Defining the superhero genre

Some people say that Superman is boring because he’s too powerful. Who could beat him in a fight? No one. He’s stronger and faster than everybody else, on top of which he can fly, see through walls, hear people whisper from halfway around the world, fire laser beams from his eyes, freeze things with his breath—plus he’s nigh indestructible, to boot. There’s practically nothing he can’t do. He can survive direct hits from nukes, and bathe in the sun without breaking a sweat. And since no one can beat him, the thinking goes, Superman, the Man of Steel, is never really in any danger, which means his stories lack peril, tension, suspense. There aren’t any stakes. There’s no thrill.

But to think about Superman this way misunderstands not only the character, but the superhero genre as a whole—what makes it unique, and what type of stories it’s best suited to tell. Worse still, this misunderstanding obscures the genre’s historical limitations, as well as how artists might transcend those limitations in the future.

By “genre” I just mean a group of artworks that share certain features in common. You can sort anything into groups based on any feature or features you like (“people with freckles,” “candy bars that don’t contain nuts”), and you can sort stories into any number of genres (“stories set over the course of a single night,” “stories that feature dogs,” “stories that feature dogs as villains”). Some types of stories attract enough fans that there’s a reliable paying market, which gives rise to commercial genres (“true crime,” “romantic comedies,” “Westerns”). And that gives rise to genre conventions—expectations as to what other features artworks in a given genre should have. Westerns tend to feature cowboys and Native Americans and saloons and sheriffs and crooked cattle ranchers—things that existed in the Old West. But an artist can make a Western without any cowboys, just like an artist can make a Western that features components traditionally found in other genres, such as aliens, or love stories, or ghosts.

The comics writer Grant Morrison has expressed doubt that superhero stories are a genre, calling superheroes “a special chilli pepper-like ingredient” [sic] that artists can use “to energize other genres,” such as Westerns, war stories, detective stories, etc. He’s half-wrong, half-right. Superheroes can in fact wind up in different genres, the same way that aliens can, and monsters can, and shootouts between cops and robbers can, and do. But that doesn’t mean that superhero stories don’t constitute their own genre, or that the superhero genre is a hybrid, comprised of pieces of other genres. Morrison errs by trying to account for every element in every superhero comic and movie out there, from Superman to Batman to X-Men to Preacher to Spawn and beyond, which involves dragging in detectives and mutants and demons, and eventually all creation.

When defining a genre, it’s better to take a minimalist, not maximalist approach—to identify the essential conventions shared by the largest number of relevant artworks, rather than trying to account for everything every story contains. Less is more: a murder mystery requires no more than a murder and a mystery, and the fact that one can set murder mysteries on space stations and in cities in addition to 19^th-century British mansions just goes to show that genres can overlap, and that artworks can inhabit more than one genre simultaneously.

Superhero stories, just like murder mysteries, don’t require much. At heart, one needs only two conventions. First, there must be a superhero, a person or group of persons with super-human abilities. Second, the superhero’s presence gives rise to a moral dilemma with which they and other characters must grapple.

The first convention is inherently fantastical: a superhero must have a super-human power or set of powers. It doesn’t matter how they get them. They can be aliens (like John Carter and Superman); they can suffer industrial accidents (like the Flash and Dr. Manhattan); they can be the subject of government experimentation (like Captain America and River Tam); or they can simply be born that way (like Wonder Woman and Marvel’s mutants). Or they can invent some wonderous new device that augments their biology, rendering them superior to everyone else (like Iron Man and the Wasp). But they must be capable of doing something that regular humans cannot do—something impossible for us in the here and now. An Olympic-level gymnast is not a superhero, which is why the movie Gymkata, in which a gymnast uses his athletic prowess to fight ninjas, isn’t a superhero movie. Nor is a vigilante with a gun a superhero, which is why the Death Wish franchise isn’t a superhero franchise—and why, for that matter, the Punisher franchise isn’t, either, at least when taken on its own terms.

But while the Punisher, Frank Castle, isn’t superhuman, his stories become part of the superhero genre by virtue of being set within the larger Marvel Universe, where Castle routinely encounters characters like Ghost Rider and Spider-Man, and where he has access to fantastical technologies like Pym Particles, adamantium, and unstable molecules. In this way the Punisher recalls Batman, who started out not unlike the hero of Gymkata—an Olympic-level athlete who uses his prowess to fight baddies—but who has evolved over the decades into a more fantastical character. These days, Batman not only battles supernatural foes like Clayface and Man-Bat, he has received extensive training from mystical ninjas, and his arsenal has swollen to include a wide variety of outfits, weapons, and vehicles whose existence requires suspension of disbelief.

So first there must be a superhuman. The second convention follows from there; it’s a predicate of the first. The world of superheroes is a world of haves and have-nots. Kryptonians who come to Earth gain powers that Earthlings don’t have, due to our solar system’s yellow sun. Mutants are markedly different than humans—arguably superior, the next stage in evolution. And while anyone, in theory, can don Iron Man’s armor, that suit belongs to Tony Stark, who invented it, and who alone understands how to build it, and how it works.

Because superheroes are actual super-humans, their very existence creates new ethical dilemmas, challenging existing laws and codes of conduct, rules that were written by humans for other humans. Had he grown up on his home planet, Kal-El would have become an ordinary citizen, subject to Krypton’s laws. But because he grew up on Earth, in Kansas, Kal-El became Superman, a vastly superior being. And because of that, because he is capable of much more than anyone else, he is ethically obliged to be more than human, to do things that we can’t do, such as rescue foolish children who slip while playing at Niagara Falls, as well as ferry Air Force One back to Earth after it’s been struck by lightning, and even turn back time to save Lois Lane when she’s been buried by an earthquake. If you and I don’t do those things, we’re not at fault, because we’re physically incapable of doing any of them. But Superman can accomplish such feats, so if he doesn’t, we’d rightly ask why he didn’t act.

The two conventions of the superhero genre—the superhero’s power and the ethical dilemmas that it provokes—are twin sides of the same coin. The power creates the ethical conflict; it precipitates the story’s dramatic action. In this way, superhero stories are examples of world-building in its most traditional sense: world-building as a kind of thought experiment, in which the artist imagines a world that’s different from ours in one respect (in this case, the superhero’s presence), then proceeds to trace out the consequences.

All superhero stories are inherently fantastical. But not all works of fantasy are superhero stories. The wizards and witches in Harry Potter have powers and abilities that normal humans don’t. But the story of Harry Potter, its drama, isn’t about that divide; it isn’t about the ethical obligations that witches and wizards owe Muggles. Instead, those novels and movies concern the Wizarding World, which chugs along merrily out of sight, just like the hidden realm of the fairies. Not only can everyone in the Wizarding World use magic, they’ve always been able to do so; that is the nature of their world, not an exception or interruption, and as such the presence of magic is not a source of problems, of that world’s conflicts and intrigues. Rather, Harry and his allies fight to defeat Voldemort in order to return their world to its status quo—a place where wizards and witches can once again send their children to Hogwarts in peace. Similarly, although the Star Wars franchise features super-powered Jedi, who can jump very far and move things with their thoughts and construct lightsabers and exert a strong influence on the weak-minded, the presence of the Jedi and their enemies the Sith doesn’t drive that franchise’s central conflict. Instead, the story revolves around a galaxy-wide military struggle that encompasses everyone, including the Jedi, who like everyone else must figure out which side to take.

By way of contrast, the X-Men franchise’s drama springs entirely from the conflict between the mutants and the humans. The emergence of the mutant is that franchise’s starting point, its inciting incident, precipitating a crisis that renders the old status quo obsolete. The moment that mutants appear on the scene, they pose a threat to themselves and others, which means that something must be done. No one, whether mutant or human, can remain neutral on this matter. As such, at heart, all X-Men stories concern control; what differs from tale to tale is who’s in the running to do the controlling. Magneto, the Sentinels, William Stryker, Genoshan Magistrates—all of them vie in turn with Professor X and his students, who insist that mutants be left alone, and be allowed to control themselves. (For more on this conflict, and the patterns by which it plays out, see my previous series of blog posts, “What Should Be Done with the Mutant Menace?”)

Every superhero story, then, involves an ethical dilemma. Historically, however, the genre has been more concerned with its first convention, powers, than with its second, preferring to dwell on the awesome feats of strength and derring-do that its characters can get up to. Over the past eighty years or so, superhero stories have all too often depicted relatively simple ethical conflicts, which is why the genre’s standard story sees the hero using their power to help police officers catch crooks. The vast majority of superhero comics and movies have been escapist fantasies, sold to readers—especially younger readers—who are eager to imagine that they themselves have superpowers. (I won’t deny that’s what attracted me to the genre when I was a kid, when I read X-Men comics and fantasized that, just like Wolverine, I had unbreakable bones and claws and a healing factor.)

This imbalance between the genre’s two conventions has led some to dismiss the whole genre as fundamentally juvenile and unserious, as the filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu did when he argued that while it’s OK for children to watch and like superhero films, when adults do the same, they’ve fallen victim to “a disease” that prevents its victims from “growing up.”

The primary cause of the historical imbalance in the genre is the Comics Code Authority, a form of self-censorship that the major comics publishers subscribed to between 1954–2011. The Code’s precepts neutered comics, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the artists working at Marvel and DC to seriously explore ethical matters. Among other things, the Code mandated that authority figures like parents and police officers be depicted as wholly virtuous and good, and that the villains always lose. And while clever artists found ways to circumvent the Code (as clever artists always do), and the Code grew weaker over time, on the whole, for decades this censorship created and enforced the perception that superhero stories are simplistic stories for children. (The fact that the market demanded that these comics be churned out quickly didn’t help.)

But there’s no reason why superhero stories can’t be as artistically ambitious as any other kind of story. Indeed, there remains a great deal for artists today to do in terms of exploring the genre’s second convention. This is true of even the oldest superheroes, like Superman. It’s true nobody can beat him up. But that doesn’t mean that artists can’t tell fascinating stories about him. What makes Superman interesting as a character is precisely the fact that he is so immensely powerful—that for all intents and purposes, he is infinite power, power unconstrained. If Superman wanted to, he could rob banks and murder people—he could rob every bank on Earth, and murder every last person on Earth. Who could stop him?

And yet, he doesn’t do those things. Instead, he chooses to live a modest life, pretending to be Clark Kent, a bumbling, unremarkable man. Knowing no physical constraints, he nonetheless submits to moral ones, subjugating himself to human law—namely, American law. And why? Because he believes in America—that America is bigger and better than he is.

Superheroes, in the hands of skillful artists, can be much more than a means for juvenile escapism, stories about whether anyone can beat Superman in a fight. They’re a means for telling great stories about ourselves, stories that couldn’t be told any other way. The resulting stories can take many forms and tones: they can be earnest or satirical, realist or cartoonish, scary or funny. But regardless of the approach, superhero stories can be vehicles for investigating human laws and institutions, and the morals on which they’re founded. Should we keep living the way that we’re living? Is it possible to create a fairer world? Are we the best that we can be? In order to ask those questions, let alone answer them, we need something bigger than life, something bigger than us, that we can use to test our ideals. We need superheroes.

 

 

For more on the Comics Code Authority, and how some artists struggled against it in order to tell more ambitious superhero stories, see my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture. I also write there about world-building past and present, and the development of the Marvel Comics Universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Thank you to Justin Roman, Mazin Saleem, Jeremy M. Davies, Hal Hlavinka, Justin Stillmaker, and Melissa McEwen for their help with this post.

The image at the top of this post was drawn by George Pérez.

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