Whatever happened to the superheroes of old?

 

 

 

Batwoman has been reinvented as a 'lipstick Lesbian'

 

 

With Batwoman reinvented as a lesbian (see picture, right), Spider-Man beset by personal problems and the X-Men hailed as a parable of scientific oppression of minorities, the old-fashioned comic superhero seems to have been vanquished.

When Superman first appeared in the 1930s, he was for many a symbol of patriotism and pure-spirited heroism in an increasingly fragile world.

As the cataclysm of World War II approached children could take solace in the simple notion of a Man of Steel who was capable of stopping any enemy.

Today, we are in the grip of a wave of success for comic book conversions at the box office, with the Spider-Man and X-Men series proving monster hits.

And the characters are proving to be in close touch with the Zeitgeist, tapping into an overwhelming feeling of global self-doubt best exemplified by Tobey Maguire's take on Peter Parker.

He is a Spider-Man whose personal life and existential crises become so serious that his powers begin to fade and he decides to quit the hero business.

 

 

 

The adjective "cartoonish" is usually taken to mean a gross over-simplication, and yet we are now used to seeing comic superheroes rich in complexity and reflecting the diversity of a multi-cultural society.

Danny Fingeroth, a former group editor of Spider-Man comics and author of Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society, says comics have changed to reflect society over the years.

"Until probably the late 1960s everybody was a 'neutral' white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Even if you had a street scene in New York or Chicago everybody was white.

"The move towards realism was originated by Stan Lee and his collaborators in the Marvel Comics of the 1960s. They put in black characters, Hispanic characters. Along with that came an attempt to have more realistic personalities and reactions to things."

Marginalised group

"Along with the complexity in personality, came the complexity portrayal of society."

 

SUPERMAN RE-THOUGHT

Many believe Superman to be an emblem of Jewishness

Both his creators were Jewish

His Kryptonian name, Kal-el, sounds Hebrew

His story can be viewed as an allegory of immigration & assimilation

 

There were early liberated female characters like Wonder Woman, an Amazon picked to fight the Nazis in 1941.

But as Fingeroth notes, they do it "while wearing stiletto heels and heavily padded brassieres and generally show more flesh than the men. It was still a fairly marginalised group".

Ethnic minority superheroes made a leap forward with the first black central character in 1966, the Black Panther, the king of a fictional African country. Ten years later Storm, a black female character, now played by Halle Berry in the X-Men movies, arrived.

These are the pre-cursors of DC Comics recent decision to reinvent the Blue Beetle, a superhero whose alter-ego used to be white and is now a Hispanic teenager, or Martha Washington, Dark Horse Comics' black hero from Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green housing projects.

Alongside this diversity, the flaws, doubts and moral ambiguousness of characters has mushroomed. But if movie fans were to read a modern comic they would see a world of darkness a million miles away from the original Man of Steel.

In 1993 Superman was killed (although, in a move that wouldn't be unfamiliar to soap opera fans, he was later resurrected). In the recent DC series Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis well-known characters are killed, turn evil, and in some cases are even raped.

Graphic novels

Suitable for eight-year-olds they are not.

Since the 1960s, "the audience is no longer mostly children, it's more and more adults," says Fingeroth.

The Blue Beetle has become a Hispanic teenager

 

"The current crop of superhero movies are where the comics were in 1967. In Spider-Man there is a certain amount of complexity but he is essentially the guy who means well and has a pure heart."

Comics historian Peter Sanderson, writer for the online journal Comics in Context and author of the Ultimate Guide to the X-Men, cites the rise of the graphic novel, a more ambitious and lengthy art form than comics.

These novels, pioneered by Will Eisner, have gone much further in their attempts to explore more difficult issues like the politics of immigration, race, sex, and authoritarianism.

The novels, with their parallels with movie storyboards, are popular choices for conversion by Hollywood: Alan Moore's V for Vendetta being a recent example.

"They can be sold in bookstores, stocked in libraries," says Sanderson. "The audience has got older and more literate. You have writers who have had to do more sophisticated material and sometimes to their own surprise there is an audience for it.

"But children are exposed to so much through the new media, these days even they are getting more sophisticated."

And in the more conventional comics a constant challenge arises because of the incredible longevity of the characters.

Fingeroth says perhaps only James Bond has been doing his action thing anywhere near as long as the likes of Superman, Batman and Spider-Man.

"Comics are read by aficionados. Everybody in the world knows Superman and Batman and yet very few people actually buy comic books. In order to appeal to the jaded, sophisticated reader you will find stuff introduced of a controversial aspect to a character."

But away from the rise of multi-culturalism in the comics, there are some who feel the parallel descent into darkness has gone too far, and long for an age of more heroic heroes.

"There are a number of people in the comics business who do want to recapture a sense of pure heroism in the characters. "They think that something has been lost with the increasing stories that focus too much on the character flaws and the dark side of the heroes."

Well I think they are making new ones and remaking the old ones so kids and adults will read the comics or watch the shows. I was never into superhero comics, but I do like the Star Wars comic alot. But I have see many old superhero cartoon TV shows like Spider Man, X-Men, etc...