According to my local Comic Book Guy, who is something of a Superman expert (he’s been reading and collecting Superman books since the 1950s, and in the 1980s he wrote a Superman reference book), at one point Superman was so powerful that he literally blew out a star. He said that was one of the “final straws” that prompted Crisis on Infinite Earths.
He had to explain the Crisis to me, since I only got into the hobby about a year afterward.
I disagree with him about it being a “final straw”.
From about '55 to about '68 or so, Superboy/man regularly blew out stars, casually shoved planets out of orbit like they were golf-balls, and in one memorable scene, Superboy took all the trees on an uninhabited planet and squeezed them into a giant matchstick, mined the planet for whatever the stuff in a matchstick head is and lit the match by (IIRC) striking it against a moon. He then used it to relight a sun. :dubious:
That said, by the early '70s, his power was scaled way, WAY, WAY back (on that scale). As a matter of fact the only time I can think of him moving a planet after about 1970 (and I could be misremembering) was an issue of D.C. Comics Presents (#3?) where he only has to move a planet’s orbit by like a millimeter. And he could just barely do it. So, I disagree that it was a ‘final straw’ since the power level issue had been fixed a decade and a half earlier.
Okay, I’ve heard this comment often enough that I just have to know – which superheros have their underwear on the outside? I can’t think of one, unless you consider circus tights themselves to be underwear. I don’t know of anyone who wears circus tights under their clothes.
Batman, Robin (in his current outfit), and Superman, to name only three, all have briefs on the outside. These aren’t practical crimefighting apparel. They are, in fact, quite silly. I think my point stands.
(Also, many heroes hide their supersuits under their civilian clothes, therefore, underwear)
That type of costume is based on old-fashioned athletic clothing, which wouldn’t have been old-fashioned in 1938/39. As recently as the late 1970’s, my high school wrestling uniform consisted of tights with a pair of trunks (not briefs) over them. Despite what you may think, they were quite practical as clothing to wear while engaged in a physical confrontation. They allowed freedom of movement and, because they were snug, weren’t liable to tangling or being grabbed like looser garments might.
No they don’t.
Then why aren’t cops and soldiers dressed like Batman?
Okay, well, I’m remembering incorrectly. Perhaps Comic Book Guy was simply using “blowing out the star” as an example of Superman’s power getting to be too much. He told me this stuff almost 20 years ago.
The fact that you even asked that question makes me wonder why you bother reading superhero comic books in the first place.
I read them because they’re fantasy adventures, often ludicrously over-the-top fantasy adventures.
I’ll mitigate my previous statement: If I had a problem with silly, I wouldn’t follow a genre in which fully-grown men routinely run around dressed like circus performers, accompanied by their similarly-clad underage sidekicks, and nobody thinks this is odd. The more over-the-top my superheroes get, the more I like it.
Superheroes are inherently a bit silly. Their costumes are silly. Their powers are silly. Their actions are often very silly indeed. The best stories don’t deny, but embrace this silliness.
:: applause ::
This should be tattooed onto the foreheads of people who want to make super-heroes “realistic”. Doods, you got people running faster than light, sticking to walls, able to hear stuff faster than the speed of sound, able to have intelligent conversations with fish that are barely smarter than plankton (“Aquaman! The Fisherman and Bait-Boy went that way!”, etc. Realism is not a prime concern here.
Internal consistancy is another matter.
*Recent issue of Superman. He has his Super-hearing trained on Lois 'cause she’s on assignment in the Middle East. Suddenly, he hears a gunshot-and gets there just after the bullet hits her. Um…but sound only travels at ~350 miles per second. It should have taken what…2 minutes for him to hear it? The bullet should have passed through her and out the other side before he even heard the shot. But for story purposes it worked.
[QUOTE=FenrisThis should be tattooed onto the foreheads of people who want to make super-heroes “realistic”.[/QUOTE]
Fantasy and realism are combined in varying degrees in a range of stories. Different proportions are appropriate for different circumstances. And sometimes more realism is necessary to make a particular story better. Sometimes the exact proportion of realism and fantasy forms the basic groundwork of the story itself (such as in Watchmen).
Oh Ho! You’ve fallen into my cleverly laid trap!
Watchmen is the story that definitively proves how silly and unrealistic superheroes are. It presupposes that people actually do wear garish costumes and take to the streets to fight crime. And what sort of people would do such a thing? Neurotics, sexual deviants, publicity-seekers, sadists, megalomaniacs, and outright lunatics. To do something that silly, even if the narrative lets you survive and have some success at it, you’d have to be crazy!
In addition, the story also illustrates how the presence of even a single superhuman would alter global politics, society, and technology in a profound way. The world of Watchmen is much, much, more unlike ours than DC or Marvel, even though the latter have scores of superhumans and super-scientists.
IOW, the point of Watchmen is that the very tropes that define the superhero genre just don’t work when held to the light of realism. These characters weren’t superheroes. Hell, they weren’t even heroes. It’s a deconstructionist work. It’s the anti-superhero story.
And now that Alan Moore has demonstrated just how unrealistic superheroes really are, we can go forward in our genre fully aware of what it means and what it really is.
Uh, okaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy.
I have no idea what this means. It was a brilliant superhero story that was premised on a certain proportion of reality to fantasy. There were definitely fantastic elements in the story – Dr. Manhattan for example, and the fact that Ozymandias was able to get away with what he did.
Whether it was an “anti-superhero” story or “deconstructionist” is for people who care about creating esoteric classifications of fictional stories. I certainly don’t. And I don’t understand what “going forward” has to do with any of it, other than I’ll eventually pick up another superhero story and hope that it’s a good one too.
It means that Moore dissected the superhero genre. Showed what the tropes would really imply. Showed how they’d operate in a realistic universe.
That is, he showed they really wouldn’t function at all. If you write superheroes as they’d really exist, even allowing for powers and unarmed vigilantes to live longer than a week, you’re rejecting much of what defines the genre. Namely, heroism and perfectly sane, mentally balanced characters.
We can do two things with this knowledge. We can give up on the genre, and move on to other subjects that do fall closer to reality. Or we can accept what Moore has shown us, and stop trying to cram realism into a genre that rejects realism in its fundamental roots.
By which I mean, creating a place where there’s room for punches that retroactively change history.
Yes and no. I definitely agree that superhero comics are in essence a fantasy role-playing game with a set of rules. The heroes have to be heroes. They cannot kill. They must be noble and self-sacrificing in the end. They must protect the non-super powered among them. Etc.
If - and this is the big if - if you want to maintain a series on an ongoing basis.
There are alternatives. Watchman is one. Stormwatch is another. Sandman is yet another. If you want to end your series, you can have your superfolk violate these rules and then either people will have fun watching everything go bang, or not.
You can also have an individual who does not play by these rules act as an anti-hero who is not accepted by the rest. Punisher or in some incarnations Wolverine are examples.
In a different light, you can spoof the conventions of the genre in any number of ways.
What you can’t do is combine the two and hope to have a coherent, realistic, indefinite series. As soon as you give up on the superhero essence you run full-tilt into a stone wall. I think this is what Askia means when he insists that superheroes and superpowers are two different things. He’s wrong in that contention, IMO, because he’s simply ignoring the distinction I’ve make and how important and powerful it is, but he’s recognizing that there are two ways to go.
Now, just because Moore went against the rules first means little. If you still want to do that you can, and it’s as valid a choice as writing another novel about the Civil War. Why didn’t they before him? I think it’s obvious that every major creator in the field knew what it would mean to violate the rules, but they didn’t want, or didn’t have the freedom, to create a limited world and then destroy it at the end.
That’s a good thing in some ways - why blow up an archetype like Batman or Superman just to say you did it? But it also means that after a certain point, you need to recreate the original to make it modern again and either draw a line across the sand - the Ultimates - or make retcons. Both methods have drawbacks for older fans. But comics shouldn’t be for older fans. It’s writing them for older fans without any good entry point for kids that have destroyed the genre and caused sales to plummet. That’s a different argument for another thread, of course.
Yet Fenris is also somewhat wrong. Realism is not the issue. Verisimilitude is the issue. A comic doesn’t have to be real; it has to seem real. That is, real inside the world that’s been created. Again, it’s a matter of the rules that have been set up. If Superman can move earths, then he can’t have trouble breaking through a wall. Yet he also can’t fly around the earth widdershins to make time go backward. Being true to the character makes the story. Writers don’t have the freedom to let just anything happen* and then say, hey, it’s only a comic book. Once a character’s parameters are set, violating them makes everything go splat. Too many comic books do exactly that.
Ironically, back pre-Crisis when Superman had the ability to move through time under his own power (and this is the power level Superbrat seems to have), that’s pretty much how he did it. He’d spin, or fly in a circle, at superspeed - clockwise for forward in time, counterclockwise for backward.
(This was spelled out in some Legion of Super-Heroes story or other. Perhaps the first of the stories involving the Time Trapper’s Iron Curtain of Time?)
Actually, I’ve been trying to say that he didn’t break the rules. He followed the rules almost perfectly. And in doing so he showed us what the rules really implied about the characters and how they’d actually function.
There’s very little difference between Rorshach and Batman’s worldviews. It’s just that Rorshach is drawn closer to how someone who thought like that would actually be like.
And I disagree that killing is the line between heroes and anti-heroes. Heroes kill all the time. Outside of (modern) Batman and family, I can’t think of a single hero who hasn’t been forced to kill by an extreme situation. Heck, look at the Incredibles. Even pre-teen Dash gets an impressive body count by the end.
The difference is brutality and intention. An anti-hero kills goal. Even if presented with a viable non-lethal mode, he’d still go for the kill. The hero may, if the situation warrants it, go in for the kill without remorse or reservation, but never as a first choice.
If DC or Marvel superheroes killed they wouldn’t have continuing villains. 
I’m saying that “realism” is breaking a cardinal rule for continuing series. Batman, no matter how psychotic he gets, cannot act like Rorschach. The minute he does, the series is over. Moore had a limited run. That’s as different as hardboiled mysteries and cozies. Both have murders; both solve murders. Yet nothing else is similar. The rules are different. Miss Marple cannot act like the Continental Op. If she did - assuming anybody would print the book in the first place - there would never be another one.
Heh–that’s what I was trying to say with the “internally consistant” comment. I fully agree with what you wrote.