I’m going to stop posting on this thread. Really, I am. Just not quite yet.
A few more, mostly on the softer side of sci-fi - but then, by my definition, so are Transmetropolitan and Mr. X:
American Flagg! (another 1980’s series for which a collected edition was announced at one point, but not sure whether it’s been released or not. Readily available via singles on eBay if not)
The Coffin (Oni Press) borderline, but might qualify
Deadenders - Why this didn’t occur to me immediately, I’ll never know. The first five-ish issues are collected in a TPB called “Stealing the Sun”. The rest of the run should be easily found in back issue bins.
The Sacred and the Profane - an obscure Dean Motter TPB you can usually find on eBay
It’s been years since I’ve read comics, so I may be off-base, but it’s not just straight SF that’s uncommon in the field, is it? I mean, you mentioned that you consider superheros to be fantasy, and they are in the “anything that’s not explainable using current science theory is fantasy” sense, but they’re not what most people would consider fantasy. The more traditional, swords and sorcery or epic fantasy that currently seems to dominate the speculative fiction field in terms of novels (not to mention RPGs) was relatively rare in comics when I was reading it. Horror comics exist, but are pretty much a niche compared to superheros. And, how are westerns, detective comics, and romances doing these days?
Superheros dominate the field, they’re obviously what the two big publishers focus on, and a lot of independent or smaller publishers put out superhero books as well. Everything else has their ups and downs, but stays relatively rare.
Though I do agree that, depending on what you consider SF, it may just not fit the format very well. Super-hard SF, like what Stephen Baxter is currently putting out, would just be odd in comic book form, given that a large part of his appeal (I assume, I didn’t really like the one book of his I read, personally) is him explaining how everything fits with current science, which would be a lot of exposition to fit into a comic book. But more pulpy, space opera stuff would have no problem fitting into the format, and that isn’t very popular in comic books currently either.
Thomas Disch’s fantastic non-fiction book on sci-fi’s impact on culture, The Dreams our Stuff is Made From, posits that “real” sci-fi has vanished because it’s all come true. We’ve “caught up” with sci-fi, so the genre finds itself in a sort of identity crisis.
The hallmarks of the golden age of sci-fi - space travel, computer technology, robots, cybernetics - are now a part of our daily lives. Sure, the Space Shuttle Columbia’s no X-wing fighter, my palm pilot’s far from a tricorder, and Sony’s AIBo and ASIMO aren’t exactly C-3P0 and Norby, but the core concepts have become a part of life, even mundane.
If the general rule is that “real” sci-fi focuses on the science/technology quotient, and “fantasy” focuses on the human quotient, then most sci-fi, even classics of the genre, are actually fantasy. Neuromancer could just as easily have been a Chandler story, transposed to 1930; the sci-fi is really only the context in which a fairly traditional detective story takes place. I certainly wouldn’t call the book “fantasy,” but it’s definitely a humanistic, character-centered story as opposed to fiction focusing on technology (in the way that Asimov’s robot books or most of Roger Zelazny’s short stories were).
Transmetropolitan and Y, the last man are incredible books, and should be read by all, but they just use sci-fi contexts to tell stories that could exist in ANY time. Spider Jerusalem could be a 1940’s reporter in New York, or hell, a writer in Victorian England. The whole chain smoking cat with two heads quotient of Transmet is just context and window dressing. Ditto for Yorick and Ampersand; it’s not that far off from The Canterbury Tales when you really break it down.
Even The Invisibles is a superhero/espionage book at the end of the day, although its sci-fi touches are much, much harder and denser than even Philip K. Dick’s most reality-bending stories (and undoubtedly influenced by them).
I’m gonna go the other direction…I recommend the Wild Cards series, edited by George R. R. Martin. I think that the original series is out of print now, but I find them in used book stores from time to time.
