This essay was first presented as a paper at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts 27, March 2006. The version here is the version published in The New York Review of Science Ficton #215, July 2006.
Kevin J. Maroney
Capes, Types, and Prototypes: A Rumination on Genre
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Over the last year, I found myself returning to the question, “Why do we consider Chris Claremont’s X-Men to be a superhero story, but not Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber?” On its face, this seems like an obvious or even downright silly question, but to me it is not obvious how one would formulate a satisfying answer, and I was gratified when I discovered that such an answer also wasn’t obvious to several comics scholars to whom I posed it.
In its simplest formulation, a superhero is a costumed crimefighter with powers or skills far beyond those of normal people. Certainly, by this description, one would think that Wolverine, Cyclops, and company qualify. And note that for the past twenty-five years, the X-Men have ruled the superhero comics roost, at least commercially, with not only the highest-selling titles in America but an amazing proliferation of them. If they aren’t superheros, nothing is.
But in fact, the X-Men spend remarkably little time being crimefighters. Oh, they certainly save the universe from the occasional deranged madman, but they’re just as likely to spend four or six issues dealing with emotional or moral conflicts completely within their own community of mutants. As Charles Hatfield pointed out, the basis of Lee and Kirby’s X-Men is that “superhuman heroes and villains spring from a common origin [. . . and vie] with each other like rival gods in a mythic pantheon, with humanity caught in the middle” (12), a premise which has little to do with law enforcement. Often, the antagonists aren’t even villains—just rival groups of X-men, fighting for control of the new “species” of mutants; almost equally often, the nature of the X-Men’s mission puts them on the wrong side of human law.
Over in Amber, we have a band of a dozen or so faux-Renaissance royals vying for control of the kingdom while also fighting incursions from the rival Courts of Chaos. But the princes of Amber are super-strong, dimension-traveling wizards, and among them are the greatest swordsman and most cunning general in all the universes. They even have distinctive color schemes, at which Corwin marvels before he has recovered his memory. In short, the Amber royal family are the Medicis done up in super-drag. Now, Kinbote’s Principle (Hlavaty 2006) states that “With sufficient ingenuity, any narrative can be found in any other narrative,” but it doesn’t take much effort to see that the Amber novels are the X-narrative on a different scale: a war among super-beings for control of the future of their kind, with the world as a secondary prize.
So this question brings us to the larger and more interesting question of how to draw a line around the genre term “superhero,” and then back to the specific question about on which side of this genre boundary the Amberites fall.
I have found five basic approaches to discussing the nature and boundaries of a genre. Since I haven’t found a completely satisfactory vocabulary for these approaches, I’m going to try out my own terms for them.
The first approach is essentialist—attempting to define the genre by identifying the most important common element of the works of a genre or by the elements necessary for works to be in the genre.
The best essentialist definition of superheros I’ve encountered was written in 1994 by Michael Chary. He reported the results of a group effort to define “superhero” on behalf of the Usenet newgroup rec.arts.comics.alternative—trying, in effect, to circumscribe a set of comics that would not be on-topic for the newgroup.
The definition:
A superhero is any character who, given the opportunity, would prevent a mugging and who would not be doing so because he is a law enforcement officer.
He continued:
Note the motivation especially[:] the character might be a police officer but he is not stopping the mugging for that reason. Note also that the character would not do this only on certain occasions, but whenever “given the opportunity.”
Later commentary showed that there’s more packed into that definition than might be instantly obvious. Chary’s choice of the word “character” indicates that the term applies to fictional creations (a real person, by this formulation, is not a superhero, except in parody or metaphor), while the “would prevent” formation indicates not just the intent to do good but the ability to regularly succeed. It’s a somewhat more expansive and slightly more precise description of superheroes than “costumed crimefighters,” but points at the same rough group.
However, this definition was generally met with hostility, some of it the reflexive hostility of Usenet but some, I feel, deserved.
This description reduces superheroes to one dimension (crime-fighting) and then clumsily has to carve out an exception for stories about police.
While it’s unmistakable that most superheroes have been crime-fighters, the focus of many titles which are unmistakably superheroic are about characters who are tremendously self-interested (Grant Morrison’s Zenith), ineffectual (many of the heroes of the movie Mystery Men or John MacLeod’s Dishman, who can clean dishes by telekinesis), unconcerned with petty crime (Orion of Kirby’s New Gods), or deal with issues largely or completely unrelated to crimefighting (much of the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four focuses on the characters as superhuman explorers; Paul Chadwick’s Concrete uses the concept of superhero as a springboard to other types of adventures or do-gooding). Even Superman during the Silver Age (c. 1955–1970) was often more about exploration, or just plain senseawunda sf, than about crimefighting.
Probably the biggest problem with the essentialist approach was described by Samuel R. Delany in 2000:
When we search for a definition, we are looking for a universal, an essential, an essence. Thus the thing we look for is (by definition, no?) not the most interesting aspect of our object, but the aspect most broadly distributed among our texts. Then we express this in the most generalized form (which is often one of the weakest forms), in order to make it apply still further. (4)
The essentialist approach is the most “definitional” in this sense of all five approaches I will discuss, and in consequence even as it helps us locate works, it tells us the least about the works to which it points.
All that said, this particular essentialist description doesn’t help us distinguish between Amberites and X-Men; while Corwin is no moral paragon, he has at least enough sense of common decency (from his time in exile as a human) that yes, he would stop a mugging and definitely has the powers and skills to succeed.
The second approach to establishing the genre boundary I call characteristics, an attempt to described common characteristics rather than a single essence.
Taking a much more wide-ranging approach, comics reporter and reviewer Pat O’Neill joined a 1996 discussion of whether the pulp hero The Shadow counted as a superhero. He maintained that a character is a superhero if it has a preponderance of the characteristics of a superhero. These characteristics included, verbatim:
1. Special powers
2. Costume
3. Secret ID
4. Fights crime or criminals
5. Known to and recognized by public
6. Operates altruistically (not for money or at the orders of others)
7. Uses special equipment
8. Does not commit crimes in the process of fighting crime (i. e., murder, manslaughter, breaking & entering. . . .)
This list does describe the center of the set of superheroes—the most recognizable elements of the characters and stories that are most unambiguously superheroic. Again, one could build a quite acceptable canon of superheroic literature (in all media) by focusing on characters who resemble this list.
Despite this, this definition was greeted by lists of characters who were clearly superheroes while lacking many of these attributes or actively rejecting them—characters without costumes, who commit crimes in the pursuit of their missions, work for money, and so forth. At perhaps the farthest extreme is the most recent incarnation of Marvel’s The Punisher. In Garth Ennis’s hands, Frank Castle is a man with nothing left in his life except his desire to hurt back as much as he has been hurt. He doesn’t have a costume; his “secret identity” is just another alias; to the extent that he is publicly known, he is feared and often hated; he steals, tortures, and leaves a huge body count in his wake. He is a monster who preys on villains. Yet these stories are unmistakably a very dark incarnation of the superhero.
The biggest problem with the “characteristics” approach is that it seems arbitrary. Why are these the features of superheroes rather than other common superhero tropes like capes, chest emblems, sidekicks, Fortresses of Solitude, or origin stories? More importantly, are there elements on this list which are more important than others? Does a high score on the “fights crime” test outweigh barely having any other elements? If so, isn’t this just a list of the secondary characteristics of characters described by the essentialist approach?
Applying O’Neill’s test: Corwin scores around 5, Wolverine 5. Another tie.
A third approach is thematic. I wrote a short response to the checklist definition given above in which I outlined my thoughts on the foundation of the genre:
[A] superhero narrative is one featuring characters who have special abilities that set them apart from their peers and usually featuring conflict between sets of such individuals and each other or “normal” society.
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This approach differs somewhat from the essentialist approach given above in that it tries to capture the sense of the emotional affect of the stories rather than the surface content.
I’m still pleased with this in many ways, because I think this gives a handle on why superhero stories work. It allows for a great many superhero stories which are not just about costumed crimefighters, including Zenith, Dishman, and Concrete.
This thematic approach showcases the way in which superhero stories can function, in Stan Lee’s famous description of them, as “20th-century mythology” (178). Treading roughly through the minefield of the word, let’s say that a myth is a narrative of remarkable people that demonstrates truths about or shapes our perception of the world. By focusing on exceptional beings, the superhero story can explore the world by amplification and distillation of elements that really matter. (The mere fact that most superhero stories come down to huggermugger fistfights shouldn’t dissuade us from thinking about the best that they can be.)
Of course, the complaints that I directed above at the essentialist approach can be directed at this approach. A great many superhero stories aren’t “about” the characters being set apart from their peers; the single most influential body of superhero work of the last forty years, the Silver Age Spider-Man stories by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and John Romita Sr., gains most of its emotional strength from the fact that its protagonist can’t separate his normal life from his super-powered life.
Additionally, there’s no reason to accept my thematic analysis as the most useful. Lawrence & Jewett’s 2002 The Myth of the American Superhero extends their 1977 work The American Monomyth to include explicit superheroes, framing them as one particular set of the larger body of American heroic stories in which an outsider restores order to the threatened community. And again we get to Delany’s complaint: if we set one particular touchstone “definition” of the superhero story, then we can easily end up taking this interesting aspect of the stories completely out of the discussion.
Finally, my thematic approach is extremely broad. I said:
By this definition, Zelazny’s Lord of Light is certainly a superhero story; so might be many sports stories, depending on whether the narrative framed the characters as being “apart” from society.
Some people are certainly going to want to define the genre more tightly than I do.
From a thematic approach, the question of Zelazny is again a wash: certainly the Amberites are characters of special ability primarily in conflict with similarly empowered peers; if anything, my thematic analysis makes the two works seem more similar, not less.
The fourth approach to genre is historical. This approach observes that genera arise from communities of stories, writers, and readers engaged in mutual influence and active discussion.
David Hartwell recently described the results of his years of thinking about issues of genre, casting genera as historical patterns—a blend of commercial marking/marketing, content, community, and expectation. Among the features of a recognizable genre he lists:
Ease of access—the ability to quickly recognize the types of works one wants to read;
Common ground—a shared canon of stories and subjects;
Modeling—stories that demonstrate how to create other stories within the genre; and
“A familiar conversation”—the works within a genre are created in awareness of and in constant dialog with each other. (24)
By this standard, it’s easy to see that X-Men exists within the superhero genre, since it is a series of stories published by a superhero publisher (Marvel Comics), created by creators of other superhero stories (Lee & Kirby, Thomas & Roth & Adams, Claremont & Cockrum & Byrne, and so forth), marketed to readers of superhero stories (Marvel universe readers), in discourse with more unambiguously superheroic stories (the characters meet and work with/against the Avengers, Spider-Man, and all the rest), at least superficially following many of the models of superhero stories.
Nine Princes in Amber, on the other hand, basically wasn’t and didn’t; when it was published, almost all superhero stories were told in comic books, and the marketing was solidly in the standard fantasy/science fiction category.
But it’s not quite that straightforward. Throughout his life, Roger Zelazny was part of the superhero audience and a comic book collector, and many of his stories show the adze-marks of this affection. The aforementioned Lord of Light (itself homaged in an early Claremont X-Men story) is the story of a superpowered human seeking to destroy the oppressive social order imposed by other superpowered humans. The superhumans put on costumes and pretend to be South Asian gods and engage in extended fight scenes. At one point, the protagonist even discusses the reasons that he changed his costume and code name—a superhero moment if ever there was one. Famously, Jack Kirby developed storyboards and other concept material for a film adaptation of the novel. Zelzany later collaborated on comics adaptations of his works (including Amber) and contributed to the prose superhero anthology series Wild Cards.
The Amber books are less firmly in the superhero tradition than Lord of Light. They derive more directly from the traditions of fantasy novels, with some storytelling techniques taken from hard-boiled detective novels—the long opening sequence on Earth could just have easily ended with Corwin discovering he’d been drugged by a mob boss as assaulted by demons under the command of his sorcerous brothers.
The X-Men story model—of warring bands of superhumans struggling for control of the world—itself comes to the superhero world from science fiction; it has clear antecedents in A. E. van Vogt’s 1940 novel Slan and William Shiras’s 1953 novella “Children of the Atom.” Zelazny was certainly familiar with both Lee and Kirby and van Vogt and almost certainly with the Shiras, which was very prominent throughout the 1950s and ’60s even if it largely forgotten now.
The superhero influence on Zelazny in general is strong, and I’ve already pointed out the ways in which the Amber narrative fits in the superhero tradition. So while they are books are not strongly in the superhero genre community, they are not definitely outside of it.
The fifth approach to genre is prototypical. Prototype theory emerged out of cognitive psychology studies in color perception. The basic idea, first put forth in 1973 by Eleanor Rosch’s article “Natural Categories,” is that “category words” such as color names gain meaning in people’s minds by their resemblance to a prototype of the category. Rosch’s earliest conceptions of prototype were either literal visualizations or a gestalt; people would form a strong mental picture of their internal prototype of a category when its name was mentioned.
She quickly applied prototypes to the entire idea of categorization, as she explained in a 1999 interview:
Categories have what I called a graded structure of better and worse examples, and many categories have unclear boundaries. Categories have prototypical best examples which get formed in various ways, but for any category, absolutely any category, and for people in all cultures where this has been done, if you ask them if X or Y is a better example of their concept of Z, they will cheerfully tell you which is better. . . . (section II)