META: Notes on a Genre I Love

[Lalo Martins]

Here's a reformatted repost.

quoth Tom Russell as of Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:33:12 +0000:
> NOTES ON A GENRE I LOVE
> 
> I. LOVE AND HOPE
> 
>    I love superheroes.  I love men and women in tights jumping on
>    rooftops and beating the snot out of each other.  I love cosmic
>    space-gods locked in millennia-long space-war using space-weapons and
>    god-tactics that are as beyond our comprehension as our world is to
>    microscopic life forms.  I love anti-matter dimensions and worlds
>    contained within a single atom. I love grizzled vigilantes fighting
>    to take back the streets; I love brightly-coloured celebrities
>    protecting the world from aliens, Atlantians, and sinister
>    masterminds.  I love narrowly-escaped death traps, secret identities,
>    kid sidekicks, and arch-enemies who live to fight another day.  I
>    love giant typewriters and robots and talking apes and impossibly
>    ridiculous bits of technology. I love crazy ideas and comedy, gritty
>    crime and high-octane melodrama, soap opera and subtlety, science
>    fiction and fantasy, pageantry and spectacle: pain and death and love
>    and betrayal and honour: life! The much-maligned superhero genre
>    contains all these things in one breath; it has room for any kind of
>    story, any kind of character, any kind of tone.  Compare this to any
>    other genre and you very quickly become aware of what a special
>    quality this is.  King Arthur's Merlin would be out of place in a
>    gritty gin-soaked hard-boiled noir story; Travis Bickle should stay
>    far, far away from romantic comedy. That's not to say that these
>    genres are necessarily set in stone: combine fantasy or science
>    fiction with the American West, for example, and you get the Weird
>    Western.  (And now that I think about it, I'd love to watch a romcom
>    about a psychopath like Bickle.)  There is some wiggle room and just
>    as every art form borrows from every other art form, every genre does
>    the same. I'm not saying that the defining features of other genres
>    are necessarily limiting; rather, I'm saying that the defining
>    feature of the superhero genre is its limitlessness.  Partially this
>    is because it is a gestalt or bastard genre, a big American Melting
>    Plot of tropes and archetypes.  But a bigger part of this freedom is
>    also a matter of form.  While superhero stories can be told in any
>    media, they flourished-- and still exhibit dominance over-- comic
>    books.  And it's not even so much that the special language of comics
>    is the best fit for the genre or that the art form itself is "more"
>    limitlessness than other art forms; rather, the salient fact I wish
>    to highlight is that comics, as they have been published for the last
>    hundred-plus years, are serial. Superman comics have been published
>    continuously since 1938, but that doesn't mean it's been one big
>    constantly-unfolding saga, one interminably-long story piling on
>    characters and plot complications.  It is, instead, many, many
>    stories, often a new story every month, with each story varying from
>    its predecessors and descendants in matters of style, substance,
>    plot, theme, and tone. And that's the true measure of the genre's
>    limitlessness.  It's not that you can use it to tell any kind of
>    story, but that you can use it to tell any kind of story you want
>    about the same characters.  That's the power of a serial format,
>    which is, it must be noted, markedly different from a mere series. 
>    Try to shift the tone or type of story from one film in a series to
>    the next, for example, and it won't be nearly as successful, as
>    Godfather III and the fourth Indiana Jones film can no doubt attest.
>    But the superhero genre has even more latitude for these sorts of
>    shifts and twists than other works of serial storytelling.  While the
>    soap opera-- with its unexpected plot twists, secret plots, long-lost
>    twins, and unexpected resurrections-- has a surprising amount in
>    common with the superhero genre, it often stretches credulity to the
>    nth degree as it strives to find a new crisis, anguish, or secret for
>    a given character to suffer through that tops the crises, anguishes,
>    and secrets they went through three months prior.  It gets to the
>    point that the audience begins to ask, how many times can someone
>    kidnap/impersonate/possess/frame for murder a seemingly normal
>    homemaker?  (Answer: a lot, apparently.) But because superhero
>    stories are about superheroes, who put their lives in danger on a
>    regular basis by definition, we're able to suspend our disbelief more
>    than we can when following around a society wife.  It makes far more
>    sense for mobsters, aliens, and deranged maniacs to center their
>    psychosis on a man, woman, or robot that's dedicated their lives to
>    fighting said mobsters, aliens, or deranged maniacs than it is for
>    mobsters, et al. to focus on tormenting Luke and Laura.  (Though, you
>    have to admit, Luke's pretty bad-ass.  You remember when he and
>    Scorpio stopped the Cassadines from taking over the world with an ice
>    machine?  That was awesome!) If it is the presence of the superhero
>    that allows the genre to be "more" limitless in terms of tone, style,
>    and genre than a soap opera or professional wrestling, the question
>    (of course) is begged: what exactly makes a superhero a superhero? 
>    Is it the presence of certain tropes, such as a costume, a secret
>    identity, powers or gadgets?  What differentiates a superhero from a
>    pulp hero, such as the Shadow, Doc Savage, and Tarzan? These are
>    important and valuable questions, and I have the utmost respect for
>    those commentators, scholars, buffs, and bloggers who have sought to
>    find the answers-- but I must confess that it's not a question that
>    particularly interests me personally in my capacity as the author of
>    this piece.  I know a superhero when I see one, and that's good
>    enough for me.  I am, however, interested in clearly stating the
>    major difference between the superhero story and its exact opposite,
>    the anti-superhero story, which comes down to, for me, the other
>    major defining feature of the former. In addition to, and
>    part-and-parcel of, the genre's aforementioned limitlessness, there
>    is also the matter of optimism: the superhero genre is inherently
>    optimistic.  Even a dark avenger like Batman, standing on a
>    rain-swept rooftop as crime and sordidness swirls below him, is an
>    optimistic figure.  Despite the fact that his fight is hopeless--
>    despite the fact that he will never vanquish crime in Gotham City--
>    he continues to fight.  As one of the smartest men on the planet,
>    Bruce Wayne knows that his mission is an impossible one, and yet each
>    night, as he dons his cape and cowl, he rededicates himself to that
>    mission-- to the idea that he can make a difference.  And that, to
>    me, is an act of optimism.  A life of optimism. People misunderstand
>    optimism and cynicism.  I had a friend who, when asked which column
>    he would put himself in, answered that he was realistic.  But
>    "realistic" doesn't really figure into it.  All of us can and should
>    be realistic; every human being owes it to themselves to be a member
>    of the fact-based community.  Optimism and cynicism has nothing to do
>    with "realism"; optimism as I see it really has nothing to do with
>    Pangloss and "the best of all possible worlds".  Optimism and
>    cynicism have nothing to do with the world as it is but with the
>    world as it might be. Neither the optimist or the cynic ignore the
>    pain and suffering in the world and the capacity for cruelty and
>    selfishness in the human character.  The difference is this: the
>    cynic sees all this and says, it's just going to get worse.  The
>    optimist sees all this and says, it can be better.  We can make it
>    better.  It won't be easy, but we can do it.  Yes, we can.  The
>    audacity of hope.  (My goodness, it's a good time to be an American.)
>    It has nothing to do with wishing it better or wearing a "Save
>    Darfur" t-shirt.  It requires that we acknowledge the reality of the
>    situation we're trying to change.  It requires action.  It requires
>    dramatic example and inspiration.  And those ideas-- that impulse--
>    is at the heart of the superhero and his genre. If the superhero
>    story is powered by and functions as an extension of optimism, the
>    anti-superhero story is powered by cynicism: we can't do it, it's
>    stupid to try, and even if someone had the power to make a
>    difference, they wouldn't do it anyway.  They would use their power
>    to accumulate great wealth.  They would terrorize normal people. 
>    They would kill and rape and maim because there would be no one who
>    could stand up to them.  They would be fascists. And, granted, if
>    superpowers and gadgetry existed in our world, there would be people
>    who would abuse that power to base and vile ends.  Even in superhero
>    stories, there are people like that.  We call them supervillains. 
>    And since most superhero stories and universes feature far more
>    villains than heroes, perhaps this bares out the cynic's conception,
>    at least by a slim majority headcount. But I refuse to believe that
>    all people are slaves to their baser urges.  Even without
>    superpowers, there are people who do acts of good, who try to help
>    others, who try to make a positive difference.  People who inspire
>    others and people who are inspired by others.  And those are the kind
>    of people that we should be celebrating.  Cynicism celebrates
>    nothing, it contributes nothing.  It is actually nihilism, and if you
>    haven't outgrown nihilism by the age of twenty-two then I feel
>    supremely sorry for you. And I'm not saying that I believe in the
>    myth of a perfect person, or that I'd find a perfect superhero an
>    interesting one.  People are complex.  They're capable of great good
>    and great evil.  They are tempted and occasionally they are weak.  We
>    are driven by psychological motives that aren't always altruistic. 
>    But as human beings we're capable of being better and I believe many
>    of us strive to become better. Superhero stories are about the
>    potential of human beings; a good superhero story affirms the innate
>    dignity of the human spirit.  And that's why it's a genre I love.
> 
> II. ENGINES AND SAGAS
> 
>    When we say something is a serial, we're really referring to two
>    not-entirely-separate and overlapping traditions.  The major
>    Victorian novels, for example, were serialized; they told a finite if
>    occasionally sprawling story with a beginning, middle, and end.  This
>    sort of serial we'll call a saga, as in "tune in next time for the
>    next chapter of the continuing saga of [blank]."  A saga seeks to
>    tell one long story, often ending each installment on some sort of
>    cliffhanger or hook to ensure that we do, indeed, tune in next time.
>    The other tradition generally relies on self-contained episodes. 
>    Each episode of Dragnet or Gunsmoke, for example, is distinct from
>    every other episode and can be comprehended, understood, and enjoyed
>    all on its lonesome.  The success of that sort of open-ended serial
>    depends on the ability of its writers to come up with new and
>    interesting stories, and they are helped or hindered in that effort
>    by their ability or lack thereof to build what John Seavey calls a
>    Storytelling Engine:
> 
> "The idea is that when creating an open-ended series, you include a
> variety of different elements that act to help the writer in generating
> ideas for stories; each of these elements can be seen as a component in
> a 'storytelling engine'... So what elements make up a storytelling
> engine? The basic concept of the series, for starters; Doctor Who... has
> as its concept 'a mysterious stranger has a time and space machine.'
> Then from there, you layer on the main character, with his motivations
> and backstory ('an endlessly curious not-quite-human trickster, on the
> run from his own people who see helping people as a crime'), the
> supporting cast ('a young woman with more curiosity and guts than common
> sense'), the setting ('the inside of the time machine', 'modern-day
> London', 'a variety of alien planets', 'various Earth historical
> locales'), the antagonists ('a variety of evil aliens who seek to
> enslave or destroy people'), and the tone ('light-hearted adventure,
> with occasional forays into horror.') Each of these, ideally, does
> something to help the writer come up with a story or move it along, and
> each of them could be changed in ways that help or hinder the writer.
> (For example, if the Doctor was 'a heavy reader with no interests
> beyond enlarging his vast library', the series would probably have to
> work much harder to get him involved in events.)"
> 
>    For more on storytelling engines, I would of course recommend looking
>    at Seavey's impressive examinations and notes on the various
>    storytelling engines in comics and television over at his wonderful
>    site, fraggmented.blogspot.com.  But, for our purposes, I think
>    you've got the general idea, and we've arrived at our two traditions
>    of serial storytelling: the saga and the engine. With the exception
>    of Victorian novels and older television shows, however, you're
>    unlikely to find the two traditions segregated.  Modern television
>    programs might still pit their heroes against the monster- or
>    crime-of-the-week, but each season might take the form of a larger
>    "saga".  From season to season, subplots unfold and characters grow,
>    making use of the best aspects of saga-telling while remaining
>    open-ended (and thus-- let's be honest here-- more profitable).
>    Superhero stories are especially likely to marry and make use of the
>    two approaches, with stand-alone stories and longer arcs combining
>    amid an often soap operatic backdrop of supporting characters,
>    subplots, twists of fate and reversals of fortune.  And, as mentioned
>    previously, the special ability of the superhero story to change tone
>    and mix genre elements from one installment to the next is just as
>    much a result of engine-driven seriality as it is of the
>    circumstances of the genre's bastardry. Regardless of how one mixes
>    it, creators of an open-ended series absolutely must keep
>    accessibility in mind.  As Jim Shooter once remarked, every issue is
>    somebody's first issue.  This does not mean that continuity-- that
>    is, the idea that previous stories matter-- should be avoided or
>    dismissed, and this does not mean that the seventh part of a
>    seven-part epic must stop dead in its tracks to catch the reader up
>    with what happened in the last six.  What this means, rather, is if a
>    reader stumbles across your twentieth episode, he should not have to
>    have read parts one through nineteen in order for that story to
>    "work". This doesn't mean that one should rely on unnaturally
>    exposition-heavy dialogue ("As you know, Wonder Moth, if you don't
>    recharge in the Cosmic God-Sack every twenty-four hours, you will
>    die") but rather that the reader should always understand what is at
>    stake:
> 
>    Wonder Moth stopped for a moment and caught his breath. "How much
>    time is left?" asked Samwise Grubgee. "An hour.  Maybe two.  I don't
>    remember..." "Just hang in there," said Samwise.  "We'll get you back
>    to the Cosmic God-Sack." Wonder Moth thanked him with a nod and they
>    continued on their way.  But both of them knew that Flojira was still
>    two space-jumps away...
> 
>    The reader doesn't always have to be told explicitly who's who and
>    what's what, but they should be able to follow it.  From the above
>    snippet, we can decipher that Samwise and Wonder Moth are allies.  We
>    don't need to be told if they're lifelong friends or erstwhile
>    allies; we just need to know that they're apparently on the same
>    side. If, in fact, they're not on the same side-- if they're lifelong
>    enemies who have temporarily become allied in order to confront a
>    greater evil or pursue a common goal-- then we need to know that.
> 
>    "How much time is left?" asked Samwise Grubgee. "Two hours, maybe
>    three."
>    Samwise knew Wonder Moth was lying, trying to hide his weakness. 
>    "Don't worry.  I'll get you to your Cosmic God-Sack." "Thanks, Sam,"
>    smirked Wonder Moth.  "I didn't know you cared." "Oh, I still want
>    you dead, no doubt about that," said Samwise.  "But I will be the one
>    to bring you down, and only when you are at the height of your
>    powers.  To let you slowly shrink away into oblivion because of some
>    accident of your ridiculous biology?  Bah.  That's no victory at
>    all." They started again on their way towards Flojira.  "Never
>    change, Samwise.  Never change."
> 
>    And, granted, that one probably tilts a little too much in the
>    exposition direction, but I think you get my drift: the reader should
>    more-or-less know what's going on in any given episode without having
>    to read all the previous installments.  All salient facts and
>    components needed to enjoy an episode should be provided within that
>    episode.  Each one should stand on its own. There is, however, a
>    larger point floating around there: not only should each episode
>    stand on its own in terms of being understood in and of itself, but
>    each episode should stand on its own in terms of serving as a
>    self-contained story in its own right.  That is, each episode should
>    tell some kind of story with a beginning, middle, and end; each
>    episode should have a satisfying conclusion. Now, this is a point
>    I've made in the past that has at times been grossly misunderstood. 
>    I am not saying that each episode should possess a self-contained
>    plot-based narrative-- though that often helps.  Understanding story
>    as "plot" is the simplest and least interesting way to both read and
>    write works of serial literature.  A story can also be about a
>    character.  I'm not talking in terms of a character driving a plot--
>    though, as Henry James tells us, that is as it should be-- but in
>    terms of an episode exploring an aspect of a given character so that
>    by its end, some new facet has been illuminated or some new
>    understanding has been gained.  Regardless of what happens in terms
>    of plot-- this could be part three of the four-part final showdown
>    between Wonder Moth and Samwise Grubgee-- some central question posed
>    early on is answered later on. Even more fruitful for the superhero
>    genre, which typically poses questions of morality, of good and evil,
>    of life and death, is an episode that tells a thematic story.  Each
>    scene or character might give us a different slant or idea on the big
>    theme that ties the story together.  That last bit is important: an
>    episode should feel self-cohesive.  An episode doesn't end merely
>    because the time or page count has expired, but because the story the
>    author was telling-- plot-based, character-based, theme-based,
>    whatever-- has been completed. And this doesn't mean that a writer
>    can't use subplots, though as a reader who wasted many years and
>    dollars reading X-Men and waiting for something to actually happen, I
>    myself generally eye them suspiciously and urge you, readers and
>    authors both, to do the same.  But if one has a lot of plot threads
>    that must be advanced simultaneously, one or two threads could be
>    used to tie it together or drive the character- or themed-based
>    story.  That thread provides the satisfaction, the sense of cohesion,
>    the sense that this episode "counts" for something and that the
>    reader didn't just waste their time reading unrelated anecdotes.  And
>    that, in turn, ensures that the reader returns for the next
>    installment-- which is the whole point of writing a serial in the
>    first place.
> 
> III. THE RIDICULOUS AND THE SUBLIME
> 
>    As Warren Ellis, Chris Ware, and other cynics will no doubt tell you,
>    superheroes are inherently ridiculous.  Accepting as a postulate the
>    idea that if people found themselves gifted with incredible and weird
>    powers that they would use them to fight crime (or commit it),
>    there's still the question of code-names, gaudy skintight costumes,
>    secret identities, law enforcement agencies and lawful citizens who
>    either celebrate or at the very least tolerate the massive property
>    damage incurred during your average superhero slobberknocker-- and
>    that's just for starters.  That's not even getting into talking apes
>    and parallel dimensions and, yes, giant typewriters. And, you know
>    what?  I'll give them that.  Absolutely, superheroes and the
>    universes they inhabit are ridiculous on their face.  But rather than
>    seeing that as a liability, or as a reason to endorse "campy"
>    material (shudder), I see it as a source of great strength.  Like its
>    "bastard" origin, it allows the superhero genre to go places and do
>    things that other genres can't; the best superhero stories use the
>    ridiculous to approach the sublime. No one did this better than Jack
>    Kirby.  Perfect example: the Silver Surfer.  The Kirby creation that
>    would become Stan Lee's favourite character (and a point of
>    contention between Lee and Kirby) is one of the most soulful and
>    philosophical of all superhero characters, unraveling the mysteries
>    of the self and the universe as he traverses the cosmos on his
>    surfboard.  Let's look at that last word again: surfboard.  The
>    Silver Surfer is a chrome-plated naked humanoid WITH A COSMIC
>    SURFBOARD.  That we're able to take this character so seriously and
>    able to feel his existential angst so potently when he has a frickin'
>    surfboard is a testament not only to the skills of Kirby and Lee but
>    also to the genre they were working in. Less popular than the Surfer,
>    but a character that I and many others take no less seriously, is his
>    cousin at Marvel's Distinguished Competition, the Black Racer.  The
>    personification of death for Kirby's Fourth World, the Black Racer
>    soars through the skies on a pair of frickin' skis!  Utterly
>    ridiculous.  Can you imagine Death in the Seventh Seal bearing down
>    from the skies on a pair of skis? But Kirby makes it work, for Surfer
>    and skier both.  I've tried to analyze this for both but been unable
>    to on any intelligible or conscious level.  And that's because these
>    sort of ideas are like a swift punch to our subconscious: their
>    absolute ridiculousness defies any rational explanation besides,
>    "Awesome!" And that, I think, is what makes them work.  The sublime
>    is a profoundly non-intellectual place.  A religious ceremony, a
>    great film (Ozu, Bresson), an aesthetic moment in life: they are
>    ideas we have no words for, emotions that cannot be named.  Ozu and
>    Bresson use the slow accumulation of detail, stillness, silence, and
>    a certain formal austerity (see Paul Schrader's "Transcendental Style
>    in Film") to get us beyond our conventional intellectual and
>    emotional responses to someplace more spiritual.  Kirby, being more
>    direct and perhaps a bit suspicious of a languid pace, gets us there
>    by punching us in the face with the one-two combination of OMAC and
>    Devil Dinosaur. The important thing to note, though, isn't just that
>    he has crazy ideas but how he uses those ideas.  He gets us past our
>    intellects, but then he gives us something to think about: the Black
>    Racer, for example, is used to bring up questions of death and
>    mortality and destiny without (and this is the key to any good art)
>    ever coming out and explicitly posing the question. Some writers use
>    these sort of whacky ideas to explore some deeper aspect of a
>    character's psychology.  Who can forget the classic story in Superman
>    # 125, in which Superman loses all his powers (all his self, all his
>    identity) and gains one new power, to wit, the ability to create a
>    miniature duplicate of himself with all his old powers.  The
>    miniature duplicate gets all the credit, the press, the adulation;
>    Superman starts to resent and hate the little creature for making him
>    feel, well, small.  It is a marvelously complex piece of work, one
>    that also apparently greatly influenced Grant Morrison in writing his
>    "All-Star Superman" (Morrison being perhaps a modern master of using
>    the ridiculous and the insane to take us to nirvana, though I could
>    actually do without his metatextualism [blasphemy, I know]). One last
>    example: readers of the LNH are no doubt familiar, at least in
>    passing, with the classic story Particle Man Annual # 1.  Since I've
>    written about this story before, I'm going to be extremely lazy and
>    just quote that bit:
> 
>    "It is, essentially, a shaggy dog story, the whole story builds
>    until the cabbie gets the girl, starts a rental car agency, and
>    sends Boy Lad a letter signed 'Love Hertz'.  The whole story's
>    really there to support this pun.
>
>    "And yet, there's something sad about that pun, it's almost a cruel
>    joke on Boy Lad and it magnifies his pain a hundred fold, pain that's
>    been built into the preceding text.  If it is a shaggy dog story,
>    than it's a sad one, it's one with heart. "To me, that's the best
>    kind of serious LNH story: one that takes a very silly place very
>    seriously, one that treats the very silly people who populate it as
>    real human beings that merit our attention and affection."
> 
>    The same could be said, perhaps, for superheroes in general: it takes
>    something very silly very seriously and the end result is something
>    glorious.  Taking the whacky ideas seriously and using the whacky
>    ideas to explore serious things is what ultimately separates
>    superheroes from farce, Kirby from camp.

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
-- 
      So many of our dreams at first seem impossible,
       then they seem improbable, and then, when we
       summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
                           -----
                  http://lalomartins.info/
GNU: never give up freedom              http://www.gnu.org/