In his seminal study The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell argued that there are recurring universal structures to be found in religion, mythology, and folk traditions, no matter from which culture and time these are taken, culminating in ‘basic truths by which man has lived throughout the millennia of his residence on the planet’ (xiii). One of the most common truths can be found in the figure of the hero, through which societies keep enacting a ‘recurrence of birth’ (Campbell 12), continuously reintroducing new life into the community. Heroes, Campbell argues, reach beyond their current socio-historical limits and bring with them ‘visions, ideas, and inspirations […] from the primary springs of human life and thought’ (14). Heroes are consequently the catalysts of change and transformation; they represent the utopian impulse of a society in that they are the individuals that unlock a potential, ‘which is hidden within us all’ (Campbell 31) and which allows for human progress. Furthermore, hero myths are not only universal, but also highly adaptive and protean – whereas the structure remains, its representation adheres to social and historical changes. In contemporary culture, one such representation is the figure of the superhero, and scholars have pointed out its strong connection with classic mythological heroes, while arguing that a hero always ‘embodies what we believe is best in ourselves,’ representing the values and morals of a society by becoming the ‘idealized vision we have of ourselves and our society’ (Fingeroth 14, 25; see Reynolds 24). For Angela Ndalianis, the hero emerges ‘in response to social change’: