 Fantasy: May 09, 2012 Issue [#5029] |
  Fantasy
This week: Superheroes Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.
-Grant Morrison
As a kid, you run around the house pretending to be a superhero, and now to be doing it as a job, I feel very lucky.
-Chris Hemsworth
If you had asked me back in grade school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said my first choice was an actor, but if I couldn't be that, I'd want to be a superhero.
-Vin Diesel
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Superheroes
With the unqualified success of Marvel's The Avengers, which opened over this past weekend in the US, I thought I'd cut loose my inner comics geek and talk about one of the more modern takes on the fantasy genre.
I'm including comics-type superheroes in the fantasy genre, yes, but it's not much of a stretch, really. Some of the most common themes in fantasy involve epic heroes defeating great evil through perseverance and commitment to an ideal - themes that are mirrored in many superhero comics, graphic novels, and movies.
There are differences, of course - most of the time (but not always), comics try to explain powers pseudoscientifically, rather than magically. Still, from an actual scientific perspective, getting powers from a radioactive spider bite is just as much magic as someone casting a spell. And superhero stories usually (but again, not always) take place in some Earth-analog, rather than a completely made-up setting.
So yes, the superhero genre is fantasy at least, or an amalgam of fantasy and science fiction.
But none of that really matters, does it, except as a justification for why I can write about it in the Fantasy newsletter.
Superheroes, in my estimation, are fantasy-genre heroes cast into something like the modern world. By "something like," I mean that it's meant to be set in our world, but the mere presence of the superhero means it's not actually our world. Think of it as a parallel universe.
Pick a comic hero. Any hero. If you know comics, or the movies they're based on, this shouldn't be hard. The best known is probably Batman, so I'll start there.
Lots of people say Batman is interesting because he doesn't have superpowers, that he's an ordinary, albeit insanely wealthy, man who chose to dress up like a bat to fight crime - and if being rich were a superpower, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates could team up to save the world from... whatever. But I don't think it's quite true that he's unpowered. Batman is presented as a guy without superpowers, but he's also a supergenius at the peak of physical perfection - in fact, his physical prowess far exceeds that of any real-life human, with the possible exception of certain performers in Cirque du Soleil (but they don't fight crime). "Powers" or not, he's beyond being an ordinary person, no more ordinary than Superman or Wolverine.
There has to be something extraordinary about the character, else why bother to make a superhero out of him (or her)?
And again, we see this in fantasy all the time. Only one person has the drive, or the blood of the dragon, or the proper immunity, or whatever, to perform the task at hand. That hero has to rise to the task, and the story is almost always as much about the hero fighting his or her inner demons as it is about the external evil.
In fact, a case could be made that the classic "defeat the ultimate evil" theme of high fantasy is a metaphor for defeating the darkness within a person.
And that, I think, is one of the draws of fantasy and superheroes - the inner and outer battles. Batman has his abandonment issues; Superman struggles with being the last of his entire race; Spiderman is haunted by what he should have done; Wolverine is... okay, maybe not everyone cares to fight the inner battles. Wolverine still kicks ass.
As for Avengers? I'm not going to spoil the movie for you, but I will say that the external evil is very evil, and the internal struggle for most of them is to learn how to work together as a team - something also common in fantasy. So common, in fact, that it's part of the very heart of the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons to assemble a team of people with different but complementary skills - and sometimes vastly different personalities.
Fantasy is, at core, modern mythology - and superheroes take that to an extreme. We need our gods and heroes - antiheroes are fine and all that, but the idea of people with powers far beyond the ordinary, or gods that walk the earth (sometimes the distinction blurs) is exciting to read about.
Or, well, watch epically awesome movies about. |
Some superheroes right here on WDC:
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Last time, in "Fantasy Newsletter (April 11, 2012)" , I talked about glitches. You had this to say:
Fyn  : Great Newsletter!!! Absolutely loved it!
Thanks! I hope there weren't too many mistakes! 
Satuawany  : Make 'em suffer like we do! Yes!  Okay, aside from just being fun, seeing them suffer like we do makes them relatable characters. Awesome newsletter, Mr. Waltz. {e:tips hat}
As I've said in previous newsletters, never make things too easy for your characters
Matt Bird MSci (Hons) AMRSC  : Great newsletter! I agree, glitches should happen more in fiction. As a comedy fantasy writer I use glitches for comic effect. In my novella, "Invalid Item" , I have transportation spells fail to work properly quite often. It's not quite a glitch, but just that for some unknown reason they're really hard to use.
Thanks for the fantastic newsletter
And thank you for the feedback and the item submission.
So that's it for this month - enjoy the spring weather (or if you're in the southern hemisphere, commence despair) and until next time,
DREAM ON!!! |
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