Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

Moore says:

> I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.

And Tolkien said:

> There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish [mythology] (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing.

I see "comic book" universes as evolving into a modern mythology, complete with monsters, heroes, and gods. So I would disagree with Moore about the merits of comic book stories. They may be "squatting" on the cultural stage, but maybe the same way that King Arthur and Ulysses do.

I expect, in a thousand years, when Superman and Wolverine are aged and in the public domain, the parallels between them and Beowulf and (non-Marvel) Odin will be even more clear.

I feel like you're missing his whole point, which is the use of superheroes as a kind of escapism from the complexities of life. Citing superficial similarities to mythical figures is just a way of sidestepping his actual arguments.

Do you believe one of the uses of mythology and epic cultural sagas in earlier ages wasn't "a kind of escapism"?

Yes, but when you look at the ratio of escapist material to material that was used to directly make sense of the world around the audience, older material seems to have a smaller amount of fluff. However, this is probably just a function of historical preservation; we only know of the masterpieces that were passed down because of them being key to philosophical research, while tons of "lighter" material has simply been lost (and keeps being lost every day).

A lot of those epics weren't to "make sense of the world". They were to transmit cultural values, and let the audience feel they were part of something bigger. For example, if you're an ordinary Roman hearing the Aeneid, what you're hearing is not a story to explain why there's thunder or how the world got made -- what you're hearing is a story that says, no matter how low you may be in the system of Roman civilization, you and all Romans share in a greater destiny.

I wonder if how completely we have attempted to understand our world has led only to greater cynicism, and there followed increased escapism.

When there is no low hanging fruit left to ponder the pondering gets done by specialists. Likewise there is less need for light practical advice books because industrialization has made the individual crafstman less common, and again specialists take center stage in their silos of information. It's also unlikely to be in a book.

It's interesting the way films like the original superman had a very clear hero "doing good". And now we have superheroes with clear flaws, wresting with their conscience and shades of gray. This mirrors the USA fall from hegemony.

> Citing superficial similarities to mythical figures...

I think you missed why I quoted Tolkien. There's something compelling about a common mythology for a culture. The modern cosmopolitan culture, American especially, doesn't have an ethnic, racial, or language identity to fall back on when exploring identity, struggle, the merits of sacrifice, moral issues, etc. Mythological figures allow us to explore these themes in a less traumatic way.

You can call that "escapism", I guess, but I think The Dark Knight was one of the few films that wrestled with the War on Terror in honest ways. It had to be a mythological film (Batman v. Joker) because the same subject would have gone over rather poorly in one way or another if it were an actual terrorism/spy thriller or something.

Anyway, I think Tolkien wasn't exactly wrong to pine for an exploration of culture, language, and identity through mythological archetypes. He, in particular, wanted non-borrowed ones. We are sort of in the same boat since nearly all content is borrowed in a global market.

I get the idea of having some sort of shared cultural touchstones. But there are plenty of candidates for that role.

Not to belabor the point, but why the guys in tights and not, say, the characters from the Abrahamic faiths? Well, you say, it's dangerous to mix faith with fantasy. But that's exactly what the old myths did and what Tolkien could do by implicitly associating his stories with Christianity, and exactly what Batman will never be. So much for the structural similarities between the Superman and Hercules.

But, again, this is all beside the point. The devil is in the details. There might be nothing inherently wrong with making superheroes the source of a shared cultural vocabulary about "spiritual" questions: what is right, what is wrong, what is bravery, etc. But how has it actually unfolded, in the world, right now? Again, Moore argues that, in the concrete, it has led to a kind of infantilism.

You bring up the Dark Knight. I don't personally like what I took away as the message of the Dark Knight, but I understand if you do. But can you name a single other example with actual critical value? Or do the vast majority just serve to make unhappy people, sleepwalking through life, continue unhappily sleepwalking?

> in a thousand years, when Superman and Wolverine are aged and in the public domain

Are we sure Congress won't just keep extending the term of copyright for the next thousand years?

> I see "comic book" universes as evolving into a modern mythology,

Or rather the other way around: you see mythology as some kind of old superhero stories.

Yea, that's how I've seen it for a long time. Comic books, superheros, villains, all of it is just massively intertwined mythology. There's nothing wrong with it. Many of these characters will be around for our grandchildren's children to enjoy.

But, as they already have been, and as nascent mythology tends to do, the stories and characters will be updated to fit the modern times. I kind of like watching that.

For example, how after the golden age of comics, a lot of Marvel stories started dealing with the perils of modern technology, and the shrinking need for heros as well as increasing perceived need for controlling these heros. The Avengers story in the MCU is a great example of this, pulling on decades-old storylines about the relationship between a society and its heroes. I mean comics aren't even 100 years old yet, complaining that they are bad for culture is kind of silly because we have no empirical data to compare it to.

Superman is pretty much Hercules for the jet age.

Born special, good at trying, wildly powerful, noble, etc.

Murders his family in a rage and tries to earn penance through acts of strength and valor... no, wait...

Man of Steel (the movie) kind of writes that in, his earthly pops dies so that he can stay hidden.

Adding immigrant parentage to the list would update it to be, per Moore, "most relevant and sufficient to [the] times".

What I don't like about Superman is his powers: they lack imagination. He's just strong (like a tractor or a crane), fast (like an airplane or rocket), has laser eyes (like... lasers), extremely sensitive hearing (like spy microphones) and X-ray vision (like microwave cameras). So he's not transcendent at all - we already have all his powers with the help of banal devices.

Superman = just a regular man + devices = Tony Stark - the creativity. When I understood this, I kind of cooled off from superman.

First off, they lack imagination only because he's almost 100 years old by now. That's like saying Zeus is an unimaginative god because controlling lighting is so overdone now.

Also, it means you haven't really read any great Superman stories. In the last 10-15 years, there have been many amazing stories centering around Superman. All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is probably top of the list.

Also, look at the Injustice 2 video game for a new take on Superman, my jaw dropped at how they took Superman off the edge.

He's a demigod though, the stuff I've read all makes it clear enough he could shred Batman (who isn't meaningfully different than Stark for this discussion), he just won't do it.

Or there is some kryptonite around. But he never throws a big thing at Batman to kill him in those situations (where he is given the power elsewhere to throw whatever the hell he wants).

I do agree it makes for kind of a boring character though.

Superman was created in 1933. A lot of those things didn't exist or barely existed. Shoot airplanes were still in their infancy.

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