I always felt Batman was Horror Fantasy and Superman was Sci fi Fantasy. Most Superhero Comics could be grouped one way or the other (unless they were just straight up Fantasy like Thor or Dr. Fate).
Of course, due to crossovers, by this point all of Marvel and DC are almost assuredly the wild imaginings of the child at the end of St. Elsewhere.
I consider them a subset of science fiction, not really science fiction, but definitely RELATED. When SF first started out in the 1920s as a pulp genre, there would have been very little to distinguish the stories in superhero comics from science fiction stories. Classic scific stories like “The Girl In The Golden Atom,” “The City of the Singing Flame,” “The Jameson Satellite” and so forth would have fit very easily into a superhero comic of any time. Any kind of brain-damaged fantasy having to do with the future or outer space or other dimensions worked, whether they flew in the face of science, human nature or reason itself.
But in the 1940s and 50s science fiction developed a spine … stories had to reflect our current knowledge of the universe, and hopefully deal with some predictable aspect of current knowledge. This restriction made science fiction stories a LOT more powerful than fantasy, because it made it to some degree more plausible than fantasy. That is where science fiction diverged from comic books, because comic books never made that distinction. They went right on with Golden Age fantasizing, though they often borrowed ideas and tropes from science fiction (or stole them wholesale).
So, comic books are RELATED to science fiction but not THE SAME.
When I was a kid, the fifth-dimensional Mr. Mxyzptlk was always treated as if he could work magic, though there was that 5-D out.
Beings from other dimensions having weird powers on Earth came to comics from sf. DC probably made him from the fifth dimension because the fourth was already a cliche. Bleiler lists dozens of stories featuring the fourth dimension, a handful of fifth and only two sixth in The Gernsback Years.
But suppose the next writer reveals that Zatanna doesn’t really have magic powers. Her powers are actually psionic. Does that make her science fiction? Does it really make a difference if a character travels back in time via a magic spell rather than a time machine?
I’d consider them fantasy, not science fiction. And that includes Batman, Iron Man, and their ilk.
Actually there is a direct link Philip Wylie’s Gladiator (available from Project Gutenberg) has a hero who is a direct antecedent of Superman. Not an alien - the result of his biologist father’s experiment on his mother - the hero has invulnerability, super speed, telescopic vision, and can leap over buildings in a single bound, just like the original Superman. Gladiator came out in 1930 so the source of Superman’s powers is kind of obvious.
I consider superhero fiction as its own genre under the “speculative fiction” umbrella.
Naturally, there is a lot of overlap between superhero, sci-fi, and fantasy. A character like Iron Man would be firmly in the sci-fi camp and Thor would be over in fantasy. The fact that they can exist together “in the same universe” is one reason why I consider superhero to be its own genre.
I like David Brin’s take on the science fiction/fantasy debate: CONTRARY BRIN: The Difference Between Science Fiction and Fantasy?
If you accept Brin’s premise that fantasy is defined by a lack of change then the super hero genre is uber-fantasy. Look at Batman and the Joker - those two have been fighting for over seventy years and they haven’t even grown older much less reached a resolution.
Big “if,” there.
It is an interesting take. It puts “Star Wars” firmly in the fantasy camp, with the Jedi and the Sith Lords endlessly fighting one another while regular humans can only cope as best they can. It puts “Star Trek” in the science fiction camp, as the future of the Federation is nothing if not open-ended. I’m OK with that division.
Well, no, Mr MXplwhateveryoucallit is strictly a Superman villain, for example.
I agree with this…but also with…
…this! I’d put superhero stuff as a subhead of fantasy, not s.f.
Batman and Iron Man go a long way toward justifying suspension of disbelief with nice technologically based background ideas, but, ultimately, they’re fantasy vehicles. The gimmicks and devices and widgets only work for those individuals, and not for anyone else. You don’t have Special Forces units made up of Batman-level soldiers, and you don’t have Aerial Battle Squadrons wearing Iron-Man armor.
While I agree that Brin’s distinction of progress vs. no progress is a very useful and important one, there are enough apparently-fantasy works with progress, and apparently-SF works without it, that I’m not sure those two labels really map to the distinction.
There’s also the issue that all speculative fiction, fantasy and science fiction alike, is inherently about some sort of change, even if it’s not a temporal one. Tolkien’s world is unlike ours, in that it has wizards, dragons, elves, and so on. Even if Middle-Earth doesn’t change, it is still, as a whole, a change from our world.
Which is why the fantasy label makes more sense - it works better because, unlike science fiction, it doesn’t have to even pretend to make sense, just be internally consistent. Calling it sci-fi and then drawing Supes towing a planet with a chain he can comfortably grasp in his human-sized hands is pissing on our heads and saying it’s raining.
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Hey! That was Superboy. And it was more than half a dozen planets, and hte chain was over his shoulder. Do your damn research!
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If we’re going to start parsing genres, 1950s superhero comics don’t belong in either science fiction or fantasy. They’re children’s literature. Children’s literature uses other genres (subsumes them, technically) and puts them at the service of its central viewpoint of a world of wonder and infinite possibilities, just like the adult world is to a child. Comic book physics is as beside the point as cartoon physics; Road Runner cartoons are no different than battling superheroes. The comic book audience was children (and subliterate adults) until Stan Lee’s Marvel changed everything. You shouldn’t blame the 50s for not being the 60s, though, and you shouldn’t classify them the same way either.
Well, Batman isn’t really a “tech” superhero - he’s got lots of cools toys, but his main “power” is the intense training he’s put his mind and body through. His gadgets, generally speaking, aren’t “sci-fi” tech - his high-end tech is fancy cars and super-computers, and his most common gadgets are boomerangs and grappling hooks. A Special Forces unit made up of Batman-level soldiers would be, more or less, just a Special Forces unit.
Ironman is much more obviously sci-fi, but your comment that his devices only work for him is misplaced. It’s pretty common for governments in the Marvel universe to have units composed of power armor-clad soldier, or out right robot units. The Sentinels, the Mandroids, some incarnations of the Hulkbusters, the Life Model Decoys, etc. And that’s just the Americans! Iron Man’s got a list of armored Russian supervillains he’s fought that’s longer than your arm, including plenty of power-armored mooks. Pretty much every time the plot requires the government to suddenly distrust a superhero, soldiers show up piloting all sort of science fiction mecha.
That being said, superhero universes (at least, the big two universes) tend to be very static. But that’s not a function of superheroes, that’s a function of open-ended serialized storytelling. The Marvel and DC universes are meant to take place in worlds that broadly resemble our own. Realistically, the technology invented by Tony Stark would fundamentally alter the world within ten years of so of his invention of the Ironman suit. But Ironman is supposed to exist in a recognizable, contemporary America, not one dominated by flying cars and personal robots. So the major advances promised by Starktech is perpetually “just around the corner,” to keep the story somewhat grounded in the real world.
It is, however, entirely possible to do superhero stories that involved major social changes - one of the major themes of Watchmen, for example, was the massive social changes caused by the emergence of just one genuine superhero, which encompasses everything from the end of the oil economy, to the political triumph of the Nixon presidency. But Watchmen was never intended to run more than a dozen issues, and Moore did not need to concern himself with what happened in his world after NYC was destroyed by a fraudulent space squid.
All quite true. However, he still does things that real people can’t, like jump off the top of a skyscraper and swing down to street level on a loose-grapnel rope.
Okay, fair enough. But even so, some of Tony Stark’s tech has a little in common with Reed Richard’s or Henry Pym’s tech, in that it doesn’t quite seem to work for others.
(I did admire the premise of the Armor Wars, where Stark was out destroying armor that used his devices/techniques. It also helped “unclutter” the Marvel Universe a little. Just like – Pum-SPAAK “Justice is Served” – the Scourge of the Underworld. Nice to clean out some of the accumulated dross of decades of mediocre writing.)
Two very, very good points. Quoted in full for truth and wisdom. (Star Trek, too, had to suffer from this kind of stasis.)
One approach I admire is Paul Chadwick’s “Concrete,” where Concrete is the world’s only super-powered individual (okay, actually a man in an alien body) and has cut a deal with the government to leave him pretty much alone. It’s in everyone’s interest for him not to change the world. It’s very, very clever writing.
The 1985 Squadron Supreme limited series was also damn clever, as Mark Gruenwald, the writer, was free to make real changes to his world, in an honest and earnest attempt to explore the changes that superheroes and supervillains would make on the world. By today’s standards, the writing is weak, but at the time, it was daring and innovative, and even today, it stands out as an excellent example of superhero philosophy. What do “right and wrong” mean in a world with mind-reading and mind-control?
Oh, absolutely, very little about Batman is realistic - but that’s different from being a fantasy, and is pretty endemic to the action genre. John McClane ran barefoot through broken glass, and didn’t spend the rest of the movie crippled, but I wouldn’t categorize Die Hard with Lord of the Rings because of it.
True, but is that an element of the genre, or just lazy writing?