elsewhere: fixing superman, part 1

[iainpj]

In a perfect moment of "l'espirit de l'escalier", I just realized that I meant to reference the superhero movies that have been so popular of late, and a conversation I had with my 70-year-old mother, who waxed rhapsodic about the X-Men movies, was reasonably enthusiastic about Batman Begins, and had problems with the gaping plot hole in Superman Returns; all this despite not having looked at a DC comic book since the Death of Superman arc, and having never read a panel of the X-Men serieses. On the other hand, the column wound up being about 4,000 words long without it so ... maybe better off without.

STRANGE HORIZONS COLUMNS: Fixing Superman, or, Building a Superhero Universe, part 1

Let's be clear: by "fixing," I don't mean either taxidermy or vasectomies. After all, the first would be impossible, or at least wildly improbable without the use of grotesque quantities of kryptonite (. . . although, if he managed to kill Superman, you know that Luthor would have him exhumed and stuffed, just to gloat). Given that Superman's been married to Lois for a while now, that whole "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" thing would not seem to be a concern, and they show no signs of having insane numbers of children—or any children—so the vasectomy would also be unnecessary (and also probably equally impossible). In fact, I'm not really talking about the Big Blue Boy Scout at all, really; I'm talking about superhero comics generally.

...We know that people will read superhero stories that don't appear in comics. We know that people may, under certain circumstances, read superhero comics when they normally wouldn't. So how do we get them to appreciate superhero comics as something that can be appreciated for all age ranges?

You change the stories you're telling.

In theory, it would be possible for DC and Marvel to do this. However, it would require quite a few changes to how they work and how they think of their stories and characters, and . . . no. Not going to happen without several major changes of management.

There's the business of making comics of course. Floppies and graphic novels. Downloads and dealing with the internet generation. Creating/expanding audience. All that business stuff, and we'll deal with that in a later (and probably quite a bit shorter) column. Right now, let me describe to you what, if I won the powerball lottery and had a small fortune and only slightly lost my mind, I might do with my very own comic book company. Bits and pieces of my preferred approach, or something maybe kind of close, exist in titles available now, but nobody pulls them together into a coherent whole.

Today . . . let's build us a universe....

Comments

[nonelvis]

Irradiated semen? IRRADIATED SEMEN?!?!?

::boggles::

[iainpj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was more or less the reaction of ... well, everyone, really. It makes a kind of sense, if you don't look at it too closely -- bitten by a radioactive and mutated spider, and apparently, he's immune to his own radioactivity, else he'd have cancers everywhere.