The Superhero Mega-thread

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Some love for the great Jack Kirby, who co-founded Marvel comics with Stan Lee.

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Can't... stop... posting these.

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Another great one.

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Another fortuitous discovery dropped in my feed today by YouTube (every once in a while they are good for something). Good stuff.

Somewhere in there I hope I got across the idea that after writing a group of characters for a certain amount of time (a series), they can take on more depth. You have to allow it though. If you hold them rigidly to what they've always been they can't grow and evolve. And it takes time and a certian amount of familiarity with the settings and the characters (and with what real people are like). Just like the host in the video above said about comic book characters—most of them started off pretty shallow and were developed by stages and by several writers and artists. It's pretty hard (maybe impossible, unless you're a really good writer with a lot of experience?) to develop really good characters quickly. Of course, it's also hard to do that when you're a new writer. It takes time logged at both levels.

I'm still learning and developing my ability to develop characters (and story settings, and the story idea, and all the rest of it). But if there's one thing I've definitely learned it's that time and growth matter. Both for yourself as an artist and for your characters (and everything else).

This is why before starting on a story I'll "write around the story" for a while. I do a lot of freewrites and little sketches with some of the characters interacting in various ways. It's aimed at finding and developing their traits. It's also why, at present anyway, I don't have a problem with taking a long time writing a story, and going back and re-writing parts (or all) of it. It's all dwell time.

In the final series we created we were a couple of Cheech & Chong-like stoners driving around all the time having run-ins with police and other predictable comedy tropes, but suddenly after having written many of the stories, my own versions of the characters blossomed and took on a little depth. Actually every aspect of my writing did. We had started the series in late high school, and it was about half a decade later, so I was in my mid twenties at the time. That's when the brain stops growing, because the final parts have come in (in the prefrontal cortex—the smart parts, that make us capable of abstract thinking at high levels, aka the deep and profound stuff). I've mentioned on the board before that at the same time I saw a big improvement in my drawing skills as well.

I based one story on a dream I had had, and that changed my whole approach to writing the series. Rather than just silly comical little episodes with stock characters, they became surreal and mysterious (the stories), and the characters differentiated strongly from each other (as well as from Cheech & Chong and Bill & Ted). I suppose this is where I really started discovery writing, winging it and depending on intuition and a combination of what felt like a few good ideas, but all held very loosely, to result in whatever magic was happening. And it kept happening. My friend said nothing ever happened in those stories, but he meant in a major plot-point way. His versions of them were gearheading around on other planets and laying waste to civilizations, whereas mine were taking very internal voyages of discovery. My deep interest in dreams was in full effect, and I was making them dreamlike, but not letting them get too crazy or weird, always trying to walk that tightrope where things remain—I don't know what to call it. Not going too far over the line into weirdness, and not using the dream elements just to allow crazy funny things to happen. It was always aimed more at a surreal sense of oddenss that was meant to be somewhat profound, Ok, I'm definitely overselling it now. I mean, it was all those things, but done at the level I was capable of at the time, which wasn't much to write home about. There was always the doubt—did all that crazy stuff really happen, or did they just share a weird drug trip together that somehow they both experienced?

For two decades I turned my attention elsewhere (other creative outlets), until I landed on a lucid dreaming forum where the idea struck me to write a story featuring myself and some of the more charismatic and popular people on the board. The story was a massive shared dream, and really it was only a step beyond what we were all already doing—keeping a dream journal there on the site where anyone can read your dreams, which often did feature other people from the board. I was just taking that dynamic and amping it up—doing a fictional version.

I had grown quite a bit as a person and as an artist, developed some depth and some character development myself I suppose, and found that my characters had as well. Probably largely because I based them on real people* I really liked and wanted to do them justice to what extent I could. I still wouldn't say those characters had a lot of depth to them compared to ones created by real writers, but it was a far cry from anything I had ever done. Fast forward about another decade and I find myself here, having recently decided to get back to writing and see how much I could learn about it, fill in all the gaps that remained.

* At least on their online personae, plus what little I knew about them from their own writing

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This was posted today in response to the massive surge of interest around the new Deadpool/Wolverine movie. I watched for some background, because I don't know anything about the character aside from having seen his first two movies.

What really struck me, and the reason I decided to post it here and write about it—is the fact that in the beginning he was a pretty ordinary character, and took some time and several writers and artists to develop into what he's become.

This was also true for Wolverine. If you saw my thread about him, he was a pretty flat character, just a hair-trigger psychopath with admanatium claws and no depth, until Chris Claremont and Frank Miller worked him over and did some serious development.

I find this is true as well for characters in stories. Well, I mean, duuh! Of course it is. It's like anything else in art—your ideas are pretty low-level at first, and don't get really good until you've put in the necessary time and effort to develop them.

If this is the case, it implies that you need to spend what I call some dwell time with your ideas and characters for them to develop fully. To age like hopefully a fine wine or a good cheese. I can say definitvely that most of my characters are pretty bland at first, and require some dwell time in my mind, which means a lot of active thinking about them but also letting my life situations filter into them. What I mean by that is that I think about my stories pretty much all the time (yes, even during lengthy stints when I'm not actively writing). That includes the characters, and definitely includes developing them. I had never explicitly thought about that until seeing this video, but it's something I've always intuitively done I guess. At least after a certain point.

Actually, let me modify that. As I've said before, I started writing in 4th grade with a friend, and all our characters were supposed to be ourselves, but they were all bland and featureless. At least in the beginning. We were just generic 'good guys' who were always fighting generic bad guys for some unknown reason. And none of the characters had any personality or deep character traits.

As I've also said, I started to move away from this, toward making the characters more like our actual personalities and character traits, but my friend really didn't like that. It caused a rift and an "I'm not your friend anymore, give me all my stuff back," but that turned out to be a small glitch, and pretty soon we were friends again. But I knew my writing was improving by leaps and bounds as I developed actual personalities and some character for my characters.

I messed that up a little. It should say "If your god is Thor, pay tribute to storms and the fury of nature." As well as being valiant and courageous. Be aware of and acknowledge that connection btween what you are inside and what exists outside, all around us. This is the part that's missing if you conceive of a god or the gods as strictly psychological archetypes. The gods are bigger than us (of course the unconscious is also much bigger than us, your conscious mind is a small outgrowth of it).

I've had a breakthrough in understanding of something that's been eluding me. This relates more directly to mythology than to superheroes, but since superheroes are our modern versions of mythic heroes, it still applies.

I noticed in studying Norse mythology that each god seems to be a combination of two things—some particular force of nature with a matching 'force of human nature.' This is what caused the breakthrough actually, the moment I worded it that way. It made me understand this clearly at last.

My problem was in understanding how gods (which was their name for Archetypes) relate to the external world. Obviously they're supposed to. They're not just inner psychological drives and experiences, they need to connect powerfully and profoundly with the external world. And wording that little phrase the way I did made me understand it in a new way.

Now it's hard to fathom how I didn't get this already. But the key to understanding it is in the fact that the outer forces of nature match the inner forces of human nature. Let me illustrate.

Thor for instance is the god of the storm—powerful, magnificent, capable of great destruction, and he also represents the human virtues of courage and valor, especially in combat. Just as Loki is fire, which can keep you warm and alive in freezing temps, but can also suddenly turn destructive and burn your house down. And he's also narcissism and betrayal. Those are the human traits that match his natural elemental force.

Of course! A god is both. Outer nature and the appropriate inner nature. This is the genius of the ancients, in recognizing that connection. Inner nature (human nature, or human traits) that are reflections of the much bigger external forces of nature. As above so below, as within so without. The man is a reflection of the environment, each of us in very particular ways. Our personality traits match certain forces of nature, so whatever god represents those forces is your god, which means to frequently give thanks and pay tribute to (which was originally conceived as sacrifice). You must make sacrifices to the larger external version of your own nature. If that's Thor, be valiant and courageous, especially when that's difficult, and pay whatever the price is. Of course today we understand balance is also necessary, Maybe don't keep doubling down on being valiant and courageous, especially if it's costing you too much and no longer giving any benefits.

But then it could be that each of us has has an entire pantheon inside, rather than just one god. That makes a lot more sense actually. In the monotheisms these things all got rolled up into one god who was then split into a good and a bad half. And it's very difficult to see those original connections anymore. This is why they say it's so important to study mythology, and especially to start with Norse, where it's the clearest.

This means that the psychology aspect of religion/mythology connects vitally with the philosophy aspect (natural philosophy, or what became aspects of science and naturalism/environmentalism).

And I'm not saying we need to all become religious and take on a literal belief in myths and fairy tales. According to Jung the cure for the ills of the modern world is to develop a religious attitude (which does not mean become a full believer). For my part I try to find the core of power and beauty and wisdom in the religions and the myths. Approach them as what they are and always were—repositories of the great wisdom of the ancient world. Our ancestors weren't stupid. Not at all. They were every bit as intelligent as we are today. They hadn't developed a highly rationalistic scientific method, and they had a hard time separating dreamlike ideas from reality, as children do. It's because children spend most of their time in the unconscious, especially when they're very young. The conscious mind emerges largely from the neocortex, the new part that sets us apart form the animals and allows us to do all this rational scientific thinking. That's the last part of the brain to grow in, and isn't finished until somewhere in your twenties. So stage by stage in our journey from children to adults we emerge from the unconscious into full rational/materialistic thinking. Some manage to hold onto some of the original unconscious processes. Well, of course, they're always going on beneath the level of conscious awareness (hence the term unconscious). But I mean some of us manage to keep a connection with it, with the magic that once animated our world (as children and even as adults in the ancient world).

To re-develop the connection, begin by losing some of the snarky modern attitude toward the ancients and their worldview. Understand that it represents a beautiful connectedness with the world and a love for all of it. Try to re-kindle that love and fan the flames each day. Take on a grateful attitude for the small pleasures in life. Learn about symbolic thinking. It's the native language of the unconscious, and is why we can interpret dreams so deeply. Dream and poetry have a powerful connection with ancient religion and myth. I think one of the worst things that's happened is our arrogant dismissal of these attitudes and this reverence for the world around us and within us. Pay attention to your dreams, write them down each day or at least dwell on them for some time. Try to get the feel for the unconscious ways of thinking, personifying the forces of nature and the machines around us. We do it a lot anyway, but we compartmentalize and think of that as just some silly quirk.

One important factor that sets the pulp heroes and the comic book heroes apart from the mythical and folk tale heroes is that the modern ones are known to both readers and writers to be fictional and made for entertainment. We have no idea exactly how mythology or folk tale originated, but people lived through the unconscious mind to a much larger extent then, the conscious mind was still under development and hadn't yet become our main way of thinking (rational, scientific, matter-of-fact, as opposed to mythical, poetic, dreamlike).

That attitude of deep gratitude and worship and thankfulness to the powers-that-be is inherent to the unconscious. It's what personifies our cars and the weather and makes us avoid stepping on cracks even though consciously we scoff at superstition. The religious and the mythical still live inside us and always will, but now we believe we know better, and we thumb our nose at those instincts and intuitions we once praised. We've disenchanted the world (the universe) and imagine it's all just random forces pushing and pulling against atoms. That may be strictly true, but it isn't a healthy attitude.

I think it's good that we no longer believe literally in the creations of the unconscious, but I think we've been rash in casting out the baby with the bathwater. We've lost our vital living connection with the universe, and our poetic feel for everything. The sense of connectedness. And now we've developed all manner of anxieties and neuroses. We no longer give praise to the powers that be and thank them when they go our way. I think this is proving to be a fatal disconnect—from our own vitality that lives in the unconscious. We've taken a sarcastic and malicious attitude toward it.

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I've seen the first ten minutes and so far it's utterly fascinating. All kinds of things I didn't know (and I was somewhat familiar with the history of the pulps). I like the way the one guy said he traces the history of the superhero all the way back to the beginning of civilzation, to Gilgamesh and Enkidu. And then he said something like all throughout history you see men and women with special abilities protecting society from dangers. The way he worded it, it includes the gods and mythic heroes as well as folk heroes, pulp heroes and comic book heroes. I suppose even detectives, police, and all manner of other protectors and helpers. Now I see it as just an evolution of the same idea running all throughout, and with the same purpose. To protect us from the scary and mysterious forces in the world around us, such as the forces of nature (as in the Norse mythology) or monsters or powerful people. And that makes me understand even more clearly what religion is and always has been—propitiatory rites with stories and songs and poems, relating the tales of these protectors (that's one aspect of it anyway). At the top of the food chain you have the gods (and the even bigger more powerful things like Titans or Frost Giants, representing the destructive, purposeless forces of nature), and then you have the half-mortal offspring of the gods (demigods), and then the various descendants of them, such as mythic heroes. In those early times of course it was all tied into one big story designed to encourage us to worship and pray to the gods in order to ensure their help. Later, as we became more secular, we lost that aspect and the explanations turned to science fiction and fantasy concepts and random chance (no gods—a purposeless universe).

I'm transfering this Youtube comment that I made recently here. Clearly I've been shadow-banned—my comments no longer get any responses, likes or dislikes. So I'll drop this here where people can at least see it:

The question was "Why didn't God just kill Satan?"

My response: "Because what Satan represents is always with us and must always be guarded against. The temptation to cast aside good values and take the fast/easy road, toward money, power, glory, sex, drugs, alcohol, or just by taking advantage of other people is not something that can be dispensed with. The same reason the Norse gods couldn't kill Loki (the spirit of narcissism and betrayal)—he was immortal just like them, all they could do was chain him in a cave until Ragnarok. God represents the right way to approach life, and Satan represents the temptations toward the wrong ways—things that feel good short term but will destroy you long term."

It also sounds very much like an early formulation of something psychological. They seem to have been wondering—what is it that suddenly causes some people to get up off their duff, take on a mission, and do something meaningful with their lives? They decided it must be the work of a god. It does seem rather miraculous, doesn't it? Even to the person it happens to. Who knows where that sudden burst of inspiration comes from?

These thoughts just connected up for me—

I said earlier on the thread that in the ancient world gods were thought to be the cause whenever someone had a sudden burst of inspiration toward a unifying goal. Like when Telemachus suddenly decided to sail off in search of his lost father Odysseus, and was able to stand up and make a rousing speech that left everyone impressed.

Well, a hero is a person who's been struck with inspiration to take on a life mission, putting himself (or herself) in great danger to help those who need it. I'm talking not just about superheros but mythic heroes as well. They also have special god-given abilities beyond the mere mortal. And sometimes weapons or devices that are a gift from some god to aid them in their quest.

So it can definitely be said, if one accepts this definition of what a god is, that a hero has a god inside, or is possessed of one, or inspired by one.

The axiom seems to apply as well to the Hebraic god. I've read and studied Genesis and Exodus, and so far what God has done is to inspire certain people to take on a mission, giving their lives purpose and unity. I'm sure he does more than that, but it's definitely a thing he does. I suppose it's why certain people are called missionaries, because they've been given a mission.