I was at the comics shop over the weekend, picking up the last Hellboy collection I didn’t have. I spent some additional time browsing around, and I had a gradual realization about something I hadn’t noticed before.
Okay, so we’ve got lots of superheroes. Lots and lots of superheroes. That’s a given in the medium. I consider them fantasy, for the most part, just as much as Bone and Conan and so on. Just because there’s a weak rationalization about “yellow suns” doesn’t make the flying guy any less magical. 
In general, I think, the overwhelming majority of published comics can be considered, essentially, fantasy.
We also have lots of horror — vampires mostly, it seems to me, plus assorted other beasties and dark magic — and adventure tales about spies and the like (e.g. Danger Girl). Plus there’s all the wonderful slice-of-life real-world indie titles, like the work of Lutes and Clowes and Ware. But…
It occurred to me after I left the shop with “Right Hand of Doom” that I hadn’t seen any of what I would consider to be true science fiction. My taste in SF novels tends to the harder stuff, the more science-oriented stories from Brin and Benford and Bear and Forward and Bova, and less the space-opera material of Foster and Zahn or the “Sci Fi” stories of latter-day Piers Anthony clones (gag). No psychic powers, no “creatures from other dimensions,” none of that crap. I’m a little more ecumenical in my comics reading, though, which is why I started thinking: I don’t recall seeing any hard-SF comics.
There are some that come close. I have a few of the Hernandez Bros’ Love and Rockets collections, which can be pretty SF-y without a lot of outright fantastic elements. And, of course, there’s a fair amount of imported manga that’s strictly SF, but up to this point, for whatever reason, I haven’t found them much to my liking. I admit, I may be forgetting something (and will smack myself at being reminded), or I may have overlooked them completely; like I said, the thought came to me after I left the shop so I didn’t have a chance to search the shelves with a specific objective. But am I imagining things here?
It may simply be that the medium doesn’t lend itself to that sort of material, any more than stage plays don’t really feature a lot of action-adventure, because it isn’t really suitable for that kind of presentation. Consider Robinson’s Mars trilogy; it’s pretty much necessary to understand the ecology of the red planet to get at what Robinson is doing over the long haul, but how boring would that be on a comics page, panel after panel of rocks and dust, with tons of accompanying expository material? “And then they launched thousands of little windmills…” Fun in prose; probably duller than linoleum if drawn.
So this topic, I think, has two possible routes for development in the ensuing thread. Either I’m stupid and have missed some obvious titles, in which case I’d appreciate some recommendations; or I’m not stupid, and it’s worth discussing why straight SF doesn’t really work in this format.
Thoughts?
