Over in LiveJournal land, I’ve been reading a bunch of posts about superhero stories, mostly in the form of forty-odd years of comic books on DVD (mentioned in locked posts on a pseudonymous LJ, so no link for you). I end up reading these posts with a sort of detached interst, because I don’t really get the whole superhero thing, particularly in comic form. I think the last time I regularly followed superhero stuff was when the “Superfriends” show was on tv on Saturday mornings.<\/p>\n
It’s a little weird, because I like some stories that riff off the idea of superheroes (Watchmen<\/cite>), and I’ve enjoyed some of the recent crop of superhero movies. I look at the shelves of the “graphic novel” section of the local chain store, groaning under the weight of umpty-zillion superhero books, though, and I invariably decide I have better things to do with my time.<\/p>\n I think the main problem is one of time scale: Watchmen<\/cite> is a complete story, told in a finite number of pages, whereas something like Spiderman<\/cite> or X-Men<\/cite> seems to require a willingness to put up with thirty years of backstory and numerous re-launches, and I’m just not willing to make that committment, particulary at the rate of twenty bucks for an hour of entertainment.<\/p>\n It’s not just attention span, though: a large part of it is that I just don’t quite see the attraction of superhero stories in general. They work fine as Summer Movies, but I go to those for the spectacle, not the literary qualities. Superhero comics just seem kind of… dopey to me. And yet, there are smart people whose tastes I otherwise respect who spend an awful lot of time reading these. So, there’s got to be something I’m not seeing, here.<\/p>\n So here’s the question: If you were going to try to convince me that there’s some merit to the whole genre, what one book would you recommend that I read? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over in LiveJournal land, I’ve been reading a bunch of posts about superhero stories, mostly in the form of forty-odd years of comic books on DVD (mentioned in locked posts on a pseudonymous LJ, so no link for you). I end up reading these posts with a sort of detached interst, because I don’t really… Continue reading Superheroes 101?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}