I’M SUPER, THANKS FOR ASKING! (You knew I’d go there.) Tim O’Neil replies to my “cool stuff superhero comics do well” post by saying, basically, Almost all superhero comics suck. Oh, yeah, absolutely! (Here, have a howl of execration.) I just don’t think it needs to matter, except in one respect.

90% of everything is, of course, crap. Almost all currently-produced mystery stories are abysmal. Almost all currently-produced romantic comedies are horrific. Leaping randomly from genre to medium, we find that the contemporary fine-arts world looks like it got hit by a whole fleet of Bad Idea trucks. (Photography not so much, or maybe it’s just that I understand photography better.) The wider one’s sampling of a genre, the more abysmally awful stuff one encounters.

But none of this means that mysteries or romantic comedies lack the potential to say all kinds of exciting things; they have characteristic narratives, themes, and strengths. That’s why some of them are, you know, really good. The other stuff, I try to avoid. And so too with superhero comics. The only superpowery comics being produced right now (= after the end of New X-Men) that interest me are Daredevil, Sleeper, and possibly The Pulse (not sure yet). I’ve got absolutely no desire to try to explicate the deep, meaningful themes of Secret Wars II (or this! or this! or this!), just as I am not going to talk about how justice and the search for truth are addressed in whatever interchangeable rotten mystery tops this week’s bestseller list. But I do think it’s worth analyzing the good stuff, and drawing whatever lessons I can draw about the characteristic strengths of the genre. You can only learn the strengths of a genre from the good stuff, anyway.

I wonder if some of my divergence in attitude from Tim isn’t a result of the fact that I didn’t read this stuff as a kid. So I didn’t swill down a huge amount of blah and then grow out of it. Instead, I got weirdly intrigued as an adult, and asked people whose judgment I trusted to point out comics they thought I’d like. This is the one way in which the 90% problem really does matter with supehero comics: People seem to be a lot more likely to encounter the 90% first, and to have a harder time finding trusted sources to truffle up the 10%. But that’s what I guess I’d call an infrastructure or subcultural problem, not a problem of the genre’s inherent narrative strengths or weaknesses.

Oh, I just thought of another problem, which is the difference between a strong character concept and a strong comic. I think Daredevil started out as a pretty sweet concept that has gotten wildly better over time (thank you Frank Miller), to the point where he’s just fascinating to me. That doesn’t mean the first DD comics were anything special. I like ’60s X-Men for the rampant Stan Lee wigness, but ’60s Daredevil leaves me pretty cold. When I talk about the strengths of the character, that’s a different discussion from something like, “Well, I never really got the point of the Fantastic Four, but I loved [insert awesome comics writer here]’s take on them.” And so there may be some confusion, when I talk about strengths of the superhero genre, because sometimes I’m talking about characters’ strengths and sometimes I’m talking more about what really good writers do with the characters. And lousy writing can, of course, obscure even strong concepts.

Rich Pulasky also replies, in the comments here (scroll! like your life depends on it!), saying the vigilantism of many superhero characters can’t be an illuminating metaphor because vigilantism is bad. I obliquely addressed that here. I’ll just briefly add that my perspective may be influenced by my religious conversion. There really are major moral choices that appear as rebellion (not in a “teen angst rebellion” way–not for its own sake) against one’s inherited culture–choices that even appear as betrayal. Being willing to operate outside societal norms in the pursuit of some higher goal is the second step of philosophy. (The first is desire for the truth.) Precisely because the symbolism in superhero comics tends to be pretty up-front, my sense is that readers are much more likely to take away this idea of what you might call vigilantism of the heart, allegorical vigilantism, rather than taking away a belief that it’s a good idea to dress funny and do some freelance goon-beating in order to keep crime down in Gotham City.

At that same link, if you keep scrolling, Jim Henley has some really good points about vigilantism, coming from a very different angle but no less accurate (and probably more in line with what superhero comic writers generally think they’re doing, as opposed to my more whacked-out take–but I still think I’m also right!).