Peter Coogan

The paper is available online at Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton pages, and as a chapter in Win Scott Eckert's (ed.)

[7] In 2017, Coogan coauthored with Professor Vanessa Fabre the report "“Use of Singular They in Academic Writing and Communications: Background and Recommendations for the Brown School,” which led the Brown School to formally accept use of singularly "they" and "themself" as gender neutral pronouns in student work and the School's communication<“Use of Singular They in Academic Writing and Communications: Background and Recommendations for the Brown School.” Coogan is co-founder (with Randy Duncan), co-chair, and co-organizer of the Comics Arts Conference[8] which is held annually at San Diego Comic-Con and at WonderCon.

[10] Comics writer and critic Peter Sanderson, in his "Comics in Context" columns dealing with Coogan's Superhero, summarizes the contention over the term "superhero" by noting that some fictional characters not "explicitly portrayed as superhuman... nonetheless perform feats that real people would be unlikely to duplicate," citing Luke Skywalker and Jack Bauer as two examples.

Coogan's remit, therefore, is to clarify these issues and “provide a basis for the study of superheroes and help to make more studies possible in the future.”[11] Sanderson also notes that Coogan - and his publisher, MonkeyBrain, who also publish Jess Nevins' annotations on Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - are not following the common trend in academic circles to largely ignore the superhero genre when comics are discussed.

The presiding Judge Learned Hand identified three defining characteristics in his ruling(see: here), which form a key part of Coogan's argument: Peter Sanderson, noted Marvel Comics historian and author of the Comics in Context blog at QuickStopEntertainment, while not agreeing completely with Coogan's points, nevertheless states that the book "should become a basic text for study of the superhero genre," recommending it to all fans of the genre.