Since I’m arguing that superhero operas encompass a huge number of subgenres, I want to break down my old reviews into categories. But rather than using the established names of genres and subgenres — “sword and sorcery,” “weird westerns,” “masked swashbucklers”—I’ve conceived of six rough categories, which I’ll use as tags for each blog-entry. There’s a lot of bleed-over between the categories, so each time I make out the tags for any entry, the tag I use as primary will appear in upper case and properly spelled, while any secondary tags will be lower case and slightly misspelled.
The first two categories focus on both the physical appearance and the timeframe of each work’s protagonist.
COSTUMED CRUSADERS—This category deals with the sort of characters that the viewing public usually thinks of as superheroes: men and women running around in gaudy costumes. In some cases, the “costume” may be no more than a domino mask worn in concert with regular clothes, as seen with characters like the Lone Ranger and the Spirit, and a few “costumes” are just the hero’s own skin, as with the green-hued Incredible Hulk. Almost all of these characters have been situated in either the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries, so I tend to associate this type of hero with the changes of the worldwide Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. I suppose some author might conceivably chronicle the adventures of a costumed hero set in the England of William Shakespeare, but if anyone ever does a movie with that setting, I’ll probably file it in this category anyway.
NON-COSTUMED KNIGHTS— Here the protagonists also reside in that same timeframe extending from the 19th through 21st centuries, but they wear whatever attire is appropriate to that timeframe. Just as not all costumed heroes have powers, many of these characters are ordinary but exemplary men and women, but they’re still associated with the metamundane through fighting mad scientists, occult menaces and the like. A few characters barely wear any attire at all, such as Tarzan and all his loincloth-clad progeny. Yet as I recall from the first Tarzan book, even the ape-man’s one concession to fashion comes about because he’s emulating one aspect of the clothing worn by jungle tribesmen.
The next two categories are exclusively about timeframe, although the eras and places may be modeled on either human knowledge of past civilizations or on speculations about the future.
ARCHAIC ADVENTURERS—This category includes all protagonists native to periods of time prior to any widespread industrial innovations. Thus the heroes may live as far back as caveman times, or in eras as diverse as Classical Greece, Arthurian England, or medieval China. The heroes may sport such familiar names as Sinbad, Hercules or Son Goku (not the one in DRAGONBALL, kids). In theory this category could range up to the historical times of the European Renaissance, though the latest historical period I’ve found for any metamundane hero is the TV series IVANHOE, set in the 12th century but infused, unlike the book, with lots of fantasy-content. It’s usually a lot easier for authors to make up some quasi-medieval world out of whole cloth, as we get in the very different works of Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien.
SPACE: THE FIGHTING FRONTIER—From this category-name one might reasonably assume that here I’m talking only about crusaders in outer space, like STAR WARS and STAR TREK. On the contrary, I’m talking about any work in which the extrapolations of futuristic concepts have transformed some environment—be it Earth or some other planet—in a battleground for contending forces, ranging from mammoth future-cities like the one in BLADE RUNNER, to apocalyptic landscapes like MAD MAX. This category also encompasses stories in which the inhabitants of some super-science dimension visit modern Earth with lots of troublesome transformations, as seen in the cartoon-adaptation MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE.
The last two categories focus on the protagonists in terms of (a) membership in a gender, and (b) association with the appearance, if not the actuality, of destructive forces.
FIGHT LIKE A GIRL—Any metamundane hero here must be either (a) a solo heroine, (2) a heroine paired with a single male partner, or (3) a member of a group made up only of women or where the women outnumber male partners at least two-to-one.
MONSTERS AND VILLAINS; UNITE—The two types of characters most often opposed by standard heroes can usually be termed either “monsters” or “villains,” but on occasion these “bad guys” get their own features. Some monsters can be “good” despite their unappetizing looks, as with Swamp Thing, while other creatures may incarnate forces of sheer destruction, whether out of instinct (Godzilla) or from a creator’s design (Kronos). Villains also fall into two categories. Some are noble souls who are simply misguided, like Doctor Doom and Megamind, and they may end up being pitted against fiends worse than they are. Others fit the category of the “charming rogue,” often going about ripping off rich people and fighting off dour cops, as with Fantomas and Catwoman.
I decided on six categories in part because I thought about devoting an entry a day to each one, with Sundays off. But I decided that this strategy would have been counterproductive. If the project holds any appeal for readers at all, it would probably be that of seeing what entries I choose each week, and what if any points of comparison exist between the items reviewed. My current intention to post six entries at least once a week (though possibly more as time permits), one for each category, and only one piece of new writing will precede each of the review-sextets: a short informational post called The Honor Roll (see following entry).
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