It's just cultural. There are a lot of people who don't see the appeal of Shonan anime/manga like Bleach or DBZ, for exactly the same reasons. Hell, even in Europe, while superheroes do have a presence in the market, a Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge comic far outsells them.
I think part of the explanation for the predominance of this genre is that it is a quite flexible genre. It can cross over into detective story, police procedural, political drama, any sort of adventure, space opera (and change from issue to issue). The superpowers allow the story to be vast and imaginative in scope, while the secret identity gives it a relatable edge.
Still, I wish they weren't so saturating that people associate an entire medium with them.
A blog that gets updated on a geological timescale.I don't think it's really a cultural matter. It's like pretending that Westerns can only be enjoyed by Americans or that La Nouvelle Vague movies can only be enjoyed by French people. They blur together if you are not willing to have a closer look.
The reason why I enjoy superheroes myself is because they are mythology, at the core of it all. These are characters who trascend time or culture because they speak on a more emotional and human level than most characters. Really, that's something you can see in all of fiction provided it's done right and that's what it's aiming for. It's about finding the relatable and human element at the core and exposing it or playing with it.
That is not to say that this is the reason why the superhero genre appeals to people but simply why it works for me, of course. People like the superhero genre (Or genres in general) for different reasons that depend on what appeals to them.
edited 29th Jul '12 11:09:50 AM by MillerCross
We made gods and jailers because we felt small. We let them judge us and we allowed ourselves to be sentenced. See! Now! Our sentence is up!![]()
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I'm not so sure it's that superheroes saturate the form, at least not anymore; I'm pretty sure there are a lot more non-super hero books than super hero books out there right now. It's just that super heroes are one of the few genres/idioms (the only one?) that was born out of the comic book form. Also, they're comics' biggest success story.
I never paid attention to what famous people were doing to set examples. I mean:
- Sports have always bored me, and I never seemed to hear about what athletes were doing unless it was bad.
- I rarely watched movies. Again, I only ever seemed to hear about what famous people were doing when it was bad, so I didn't realize until maybe my mid-teens that it was okay to look up to a famous person.
- I pretty much only listened to country, and country singers are almost unanimously humble, down-to-earth types, so no particular one stood out as an example.
- I've never known anyone who was a police officer, firefighter, EMT, or soldier.
- My mom is certainly a nice person whom I dearly love, but she's also a disorganized ditz; she has no attention span whatsoever; she refuses to ask for help, no matter how far in over her head she is; and she thinks that every problem will always fix itself. (My parents divorced when I was 4, so I've barely even seen my dad in the past 15 years. To be fair, he does seem to have mellowed.)
Lacking motivational heroes won't inhibit the point if you still think of it as a story involving superpowers. You might want to stay away from some of The Cape style heroes though, since half of them seem to exist to toot the authors horn.
Fight smart, not fair.![]()
I don't remember much from history. We just barely brushed on things, and outright skipped a lot of stuff. I don't remember us learning anything about FDR other than all the New Deal agencies he started, and that he was the only president who did 4 terms. Likewise, the 45 seconds we spent on JFK were all about Bay of Pigs, and oh yeah, he was Catholic and got shot and stuff. Just very, very, very light on information.
I don't know why I can't seem to get into the concept of having superpowers when it's actually branded "superhero". I mean, one of my favorite cartoons has a character who randomly has a power to see and help mediate an invisible world of monsters, and said power is passed down through the generations. But it's not "superhero" — she's an otherwise ordinary 12 year old girl who does the Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World thing.
Possibly. You may also dislike some of the ways that superhero tales are structured around issues. What have you tried so far?
Fight smart, not fair.Well, as the Not Wearing Tights page points out, the word "superhero" is a trademark held collectively by Marvel and DC Comics. While the word is used much more broadly by the general public, the only superheores who can officially be labelled as such (without being sued) are the ones owned by (or given permission by) Marvel and DC. So it could be that you just don't like those two comic companies.
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I can't say I've read that many really. But I haven't read them because so few of them sound interesting enough. And as I've said before, the fact that some of them have about a billion issues and 75 different canons makes it damn hard to find a starting point. Furthermore, the nearest comic book store is over an hour away, so I can't just go in and browse at my leisure.
It's probably just because anything actually branded "superhero" is so foreign to me. I didn't grow up on it. I don't pay much attention to the genre, so I barely know which are DC or Marvel.
Some of it could be visual, too. I mean, Superman's looked pretty much the same since the dawn of time, so he always looks like an anachronism to me. I find Spidey's eyes and a lack of mouth hole on his suit kinda creepy. The X-Men are a mixed bag. And so on.
And I'll admit, yes, I am very easily Distracted by the Sexy when it comes to female characters in general. Just sayin'.
edited 3rd Aug '12 11:42:10 PM by Twentington
You could always start with Watchmen. I haven't read it myself, but it is widely accepted as one of the best graphic novels of all time. It's a deconstruction of the genre, which might appeal to you a bit more. And it's a self-contained story, no need to worry about continuity.
As far as the long continuity goes, a lot of people do seem to find it intimidating, but it's actually not as bad as one would think. In general, you can pick up a random issue of any series, and catch on fairly quickly to what's going on: This is the good guy, this is the bad guy, they hit each other, now let's look at the good guy's supporting cast before going back to them hitting each other. If all else fails, the Internet's really good for figuring shit out. You can go on Wikipedia, or just ask people on a message board.
As an aside, I find one of the best things about the superhero genre is trying to explain the stories. The sheer absurdity of certain statements can be pure joy. For example, there was an Avengers issue that had the Lincoln Monument come to life and beat up Nazis beside dinosaurs and ghost soldiers led by George Washington. It Makes Sense in Context, but it's so gloriously bizarre a sentence that you can't not love it.
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.You may want to steer clear of the continuous issues. They tend to have this issue where they need to be done in such a way that they can switch authors and not change that much. Read whole arcs or not at all unless you like those kinds of stories. Or superhero webcomics, but those tend to be parodies or have art that makes you want to gouge your eyes out.
Fight smart, not fair.Most supehero comics I've read do a good job letting new readers understand what's going on despite not having read past issues. What they don't do a good job of, in my experience, is handling crossovers.
I was reading Birds Of Prey once, and inbetween one issue and the next, suddenly the Main Characters' base of operations was destroyed, they were leaving the city they'd been operating out of, were changing their mission statement, and adding new characters to their team. All because of something that happened during a crossover that I never read. While I was able to follow what was going on, having that big a change in the status quo occur off-screen is just not very good storytelling.
Depends on the book and the crossover. But yeah, that can sometimes be a bit jarring, when stuff happens in another book that causes a major change in the status quo for the book you're reading.

As a non-American I really don't see the appeal of superheroes. Obviously it's a cultural thing, but they just seem so similar and gimmicky. Even more so than primetime crime dramas.
'All he needs is for somebody to throw handgrenades at him for the rest of his life...'