By conventional superheroes, I mean the ones the people here are likely thinking of when we hear about superheroes: Superman, Spider-man, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Fantastic Four, Forbush Man, and so forth. They have always existed in a version of our real world, but often with the same political figures, social conventions, and everyday tech. Somehow, the super-tech rarely has much influence on the day-to-day world. The heroes react to real events, but not in such a way as to change the historical timeline. They can take arms against universe-altering villains but not change the course of global conflict.
There is a weird plausibility (allowing for fantastic powers and genre conventions) and a near-familiarity about the superhero world.
Most of the heroes operate in the United States.
Given these perimeters, can conventional heroes actually be shown functoning in anything resembling our current reality? If not, why not? If so, how? Or, with the current, older readership, must they drift further into completely alternate realities?
Replies
I think that technology has evolved to the point that it is impossible to keep secret identities.
You could have some sort of superpowered villages, but they would only keep civilian lives among themselves. By that point you would be very close to pure sci-fi and fantasy (the genres that spawned superheroes). Plots involving "mundanes" would unavoidably become more political and philosofical in nature, and it would be more difficult to fail to notice that they don't often reach significant conclusions.
Or you could go in the opposite direction and make superheroes more difficult to perceive so that they do not need secret identities; you could think of something like Warren Ellis' "Global Frequency" organization, where the characters are essentially single-mission task forces curated from a very large, essentially anonymous pool. But that is more like ad hoc SWAT teams or Special Forces than superheroes. The current "Batman Inc." has some elements of this, but there are very real weaknesses in the concept, not least among them the exposure of Bruce Wayne as its financer. That would realistically cripple his ability to keep acting as Batman.
An interesting variation could be one that Lee Falk's "The Phantom" sometimes plays with in his role as the Unknown Commander of the Jungle Patrol: the elite operative of a military or paramilitary group with a secret identity that is hidden in plain sight. Of course, that was how Captain America was set up in its first four years or so. This take, too, has limitations, mostly because it is very difficult to establish outside of some sort of military force.
I guess the bottom line is that keeping true anonimity alongside significance, "Lone Ranger"-style, was difficult in the 1990s and is essentially impossible today. In today's world you would need some sort of supporting organization to provide the means for keeping confidentiality. That, or exotic powers such as teleportation or dimension hopping. It is difficult to suspend disbelief about the apparent refusal to track Superman's movements through satellite. Batman would need to operate out of an Island with heavy defenses. Wonder Woman would not have an Invisible Plane. The Fortress of Solitude's exact coordinates would be a matter of public record. Most superheroes would be operatives with backing from multimillionaires, governments or wealthy non-governmental agencies, in each case dealing with certain levels of mistrust and scrutinity (and protocols for dealing with dissenters and rogues).
Either that or you go back in time literally to the previous century.
Could make an interesting limited series... how does Batman or Spider-Man deal with the gradual realization that their old arrangements just can't work anymore?
As you say, without both teleportation and shape-shifting abilities, it would be impossible to maintain a "secret identity." And separate of that question, the world would probably resemble The Boys or Watchmen more than I'd like to think.
BIG TOWN was written along the lines you suggest.
In 2026, does Captain Mainstream Superhero:
(a) Oppose the current American government?
(b) Fight on behalf of the current American government?
(c) Continue to fight supervillains, ordinary crooks, and stand-ins for real people?
The only viable option for the publishers of Captain Mainstream Superhero is likely (c), and that's not terribly realistic.
Maybe (d) Fight from within the current American government to effect change...?
That's a great question JD. I think probably a, c and d, or some combination, as circumstances allow. "B" makes the character Homelander, and I don't see how you could pull off a gung-ho superpatriot and sell enough comic books to get by. I don't see a lot of MAGA in comic shops.
It's always seemed to me that in the 1940's (if you added up all of the characters published by all the companies), there were a hundred or so super-humans/people with tech or magic that effectively made them super-humans (and left out the characters who were essentially tough guys who dressed funny), by the 1960's, a thousand or so, by the 1980's, ten thousand or so, by the turn of the century, a hundred thousand or so, by today, a million or so. By the end of this century, you'd have a situation like in My Hero Academia where the majority of the human race have powers of some sort. I think that inevitably, military and police forces would have to recruit super-humans, and a nation's power would be measured not just by how many nukes they have, but by how many super-humans they have that could survive and even thrive after a nuclear war.
I've always understood why mundanes might fear being supplanted by mutants as in so many X-Men stories, I've just never understood why it only applikes to mutants, and not to super-humans in general. To someone who didn't knolw them, Ben Grimm might well be as creepy as Nightcrawler.
It's a good point. I suppose that the argument might be that you could be infected by a radioactive elf in Crime Alley and become a metahuman. The children of the X-Men will always be metahuman, and keep reproducing.
I did like the moment in the first season of Jessica Jones where someone sees her use her powers and says, "Oh! You're one of them" (or something like that) and walks quickly in the other direction.
The thousands of superhero thing always takes the comics out of reality. Marvel and DC's earths have to resemble ours to maintain their appeal, but they should be radically different. Tony Stark and Reed Richards tech or Lexcorp tech and the existence of aliens alone would ensure that.
Does the general public know where Spider-Man's powers come from, or do they maybe think that he's a human/spider hybrid that escaped from some lab somewhere, especially now that another guy (Miles Morales) and a woman (Spider-Gwen) with basically the same powers have turned up?
Regarding tech alone, even if Ted Knight didn't share the secret of the Cosmic Rod, people would see that it was possible and reverse engineer the technology eventuslly. two different guys have come up with Robotmen that a human brain could be kept alive in. That would be revolutionary all by itself. A guy in Stephen Hawking's position might well have thought that it was worth it to be mobile again.
And not die young.
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next