The Magic of the Multiverse: Easter Eggs, Superhuman Beings, and Metamodernism in Marvel’s Story Worlds.

Abstract

Popular culture provides a fertile ground for a host of narratives, symbols, and characters known from history of religions. Dispersed and consumed on a multitude of new emerging media platforms, these narratives, symbols, and characters become ingredients in artistic processes of imagination and adaptation where religion can be played with in a variety of ways. In these processes of production, consumption, and engagement, there are high stakes, but they also create new room for exploring and combining humor and playfulness with awe and “great mystery” in ways that resonate with, but also contribute to contemporary cultural production of religion. Comics has been a very prolific medium in these processes (e.g., Chireau 2019; Clements and Gauvain 2014; Lewis 2014; Salazar 2020; Thomas 2012). In this chapter, I will look at three recent TV series from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Like other MCU products, these series engage in complex intertextual story worlds based on the Marvel Comics where the protagonists originated. How do various narrative and literary devices, such as “Easter eggs,” multiverses, and contemporary cultural tendencies categorized under the term metamodernism, provide means for engagement and social bonds that are reminiscent of contemporary religious engagement? I am particularly interested in how these fictive story worlds open for larger narratives that explore non-empirical “truths” in a post-postmodern universe.