Hero Worship

The Financial Times looks at the changing face of superhero comics.

From the article...

Superhero comics – secular modern myths, written in collaboration by generations of writers – have tracked our culture for more than 70 years, providing wish fulfilment fantasies, cultural exemplars, vehicles of satire and cautionary tales of the abuse of power. Attempts to work out what they say about us have been around nearly as long. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in 1938, as fascism took Europe in its grip, they intended him to be, in Siegel’s words, “a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strongmen I ever heard of, rolled into one”. Umberto Eco proposed, in a 1970s essay on Superman, that in a society increasingly dominated by machines, it was down to the “positive hero” of myth to “embody to an unthinkable degree the power demands that the average citizen nurtures but cannot satisfy”. As the comics writer Grant Morrison pithily observes in Supergods, his book-length analysis of the superhero phenomenon, the idea of these characters has long been “at least as real as the idea of God”.

Like the idea of God, the idea of superheroes has changed with the times, subject to canonical revision, radical exegesis and acrimonious debate. They have also risen and fallen in the public esteem, with the recent boom in Hollywood adaptations an instructive case in point. Tales of godlike superbeings are out, while tales of humans in excelsis are in – as evidenced by the recent popularity of Iron Man and Batman, millionaire playboys and super-CEOs waging a technologically assisted war on crime and the enemies of society. A 2006 film featuring the infallible Son of Krypton proved markedly less popular.

Like the idea of God, too, a recent downturn in public interest has earthly rights­holders worried.