Superheroes — why?

Hoping this bump is okay, since it's related to my original post.

I finally attempted looking at a superhero work, albeit a movie instead of a comic book. And now, if anything, I get it even less.

You know the good guy's gonna win. So what? Why bother?

"It's the journey, not the destination," says a friend. "It's not that they win, but what they go through to do so." Well, if all journeys lead to the same destination, why bother with the journey part either?

You could say that about 95% of fiction ever made.

Superheroes don't always win, either. And even then, you sometimes need a very broad definition of "victory".

Avengers Disassembled, for example, ended with the team defeating the immediate threat involved, but still having had their entire team pretty much destroyed.

X-Statix ended with the whole team being killed.

i doubt Batman would count "A Death in the Family" as a victory.

Heck even the Crimebusters in Watchmen failed before it was even started. The Comedian basically points out that in the context of a potential nuclear war or other world threatening crime, beating up street level thugs isn't gonna solve anything. The book also pointed out how Right Wing most superhero groups tend to be.

Since at least the '20's, there's been a theory of storytelling that says the point of fiction (or melodrama, which was being discussed in the article I read) is not necessarily to keep the ending in plausible doubt, but to tell a compelling enough story that the audience either temporarily forgets or plain doesn't care that they know the boy and girl will end up together, or that the hero will win through in the end. Even if the average was 50/50 in fiction that the hero would win, you could make the criticism "What's the point? It's only going to have one of two endings. Either the hero wins or he doesn't." I'd say the ending is less the point than whether or not you care enough about the characters to care about what happens to them. I'd say the ending doesn't matter at all except I've seen lot, LOTS of instances where people have had seriously negative reactions to sad/downer/hero un-victorious endings.

This is very true. For the vast majority of Western history, all the plays and poems and books were about stories everyone knew the ending to - clearly, suspense of the ending has never been that big a deal.

The question is how they'll win, not if. Like if Batman's in a death trap, we know he'll get out of it somehow and then defeat the villain.

Which, tangentially, brings up my issue with Batman lately - I am getting really tired of the "how" being a cop-out "because he's Batman." I'm sure it doesn't happen as often as I perceive, but that should never be an explanation.

Is the explanation for Clark winning ever been "because he's Superman"? At least that makes more sense, in a silver age way.

The funny thing is Batman is every bit as ridiculous as Superman. Sure, he may not crush planets with his hands but he is the world's greatest detective, has mastery over all sorts of martial arts, has the ability to somehow bend the narrative to suit his needs, is infamous for his Batman gambits and he is absurdly rich with indeterminate sums of money at his disposal.

Oh, like silver age Supes pulling a random power from his butt or Bats pulling a gadget ex machina? Why is it that wish fufillment characters are fun but marty stu characters are annoying when they both are overpowered?

Because they're just positive and negative terms for the same type of character, which can be written well or poorly?

To be fair, Superman only ever "pulled a random power out of his butt" in non-comics incarnations; it happened a couple of times on the 40's radio show (where he on occasion was able to walk through walls and change how his face looked through "super human muscular control") and at the tail end of Superman 2 (which happened largely because they changed directors and the new one didn't know much about Superman). Batman's Deus Ex Machina gadgetry usually only happened on TV, too, in cartoons and his live action series.

An interesting thing about the Fleisher Superman shorts of the '40's is that if they were going to have Superman use a power he hadn't in previous installments, they'd mention the new power in the cartoon's introduction ("Superman, armed with his remarkable x-ray vision, fights a never-ending battle for truth and justice" and so forth..)

I wonder if that's part of it. Beating up baddies is just a wish I've never wanted to fulfill.

And the Silver Age comics, where one time Superman got the power to SHOOT RAINBOW BEAMS FROM HIS FINGERS that created a miniature version of himself.

Beating up baddies is all well and good to me, but it still has to amount to something. Given the Perpetually Static nature of the genre, all the violence can appear decidedly gratuitous. It is this static nature that also deflates any sort of drama out of all those Darker and Edgier iterations, because you simply can't have drama if you know nothing's really going to change. Superheroes are often accused of being too passive, but frankly, that's actually the only thing keeping them from looking utterly impotent if they do try to change anything.

It doesn't help that the modern trend is to imitate the tone of well-selling works like Watchmen or V for Vendetta, while missing the detail that these were self-contained stories that did have significant changes happen by the end. Speaking of which - they had an end. To contrast, it's mighty hard to care for the deeply tragic plight of anyone in the immutable Wretched Hive that Gotham's presented as nowadays, when you can be pretty sure things aren't going to change anytime soon, and Batman's overhyped reputation is all talk at this point.

To sum it up, it's no big deal that in superhero comics, the Status Quo Is God. But things go downhill when the Status Quo Is Bad, with characters too angsty and self-pitying to be likable, and plots widely advertising what they simply can't sell. One of the reasons I gravitate toward freelance troublemakers like Deadpool and Lobo is precisely because their High Concept is flexible enough to fly right over the restrictions of the genre, usually with more than a healthy dose of utterly irreverent humor. Instead, they focus on fun adventures peppered with cheesy one-liners - what the genre was built around in the first place.

edited 2nd May '14 6:57:50 AM by indiana404

To be honest, I kind of wish we could stick with a consistent status quo for a while. Between DC's reboots and Marvel's "earth-shaking" events, I'm getting sort of sick of being told NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AFTER THIS ISSUE! A good Batman story doesn't have to necessarily change Batman forever, it can just be a good mystery or something.

I echo this most profusely. Seriously, if you haven't had time to get used to a status quo, then what's the point of changing it? Then constant, apparently capricious change becomes status quo.

Luke Cage: "Hey, guys, how 'bout the Green Goblin running the government and stuff, pretty crazy, huh?"

Wolverine: "Ugh, that's so last week, Cage, now we're doing the thing where everyone gets giant hammers and the world will never be the same. Like, get with it."

Nobody dies in comics.

Well, nobody except extras and minor characters anyway. For that matter, traditional superhero comics are probably the only action genre where it's come to be considered unwholesome to actually kill the villain at the end of the story. Now, I would reluctantly buy the fluff about how killing is always wrong and all, if not for how all kinds of sentient robots, magical beings and non-humanoid aliens can get slaughtered en masse, without anyone batting an eye. Add a few plots actually revolving around the shilling of such "non-lethal" methods, and the heroes in question come off not as strict moral paragons never crossing certain lines, but more as myopic hypocrites trying to defend their own double standards. Much as with threatening death and never delivering on it, this is one particular cake that you can't have and eat as well.

edited 3rd May '14 4:26:05 AM by indiana404

That wasn't the kind of death they were talking about.

Like they won't PERMANENTLY kill Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne?