Can superheroes ever truly be realistic?

[superduperman]

The other day I saw the Dark Knight trilogy collection in the store and it made me realize something: Superheroes are inherently ridiculous concepts by nature no matter how realistic you try to make them. If the franchise had gone on any longer, they would have had to break out the more silly villains defeating the purpose of the "realistic" tone of the movies. There's a reason we aren't up to Dark Knight 5 by now: He'd be fighting Killer Croc and Mr. Freeze again. No, it probably wouldn't be Arnold in the suit but it would still be making an appearance none the less. Thus everything Nolan was trying to achieve would go out the window. This is true of any super-hero no matter how realistic they try to make him. Look at what Byrne did to Superman. He made him as realistic as you possibly could and it ended up stripping him of a lot of his support system. Krypton was a wasteland long before it blew up, his childhood was normal (read: boring) and half his supporting cast was either thrown out (Krypto, Supergirl, the Legion) or changed to completely different characters (Lex Luthor, the Kents). The problem with this is that sooner or later, someone like Mxyzptlk shows up and all of the sudden a flying dog with a cape doesn't seem so ridiculous after all. There's no way to keep it truly "realistic".

David Mazzucchelli went into this somewhat at the end of Year One. You can do a realistic story up to a point but the moment Bat-Mite shows up, it lessens the believability of the realistic story somewhat. Or, to quote Mazzucchelli himself "The more realistic super-heroes become, the less believable they are". Mike Grell made Green Arrow realistic almost to the point of taking him out of the mainstream DC universe altogether. But Superman was still flying around out there somewhere. The trick arrows were still a part of his history. Ditto the Arrow TV show. When it debuted two years ago, he was the most realistic take anyone had done to a super-hero. Even more so than the Dark Knight movies IMHO. But Green Arrow doesn't have a huge rogues gallery to begin with so he became kind of a stand in for Batman. Huntress, Ras Al Ghul and the League of Assassins, Deadshot, all made appearances and pretty soon he was living in the same universe as the Flash and the Atom and, depending on how the whole Supergirl TV show pans out, possibly Superman. Hawkgirl is going to be part of a spinoff show this fall.

Ten years after the Byrne reboot, the writers of the Superman comics were trying to find ways to force SA elements back into the comics. They ran out of ideas because they ran out of toys to play with. The Daredevil show is really good but it still takes place in the same universe as the movies and again, how many enemies does he have they can tap into without bringing the rest of the Marvel universe in to play with him? I hear Punisher is on tap to show up next season. Sony ran into this problem with the Spider-Man franchise. They wanted to do spin-offs but there was no one to spin-off to besides villains. The idea that a number of super-powered beings with unrelated origins showing up at the same time is not the most believable concept to begin with. The X-Men are about the only ones who can pull it off and that's only because people are born with powers there. And most of them aren't believable. Guy who heals from anything and is semi-immortal, not the most unbelievable concept. Guy whose skin turns to steel, not so much.

The system is set up so that you have to live in a universe with other heroes and over-the-top villains in order to stay interesting. Nobody wants to see Superman or Batman just catching burglars and purse snatchers all the time. I'm not trying to bash super-heroes; I love comics and super-heroes, but there seems to be a push to try to make them more and more "realistic" and it just seems like you can only go so far before you realize, hey, they're just a bunch of grown adults running around in masks. I don't know if you'd qualify this as a rant or what but it was something I thought about the other day and wanted to get off my chest.

[ed2962]

I dunno. I think you might be confusing a serious tone or more "adult" with realistic. With many of the examples you gave, the creators never pretended to be doing something "realistic."

[Savage Savant]

I don't read superheroes, sci-fi & fantasy fiction for realism. It's all a suspension of disbelief. I read these stories because I enjoy discovering the adventures of larger-than-life characters & understanding their personalities & abilities as well as how they react to certain situations or how they use their abilities to solve their problems as well as their motivations among other things. If I want realism, I'll watch a documentary or read a non-fiction novel regarding an event or a biography, etc.

[Lee Stone]

The benefit of comics is that anything can be drawn on paper.
So you can make them as realistic as you want. Or not.
And DC and Marvel are both shared universes built on fantastic science, aliens, magic, deus ex machina storytelling and atomic monsters.

Sandman Mystery Theatre would be a realistic approach, as would Batman Year One.
But realistically, both characters would've been killed within two years of their careers.

One of the most realistic characters, James Bond, partakes in some of the most unrealistic adventures that are full of improbable events and unrealistic outcomes.

I understand that the people in suits think Batman (and the other heroes) would be more interesting to general audiences if they just remove the costume, call him Bruce Wayne and have him fight gang members and mobsters.
But then he wouldn't be Batman anymore.
It would be Die Hard with a millionaire.

If readers wanted that, the top selling comics would be Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Kickboxer, The Expendables and The Transporter.
Not Batman, Justice League, X-Men, Avengers and Spider-man.

[quinnzel]

I think the thing about superheroes, as the OP and others said, is that superheroes are inherently unrealistic. They're superpowered, are almost supernatural, and carry (in some cases) an almost godlike air about them. So in that respect, superheroes are, by definition, not realistic. They're fantastic departures from what is normal and known.

That being said, superheroes still have very human elements about them. And take superheroes that aren't technically "super" such as Batman. I mean, yeah, a billionaire with a Bat Cave who grapples his way through a huge city taking down bad guys isn't exactly realistic, but at the end of the day he's still human (well, with the exception of Bat-God). And most superheroes, even the invulnerable and alien ones like Superman, are still portrayed as having very human emotions. In that respect, most superhero stories have very realistic elements.

[blackbolt396]

No, that's goes against what a superhero is.

[byrd156]

Superheros aren't supposed to be realistic, that's kinda the point. Sure there can be realism to the stories but it can only go so far.

[Radix]

No fiction is truly realistic. Most fiction has unrealistic physics, and the like.

[t hedge coke]

Even Realism isn't realistic.

I do like Morrison's suggestion of superhero fiction as being particularly suited to Social Realism, though.

[FanboyStranger]

No. A truly realistic superhero comic would be one issue of putting on a costume to fight crime, then twenty issues of the character in traction.

I think when people say "realistic superhero" what they really mean is how does the existence of a superhero impact an overwise realistic world. The superhero itself is not realistic at all, but the world he/she inhabits may be.

[Billy Batson]

Sure.
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com...l-time-batman/

[t hedge coke]

How did that Top Cow series go, about the girl patrolling her neighborhood at night with some gear she bought online, most of which she couldn't use until she'd built up more muscle or had some training?

I really liked the first issue, but never picked up the rest, mainly because I didn't realize it was a continuing story until fairly recently.

[JackDaw]

DC and Marvel mainstream super hero tales use a shed load of story telling conventions, such as:-

1/ Main characters never die "permanently".
2/ Main characters are all good looking.
3/ Main heroes wear stylised costumes.
4/ Main characters never age convincingly.
5/ The good guys always win.

Etc, etc, etc.

Of course, you can write stories using a different set of conventions. And many great writers in other genres do just that, and produce wonderful stories. And...of course... it could be done (and has been done) using super powered lead characters.

But for some obscure reason you always get a shed load of fans in threads like this effectively asserting "No departure from the conventions is possible"....with the "clinching argument": "Because this is comics". No its not: Its one small area of comics where the writers usually stick to existing conventions, because that's what the paying customers in that market segment tend to prefer.

Do other sets of conventions actually support better story telling?? Personally I think they do (mainstream super hero yarns are a small part of my reading nowadays). If you look at the mainstream super hero conventions dispassionately, they are more about "brand management" than designed to support good stories.

[Void-X]

Salt to taste, know what I mean?

Quesada, as an example, (as I understand it) doesn't particularly care for the uber powerful guys, the street level characters being more realistic to him. Okay. In a manner, I could see that.

But there have always been the uber powerful characters. Ancient mythologies are filled with characters like Heracles, Zeus, Gilgamesh, Atlas, etc....

Some of the Lord of the Rings characters (the books, not the movies) were particularly powerful as I recall....

And there are the Superman like characters of today.

Mark Gruenwald was one who went as far as to inject his brand of realism into every spectrum (power tier?) of Marvel characters, placing (attempted to place??) limitations on some characters that had not previously been seen before.

At any rate, to me the whole point is to inject as much realism into the character being written without taking away from the fantasy for the fan of the character.

Readers of Batman read the book, in part, because they like Batman's power set.

Reader's of Superman, same thing.

The thing about John Byrne is right. Silver Age Superman had become so powerful in fact, it had become unrealistic for most of his villains to be a legitimate threat. But he was knocked so far from his previous levels of power, he started to stray from what made him popular in the first place. Really smart writer's created scary villains (Darkseid, Doomsday).

At the end of the day, it really just matters what you as an individual are into.

[Dispenser Of Truth]

The most realistic superhero story I've ever read was a short piece in a superhero anthology novel, about a 16-year old who'd earned his blackbelt and decided to be a superhero to defend his hometown. He found and knocked out a handful of petty crooks, until he misjudged a kick and broke a guy's neck; looking through his pockets for a phone to call the police, he found his wallet, which contained a picture of the crook with his family. That's it. That's the story. That's a real superhero.

Beyond that, while realistic stories adhering to realistic conventions like Ultimates and Miracleman can be interesting in their own worlds, it's a terrible setting for a larger superhero universe that's supposed to encompass superheroes in capes and masks running roughshod without much in the way of causalities or legal problems, gods, parallel universes, time-travel, ghosts, etc. The half-and-half approach so many creators like to take, as exemplified by the likes of John Byrne's Superman, is the absolute worst of both worlds: the mundanity of taking away the more fantastic aspects, without exploring the more fascinating repercussions of a 'realistic' superhero. You get a generic rock-em-sock-em soap opera. Commit one way or the other. I'd be perfectly fine with DC abandoning even the base pretension of realism and turning into a full-on Wildstorm/ABC style Superworld, the way Grant Morrison's work always seemed to imply.