Superheroes, Science Fiction, Action

"Superheroes" didn't used to constitute its own genre. There were the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, the Tim Burton Batman movies, a few stinky outliers like Howard the Duck, and that was it.

We no longer live in that world, folks.

We're living in a world where three or four superhero movies get released every year, and they're always among the biggest financial successes of that year. Superhero movies, which used to exist as a kind of amalgamation of action films and science fiction films, are definitely a genre unto themselves.

Superhero stories are defined largely by the characters who play them—the donners of tights and caps in the service of protecting the world from All That Is Awful. But they're also defined by two things: wondrous things in an ordinary world.

Superhero stories take classic heroes (think Greeks, think Knights of the Round Table) and put them in a modern setting. You don't see a lot of comic book stories set in the past (although there are outliers). Mostly, they exist in places we can understand: big cities like New York (or even fictional ones like Gotham), full of characters living lives that we can recognize as similar to our own.

Now add a healthy dose of fantasy and wild sci-fi: mad scientists, killer robots, pagan gods rubbing shoulders with alien empires beyond the stars. Mix that all together and let it bake for a while, and you get something like The Avengers: costumed do-gooders facing off against an alien invasion led by a magical deity. And yet…it all makes perfect sense.

That's the essence of comic book stories: bringing a particular brand of the fantastic into our workaday world. Even Harry Potter exists in a world separate from ours, hidden away in the corners. Superhero movies walk right down Main Street, bringing their fantastical threats and modern knights to a place we all inhabit.