in a market-driven serial publishing system which privileges constancy over major change.

With emancipation comes the opening up of new possibilities for challenging assumptions over women's appearance and, more radically, the gender order itself. Ventura (She-Thing) comes not only to accept her new "intragender" status but to see it as advantageous -- for dealing with her misandry, for personal growth, and even for becoming a person capable of giving and accepting love.