Superheroes as a Subgenre of Fantasy
Jim Henley writes about a heck of a lot of things, including responding to a dismissal of superheroes as “inherently uninteresting”, in which he makes a great point :
Fantasy, at least, works (usually) by externalizing what are in our world internal conflicts, or by personifying abstract principles: making characters of ideas. Science fiction can do this too, but needn’t. While science fiction and fantasy are shelved together in bookstores, the imperatives, opportunities and pleasures of the two genres overlap only - they are not everywhere the same. […] By the logic of science fiction, you must deal with the question of how the existence of superpowered people would affect the world. “Realistically,” you can’t escape dealing with these topics. Science fiction demands that the world of the story be “plausible,” or at least as recognizably implausible as our own. But that’s not what interests me about superheroes right now.
I figure that there are two realistic outcomes to significant superpowers. Either those with them take over, e.g. Squadron Supreme, or those with them are crushed or co-opted by the powers that be, e.g. Watchmen, Marvel’s “New Universe.”
Governments letting superheroes do their thing without interference is right out. (let alone giving them privileges without subordinating them, a status the JLA and Avengers have enjoyed.) As is the world being substantially unchanged by decades of time travel, teleportation, artifical intelligence, alien invasion, undeniable evidence of magic and demons, etc., a conceit implicitly upheld by any of the long-running superhero milieus.
There’s been a strong recent trend toward a pseudo-realism. The DC Universe has a shadowy U.S. government Department of Extranormal Operations that makes dossiers on superheroes and devises countermeasures against them. The Marvel Ultimate Universe has been striving for a more science fictional tone. Radiation is being deleted from origin stories. SHIELD oversees a lot of superhero activity. In the Wildstorm Universe, espionage is tightly linked to superpowers, and the U.N. had a black ops superteam (I think they don’t anymore; my reading of the literature is far from thorough.)
Some good stories have stemmed from these. But what I find problematic is that half-measures toward realism only emphasize all the inherently ridiculous conventions of the genre. Villains still don’t kill heroes when they have the chance. Heroes with nothing going for them but archery skills survive hundreds of battles against villains with serious power. Villains wear outrageous costumes and announce themselves and engage in penny-ante schemes when their powers could easily net them fortunes legitimately or through simpler illegitimate strategies. Even pathetically maintained secret identities are rarely outed. Not to mention that physical laws as fundamental as conservation of energy and Newton’s laws of motion are routinely violated.
Recent events in the DC Universe include a couple of cities being nuked, the entire human race gaining superpowers temporarily, and an interplanetary war. In the Wildstorm Universe, substantial portions of the population and infrastructure of major cities (including London and LA, if I recall correctly) were eliminated, and the entire human race evacuated the planet into alternate dimensions. In the Marvel Universe, super-Vikings took Manhattan, slaughtering at least tens of thousands, leaving hills of severed heads and city blocks of heads on pikes.
And life goes on. The structure of society and how non-superpowered folk live their lives is unchanged. People aren’t actively worried about being killed by superheroes’ and villains’ activities (save maybe for the occasional supporting character who’s played Hostage Boy or Hostage Girl once too often.) There is no consistent concerted effort to control superheroes (but lame, inconsistent attempts are a recurring plot coming up every few years, and in the Marvel Universe anti-mutant sentiment is perennial.) Geopolitics, religion, the technology of the non-superpowered, they’re all more or less what they are in our world.
The more realism they strive for, the more they approach one of the two outcomes of superhero realism I cited above. The Marvel Ultimate Universe is approaching the co-opted superheroes attractor. In a current story in the Wildstorm universe, a superteam, the Authority, is taking over the world.
It gets repetitive.
The thesis that “there’s nothing more to be said about superheroes” has been bandied about a lot. And I wonder whether it might be true that deconstructing superheroes, or making them realistic has been mined out for now, and that that field needs to lie fallow (to mix my metaphor.)
Goedel’s Theorem says that no non-trivial formal system can be both complete and consistent (paraphrasing, but without too much violence.) Completeness or consistency: pick one.
The recent triend I’ve been commenting on has stressed consistency. But for decades, superhero comics displayed much more interest in completeness.
Alan Moore’s American’s Best Comics line embraces the wonderful tropes of superhero comics. A talking gorilla, a duplicate Earth, magical realms, a precocious boy mad scientist who routinely violates any number of laws of nature, a city where everyone has superpowers… all of them nominally coexisting in the same world. The world of each comic seems to function by different rules. It’s inconsistent as hell. And it’s been some of my favorite work of recent years — some of the few superhero titles that I still buy by the issue instead of waiting for the collection (and then not getting around to getting it.)
Obviously I’m not advocating abandoning all realism. For the stories to engage me, I still need to be able to sympathize with the characters and their motivations, to suspend disbelief.
But what I’d really like to see is more playfulness.
I think his essay and your comments about it have clarified some ideas for me about why I do appreciate superheroes.
One dimension of superhero work that you haven't touched on is deconstruction on a literary ('post-modernist') level--and the author whose work manifests that most strongly is Grant Morrison. If you read 'Flex Mentallo' or 'Animal Man' or 'Doom Patrol', you're reading someone who is clearly using superheroes to deconstruct themselves -- and not just to reveal all the insanities in their construction (though that is fun), but to make literary and philosophical magic out of it. His work on 'Invisibles' is more of a mystical journey, but there are elements of literary play there as well. His work on JLA and XMen is similar, albeit more within the confines of 'mainstream' superhero comics. Your call for more play, at least in that sense, is being answered.
Posted by Zvi on February 27 2004 05:51
Yeah, I love Morrison's work. I've read all of the above except for some of the Doom Patrol.
There is playfulness out there. Though I only mentioned Moore's America's Best Comics line as an exemplar, I didn't mean to imply it's the only one. See also Joe Casey's Mr. Majestic, Adam Warren's Gen13, Priest's Black Panther, most of Kurt Busiek's and Mark Waid's work... I'm sure I'd come up with more with more thought, and doubtless am missing current titles I'd enjoy.
The pseudo-realism trend I was talking about is currently most evident in the Wildstorm and Marvel Ultimate universes, and much less so in the DC and mainstream Marvel universes.
Posted by Zed on February 27 2004 06:56
Ah, the funny books. I know it's been said before, but many of the percieved problems with comics seem to have sprung from the proliferation of a crop of GenX (let's say born between 1964 and 1980) readers who, instead of tossing aside comics as "kid stuff" when they got older, continued to read them as adults and began to make adult demands on them.
Despite the occasional efforts to give the comics "social relevance" (admirable in their sincerity if not their results), the medium was always one of escape from the real world, not a mirror of the real world. Continuity was just introduced to facilitate continuing storylines (so the readers would keep buying the comics month after month), and the shared-Universe concept was introduced solely to allow heroes to appear in each other's titles (to sell more of both books). Neither Marvel nor DC began with the conscious intent to create a coherent picture of a "real" world spanning all of their titles (although Marvel leaned more in this direction, as shown by contrast with DC's utter confusion of multiple Earths).
The superhero stories were set in what purported to be "the real world" for the same reason that the actions of the superheroes never substantially changed that world. Because the tellers of superhero tales wanted the readers to be able to relate to them. They wanted us to believe that these stories could be happening in our world, and that meant not changing that world beyond recognition, as the presence of superheroes would certainly do.
And those stories were fine, and still are fine, if you accept them at face value. My favorite comic stories ever are still the Fantastic Four's adventures in the John Byrne years. Here we've got this guy, Reed Richards, who owns a skyscraper in Manhattan. He creates technology far in advance of anything else available in the 20th century. He's got a portal to another dimension in Midtown Manhattan! A freakin' cosmic force of nature says that it considers Reed Richards to be its friend! And this is all happening during the tensest point of the Cold War.
Had this actually been the case in the 1980's America in which you and I existed, Reed Richards would either have been another Einstein, cooking up technical marvels for the US or the UN and revolutionizing science and technology, or a shadowy, behind-the-scenes wizard who secretly ran the world. Or else the US and USSR would both have been so terrified of the guy that they would have had him assassinated as soon as possible. (I noted with satisfaction that Warren Ellis went down this very path with his evil Richards analogue in Planetary.)
But no, Reed Richards and family battle cosmic menaces, get attacked by Doctor Doom, explore the Negative Zone, and have various larger-than-life personal crises. And, oops! Manhattan gets ripped off the planet and into orbit! A busy supermarket parking lot gets blasted into a lava pit! Alien warriors get slammed through buildings! Cars and buses are tossed around as weapons! But hey, it's all part of life in New York City. (And, as someone who spent a lot of day-to-day life in Manhattan, I sometimes need to remind myself that much of the rest of the world regards NYC as a fantasy world in the first place. There's a good reason why successful superhero stories aren't set in Worcester, Massachusetts or Amarillo, Texas.)
The point is, though, it all works if you just take it as a series of rattling good tales. It doesn't work if you try to pretend that these are anything but sheer escapist fantasy.
By contrast, look at Watchmen, the most famous example of the "realistic superhero story" effort. Yes, the world is believable. But it's not ours. You can accept it, but you can't see yourself in it. Just like the other great superhero saga of the late 80's, The Dark Knight Returns, it shows us a world that is obviously not ours, but that is just as obviously an allegory for ours. If you use "realism" to depict the results of something that patently can't be real to begin with, you either come crashing down under the weight of self-contradiction, or you use the realism to illustrate something that actually has little to do with costumed heroes and superhuman powers.
I agree with Henley's points about comics as fantasy vs. comics as science fiction. And I have to admit, as much as I like science fiction, the comics work better for me when they're fantasy.
Posted by Jimcat on February 27 2004 11:45
Sure there are successful superhero stories set in Worcester, Mass --Jack O'Connell's novels.
Posted by Josh Lukin on February 29 2004 00:25