Superhero stories get compared to myths all the bloody time, and I think there's something intersting to that.
Part of the quality of myth (by which I mean the Greek and Roman stuff, maybe the Norse, too) is that we've divorced them from historical context, for the most part. Something like The Iliad is called a "building block" of Western culture, or "a timeless struggle of" blah blah blah. Now, it is a building block of Western culture and literature, of course, but it's not timeless at all. Nothing is, really. It's a product of a particular time and place: Ancient Greece.
When superheroes are presented as myth, the Justice League of America is equated with the ancient gods a lot, for example, we end up casting comics as universal, timeless, without context. Obviously, this is a load of dingo's kidneys. What's fascinating, though, is how they do so, and the bigger question, why?
The "How" is usually a matter of setting up instantly recognisable generic situations (dangle the bus full of nuns off the side of the bridge), arch-rivalries (you're a evil genius, and I'm from Krypton, but we might team up just this once...), and constantly updating the characters to the present while making no real changes to the stories themselves, or their themes and ideological impact.
This isn't as true since the 80s, of course. The revisionists stomped all over that one, but it's still the basic mode of superhero storytelling. The characters have been around for long enough that successive generations of writers and readers have literally spent their lives with Spider-man and Batman, and those fans have absorbed the heroes' histories and stories into their own personalitites. When Spider-man screams "OSBORN!" into the heavens because the Green Goblin has managed to wreak havoc on his life from beyond the grave, I feel it. When Lex Luthor tries to kill Superman with kryptonite yet again the situation is so familiar to me that I get a strong sense of comfort, like a story a parent tells a child, over and over again.
One of the things I've had to make peace with over the last few months is the simple fact that comics were, for a long time, "just for kids." That's not true anymore, and there were always comics that slid over to the edge of "adult entertainment" (and I ain't just talkin' about porn, neither), but as a general statement, hell yes, it's kiddie lit. That had a lot to do with the basic form of the books (the reason they still use all-caps in comics lettering is because they thought it was easier for kids to read!), and with the genres and themes.
The result is that the writers know that their readers "turn over" every four or five years. They grow out of comics, and the little brothers and littler sisters of today's readers become tomorrow's readers. This means that they can recycle stories wholesale and continuously produce new books for sale. It also means that most superheroes are caught in a changeless neverwhen. Sure, Superman doesn't smoke anymore, and Bob Kane's gun-toting Batman hasn't been with us for quite some time, but they all crystalise at some point in their production (which, I think, happens after a certain critical mass of writers have all chugged out a character, so that the characters becomes an amalgam, rather than the product of one artist or artistic team).
So they write for kids who turn over, they crystalise the characters in a form that works, while updating the characters just enough to create the illusion of change, and they set up the genre itself so that all the events seem to be part of "an eternal struggle of good versus evil." That's the "How?" I'll tackle "Why?" some other time.
Posted by orion at October 31, 2004 11:25 PM