Where have all the Superheroes gone?

[Lord Fyre]

Do superheroes still make sense in this world? Or have we become to cynical and angsty for us to accept them anymore?

Has our modern world become too dystopian?

 

• With Global Warming causing all manner of droughts, massive storms, and other environmental instability . . .
  
• With our industrial and military legacies creating toxic time bombs all over the world (including the “trash” that is now orbiting the planet).
  
• With vital fuels and materials become more an more scarce . . .
  
• With rising world population increasing Global poverty (as the fastest growing areas are also the poorest) . . .
  
• With governments around the world (and in the US in particular) and major businesses (kind of “de facto” governments) becoming less and less accountable to their people . . .
  
• The resulting “kleptocractic” structures exacerbating the very real shortages of resources and living space . . .
  
• The universality of these forces making it difficult to identify who are the good and bad guys in our modern world . . .
  
• The desperation that that results driving some groups to “suicidal” resistance (such as the suicide bombers in the middle east) . . .
  
• The resulting fear that fosters in the rest of the population . . .
  
• With internet and news organizations exploiting that fear to drive up their own sales . . .

The reason I ask, is does it still make sense to run a superhero gaming setting in today’s world anymore? Or do we need to move it to the past (the 40’s or the 60’s – which still had plenty of their own problems) or toward distant future setting?

[Comic]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Always seemed to me the whole point of superheroes was to reflect the ideals of any age and show what hope there might be for solutions.

 

The world is no more dystopian now than in the past. The genocides of today are not out of scale with the genocides of six, sixteen, or sixty years ago. The environmental concerns, though bigger, are not out of proportion with the number of people who rally to address them. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.

 

We certainly have better words for describing our conditions than in the past. I love 'kleptocratic.' While I like settings in past or future worlds, the mainstay of adventure is going to remain, for me, the present day, I think.

 

Whenever that happens to be.

[Balabanto]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Fyre, you just eloquently described precisely why...

 

This world needs superheroes more than ever.

[Clonus]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Do superheroes still make sense in this world? Or have we become to cynical and angsty for us to accept them anymore?

Has our modern world become too dystopian?

?

 

Superheroes make just as much sense now as they did when killer fogs made out of pollution killed hundreds of people at a time and the world was dominated by two superpowers who were building an arsenal capable of devastating every city in the world.

[OddHat]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

The reason I ask' date=' is does it still make sense to run a superhero gaming setting in today’s world anymore? Or do we need to move it to the past (the 40’s or the 60’s – which still had plenty of their own problems) or toward distant future setting?[/quote']

 

Hogwash.

 

Not intended as a slam, but really, sheesh. The world was in hideous shape in the Victorian era, the period that saw the birth of modern popular science fiction and heroic literature. The world was in hideous shape in the 1920s and 30s, the period that saw the birth of the Pulps and almost everything that would become Superheroic fiction. The world was in horrible shape in the 1930s and 40s, the Golden Age of Comic Book Superheroes. War, genocide and the threat of global extinction were the backdrop of the 1960s and 70s, the Silver Age.

 

The world has real problems today, but socially at least we're a hell of a lot better off than we were in America and the West (and in most of Asia) than we were when the Superhero in its modern form first came to be. Claiming that the world is in such bad shape you can't tell Superhero stories is just silly. We started telling them when the Brits still thought that stealing people's countries just because you could was both right and just, we told them when the Germans were killing tens of millions, we told them when Blacks in America were being lynched by "respectable" whites and the police and courts did nothing, etc, etc. The 20th Century played host to a litany of horrors, and still we told Superhero stories.

 

Want a Superhero to solve all the problems of the modern world? Make one, it's easy enough. Socially Conscious Man can solve all the world's problems on 350 points without breaking a single rule. Find that boring or childish, or beyond your ability to suspend your disbelief? Have them fulfill their traditional role of stopping madmen and monsters. Remembering that it was never a "realistic" medium will help.

 

Or run a period game if you feel like it, or an Iron Age angst fest, or nothing at all. It's your game.

[OddHat]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

One more note:

 

It has been fashionable on and off since at least 1924 to note that muscle men can't solve social and institutional problems, usually in satire. Phylip Wylie did it in Gladiator, Philip Jose Farmer did it in many of his Pulp pastiches, Warren Ellis won't shut up about it and has apparently decided against the satirical touch brought by earlier writers dealing with the same idea.

 

The Satirists are partially right. Muscle Men in Tights can't realistically solve social and institutional problems. But then, it's not a realistic genre, and solving social ills was never the main part of their job. Sure, Doc Savage gave jobs to the poor and handed out charity, but his main job was stopping lunatics bent on murder and mayhem, and that's as it should be. In a world with Supers, a lunatic with a death ray is a real problem.

[Lord Fyre]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

One more note:

 

It has been fashionable on and off since at least 1924 to note that muscle men can't solve social and institutional problems, usually in satire. Phylip Wylie did it in Gladiator, Philip Jose Farmer did it in many of his Pulp pastiches, Warren Ellis won't shut up about it and has apparently decided against the satirical touch brought by earlier writers dealing with the same idea.

 

The Satirists are partially right. Muscle Men in Tights can't realistically solve social and institutional problems. But then, it's not a realistic genre, and solving social ills was never the main part of their job. Sure, Doc Savage gave jobs to the poor and handed out charity, but his main job was stopping lunatics bent on murder and mayhem, and that's as it should be. In a world with Supers, a lunatic with a death ray is a real problem.

 

One of the factors that defines the "Bronze Age" from the earlier periods was a willingness to address social issues and consequences.

 

I don't know. It seems to me that the kinds of fears I mentioned in my OP are what is driving the renewed popularity of Post-Apocolyptic gaming.

(http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/ffn/index.php?date=2007-06-20)

 

But, one might correctly point out, that the sub-genre is not new, so we have been to this place "culturally" before.

[OddHat]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

One of the factors that defines the "Bronze Age" from the earlier periods was a willingness to address social issues and consequences.

The Pulp Heroes sometimes dealt with social issues, as did the Victorian Sci Fi and Fantasy Heroes that preceded them and the Superheroes of the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. "Bronze Age" is a convenient and popular label, and like most such labels it carries baggage, including oversimplifications.

 

Nor am I suggesting that you can never deal with social issues in your games or fiction if it floats your boat; they're yours, you can do as you like with them. I am suggesting that Doc Savage dealing with unemployment on his own was never the point of the stories where he was handing out jobs and cash, and that this was as it should be. This is not a genre about grass roots political organizing and collective action, and trying to make those the focus of the stories (or bemoaning their absence) misses the point of big guys with superpowers. You don't need a costume and huge biceps to organize a letter writing campaign.

 

I don't know. It seems to me that the kinds of fears I mentioned in my OP are what is driving the renewed popularity of Post-Apocolyptic gaming.

 

The possibility of the sudden end of our current Civilization on Earth, by Human action, was absolutely real from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, and is still present today. Superhero stories did fine for most of that period, even if the comic book and pulp industries didn't.

 

But, one might correctly point out, that the sub-genre is not new, so we have been to this place "culturally" before.

 

We've been in much worse places before, and will be again. And we'll still want to hear about good guys who stood up to the bad guys and won.

 

And some of them will wear capes.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

The world isn't ending.

 

Just the world as we know it.

 

Happens every generation.

[Force]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Rep to oddhat and ghost. Again. I can't really rep you guys, but you know it's the thought that counts.

 

You guys hit it on the head.

 

As for the OP, half of your 'concerns' are simply misgivings. Every generation since Christ has thought the end was coming now and not later. Machine guns were invented to end all wars as they were such a 'terrible weapon' to cause such 'massive casualties' that wars would not longer be fought because people wouldn't tolerate it.

 

As for your fears altering your game settings, that's your call. I don't think it's needed in the slightest, but then I'm not you.

[assault]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Do superheroes still make sense in this world? Or have we become to cynical and angsty for us to accept them anymore?

 

Define "we".

 

Other people have already addressed the question quite well.

 

What I want to suggest is that mixing a little satire and humour into four-colour settings is a good way of "adulting them up" a bit without wallowing in teenage whininess. In other words, read a bit of Terry Pratchett, or Douglas Adams, while you are designing your campaign setting.

[Trebuchet]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Do superheroes still make sense in this world? Or have we become to cynical and angsty for us to accept them anymore?

Has our modern world become too dystopian?

 

• With Global Warming causing all manner of droughts, massive storms, and other environmental instability . . .
  
• With our industrial and military legacies creating toxic time bombs all over the world (including the “trash” that is now orbiting the planet).
  
• With vital fuels and materials become more an more scarce . . .
  
• With rising world population increasing Global poverty (as the fastest growing areas are also the poorest) . . .
  
• With governments around the world (and in the US in particular) and major businesses (kind of “de facto” governments) becoming less and less accountable to their people . . .
  
• The resulting “kleptocractic” structures exacerbating the very real shortages of resources and living space . . .
  
• The universality of these forces making it difficult to identify who are the good and bad guys in our modern world . . .
  
• The desperation that that results driving some groups to “suicidal” resistance (such as the suicide bombers in the middle east) . . .
  
• The resulting fear that fosters in the rest of the population . . .
  
• With internet and news organizations exploiting that fear to drive up their own sales . . .

The reason I ask, is does it still make sense to run a superhero gaming setting in today’s world anymore? Or do we need to move it to the past (the 40’s or the 60’s – which still had plenty of their own problems) or toward distant future setting?

Shouldn't this discussion really be in the NGD?

[assault]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Shouldn't this discussion really be in the NGD?

 

While I see your point, it's really a discussion of campaign tone in a particular genre.

 

As long as nobody gets excited about side issues, it should be fine.

 

In any case, the main question has been pretty well answered: several people think that the superheroic genre works quite well in the present day, and have argued that coherently and IMHO persuasively. No doubt there are others who don't agree with them. Some people will deal with the situation by being "grim 'n' gritty", others with satire and humour, and still others don't even see there's a problem at all.

 

In other words: everyone's answer depends on their individual tastes.

 

Now that's a surprise, isn't it?

 

---

 

Personally, my games/settings are always a little tongue in cheek. That's why some of them, at least, contain super-pets and other hyper-Silver Age absurdities.

[The Monster]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

IMO it's not that the world per se is any worse (or not) than before. It's that the whole idea of heroes and superheroes has been so heavily assaulted (i.e., denigrated under the banner of "deconstructing") over the last generation or three. You can't have real "good guy" heroes any more it seems, who try to maintain serious codes of honor and behavior, and usually succeed; such characters are derided as "unrealistic" and/or "boring." To be acceptable, it seems you have to have heroes who have flaws - and not just flaws, but serious emotional issues, like addiction or schizophrenia or love of violence for its own sake, something that almost negates their effectiveness as heroes.

It isn't that world is so much worse than before (IMO, it isn't really any worse, except maybe in some very specific ways), it's that we can't tolerate heroes who are heroic in the classic mold.

[TheQuestionMan]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Nice work!

 

Keep it up, you'll do fine.

 

 

QM

[Victim]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

it's that we can't tolerate heroes who are heroic in the classic mold.

 

Heroic in the classic sense, or the 4 color super hero sense? You could argue that modern flawed heroes are made from the classic mold.

["V"]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Forgive me for reusing an anecdote I've already mentioned on the boards, but it's appropriate and touches on what an earlier poster mentioned.

 

Some variety of door to door evangelist came to our door & was met by Mrs V. Their approach was of the "Ooh isn't the world a dreadful place now, AIDS, war, earthquake, immorality, yea and surely these are the end times, etcetera."

 

Mrs V having taken her degree in history let them give examples of the woes of the world they were lamenting and then listed a handful of far worse cases from the past few thousand years of history.

 

She doesn't in fact need evangelising, but has picked up from me a hatred of sloppy thinking even in those whose overall aim she agrees with.

[OddHat]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

I'd say a big part of the decline in the traditional four color comic book Superhero has to do in part with the increasing age of the current audience. The Pulps appealed to adults and kids alike, and often featured fairly sophisticated stories (as action-adventure went), with characters that could be seen as early Superheroes. Pre-code comic book Superheroes appealed mainly to kids and teens, with an older teen and young adult audience that dropped off sharply after WWII. After the code, comic book Superhero stories didn't really start to aim at a young adult audience again until the 1980s. Tropes and storylines that made sense to a bright nine year old will leave a twenty-five year old comic book fan shaking his head in annoyance. Now we have a generation of writers and readers frustrated over the "silliness" of the genre, yet still reading it and writing in it.

 

I expect they just don't like to admit that they enjoy the whole athletes in tights side of things.

[Balabanto]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

That's an interesting point, Oddhat, and one that bears further examination. It's my contention that while flawed heroes are slightly more interesting, it's the simple fact that somewhere along the way, these writers disassociated the words "Cape and tights" from "Role Model."

 

Now, my champions world is not cape heavy. You don't have a lot of heroes wearing capes, but that was a conscious choice on the part of the players. However, a lot of heroes don't have big obvious symbols on their chests, though those that do tend to be better defended. A symbol on the arm, or the shoulder is usually more common than any large target covering the center of their body.

 

One of the heroes who DOES have a cape knows how to use it as a weapon, however.

 

To get back on the subject thereof, morality itself has changed. 90 percent of our heroes in the classic mold are white. 90 percent are male. 90 percent are christian. But this is no longer the demographic of the american mind.

 

If you want to have heroes in the classic mold and retain that structure, you have to delimit the genre and make heroes in the classic mold that belong to other ethnic, social and demographic groups.

 

We shouldn't take away the old classics, of course. But we should struggle to create new ones in the classic mold. Black, Hispanic, Gay, Asian, Transgendered, and whatever strikes your fancy. However, I don't think that comic book companies are going about this the right way. DC has made a couple attempts to change the ethnic group of classic heroes, and those books were terrible.

 

What made the Milestone books great was that they created minority heroes, but they were all minority heroes in the classic mold, with the exceptions of Blood Syndicate (A little gangy), and Xombi (A book that fulfilled the promise of what Morrison's Doom Patrol COULD have been.)

 

Unfortunately, people didn't BUY those books. At least, not as much as they should have. While they were being published, they were one of my biggest reads each month.

 

But if you want to attract a wider audience to superheroes, you have to have a range of superheroes who are more "like us." as we are now, not "like us" in the population demographic of the 1930's and 40's. Are Superman and Batman still awesome? Of COURSE they are. Is Spidey still cool? Of COURSE he is.

 

Can you have a hero or heroine who is into BDSM? Sure you can, as long as it doesn't detract from the story or become the sole bone of contention. Do they fight for right when they put on the costume? If they do, they're still a hero.

 

Can you have a hero or heroine who enjoys killing? No. It's my contention that this is STILL worse than anything that a classic hero might keep in their closet.

 

Can you have a hero whose morals don't approximate the classic moral heroic code? Now we begin to see, what I think, is the problem. A lot of people have forgotten that there is this thing called a social contract, and they want the heroes to forget it too because the bad guys are doing really bad things.

 

But for those of us who like our heroes classic, we know it can't work that way. People are trying to hedge their way around the argument that you can't sink to the level of the villain, and THAT, I think, is where the problem with the "loss of superheroicness" comes in.

 

People are so obsessed with pushbutton resolutions and instant solutions nowadays that they're willing to throw what's right out the window for a sense of closure.

[Remjin]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Do superheroes still make sense in this world? Or have we become to cynical and angsty for us to accept them anymore?

Has our modern world become too dystopian?

 

• With Global Warming causing all manner of droughts, massive storms, and other environmental instability . . .
  
• With our industrial and military legacies creating toxic time bombs all over the world (including the “trash” that is now orbiting the planet).
  
• With vital fuels and materials become more an more scarce . . .
  
• With rising world population increasing Global poverty (as the fastest growing areas are also the poorest) . . .
  
• With governments around the world (and in the US in particular) and major businesses (kind of “de facto” governments) becoming less and less accountable to their people . . .
  
• The resulting “kleptocractic” structures exacerbating the very real shortages of resources and living space . . .
  
• The universality of these forces making it difficult to identify who are the good and bad guys in our modern world . . .
  
• The desperation that that results driving some groups to “suicidal” resistance (such as the suicide bombers in the middle east) . . .
  
• The resulting fear that fosters in the rest of the population . . .
  
• With internet and news organizations exploiting that fear to drive up their own sales . . .

The reason I ask, is does it still make sense to run a superhero gaming setting in today’s world anymore? Or do we need to move it to the past (the 40’s or the 60’s – which still had plenty of their own problems) or toward distant future setting?

 

Well, I was gonna say something about the Global Warming farce... but I'll keep politics out of this discussion....

 

Honestly, I would say it all depended on the kind of superhero stuff you were talking about. Some, if not all, of these types of issues have been addressed in comics before and I'm sure they still are. If you're looking for more Golden Age or similar, then you should probably move to those kinds of times, but Silver Age dealt with some of this, Bronze and Iron definitely have. Superheroes are supposed to solve problems, so these could be amongst them.

 

What's more superheroic than overcoming problems that can't be fixed by us normal humans? =)

 

Personally, I like some of the more realistic and gritty problems to deal with. It makes for interesting play and can also make for interesting solutions.

 

[series of comments deleted, self-imposed, due to political content.]

[Remjin]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

Forgive me for reusing an anecdote I've already mentioned on the boards, but it's appropriate and touches on what an earlier poster mentioned.

 

Some variety of door to door evangelist came to our door & was met by Mrs V. Their approach was of the "Ooh isn't the world a dreadful place now, AIDS, war, earthquake, immorality, yea and surely these are the end times, etcetera."

 

Mrs V having taken her degree in history let them give examples of the woes of the world they were lamenting and then listed a handful of far worse cases from the past few thousand years of history.

 

She doesn't in fact need evangelising, but has picked up from me a hatred of sloppy thinking even in those whose overall aim she agrees with.

 

Ah, its so wonderful to know that many others also abhor the idiotic rhetoric of these days... these boards give me some solace.

[ParagonAlpha]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

To get back on the subject thereof, morality itself has changed. 90 percent of our heroes in the classic mold are white. 90 percent are male. 90 percent are christian. But this is no longer the demographic of the american mind.

 

If you want to have heroes in the classic mold and retain that structure, you have to delimit the genre and make heroes in the classic mold that belong to other ethnic, social and demographic groups.

 

We shouldn't take away the old classics, of course. But we should struggle to create new ones in the classic mold. Black, Hispanic, Gay, Asian, Transgendered, and whatever strikes your fancy. However, I don't think that comic book companies are going about this the right way. DC has made a couple attempts to change the ethnic group of classic heroes, and those books were terrible.

 

What made the Milestone books great was that they created minority heroes, but they were all minority heroes in the classic mold, with the exceptions of Blood Syndicate (A little gangy), and Xombi (A book that fulfilled the promise of what Morrison's Doom Patrol COULD have been.)

 

Unfortunately, people didn't BUY those books. At least, not as much as they should have. While they were being published, they were one of my biggest reads each month.

 

But if you want to attract a wider audience to superheroes, you have to have a range of superheroes who are more "like us." as we are now, not "like us" in the population demographic of the 1930's and 40's. Are Superman and Batman still awesome? Of COURSE they are. Is Spidey still cool? Of COURSE he is.

 

Can you have a hero or heroine who is into BDSM? Sure you can, as long as it doesn't detract from the story or become the sole bone of contention. Do they fight for right when they put on the costume? If they do, they're still a hero.

 

Can you have a hero or heroine who enjoys killing? No. It's my contention that this is STILL worse than anything that a classic hero might keep in their closet.

 

Can you have a hero whose morals don't approximate the classic moral heroic code? Now we begin to see, what I think, is the problem. A lot of people have forgotten that there is this thing called a social contract, and they want the heroes to forget it too because the bad guys are doing really bad things.

 

But for those of us who like our heroes classic, we know it can't work that way. People are trying to hedge their way around the argument that you can't sink to the level of the villain, and THAT, I think, is where the problem with the "loss of superheroicness" comes in.

 

People are so obsessed with pushbutton resolutions and instant solutions nowadays that they're willing to throw what's right out the window for a sense of closure.

 

 

Granted comic books have always been written for the white male, and almost every attempt to include an African-American hero has met with utter failure. As an African-American reader and comic fan I still bought and read comics. I was disappointed with almost every attempt to create ethnic characters because the issue became their ethnicity and not their being heroes. That fact is while Milestone failed regardless of the fact that they had some of the best writing and artists in the business.

 

The world has become so politically correct in its thinking that it doesn't realize that it causes more harm in an attempt to deflect harm.

 

There is no reason to write comics that appeal to Asian, Gays, African-American's or whatever. What they need to do is start writing good, strong, heroic characters. Good writing will draw in readers.

 

I mean look at the trend. Comic books have become dark and "realistic". Comic Book sales have decreased.

 

Comic book writers have become lazy. It's easier to have characters kill or act without care, it allows for easy solutions to moral story themes. I call that plain lazy.

 

Look at Chris Claremont and his work on the X-Men throughout the 80's. These were heroes. Granted Wolverine was a killer, but his actions still had moral and social reprecussions in the storyline.

 

All I know is the current 2 1/2 color comic books that are being made are not being read by me.

[Balabanto]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

I don't know. I LOVED Icon. That was a GREAT comic. It was well written, but it didn't acquire a readership.

 

If your contention is that only white males are reading comic books, I assure you, you're wrong. It's not just the darkness, it's that minority groups don't feel that they're adequately or positively represented in them.

 

You're right about the good writing, though. I can't stress that 2.5 color comic books don't really do it for me. The problem is that there's no moral difficulty anymore when the heroes come to a potentially ethical crossroads. The pushbutton solutions are the problem.

[nexus]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

As for the OP, half of your 'concerns' are simply misgivings. Every generation since Christ has thought the end was coming now and not later. Machine guns were invented to end all wars as they were such a 'terrible weapon' to cause such 'massive casualties' that wars would not longer be fought because people wouldn't tolerate it.

 

I thought that was the crossbow

[nexus]

Re: Where have all the Superheroes gone?

 

IMO it's not that the world per se is any worse (or not) than before. It's that the whole idea of heroes and superheroes has been so heavily assaulted (i.e., denigrated under the banner of "deconstructing") over the last generation or three. You can't have real "good guy" heroes any more it seems, who try to maintain serious codes of honor and behavior, and usually succeed; such characters are derided as "unrealistic" and/or "boring." To be acceptable, it seems you have to have heroes who have flaws - and not just flaws, but serious emotional issues, like addiction or schizophrenia or love of violence for its own sake, something that almost negates their effectiveness as heroes.

It isn't that world is so much worse than before (IMO, it isn't really any worse, except maybe in some very specific ways), it's that we can't tolerate heroes who are heroic in the classic mold.

 

I've seen the attitude your describing allot among the "younger" (or maybe kewler would be a better word) crowd in gaming too. "Good guys" are equated with fools or jokes and character are only intereste in their smeared with mud (or worse) in some manner. Not that heroes can't or shouldn't have flaws even profound one but trying (or succeeding) in overcoming them not revelling in or surrendering to them almost seems like its passe now. Cynicall dark or jaded heroes can be fun (I play a couple) but there is a sense like they're only accpetable model for a character at least if you're interested in 'real" role playing. Whatever that means.