Laura Gascoigne

Evocative tribute to the orphaned caped crusader: Superheroes, Orphans & Origins at the Foundling Museum reviewed

A fascinating flick through 125 years of comic strips and their orphaned, abandoned, adopted or fostered heroes and heroines

Marvellously evocative: Taiyo Matsumoto’s manga series Sunny is about a group of friends from a children’s home who make their base in an abandoned Nissan Datsun Sunny. The artist spent six years in a similar home. Credit: © taiyo matsumoto 
issue 30 April 2022

Instead of wasting money, like other museums, on extravagant architectural statements, the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square has sensibly chosen to welcome visitors with a written statement. In 2014 it commissioned the poet Lemn Sissay, who spent his teenage years in a children’s home, to create a memorial in its entrance hall to the many parentless heroes and heroines in fiction. ‘Heathcliff was a foundling… Harry Potter was fostered… Dorothy Gale was adopted… James Bond was fostered…’ The list goes on, running to more than 100 names. Sissay’s mural will trigger a lightbulb moment for any dimwit like me who has failed to notice this narrative trope – and there are further revelations in the show downstairs.

Superheroes, Orphans & Origins is a fascinating flick through 125 years of comic strips whose heroes and heroines – role models to generations of children – are all orphaned, abandoned, adopted or fostered. There’s a reason for this, points out graphic novelist Woodrow Phoenix: ‘If there are parents, then there is someone to say no.’

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