Batman could provide swift and thorough beatings to people who wistfully dream of being beaten by a tall, handsome man in a mask (and perhaps his youthful ward).
Because they're set up as contrasts to the non-super-heroes of moralistic crime-related films, like crusading lawyers/reformers?
(Note: I have almost no knowledge of superhero stuff.)
A guy who boils water would also be a contrast, and anyway, I want an internal reason.
The internal reason generally seems to fall into one of three bins. Superheroes doing things of actual global significance would be one way or another robbing us muggles of our free will (Superman); superheroes doing things of global significance would make them targets for retribution (X-Men, various works of Warren Ellis*); superheroes doing things of global significance doesn't scratch the pathological itch that makes them do what they do (Batman; arguably Watchmen, although I'd say that this actually comes close to what Neb is asking for).
* Notably his Authority predecessor, Stormwatch, in which a bunch of old superheroes decide to create a Utopia in sub-Sarahan Africa and are assassinated for their trouble by the titular U.N. response team.
What, aren't they already targets of retribution? Bleh. I bet the Human Torch just never thought of boiling water.
Congee man can convert everyone to law-abiding Congregationalism.
Hobo-man can improve the transportation system.
Congregationalism is a bland, inoffensive doctrine.
Congee Man would clearly be someone who deceives the federal authorities.
Robin could be everyone's friend on Facebook.
Catwoman can take care of animal control.
The superheroes are single-minded, because they're wacked out on andro.
Or, they're desperate to preserve their individuality, in the face of a world order that inevitably demands they sacrifice themselves to the furnace of an overspecified greater good that may, in the end, destroy society's entrepreneurial, capitalist spirit.
15 comments and no one has yet pointed out to neb that Superman couldn't take over the Human Torch's water-boiling duties, because they live in different universes? Sheesh.
The superhero mythos is basically an outlet for violent instincts impatient with justice systems and things like due process, as I think I've argued about with Farber and various other parties here before. (Yes, the heroes often turn the villains in "to the authorities" afterward, but this is a formalism, lip-service -- like Spider-Man's continued formal subservience to authorities that hate him, and likewise with the X-Men -- since the villains are usually constructed as being beyond normal authority anyway. Lex Luthor and the Joker reappear at will no matter how many times Supes or Bats "turn them over to the authorities." The real action is in the duking-out and the dispensing of vigilante justice. Supervillains exist to bolster the justification of this instinct wherever "normal" forces like the Mob or the Nazis would usually fail.)
As a result, superheroism always collapses on close examination. There's really just no way that duking it out with dudes in alleyways and on rooftops is a logical use of Bruce Wayne's billions for the public good. If Aquaman is really king of the sea, there's no way he should have time for vigilantism.
If Aquaman is really king of the sea, there's no way he should have time for vigilantism.
He probably just knows how to delegate.
What if it's a constitutional monarchy? Aquaman probably doesn't have to do more than make one speech in Sea Parliament a year and get caught by the sea paparazzi making out with mermaids at sea discos.
get caught by the sea paparazzi
You don't think they'd respect his anemone-ty?
The whole sea is a rotten borough. Aquaman gets reelected year after year and barely sets foot in the place.
The superhero mythos is basically an outlet for violent instincts impatient with justice systems and things like due process, as I think I've argued about with Farber and various other parties here before.
Also, I don't think I've had the pleasure of reading those arguments, so perhaps there are strong arguments on the other side, but—duh?
Reed Richards, and others, were supposed to have invented all sorts of amazing stuff, but the comics never really explored how having these hyper-inventive mega-geniuses revolutionizing technology every other week would actually affect ordinary people. It's like most of humanity just kind of keeps happily driving their cars while the superheroes are zipping about with their magical fast-as-light superplanes or whatever. People keep watching reality TV even while there's a whole population of superheroes jumping to alternate realities every month. Seems like it should be hard to maintain normalcy in these worlds.
22: Yeah, you'd think. Very controversial statement though, it would seem.
There was a Superman storyline sometime in the 90s where he got really stressed out about how he was preventing these piddly little crimes and not doing everything he could. So he went on a do-gooding binge, zipping all over the world to try to help everyone on the planet with every possible problem, dumping a bunch of weapons into space, monitoring all the world's radio and TV to try to be alerted of every single thing he could help with, etc. Alienated his friends, told Lois he loved her but just couldn't spare the time to spend with her when there was always someone who needed his help, that sort of thing. I don't remember enough to Google any of this, and I don't remember it as being handled very well, but it was definitely a "what if a superhero really tried to do as much good as possible?" kind of storyline, and the answer was that he burned himself out and lost his humanity. But, surely there's a compromise between that and just getting into fisticuffs with super-baddies every week.
This has been extensively analyzed on the most addictive site on the Internet.
In addition to all of the above there used to be a narrative imperative (explicitly put down in the Comics Code?) to illustrate that "crime does not pay."
Leave Superman alone. Superman is a usual dude who likes fucking his wife and being the Metropolis version of Thomas Friedman. Sure when robo-tigers from earth 17 show up to conquer the earth, and take all our men for reproduction, he'll stop them. I mean, if all the men disappeared who'd collect his garbage, and what else can he do, rely on the army to stop a robot sexual invasion? Please, those guys are losing a war in Afghanistan, what the fuck are they going to do about 12 foot tall tigers. Now are you satisfied with being saved from tiger-rape? fuck no! Your also all: "Why don't you save those poor people in Syria Superman, why don't you give me unlimited, clean, free energy?"
"Well why don't you just go fuck yourself?" Superman says, "I've got the fucking crossword to do, and I don't even see you putting out your goddamn recycling. When global warming is about to kill all of you, whose going to have to do something about it, me. "
My superpower is being ignorant of comics, so I'm not qualified to answer this question . . . . but doesn't the existence of supervillains provide the entire and complete answer to the OP? I mean, sure, if everything's hunky dory in the world, sit back and be a gigantic geothermal plant or whatever, but if there's some guy with 98% of your powers who is out to destroy and enslave humanity right now, you better get off your ass and fight that shit.
I'll bet Nosflow would have surrendered to the Soviets, as well.
Wonder Woman could, potentially, get her tits out.
Reed Richards, and others, were supposed to have invented all sorts of amazing stuff, but the comics never really explored how having these hyper-inventive mega-geniuses revolutionizing technology every other week would actually affect ordinary people.
Another Warren Ellis title, "Planetary", addressed this by making it clear that the Four were the villains, because they had all this cool technology and weren't prepared to share it with the rest of the world. They come to a sticky end.
It's a beautiful comic, too - very nice art. Highly recommended.
Maybe the technology is actually unreliable, absurdly expensive and fragile, and the comics just show the small number of occasions on which it worked properly and not the endless months during which Reed Richards is tinkering with the thing like a British motorcycle, swearing and burning his fingers with a soldering iron as he tries to get it working again.
27: (explicitly put down in the Comics Code?)
"6. In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds."
I had no idea that a version of the code had lasted until earlier this year (DC and Archie were the last ones using it).
Shit Ben, Collosus *did* work at a building site and look where that got him! Lynched by his workmates!
Not only did 28 pwn 29, it's objectively awesome. I would read that in comic-book form.
Reed Richards is tinkering with the thing like a British motorcycle
My favourite line about the death of the British motor industry, from a friend of mine:
"I drive a Triumph Spitfire. Well, I own a Triumph Spitfire."
One of the old dusty preservation dudes here at work drives a _massive_ vintage looking Triumph bike. Completely incongruous, you'd never guess to look at the guy. But I expect it's one of the modern actually-working reissue ones.
The idea that Reed Richards could founder in some project because he can't find the right type of Bulgin connector or a KT66 valve is also funny.
neb, seriously, you need to read some comic books. "red son" (in which the man of steel fell to earth in the USSR) explored this already in detail. the russians don't bother with seatbelts or any safety equipment ever, because superman's going to notice the crash and come save them; he generally takes over as a benevolent leader of the proletariat. in "invincible" atom eve retires from crime-fighting to go molecule-re-arrange barren, polluted wasteland in africa into fertile soil, and generally put wells of potable water all over. (she does then seem to go back to fighting bad guys though, for ill-explained reasons.) I think the flash has to power a generator or something in a frank miller batman. in the case of spiderman, in which he independently invents the webshooters and gains spider-eques strength etc. they realize the need to gesture in the direction of why he's not now getting rich on the grounds that the webs dissolve after x minutes and are thus stipulatively not a valuable invention. it's a genre thing, yo.
32 et seq.: when I used to go out to SF bars, it was coolerto have an actual british bike rather than the japanese copies of the same era, but also widely recognized that you couldn't ever go anywhere on them because they weren't running, and if you talked to the guy you would have to hear endlessly about he was waiting for some special part that you couldn't get anymore, but this one guy in sonoma was going to lathe one, and blah blah blah.
I once shared a house with a couple of guys with British bikes, and I would guess they were actually roadworthy about 75% of the time. The point was, in those days the Japanese products weren't seriously more reliable, but when your Triumph or Arial broke down you could fix it in minutes or hours, whereas your Kawasaki or Honda had to be taken in to a shop (tricky if you couldn't ride it) where it was out of your hands when they would get around to looking at it.
This of course no longer applies, but it was burned into the consciousness of a generation the hard way.
FWIW, the 'vintage' British tech I've actually owned -- valve amps, cameras, enlargers, that sort of thing -- has all been pretty bomb-proof and easy to fix.
Since neb linked to Kotsko
More Geezer Crank Trolling, Oblique Arrogance Mode:
More Alyssa Rosenberg, this time on X-Men
Comment by Eldridge:
You're being really ridiculous, Deborah. The comics as well as the films are explicitly a metaphor for both the civil rights struggle and the current gay rights movement. Not only is this painfully obvious from the work, it's been endorsed by a variety of creators over the years.
Yeah, a metaphor with added plasma beams shooting from the navel, therewith saving the world.
One of the finer moments in my intellectual life was the SNAP! I had near the end of Thomas Disch's On Wings of Song. Suddenly I fell out of the narrative and the identification with the lead, and was able to see the symbol Disch had placed on the stage to be shot, with all his accoutrements and insanely hilarious baggage. I laughed til I cried and then I laughed some more til I hurt and I am still laughing, at the character, and with Disch at any readers who find OWoS "uplifting."
I will grant that it helped to have read a lot of Disch, Concentration, "Angouleme" etc, and it helped to have been aware of the decade long discussion of "power fantasies" within the SF community(read some Russ and Delany). But the idea that some people could believe that Disch would write a novel about gay empowerment with added fairy-assisted superpowered flying and an end in heavenly transcendance remains one of the hilarious facts of my world. OWoS is my favorite attack on Romanticism, being both general and specific to its genre.
Disch's point:Superpowers and transcendance (and much else, like "mission" and "compassion" toward your enemies) negate any metaphors they are attached to. The Superhero fantasy culture is a diseased cancre on the corpse of meaningful liberation politics, worse than any old time religion.
I owned a Spitfire and it was an unreliable piece of shit, although gorgeous. I drove it around Paris when the (as she then wasn't) missus was living there and Serge Gainsbourg types would gasp with admiration, reminisce about how they once owned one or knew someone who did, then comiserate with me about how they had been equally unreliable in the 60s.
43: and let's hear it for the BBC Micro. Genius kit.
Just looked at the specs for the Spitfire on wiki. Striking how cars have moved on. 0-60 times and top speeds that you'd get from a 0.9 litre Cinquecento. Lovely looking things, mind you.
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Well, trashmen come and gone taking my old monitor with it.
Will I regret replacing my Viewsonic V75f with a flatscreen? Damn, it was still displaying perfectly after a decade of constant use. I feel guilty, it had served me so faithfully.
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22
The superhero mythos is basically an outlet for violent instincts impatient with justice systems and things like due process, as I think I've argued about with Farber and various other parties here before.
Also, I don't think I've had the pleasure of reading those arguments, so perhaps there are strong arguments on the other side, but--duh?
Well, sure, when he phrases it like that it's banal. But when he calls superhero comic books a "fascist fantasy" things get a bit more complicated. Sure, there are superheroes of which that is true, just like there is non-superhero fiction of which it's true, but a lot of the most significant comic book characters - Spiderman, the X-Men, Superman for big parts of his history - really can't possibly be considered fascist, unless you call fascist anything that's not pacifist. FWIW, despite using a dubious example, I think Walt put it best overall.
Congregationalism is a bland, inoffensive doctrine.
That's not what your mother said.
Another Warren Ellis title, "Planetary", addressed this by making it clear that the Four were the villains, because they had all this cool technology and weren't prepared to share it with the rest of the world.
In retrospect, an almost parodically Warren Ellis-ian theme. Lovely art, though. Cassaday's linework is even more beautifully delicate before inking and coloring.
[S]uperheroes doing things of global significance doesn't scratch the pathological itch that makes them do what they do....
This is a bit post facto; I submit that, originally, superheroes didn't take actions with global significance (with the obvious exception of being superheroes, I suppose) because the stories were intended for children and children's interests tend to be immediate, local and simple: cf. the "Superman is a dick" stories. As for why superheroes still don't take actions with global significance, well, there are all sorts of ways of being childish.
49:Since that link leads to a discussion of violence and Revolution...
Ian Welsh discussing a Stephen Ross article on Arundhati Roy, Maoism, and insurrection in India
There is nothing you can do that outweighs the money that is to be made by moving you out of the way, and if moving you means getting you dead, that works too.This lesson, of the sharp limits of non-violence, is one the world's effete leftists are going to have learn, and learn the hard way. At the very least you have to be willing to make life unpleasant for your enemies, to get in their face, to shut down their hotels, their factories, their airports, their refineries, their businesses. That is at the least. Modern elites are selected for their ability to do make decisions based on cost-benefit analysis, taking into account only money, the possibility of harm to self or the immediate family, and the possibility of going to jail (minimal). Everything else is irrelevant to their decision making calculus. If the cost of moving you aside, to them, not to you, or to the environment, or society, or to the children, or to God, is less than the benefit of doing so, for them, they will do so. End of story. Morals and ethics do not come into it. Period. The communications industry runs on minerals out of the Congo, which is a region ruled by mass systemic rape.
Non-violence needs a mass medium, and a mass audience, neither of which is available anymore. Wisconsin was ignored. Heard much lately about the continuing protests in Tahrir Square? They're still there.
Ah, I see neoconservative troll wants to talk about the redemptive power of violence again.
OOoooh, I like me some Welsh
There used to be some in-groups. That is to say, if you were American or European, you could expect to not be treated like a black African. ... Those in-groups are fading. In the Western world they are gone or going in major nations. American elites do not think they need share anything with Americans.
Connect this with the Yglles post of the other day, and you should understand that the outgroups are also fading
Rich blacks, Harvard educated women, LGBTs as Congressional staffers and pop superstars, Muslims officers in oilarchy armies...these are not the fucking subaltern, for God's sake. They are not oppressed, they are the oppressors, sucking the blood out of any worker below them, including and especially those non-elites of their own identity group, in enthusiastic alliance with the Cheneys and Obamas.
my personal favorites as a young lady were ghost rider and conan, and I don't really think you can accuse either of neglecting their primary occupations, to wit: searing some asshole's soul with hellfire, and; treading the jeweled crowns of the earth beneath his sandaled feet, respectively. and I loved dr. strange, but I think his whole job was sitting around smoking hash with partially-clad chicks and meditating.
How exactly does one get into this strange-doctoring business? It sounds interesting.
52:No one gets redeemed. It really is simply a matter of who gets killed, beaten, raped, or enslaved...the 10% elite or the other 90% of the human race. It is like a material reality, not abstract and moral.
55: You have nationalized health care, so doctors only get fully-clad chicks with huge headaches and coffee with artificial creamer.
I don't really think you can accuse either of neglecting their primary occupations
Ross: So you're saying the Punisher's a pussy.
John: No, but I'm saying he has no work ethic.
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2004/12/true-geek-conversations-3892.html
Who would have thought wearing a cape and walking around saying "by the hoary hoasts of Hoggoth!" was the way to meet women?
Steve Ditko's Dr Strange was so excellent.
52. I'm quite fond of Bob, so I don't like to rag on him too much, but he does sometimes put me in mind of Peter Oppenheimer's characterisation of David Willetts: "He has got the kind of open-mindedness which enables him to see the value of a whole range of points of view, especially that of the person he last talked to."
54: I hate to pedant, but it's "jeweled thrones":
Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet...
[Returns to pricing back issue of Ghost Rider in which Ghost Rider advises Mary Worth to commit suicide.]
54: Also, wasn't Dormammu's daughter usually fully-dressed, in a sort of Pucci-meets-Mary-Quant style?
To go back to the original post and connect it to my trolling, the answer to neb's question should be obvious. I realize he was looking for internal reasons, but this is too important.
Superhero stories are about elites, about serving the fantasies that the reader can be elite, and serving the system by saying elitism is based on random chance mutations.
And what do elite superheroes do? The same as other elites, they don't serve the masses...
they battle each other for the opportunity to exploit* the masses.
This is what kids are being taught is the rule from grade school. Their lives should be spent battling other elites, be they white elites, male elites, Republican elites, religious elites etc. The huddled masses are mushrooms, collateral damage, ignored with contempt.
Which of course can include various self-serving, ego-tripping, patronizing, condescending forms of "service"
Secretly, I wasn't looking for any kind of reasons. I wanted to know what other kinds of more generally useful things superheroes could have gotten up to. The Flash powering a hamster wheel is a good one.
The Human Torch could be the Olympic flame, saving countries through which it passes the expense of providing security and saving the IOC potential embarrassment if there are any mishaps.
MODOK could get refashioned into a Mental Organism Designed Only for Knitting.
Superhero fighting the *big* fight.
The Incredible Hulk would have been good on talk radio.
re: 71
I can imagine him guest-hosting Newsnight Review.
And presuming that the female superheros in general designed their own costumes, their sensibility would be just right as stylists for "Jersey Shore" or for professional wrestling.
Alpha Flight would have made really excellent mall store greeters.
Wolverine would have been an amazing topiary artist. Spiderman could have been a safety worker for Cirque Du Soleil.
Thor and his mates could run a welfare state administration with extremely generous childcare benefits and well-designed wooden furniture.
#76: surely Spiderman would be better able to serve humanity as a safety worker for "Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark". Although, since this would be a musical about a theatre safety worker, it might have been less exciting.
The superhero mythos is basically an outlet for violent instincts impatient with justice systems and things like due process
Imagine the inspirational power of Procedural Liberalism Man and his Compromise Ray.
They could put Magneto in the middle of the LHC and save a ton on electric bills.
The Iron Man could have been in Black Sabbath.
What happens to the teen sidekicks in this nightmarish realm of ends communitarian dystopia of mutually-supportive equals? Are they forced to pursue higher education in the fields for which they are suited outside the swinging-on-ropes-and-kicking-deformed-psychopaths-in-the-face sector? Some of them might be difficult to place, vocationally.
79: And his inspirational catchphrase, "Anyone interested in some Midnight Basketball?".
83: "Come, let us reason together. Especially you, young lady. Why don't you come here and tell ol' Procedural Liberalism Man what you want for the year-end religious or ethnic festival of gift exchange of your choice?"
There's a Cherryh novel about Superman and Lois that goes partway to realism. Good scene with a cow. May point out tytt systemic fixes are impossible or ill-defined.
I don't want to think about Superman, Lois and a cow.
37: Bumper sticker: "The Parts Falling Off This Car Are Of The Finest British Manufacture"
Why superheroes cluster at the two ends of the morality spectrum?
Those who wrote about helping someone were able to hold the weight 5 seconds longer than those who wrote about a neutral interaction. Envisioning evil acts seemed to confer even more strength -- those who thought about harming someone else held the weight about 8 seconds longer.
"When you think of superheroes or super villains, [you think of people] that can possess huge amounts of willpower and are relatively unfazed by pain," said study researcher Kurt Gray, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "And because of your stereotype of heroes and villains, you kind of embody that, or transform yourself into your perception of hero and villain," when you perform good or evil acts, he said.
Uh, sure, that's one theory, I guess.
Alternative, science-based scene from Speed:
"Pop quiz hot shot. You need 56 seconds to diffuse a bomb and the only thing stopping the bomb from exploding before then is someone holding a five pound weight off the trigger. What do you do?"
You need 56 seconds to diffuse a bomb
The bomb will diffuse if you just let it explode.
Imagine the inspirational power of Procedural Liberalism Man and his Compromise Ray.
Or the dynamic duo of Due Process Woman and Miranda.
The Adventures of Action Item ... Professional Superhero.
"But always remember, don't be--The Bottleneck!"
the Metropolis version of Thomas Friedman
Nicholas Kristof, surely?
Otherwise, 35 is certainly correct.
I really liked this take on the origin of superhero comics.
Or the Dynamic Duo of Bankers and Neo-Liberal Military and Intelligence Agencies saving the People of Greece from the horrors of Marxist Revolution
Wait. We have seen this movie before. Boring.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? In fact, it sounds a lot like the increasingly severe austerity measures that the EU, the ECB and the IMF have compelled the Greek government to accept over the last year and a half. In such a situation, the restoration of workplace discipline is essential. Capitalists, or, investors, if you will, can't recover their profits if the populace insist upon protesting the measures through job actions, strikes, protests and industrial sabotage. In this instance, the bankers of Germany, and especially France, can't collect their loans, plus interest, if the workers of Greece refuse to work more hours for less pay with increased productivity. Hence, the true threat of a coup lies, not so much in the spasmodic violence associated with protests against the bailout, but, rather, in the economic necessity for strict measures to force the populace to work under conditions imposed by the government and its foreign allies. Needless to say, such measures are much more easily imposed through a military dictatorship than through an obstensibly democratic political system weakened by the economic crisis. So, the leaked release of the CIA report may actually be an act of black propaganda, designed to obscure the real reasons for the coup if it should happen.
Quite relevant to the OP: My daughter pointed me to a Frank Conniff blog post including letters to and from Superman:
Dear Mr. Gandhi, [in response to a request to melt all the guns in the world]
I am a great supporter of all your good works, and I would love to be of some assistance to you, but unfortunately I already promised Inspector Henderson that I would help him smash a ring of jewel thieves that have made off with hundreds of dollars in stolen loot. So until I crack this case, and rescue Jimmy Olsen, who has been kidnapped by the gang, I will not be available for any activities that involve the bringing about of world peace. But I am a big fan of your work and I hope that one day we can work on a project together.Also Dwight Eisenhower on nuclear weapons, Thank you for interest and please accept the enclosed eight-by-ten autographed picture of myself as a token of my esteem, and Dr. Schweitzer on x-ray vision for use in medicine
From earlier in the same post:
I happen to love the Adam West "Batman" series; how could I have been a ten-year-old in 1966 and not loved it? But times have changed. I bet modern ten-year-old kids who see the Adam West version now probably say, "Bogus! It completely betrays the dark, noir-ish vengeance and violence-based dramaturgy that is essential to the Batman mythos!"
Wonder Woman could lasso defendants and witnesses for the International Criminal Court and similar tribunals.
100: my 9-year-old's reaction: "it doesn't seem like they're taking this very seriously."
