Quote Originally Posted by MyriVerse View Post
The superhero genre is typically more free and open to elements of fantasy and horror, as well as, science fiction.
It's changing with the manga influence as well as a lot of properties that began as cartoons becoming comics as well. It will be interesting to see how things develop, but the main reason we read superhero comics over most others is that for most readers, superheroes were pretty much only common in comic books.

Star Trek was, and mostly still is, something you watch on television. Star Wars you watched in movie theaters or on the television. Before the comics code, comics were still for kids, but horror comics, war comics, romance comics and science fiction comics were just as popular as super-heroes. After the code, the other genres migrated to other media and superheroes became even more aimed at children, like Saturday morning cartoons.

Then, when comics exploded in popularity really in the 80's, it was because of the appeal to teenager and young college age students - mostly boys. Teen Titans and the New X-men especially. Today, you get a lot of comparison between the X-Men and minorities, but really they're appeal was that the mutant experience mirrored adolescence.

When most people are little kids, they are cute, harmless and everyone loves them. Then, when they reach their teens, they stop being cute, people who loved them now get angry with them, their bodies change in scary ways, they face judgment from strangers and, worst of all, they feel dangerous. They can get pregnant or get someone pregnant, get into a car accident, hurt someone in a fight. They feel like freaks - and the way New X-men and Teen Titans were written - with terrific artwork, too - really spoke to that.

So, that's when a great deal of comics readers developed a strong emotional connection to the medium and associated it with the superhero genre - and those were the readers who would then go into comics and create a lot of the independent publishers like Image, too. So the entire medium was geared to deliver superheroes even as it became more mature.