Oh no, comics most definitely ≠ superheroes. There's a wide wonderful world of storytelling out there in comicdom, and superheroes are only one genre.
But they're the only genre that captures archetypes that are in the public consciousness. To me, that's their defining feature - it's not the fights and tights, it's the archetypical characters. I <3 what Morrison did with his run on JLA. He brought in seven archetypes (hell, Plastic Man made a fantastic Coyote, didn't he?), and had stories that were truly epic in scope.
While another genre could tell a similar story, those characters wouldn't necessarily have already been embedded in the societal psyche. Perhaps the closest we've seen outside of the fights'n'tights was Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but even then, they were iconic, mythic figures that were... tweaked a bit... to be more archetypical than their original incarnations.
It's interesting that archetypifying (is that even a word?) a character means stripping away much of what is complex and multivaried about him or her, and reducing them to a singular facet that can then be used as a lens into psychological and sociological interactions.
When you get a number of offsetting facets together, such as Morrison's JLA, you end up with a whole gem that you can turn in a number of interesting ways to catch the light.
It's kind of a unique storytelling framework, unlike most other comics genres.
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Date: 2007-08-02 01:40 am (UTC)But they're the only genre that captures archetypes that are in the public consciousness. To me, that's their defining feature - it's not the fights and tights, it's the archetypical characters. I <3 what Morrison did with his run on JLA. He brought in seven archetypes (hell, Plastic Man made a fantastic Coyote, didn't he?), and had stories that were truly epic in scope.
While another genre could tell a similar story, those characters wouldn't necessarily have already been embedded in the societal psyche. Perhaps the closest we've seen outside of the fights'n'tights was Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but even then, they were iconic, mythic figures that were... tweaked a bit... to be more archetypical than their original incarnations.
It's interesting that archetypifying (is that even a word?) a character means stripping away much of what is complex and multivaried about him or her, and reducing them to a singular facet that can then be used as a lens into psychological and sociological interactions.
When you get a number of offsetting facets together, such as Morrison's JLA, you end up with a whole gem that you can turn in a number of interesting ways to catch the light.
It's kind of a unique storytelling framework, unlike most other comics genres.