The Dark Fantastic: Emancipating the Imagination

Anonymous asked: Where do you think the urge for "realism" in comics comes from? It seems weird that people stress such minor squabbles in a world where guys can fly and shoot lasers from their eyes.

brevoortformspring:

Well, it starts with a need for verisimilitude, a desire for there to be a sense of real-world consequences to these fairy stories. That’s a function to a certain degree of age, where you can’t accept the same level of unreality as an eight-year-old can. Additionally, there’s still that sense, especially as one grows older, that all of this stuff is silly, stupid, kid’s stuff. And yet, you love it, and you want other people to respect it–and so you want it more and more to be “serious”, to play by real-world rules. So that it doesn’t embarrass you.

Years ago, when I was just a fan, I once wrote a thing called “The Most Realistic Batman Story Ever”, which amounted to this: Batman, from the rooftop across the street, sees a jewelry store being robbed. So he casts his batline in order to swing down to the attack. Then, having failed to secure it, he reels it back up, resets, and throws it again. And again, and again. Finally, after a dozen attempts, he gets it to catch, and swings down to the jewelry store, surprising the thieves by crashing through the plate glass front window. His body is cut to ribbons–seconds before the startled gunmen pull their guns wildly and shoot him dead.

That’s a very didactic and cynical sort of exercise, even though it’s cynicism about cynicism. But there’s a nugget of truth to it. That’s not the story we want. Even the most realistic-skewing fan doesn’t really want realism, what they really want is verisimilitude–emotional truth, the feeling that the events taking place are of import to the characters, and the imparting of an emotional experience onto the reader. That’s what we consume stories for.

WATCHMEN is rightly considered one of the most realistic and thoroughly thought-through comic books ever created. And it’s full of absolute nonsense that would never work. Hell, its whole ending is predicated on an absurd twist that’s right out of a comic book. To me, though, that’s not a flaw in WATCHMEN, that’s one of the things that makes it great. Because while it spends a lot of time deconstructing a number of the tropes of the super hero genre, it spends just as much time reveling in them.