'Even an android can cry'

'Even An Android Can Cry' is a short piece that uses a critical examination of a full-page illustration from a Marvel comic book to explore larger issues regarding the relationships between superheroes, bodybuilding and ideas of masculinity. The piece contrasts the ideal of the bodybuilder/superhero as male role model with the more ironic and ambiguous approach of the illustration, going on to suggest that the version of masculinity depicted by Marvel Comics during the 1960s offered a fuller response to the problem of growing up than the traditional approach of the superhero genre. The piece explicitly refers to Mark Simpson's arguments regarding bodybuilding from Male Impersonators , Sam Fussel's bodybuilding memoir, Muscle and Susan Sontag's 'Notes on Camp'.