Superman v. Capitalism
April 25, 2016 10:33 AM Subscribe
The question “why does a superhero exist?” is easy to answer nowadays: to fight super-villains, or more recently, other superheroes in brattish fits of pique. But, as mentioned, “superhero” is derived from “Superman”, ditto “super-villain”; neither concept existed when Superman first appeared. The first enemy Superman would fight with abilities more than those of ordinary men would not appear until Action Comics #13; until then, Superman fought miscreants with no more power than afforded humans in the real world. ... This hardly seems fair given his non-“super” opposition, but Shuster and Siegel provided a perspective that more than made up the difference to themselves and their readers: class & oppression.
The swift rise of Superman to national icon captures a moment when young boys in big cities in the United States would save up their allowances to purchase weekly the exploits of an anti-capitalist strong-man, a “Man of Steel”, as he did what any self-respecting man would do when faced with the iniquities of the world. He would go out there, find the crooks responsible, and kick their asses.Was the Stalin reference intentional? Are they outright admiring last century's populist violent strongman with a blame-the-outgroup policy because he was an authoritarian for the
[...] the real Man of Steel was already saving the world from the Nazis while everyone watched, and the American press was preparing itself to turn on a dime as soon as the war was over and America’s alliances duly shifted back to supporting addled post-World-War-II fascists like Winston Churchill and Charles De Gaulle as they beat the drums for war against the Reds and the re-enslavement of their colonial empires.Looks like it.
posted by Rangi at 10:58 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
Also, keep in mind that while Superman was faster than a speeding bullet, he was originally only able to leap buildings in a single bound. His powers got an upgrade, as well as his opponents.
My dad also remembers as a kid TV Superman (George Reeves maybe??) throwing bad guys off the roof of buildings. So Perfect Boy Scout Superman was also something that came later, apparently.
posted by sideshow at 11:04 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
My dad also remembers as a kid TV Superman (George Reeves maybe??) throwing bad guys off the roof of buildings. So Perfect Boy Scout Superman was also something that came later, apparently.
posted by sideshow at 11:04 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
showy Congressional tribunals denouncing many of the titles as violent, gory, sexy, pretty great and altogether inappropriate for the children reading them.I think this is what the much-rumored "irony poisoning" must look like: the impulse to contrarianism becoming so powerful that it overrides all other considerations, including internal consistency. You end up with this weirdly schizophrenic politics defined by being against whatever you perceive to be the common wisdom, whether that's anticommunism or anticensorship.
The official history of corporate comics relates this story of a regulated consumer market with hissing, booing and Signs of the Cross, but most of the accusations were fair enough
posted by RogerB at 11:04 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
Sorry, I don't have much time for someone who spends his entire first paragraph discussing the cover to Action #1 in a way that is desperate to let you know that He's Not One Of Those Nerds.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:09 AM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:09 AM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
My dad also remembers as a kid TV Superman (George Reeves maybe??) throwing bad guys off the roof of buildings. So Perfect Boy Scout Superman was also something that came later, apparently.
The Superdickery website is basically premised on the harsh truth that for at least a large chunk of the Silver Age, Superman was kind of a dick. I haven't done enough research up and down the Superman media-chronology to pinpoint when the kinder, gentler Superman emerged, but I suspect that the Donner movies (and Christopher Reeve's portrayal) might have played a role in giving the character a more sensitive soul than in years past.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:34 AM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
The Superdickery website is basically premised on the harsh truth that for at least a large chunk of the Silver Age, Superman was kind of a dick. I haven't done enough research up and down the Superman media-chronology to pinpoint when the kinder, gentler Superman emerged, but I suspect that the Donner movies (and Christopher Reeve's portrayal) might have played a role in giving the character a more sensitive soul than in years past.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:34 AM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
There is interesting stuff in here. There is also stuff like this -
our own time—likely the twilight of the relatively short-lived existence of superhero comics
- that makes me wonder what dataset they're looking at and how the superhero comics' total conquest of the movie business, not only in terms of content but also in terms of connected universe storytelling, is somehow excluded. Superhero comics have been "dying" the whole thirty years I've been reading them. It's a dream, and an imaginary story.
I'll finish RingTFA but dag: more historical Superman, less cool-kid posturing plzkthnx.
posted by EatTheWeek at 11:38 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
our own time—likely the twilight of the relatively short-lived existence of superhero comics
- that makes me wonder what dataset they're looking at and how the superhero comics' total conquest of the movie business, not only in terms of content but also in terms of connected universe storytelling, is somehow excluded. Superhero comics have been "dying" the whole thirty years I've been reading them. It's a dream, and an imaginary story.
I'll finish RingTFA but dag: more historical Superman, less cool-kid posturing plzkthnx.
posted by EatTheWeek at 11:38 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
" ... [Today's Superman is] the gloomy Übermensch of a regrettable future-made-present who has nothing to occupy his time ever since the fascists won the Second World War in 1946, a puffed-out fathead who goes around pounding on his friends in unstable rages and reciting old war stories at the ratty Kneipe down the street to a dwindling and aging group of fans, who are themselves waiting for the chance to man a tower at the camps whether they realize it or not.Worst vanguard of the revolution ever.
... Superheroes are outsold in the tiny existing market only by comic-book “seasons” of cancelled kidult TV sci-fi dramas, and the shoegazing “indie” comics scene that remains is like what would happen if Lex Luthor gave each of the bourgeois literati in New York City a stroke one by one, then forced them to continue their careers through photocopied pictographs about baking muffins while depressed.
Fucking die comics you suck.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:44 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
Jesus, someone forgot to drink their Ovaltine.
posted by Naberius at 12:01 PM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by Naberius at 12:01 PM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
Once again, I knew a great rant would whiz right over the heads of the collective Comic Book Man that is MetaFilter. Come the fuck on, how can you not love stuff like this?
posted by languagehat at 12:21 PM on April 25, 2016 [22 favorites]
Comic books were once the chosen form of propaganda for the masses in the West, for good or ill, but now, they’re the true last refuge of the middle-brow, “middle-class” pseudo-intellectual who can’t handle the pace of cable TV or movies, a basement laboratory for testing intellectual property before anyone important tries to make real money from it. Superheroes are outsold in the tiny existing market only by comic-book “seasons” of cancelled kidult TV sci-fi dramas, and the shoegazing “indie” comics scene that remains is like what would happen if Lex Luthor gave each of the bourgeois literati in New York City a stroke one by one, then forced them to continue their careers through photocopied pictographs about baking muffins while depressed.This is like when people read the great S.C.U.M. Manifesto and go "OMG, she's talking about destroying half the human race! How very terrible!!" Hell, it justifies itself just with this:
“Egg Fu”, an unforgettable mash-up of Fu Manchu, Jerry Lewis’s “flied lice” routine and an actual honest-to-God eggI will go to my grave being glad to have read that.
posted by languagehat at 12:21 PM on April 25, 2016 [22 favorites]
and the shoegazing “indie” comics scene that remains is like what would happen if Lex Luthor gave each of the bourgeois literati in New York City a stroke one by one, then forced them to continue their careers through photocopied pictographs about baking muffins while depressed.
This is completely untrue, and I deplore the implication.
I only ever used the stroke ray on Frank Miller, and we all saw what happened there.
I'm actually rather a fan of Saga, and Nimona, and I've always enjoyed Daniel Clowes' work.
posted by Alexander J. Luthor at 12:40 PM on April 25, 2016 [13 favorites]
This is completely untrue, and I deplore the implication.
I only ever used the stroke ray on Frank Miller, and we all saw what happened there.
I'm actually rather a fan of Saga, and Nimona, and I've always enjoyed Daniel Clowes' work.
posted by Alexander J. Luthor at 12:40 PM on April 25, 2016 [13 favorites]
Come the fuck on, how can you not love stuff like this?
That said, the entire website is a gift. So far I think my favorite is "Capitalism from a distant vantage point: Google Earth as an aid to dialectical materialism," a piece which starts with
(I'm just not sure what kind of stuff.)
posted by octobersurprise at 12:44 PM on April 25, 2016 [13 favorites]
" ...the shoegazing “indie” comics scene that remains is like what would happen if Lex Luthor gave each of the bourgeois literati in New York City a stroke one by one, then forced them to continue their careers through photocopied pictographs about baking muffins while depressed."is a fine line. A very fine line. But it's the best one in there and having read the entire piece, I'm just not sure the payoff is worth it. (Tho, Egg-Fu is pretty great, too. Could someone pit him against Fin Fang Foom, please?)
That said, the entire website is a gift. So far I think my favorite is "Capitalism from a distant vantage point: Google Earth as an aid to dialectical materialism," a piece which starts with
"I first started staring at “our” planet through google earth shortly after I began deliberately smoking large volumes of cannabis as an aid to enhance dialectical materialist thinking. I'd smoke as soon as I got home from work, load up earth, all labels off, and just look, really fucking look. And I could see it, I could see capitalism."and continues with
"I believe that if Engels and Marx had access to detailed zoom-able scrollable satellite imagery of the entire globe the would have revelled in it in the same way I do. They would have used it in the same way I do, to pummel a sense of scale into my consciousness, no matter how horrific. To conjure up disgust at the near incomprehensible volume of suffering that capitalism entails. To fill myself with extreme fear and paranoia at the shadow of violence that hangs over every human slave to capital. To send my heart-rate soaring as I understand the need for communism now, not tomorrow, not later, not when the “time is right” but right fucking now, because every second that goes by under capitalism is another second of evil at the planetary scale. Another second of oppression, death, pain, suffering, theft and rape, torture and murder, another second more of the existence of a hell constructed to cover an entire planet. Always I'm overwhelmed, often I feel sick, sometimes I cry, depending on the strain and how much I’ve smoked sometimes I have wonderful, terrifying, beautifully conscious panic attacks that render me near paralysed in paranoid terror."Yeah, man. That right there's the stuff.
(I'm just not sure what kind of stuff.)
posted by octobersurprise at 12:44 PM on April 25, 2016 [13 favorites]
The extended rant is, IMO, a vastly underrated genre, and this is a beautiful example.
Like the best rants, it has a lot of truth embedded in with the frothing at the mouth extremism and contrarian for its own sake style. The fact is that superhero comics have stagnated as a medium, we've got Marvel's endless angstfest where friend and foe shift from issue to issue so we can all know the official answer for who would win in any random superpowered scuffle, and epic wars to save not merely the planet but the entire universe take place so often they've become all but unnoticeable. And on DC's side you've got the elderly superhero squad doing whatever it is they do.
Superhero comics were always escapism, but either it's a genre intended to be used up by each generation and discarded, or it needs some revamping. Fighting crime, with eye lasers or super speed or whatever is, frankly, uninteresting. Who the fuck cares if a bank is robbed or not? They're insured. Street crime, at least, has a bit of personal interest and threat but even your friendly neighborhood Spiderman is overpowered for police work, to say nothing of Supes himself.
Which is why super-villains were invented: to give all the people with their underwear on the outside someone in their weight class to fight.
But all that did, really, was make everything mundane in a sort of perverse way. Now we're back to personality clashes, with really bland and awful personalities. Gofus and Gallant given giant world smashing clubs beating on each other.
People try, from time to time, looking at superheros and wondering what if they were in the real world, but that's hard and it is so very easy to just drag on a super powered megalomaniac bent on world domination for a cheap fight. Worse, the averge superhero in the real world comic tends to focus on the USA and the west, and mostly straight white men in the US and the west.
I think there might be interesting things to explore if someone wanted to write a comic about what might happen if a completely random subset of humanity (5% to 25% maybe?) suddenly acquired powers. Among other things, it would be the largest acquisition of force multipliers by women and the poor that has ever taken place. What happens when 10% of the population of Kenya, including 10% of the women, can fly, or shoot eye lasers, or lift fifty tons, or whatever? How does the PRC keep things going when one Chinese out of ten (again, including women) has supernatural abilities?
I'm doubtful that the US could maintain its hegomony in the face of a superpowered world.
And think of green energy. Employing a few hundred superstrong people to turn a dynamo rather than burning coal? Or hiring a couple dozen electrokinetic types to just produce the good stuff? A whole lot of the current economy depends on things being scarce that superpowered people could produce cheaply and abundantly. Who needs airliners when the world has a few million people who can teleport both themselves and several passengers?
Or, level the playing field entirely: what about a world where tomorrow everyone wakes up with a super power. Every single person, from the newborns to the elderly, rich and poor alike.
posted by sotonohito at 12:48 PM on April 25, 2016 [7 favorites]
Like the best rants, it has a lot of truth embedded in with the frothing at the mouth extremism and contrarian for its own sake style. The fact is that superhero comics have stagnated as a medium, we've got Marvel's endless angstfest where friend and foe shift from issue to issue so we can all know the official answer for who would win in any random superpowered scuffle, and epic wars to save not merely the planet but the entire universe take place so often they've become all but unnoticeable. And on DC's side you've got the elderly superhero squad doing whatever it is they do.
Superhero comics were always escapism, but either it's a genre intended to be used up by each generation and discarded, or it needs some revamping. Fighting crime, with eye lasers or super speed or whatever is, frankly, uninteresting. Who the fuck cares if a bank is robbed or not? They're insured. Street crime, at least, has a bit of personal interest and threat but even your friendly neighborhood Spiderman is overpowered for police work, to say nothing of Supes himself.
Which is why super-villains were invented: to give all the people with their underwear on the outside someone in their weight class to fight.
But all that did, really, was make everything mundane in a sort of perverse way. Now we're back to personality clashes, with really bland and awful personalities. Gofus and Gallant given giant world smashing clubs beating on each other.
People try, from time to time, looking at superheros and wondering what if they were in the real world, but that's hard and it is so very easy to just drag on a super powered megalomaniac bent on world domination for a cheap fight. Worse, the averge superhero in the real world comic tends to focus on the USA and the west, and mostly straight white men in the US and the west.
I think there might be interesting things to explore if someone wanted to write a comic about what might happen if a completely random subset of humanity (5% to 25% maybe?) suddenly acquired powers. Among other things, it would be the largest acquisition of force multipliers by women and the poor that has ever taken place. What happens when 10% of the population of Kenya, including 10% of the women, can fly, or shoot eye lasers, or lift fifty tons, or whatever? How does the PRC keep things going when one Chinese out of ten (again, including women) has supernatural abilities?
I'm doubtful that the US could maintain its hegomony in the face of a superpowered world.
And think of green energy. Employing a few hundred superstrong people to turn a dynamo rather than burning coal? Or hiring a couple dozen electrokinetic types to just produce the good stuff? A whole lot of the current economy depends on things being scarce that superpowered people could produce cheaply and abundantly. Who needs airliners when the world has a few million people who can teleport both themselves and several passengers?
Or, level the playing field entirely: what about a world where tomorrow everyone wakes up with a super power. Every single person, from the newborns to the elderly, rich and poor alike.
posted by sotonohito at 12:48 PM on April 25, 2016 [7 favorites]
This is like when people read the great S.C.U.M. Manifesto and go "OMG, she's talking about destroying half the human race! How very terrible!!"
Apart from her terrible beliefs about trans people, Solanas had a lot of good ideas.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:53 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
Apart from her terrible beliefs about trans people, Solanas had a lot of good ideas.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:53 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
sotonohito: Not a comic book, but you might enjoy the superhero novel Turbulence by [Indian author] Samit Basu.
Desi supers, and what happens when the Indian and Pakistani air force flyers go after each other, and much much more. (Good clean fun, but not exactly SWM/USA.)
posted by cstross at 1:14 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Desi supers, and what happens when the Indian and Pakistani air force flyers go after each other, and much much more. (Good clean fun, but not exactly SWM/USA.)
posted by cstross at 1:14 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
In the Captain Marvel serial, the Big Red Cheese threw a guy off the roof of a building, but I don't have a specific recollection of anything like that for Superman.
posted by Billiken at 1:15 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by Billiken at 1:15 PM on April 25, 2016
Thanks, I'll have to check it out!
posted by sotonohito at 1:19 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by sotonohito at 1:19 PM on April 25, 2016
I think this is what the much-rumored "irony poisoning" must look like: the impulse to contrarianism becoming so powerful that it overrides all other considerations, including internal consistency.
see also
posted by 3urypteris at 1:20 PM on April 25, 2016
see also
posted by 3urypteris at 1:20 PM on April 25, 2016
Whatever you think of this guy's article, he's so right about the first few issues of Action Comics. Action Comics #3 is one of the greatest Superman stories ever.
Superman rescues a miner from a cave-in and discovers that the safety conditions are terrible. He crashes the mine-owner's posh party disguised as an immigrant miner and tricks the owner and his rich partygoers into touring the mine as a lark. Superman causes a cave in so they can see for themselves how inadequate the safety precautions are and lets them vainly try to dig themselves out. Then when they've given up hope and the mine owner laments his failure to ensure the mine's safety, Superman rescues them, and the owner vows that henceforth he'll have the safest mine in the country.
I'd say it's like "What if Charles Dickens wrote Superman," except it's actually just straight up the original Siegel and Shuster Superman.
posted by straight at 1:26 PM on April 25, 2016 [21 favorites]
Superman rescues a miner from a cave-in and discovers that the safety conditions are terrible. He crashes the mine-owner's posh party disguised as an immigrant miner and tricks the owner and his rich partygoers into touring the mine as a lark. Superman causes a cave in so they can see for themselves how inadequate the safety precautions are and lets them vainly try to dig themselves out. Then when they've given up hope and the mine owner laments his failure to ensure the mine's safety, Superman rescues them, and the owner vows that henceforth he'll have the safest mine in the country.
I'd say it's like "What if Charles Dickens wrote Superman," except it's actually just straight up the original Siegel and Shuster Superman.
posted by straight at 1:26 PM on April 25, 2016 [21 favorites]
And speaking of Superman, connoisseurs of chemically-induced rants will not want to miss the rhizzone's "Post-Soviet Anxiety: Man of Steel and Doctor Who" of which the author writes "(i wrote this at 5 int he morning drunk out of my senses please dont judge )".
posted by octobersurprise at 1:39 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by octobersurprise at 1:39 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
Come the fuck on, how can you not love stuff like this?
Because I'm old, and separating the really interesting things he had to say about early Superman from his desperation to make clear that he's not writing any of this really long article because he's actually interested in what he's writing about (god forbid!) tired me right the fuck out, and now I need a nap.
I don't have that much time left and I'd rather not spend any more of it than I absolutely have to sleeping.
posted by Naberius at 1:42 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
Because I'm old, and separating the really interesting things he had to say about early Superman from his desperation to make clear that he's not writing any of this really long article because he's actually interested in what he's writing about (god forbid!) tired me right the fuck out, and now I need a nap.
I don't have that much time left and I'd rather not spend any more of it than I absolutely have to sleeping.
posted by Naberius at 1:42 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
Or, level the playing field entirely: what about a world where tomorrow everyone wakes up with a super power. Every single person, from the newborns to the elderly, rich and poor alike.
So I would need to be gifted with the means of escaping this doomed rock without needing food or drink (or company), realize it in the time it took most other people to start accidentally landscaping their home cities, and effect my escape.
Pass.
posted by Slackermagee at 1:44 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
So I would need to be gifted with the means of escaping this doomed rock without needing food or drink (or company), realize it in the time it took most other people to start accidentally landscaping their home cities, and effect my escape.
Pass.
posted by Slackermagee at 1:44 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
sotonohito, I don't know how much you read comics, but pretty much everything you've suggested has been done in one form or another. The first half of your comment is Watchmen, but it seems like that's the intent. The answer to pretty much any question about "what if superheroes were real" is going to be Watchmen. The point of Dr. Manhattan was to show how much a single superbeing alone would distort the world.
The "what if X% of the world got superpowers" has been explored in works like Marvel's New Universe experiment (and Warren Ellis's newuniversal remix even moreso), Warren Ellis's Supergod (though this is about a superhuman arms race between nations, not supers just appearing), Malibu Comics's Ultraverse books, Marvel's Earth X (and follow up) books, J. Michael Straczynski's Supreme Power and Rising Stars series, Ordinary from Titan Comics (about a world where everybody but one guy gets powers) and individual stories and arcs in series like JLA or the FF. It's also the premise of the X-men franchise.
A lot of these works looked at the economic, political, social ramifications of the emergence of super-powered beings, though you're right that very often the focus is Western-centric.
Who needs airliners when the world has a few million people who can teleport both themselves and several passengers?
Not a comic, but this is the premise of the excellent old SF novel The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester: it's discovered that people can teleport to varying degrees just by thinking, and the book is a pretty interesting examination of the ramifications society (people building houses with complex and confusing layouts to prevent break-ins, the rich showing off by intentionally using slower normal forms of transportation, etc.)
posted by Sangermaine at 2:15 PM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
The "what if X% of the world got superpowers" has been explored in works like Marvel's New Universe experiment (and Warren Ellis's newuniversal remix even moreso), Warren Ellis's Supergod (though this is about a superhuman arms race between nations, not supers just appearing), Malibu Comics's Ultraverse books, Marvel's Earth X (and follow up) books, J. Michael Straczynski's Supreme Power and Rising Stars series, Ordinary from Titan Comics (about a world where everybody but one guy gets powers) and individual stories and arcs in series like JLA or the FF. It's also the premise of the X-men franchise.
A lot of these works looked at the economic, political, social ramifications of the emergence of super-powered beings, though you're right that very often the focus is Western-centric.
Who needs airliners when the world has a few million people who can teleport both themselves and several passengers?
Not a comic, but this is the premise of the excellent old SF novel The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester: it's discovered that people can teleport to varying degrees just by thinking, and the book is a pretty interesting examination of the ramifications society (people building houses with complex and confusing layouts to prevent break-ins, the rich showing off by intentionally using slower normal forms of transportation, etc.)
posted by Sangermaine at 2:15 PM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
Superhero comics are currently in the act of milking the last drops of nostalgia from a failing readership that are, despite their shared super-powers of forgetting to vote, drinking too much and legally renting a car to die in, still far too young to actually remember the children’s stories that get endlessly retold in the total garbage that lands on their Kindles each month. Nowadays, Superman plays surrogate Super-Dad to a shrinking nursery of adult babies, and he’s an angry daddy who likes to play rough.
Yeah! Fuck you, garbage humans!
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:56 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Yeah! Fuck you, garbage humans!
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:56 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Yes, yes, we get it, all comic book fans are infantile idiots who childishly ignore reality and you're sooooo much better and smarter than them.
Meanwhile, though, did he just implicitly defend Stalin by writing off opposition to the USSR? Somehow I don't think comic book fans are the only ones with an embarrassingly naive view of reality.
posted by Green Winnebago at 3:03 PM on April 25, 2016
Meanwhile, though, did he just implicitly defend Stalin by writing off opposition to the USSR? Somehow I don't think comic book fans are the only ones with an embarrassingly naive view of reality.
posted by Green Winnebago at 3:03 PM on April 25, 2016
The question “why does a superhero exist?” is easy to answer nowadays:
It's usually down to radiation of some sort, I find.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:16 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
It's usually down to radiation of some sort, I find.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:16 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
I think he's trying to write a version of Adorno's jazz essays, but for comics.
If he suggests that the only comics we should be reading are about the life and times of Arnold Schoenberg, we'll know for sure.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:20 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
If he suggests that the only comics we should be reading are about the life and times of Arnold Schoenberg, we'll know for sure.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:20 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
I think there might be interesting things to explore if someone wanted to write a comic about what might happen if a completely random subset of humanity (5% to 25% maybe?) suddenly acquired powers.
Marvel's New Universe was pretty much this. And I think they did many things well: human-scale stories and then the conflicts that inevitably happen as those interested in power scramble to gain influence and control over these new manifestations of power. Apparently they didn't sell well, though, and all this was much more popular as Heroes.
Perhaps better is Brandon Sanderson's recent treatment in Steelheart and its sequels. He's taken the idea that power corrupts seriously, so it turns out that gaining superpowers means you're all but guaranteed to become an asshole.
posted by wildblueyonder at 4:29 PM on April 25, 2016
Marvel's New Universe was pretty much this. And I think they did many things well: human-scale stories and then the conflicts that inevitably happen as those interested in power scramble to gain influence and control over these new manifestations of power. Apparently they didn't sell well, though, and all this was much more popular as Heroes.
Perhaps better is Brandon Sanderson's recent treatment in Steelheart and its sequels. He's taken the idea that power corrupts seriously, so it turns out that gaining superpowers means you're all but guaranteed to become an asshole.
posted by wildblueyonder at 4:29 PM on April 25, 2016
A better treatment of this is an article called "Superman in Depression and War" by David Welky.
...which unfortunately doesn't seem to be online.
Marvel's New Universe was pretty much this.
The best part of the New Universe was a team of football players who gained superpowers. They were called Kickers, Inc.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:12 PM on April 25, 2016
...which unfortunately doesn't seem to be online.
Marvel's New Universe was pretty much this.
The best part of the New Universe was a team of football players who gained superpowers. They were called Kickers, Inc.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:12 PM on April 25, 2016
Heh, comic book guys rule
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:12 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:12 PM on April 25, 2016
cstross didn’t mention that he also wrote a novel about what happens when a bunch of random people get super powers.
posted by mbrubeck at 5:28 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by mbrubeck at 5:28 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
If he suggests that the only comics we should be reading are about the life and times of Arnold Schoenberg, we'll know for sure.
I so want a comic about Professor Schoenberg and his Second Viennese School For Gifted Youngsters right now.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:39 PM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
I so want a comic about Professor Schoenberg and his Second Viennese School For Gifted Youngsters right now.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:39 PM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
cstross didn’t mention that he also wrote a novel about what happens when a bunch of random people get super powers.
I'm in the middle of that one now but am dragging it out as long as I can because June might as well be a million years away.
Gonna give Turbulence a go in the meantime, though.
posted by asperity at 6:48 PM on April 25, 2016
I'm in the middle of that one now but am dragging it out as long as I can because June might as well be a million years away.
Gonna give Turbulence a go in the meantime, though.
posted by asperity at 6:48 PM on April 25, 2016
I so want a comic about Professor Schoenberg and his Second Viennese School For Gifted Youngsters right now.
Between Adorno & Horkheimer, Teddy Adorno is definitely the Magneto.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:07 PM on April 25, 2016
Between Adorno & Horkheimer, Teddy Adorno is definitely the Magneto.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:07 PM on April 25, 2016
(Groans and succumbs to self-indulgent urge now this is nowhere near the top item on MeFi) ...
There is a supervillain novel I actually want to write, but they're not terribly viable in the commercial mass market (according to my editors and agent) and in the meantime I am being ordered to write a space opera, and I have zero artistic chops so am incapable of drawing my own comic.
TLDR version of the pitch is: Mookville is the rustbelt town on Lake Erie where the mooks -- those boilersuited minions all self-respecting supervillains lead a disposable army of -- come from. (The demographics of Mookville are dominated by widows and orphans, because superheroes). Mookville has fallen on very hard times and is in the middle of a budget crisis as deep as Detroit's. So when the town's widowed single-mom deputy librarian learns that pre-school and kindergarten care is being axed, along with the library, she runs for mayor as a third party candidate -- and to everybody's surprise, she wins the election. But if you lead mooks, you inevitably acquire the characteristics of a leader of mooks, and the world at large has a term for someone who leads mooks and tries to overturn the established order: a supervillain ...
posted by cstross at 4:53 AM on April 26, 2016 [10 favorites]
There is a supervillain novel I actually want to write, but they're not terribly viable in the commercial mass market (according to my editors and agent) and in the meantime I am being ordered to write a space opera, and I have zero artistic chops so am incapable of drawing my own comic.
TLDR version of the pitch is: Mookville is the rustbelt town on Lake Erie where the mooks -- those boilersuited minions all self-respecting supervillains lead a disposable army of -- come from. (The demographics of Mookville are dominated by widows and orphans, because superheroes). Mookville has fallen on very hard times and is in the middle of a budget crisis as deep as Detroit's. So when the town's widowed single-mom deputy librarian learns that pre-school and kindergarten care is being axed, along with the library, she runs for mayor as a third party candidate -- and to everybody's surprise, she wins the election. But if you lead mooks, you inevitably acquire the characteristics of a leader of mooks, and the world at large has a term for someone who leads mooks and tries to overturn the established order: a supervillain ...
posted by cstross at 4:53 AM on April 26, 2016 [10 favorites]
cstross, have you ever been approached by (or thought about approaching) a comic book company to do a comic?
posted by Sangermaine at 7:47 AM on April 26, 2016
posted by Sangermaine at 7:47 AM on April 26, 2016
Sangermaine: Yes, but nothing has come of any approach so far. (Don't ask me about the time Marvel asked me to take on Iron Man and I turned them down, back in 2006 ...)
posted by cstross at 7:55 AM on April 26, 2016
posted by cstross at 7:55 AM on April 26, 2016
mbrubeck, I read Annihilation Score very soon after it came out in the US. I thought it had a novel take on superheros, but as it was leading up to Case Nightmare Green I suppose novel is a bit of an understatement. I'm looking forward to the novel where the Laundry goes public, that'll be interesting to me because for all that the secret agent crossed with Ancient Gods stuff is wonderful, I really get a massive joy in books that involve turning the world completely upside down and seeing how the author handles all the fallout.
And admitting to the world that magic is real, demons who want to eat your soul live just beyond the edge of the Mandelbrodt set, anyone who knows how can turn a phone into something worse than a nuke, and oh, by the way, the stars are about to be right and the Elder Gods are going to come do something much worse than merely killing us all is going to result in exactly the sort of total world altering fun I enjoy reading about.
But reading Nightmare Stacks should also be fun and help tide me over until cstross gets to that one.
posted by sotonohito at 9:09 AM on April 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
And admitting to the world that magic is real, demons who want to eat your soul live just beyond the edge of the Mandelbrodt set, anyone who knows how can turn a phone into something worse than a nuke, and oh, by the way, the stars are about to be right and the Elder Gods are going to come do something much worse than merely killing us all is going to result in exactly the sort of total world altering fun I enjoy reading about.
But reading Nightmare Stacks should also be fun and help tide me over until cstross gets to that one.
posted by sotonohito at 9:09 AM on April 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
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I remember when I first read that very first issue of Action Comics, sometime in the mid-nineties after having bought the first three Superman Archives for a steep discount at my local comic shop and seeing Supes slap around a wife beater, a war profiter and an evil landlord, not necessarily in that order.
That permanently altered my view of Superman.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:50 AM on April 25, 2016 [8 favorites]