Mark Oelhert "From Captain America to Wolverine" In The Cyborg Handbook; edited by Chris Hables Gray, Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera, and Steven Mentor; New York: Routledge, 1995 (pp. 219-33) In this article, Mark Oelhert narrates the history and development of the cyborg representations within the comic industry. Dominated largely by monopolies such as Marvel, Oelhert shows how the industry focused on cyborg themes, boundary characters, and science fiction well before Weiner's formulation of 'cybernetics' as a discipline. While Oelhert poses a taxonomy of comic cyborgs in the tripartite distinction of 'simple controllers,' 'biotech engineers,' and 'genetic cyborgs,' he also readily acknowledges the futility of such a project: "One thing that makes grouping characters into categories difficult is that many of the heroes and villains fit into multiple divisions." Oelhert further notes how the fragmented and volatile character-identities shift between 'good' and 'bad' with little enduring or static opposition. In addition, he highlights the overwhelming presence of government military, war, and multinational corporations in these texts ("The great evils in this comic book world are the multinational corporations"). Oelhert explains this tension as well as the overwhelming violence of comic cyborgs as reflections of our own 'unease' with biotechnology and genetic engineering. L.E. Fazen