Question answered: why I like superheroes

I took Yu to see Iron Man tonight, which marks the third time I have been to see the film at the cinema. The BFI are running a superhero season, which is a brilliant idea. I’ve never been to the BFI at Southbank before, although I have been to the IMAX down the road (I saw 300 there – never was a film more suited to an IMAX screen).

When I first revealed to Yu my liking of superheroes, she asked me to write down my reasons. She wanted to know why a twenty-eight-year-old man of reasonable education would enjoy what boils down to little more than men in tights hitting each other with magic powers. It’s a fair question, and one that isn’t entirely easy to answer.

The obvious response is that superheroes represent escapism. However, that’s not a good enough answer. In fact, in this world of a thousand fictions, it’s a bit of a copout. There are literally hundreds of alternative genres to escape into. I have no particular desire to have superpowers; like most guys I have pondered which superpower I would prefer, but that doesn’t mean I dream of having one. *

Any film you watch, any book you read, any game you play, represents escapism to some degree or other. Escapism, in short, doesn’t cover why I prefer superhero fiction to, say, romance novels or crime stories.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is to do with my love of graphic novels and comics. When I was a child, my parents took out subscriptions to Transformers (the UK comic, as opposed to the at-the-time substandard US version) and the Real Ghostbusters. Not strictly superhero comics, they were a marked difference to comics such as the Beano, which in the UK was pretty much the only alternative to a boy too young to really understand 2000AD.

I stopped reading comics when I went to boarding school, and only picked them up again when I was bored while studying for my Masters Degree. I’d recently been to see the first Spider-Man film at the cinema, and wanted to read the origin story in comic form. Completely by accident, I missed the original version and picked up the trade paperback of Ultimate Spider-Man.

Now there was an eye-opener.

If you’ve never read it, Ultimate Spider-Man is a reimagining of the character, set in more modern times. It was – and still is – written by Brian Michael Bendis, and represents every reason I love superheroes. I still have it on subscription.

Bendis’ Peter Parker walks and talks like a real teenager. He has problems like I had at school. He has a girlfriend, with all the highs and lows that brings. He argues with his aunt and uncle. He is irrational, occasionally stupid, and frequently bullied. The only difference between him and any other teenager is the fact he has superpowers and a secret identity.

Bendis isn’t writing a superhero story, though. Primarily, he’s writing a soap opera. Every character, no matter how minor, is fully developed and beautifully written. Seriously, I studied novels during my degree with worse characterisation. So, as an introduction to comics, Ultimate Spider-Man was a good’un.

I’ve read a lot of comics now. Most of them were superhero comics. The thing that people tend to get confused with, however, is the fact that ‘comic’ is not a genre: it’s a medium. Comics can be any genre. I’ve read some wonderful Westerns (Loveless, for example), good crime stories (Criminal), some seriously top-notch fantasies (Sandman being top of a very long list) and more comedies than you can shake a stick at (Invincible, The Boys, or – for lack of any better genre to put it in – Girls). On top of that, titles such as Maus, Local, DMZ and Glamorpuss demonstrate the sheer breath of comic genres. Pick any one of those four titles: they are decidedly not for kids.

But I still keep coming back to superheroes. Why? Well, they’ve been around a while. Some of them – not all, but some – have been around long enough to mature into really good stories. Want proof? Read Ultimate Spider-Man, The Ultimates, Invincible, Watchmen, certain Batman comics, or Mark Miller’s new Kick-Ass series. They may all wear tights, but not at the expense of good stories or dialogue.

I mentioned again in my last post my current writing project. To give a few more details away… It’s a comic, being drawn by Chris Ralls. It’s about a man called Carnival. He’s not a superhero, but he’s not a normal man either. The comic – hopefully – will straddle the fantasy and detective genres. And writing a good comic script, in all seriousness, is the hardest style of writing I have ever engaged in.

I’m writing this with a glass of Southern Comfort (I know, I know) next to me, and I am fully aware that I’ve avoided the original question. The answer, I guess, is that I don’t intrinsically like superhero fiction any more than other genres. Instead, I’ve been lucky enough to find some fantastic comic stories – some of which are, by chance, about superheroes.


* For the record – and discounting the rather cheap and easy “I’d be Superman” answer – I’ve have either the powers of the Hulk or Captain America. Even better, though, would be to forego superpowers entirely and be able to fly the Iron Man suit around.

Carnival

There will be another blog post up soon - got a hankering to write about my trip to Berlin, from which I have just returned.

First up, though, I want to put up a quick update to this post. Not only is there finally and definitely An Artist Attached To This Project in the rather rugged and handsome form of Chris Ralls, but I've got the first five pages sitting on my hard drive.

And they are fucking awesome.

More soon. I may even put in some details next time.

There is now...

...an artist attached to this project.

That is all.

Comic Collector: it seemed like a good idea at the time

It’s a commonly held – and almost entirely inaccurate – belief that I am somehow a technically apt person. I think this is because I wear glasses. Ever since school, I have often been mistaken for someone who knows about computers. I have even fooled my employers: somehow, I work for a company that builds internet and intranet sites.

Truthfully, however, I am never going to be properly computer literate, mostly because I need to take my socks off whenever I count above ten. I once tried to update Windows 98 on my PC, with the help of a friend. We ended up having to rebuild the computer from scratch. After that, Windows displayed error messages in Czech.

I still have no home internet connection. Even my grandparents have broadband.

A couple of years ago – almost to the day, in fact - I decided that I needed a database to hold information on my rapidly growing array of comics. I trawled the internet for a few weeks, but didn’t have much success: all of the programs I found were ugly or simplistic, or just did something in a fashion I found counterintuitive.

Then I split up with my girlfriend, in part because she didn’t want to be going out with the sort of person who catalogued his comic collection. I went home after the break-up, and while I was there my dad gave me a copy of Microsoft Access.

I learned to use Access at school, during my Computing A-Level. It’s a pointless skill to have, as no one in the entire world uses Access for anything. I built a database that organised magazine articles for my A-Level coursework. It was my dad’s idea; I couldn’t think of anything else to do. While I was home, I dug out my old project and decided to use it as a template for a new, home-grown comic database.

This exercise has taught me that I don’t really build programs so much as grow them, much like I do mould in tea cups – an attitude that is going to get me in trouble at work very soon. My database, which started off as two tables and a simple query, now contains seven tables, nine queries and a user interface that would confuse a submarine operator. Including the inputted data, it stands proud at over 220 megabytes in size. And it’s still growing.

I haven’t even finished inputting all of my comics. It’s been two years.

The problem with my organic approach is that, because I have no plan and because I tend to put the project down and leave it for months at a time, I keep forgetting how it works. For example, there is a nifty feature that displays a random comic cover on the main menu screen. All of the comic covers are scanned in, so when you open the program it will show one of them with the title and issue number. I programmed this feature, and am rightly proud of it. But I have no idea how it works. I checked recently, and my methodology makes no logical sense. For all I know, the database offers a prayer to the fire rabbits of Pluto, who tell it what cover to display.

Yet I still keep dreaming up and adding new features. This weekend, I figured it would be a good idea to be able to assign categories to the comics, so you could search for which ones you have on subscription, or for anything in the Marvel Ultimate Universe, or whatever. It didn’t take too long to add the categories, but I haven’t even started building the relevant searches yet: that’s the work of another weekend. Just adding the categories required me to break and fix the program no less than four times.

It feels like I’ve built the damn thing out of lard. Sooner or later, I’m going to add something slightly too heavy and the whole program will slop into a melted, useless lump. God forbid I try and remove anything. A year ago, in the name of testing, I built a backup table that isn’t connected to anything important. I tried to delete it yesterday, and the whole database crashed. I don’t understand why, and probably never will.

I’m catching up with the data entry; I now have 498 comics logged, out of maybe seven hundred. I have decided that, in order to count this project as ‘complete’, I need to input the rest of the comics, finish the category search and add the functionality to print search results. And then I need to rejig the user interface, simply on a cosmetic level.

This may take some time.