Superheroes are Fairytales

Let me rephrase that. Superheroes are best when treated and presented like fairytales.

This isn’t just pride of authorship because I’ve toiled so long in the fairytale vineyards (for those who don’t know, I wrote a long-running series of comic books called Fables, about a sprawling community of fairytale characters). It’s an opinion I’ve come around to slowly and at times reluctantly.

Back in my earliest comic book reading days, in the late fifties and early sixties, I was an eager reader, which in this case means I wasn’t just eager to read (I was, but that isn’t my point here), but I was eager to buy into whatever story premise was set before me. Sure, it was due to the innocence and naïveté of youth. But, whatever the reason, I was willing to accept big and even silly concepts at face value. Show me and tell me Superboy is pulling a long string of planets through space on a big chain and I believed it, because the storytellers just showed that to me.

Back then the comics writers and artists simply said, “this is so,” without explanation or rationalization, and we believed it.

And because we believed it, those stories had undiminished power.

Then, in the late seventies, and throughout the eighties, we (I say we, because I was doing professional comics by that point) began to feel we had to explain things. We convinced ourselves explaining things made our stories better — more sophisticated. Superman can lift an entire building, but only because he projects some sort of psychic field around the building, which would otherwise crumble under its own weight. With my comic called the Elementals, I was as guilty as anyone, infected with the need to explain things — and over explain them.

We stopped saying, “this is so,” and started saying, “this is so, but only because this happened and these other things worked to make this happen and here’s some technobabble to sound like we’re explaining things in a more rational and believable way.”

And all the while our characters and stories were losing power. No, not ‘power’ as in, Superman used to be able to lift a million tons, but now he can only lift 100,000 tons. I mean, because we threw it away, we lost the power of our story to draw in a reader and evoke his awe and wonder.

It’s a basic psychological principle that the more you try to prop up a claim with unasked-for details and defenses, the less truthful your claim seems. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” is how Billy Shakespeare put it.

Which brings us to fairytales, which have never lost any of their power to engage and entertain. Why is that? I believe it’s mostly due to the fact that fairytales don’t explain a lot. They simply say, “this is so.” They don’t tell you about a pair of magic boots that take you seven leagues in a single step, and then try to justify that audacious claim by explaining how those boots work and how they counteract the natural forces of entropy, angular momentum, and inertia in order to achieve their miraculous effect. They simply say, “this is so.” They simply rely on the author’s authority to make a claim, and it always works. A princess is able to charm a ravenous lion because the text just said, ‘a princess charmed the ravenous lion.’ A bottle imp is able to grant wishes because the storyteller just told us he can, and no further explanation is required.

So then, why are we as comic book writers working so hard to surrender our authority by adding so many explanations and argue-bargle nonsense?

I’ve come full circle in my years as a reader and professional storyteller. The most powerful stories are the ones where tedious excuses aren’t offered. Superboy can pull a string of planets through space because we just showed him doing it.

Superheroes are best when they’re fairytales.