THE CONCEPT

The blog’s title may occasion the first question: why a “superhero opera?” The easiest explanation is that I’m using “opera” the way it’s used in the slang term “soap opera.” The genre of the soap opera includes diverse works in diverse media—usually movies and TV, but sometimes also prose and comic books—which have in common some sort of narrative built around the problems of love. In contrast, my concept of a “superhero opera” includes diverse works in diverse media—though I’m dealing only with movies and TV here—whose narratives concern the conflict of good fighting evil. If I was going to boil down the appeal of the superhero opera to one phrase, it would be “awesome battles in a world of strange wonders”—though some wonders may be a little more down to earth than others.

For many years I’ve been arguing on my other blogs for the essential identity between superhero-stories and all other forms of metamundane adventure, so I won’t go into theory here. My concern here is to put together a resource of reviews of superhero operas, culled from my movie-review blog NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS! 

Most of my reviews there focus on all the different genres of the metamundane—mostly horror, SF and fantasy, with a smattering of artsy speculative fiction. That means that the superhero operas, which have their own special idiom, can get lost in the shuffle. I may or may not ever publish a book devoted to this topic, but for over ten years I’ve worked out the nature of this idiom, and I wanted to put out a resource dealing only with that topic.

But I also want to arrange the resource so that it might have some appeal for readers of the movie-blog, if only to see how I’ve organized it. For that subject, see the ensuing post THE ORGANIZATION.