In the American academic criticism of both prose literature and film, so-called "myth criticism" is fairly spotty, without a dominant theoretical voice. Not that I would want everyone to sound the same. But there were a better general understanding of what distinguishes mythopoeic discourse from didactic discourse, authors like the ones who assembled this travesty might have a harder time promoting their drivel.
I believe American film criticism has one important advantage over its prose kindred, though. Because of the way commercial films were and are marketed, film critics have paid more attention to the ways mythic content can be expressed according to genre-expectations. No one has to my knowledge ever attempted a myth-history even for American popular films, and thus every interested critic, be it Raymond Durgnat, Richard Slotkin, or Geoffrey Hill, simply focuses on whatever genres or genre-products each finds most rewarding.
As a generalization based on personal reading, I find that three genres have generally attracted the most attention from myth-critics: horror, science fiction, and westerns. There's considerably less focus upon war and crime/mystery/espionage, except where critics have concentrated a particular creator with a particular genre-specialization, as with Hitchcock. And although one might argue that even silent film employed characters one might call "superheroes," understandably this quintessential comic-book genre has remained out of favor with most critics.
In comics criticism, I would say the bulk of myth-criticism has focused upon particular characters, be it perennials like Superman and Wonder Woman or relative upstarts executed by a particular creator, as with Frank Miller's Daredevil. So when I state that the bulk of comic-book criticism focuses upon superheroes, I'm talking about such focused examinations, and not so much on seeing myth broadly, through examinations of overall genre expectations. At least I'm not aware of any parallels in comics criticism to Slotkin's 1992 GUNFIGHTER NATION, which embraced a wide variety of frontier/western narratives of the 20th century.
I'm not thumping my own tub to claim that my blog seems to be the only one that has searched through the majority of comic-book genres In Quest of Myth; it is, as far as I know, simple unadorned truth. Despite my efforts to be open to all generic forms, though, there can be no doubt that I too have found myth-discourse most often in the comic-book genre of the superhero. Probably the superhero-tale's nearest rival on this blog is the horror comic, with considerably fewer exemplars in the domains of science fiction, teen humor, and westerns.
Now, this is not so much the case on the blog I've dedicated to metaphenomenal film. Movies and television episodes with a "good" mythicity rating may actually be stronger there for both "horror" and "science fiction" than they are for "superheroes," though again, I have not attempted a precise breakdown, nor do I tend to do one.
Now, the very fact that the NUM blog focuses only metaphenomenal film means that I almost never examine in detail one of the film-genres that earns the widest plaudits from academics: the western. Whereas horror, science fiction, and superheroes all might be expected to have heavy mythicity thanks to their evocation of metaphenomena, western narratives, even relatively simple efforts by "non-auteurs," often generate complex symbolic discourses even within purely (or largely) isophenomenal worlds. And I would say, again without making any attempt at a statistical breakdown, that western films do so much more frequently than other genres that tend to be dominantly isophenomenal, such as crime and mystery, romance, teen humor, and war.
I may come up with a theory to explain this discrepancy after doing more research into western-myth criticism as it exists, but for now, this essay serves mostly as a lead-in to my next essay: How Many Western Myths Have I Found?
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