I think the roaring success of movies like The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers proves that the world loves a good Superhero today as much as it ever has. Superheroes are an ideal; our best qualities boiled down into a single metaphorical being so that we can strive towards it, even though it might be unattainable.
Personally, I’ve been living off a steady diet of superheroes my entire life, and look where it got me! Yep, they’re the best, but more often than not a comic book reader has to … accept certain things, if he or she is to enjoy the medium. We have to accept implausibility as possible, or at least in some way credible.
There are many, many superheroes kicking around by now; it’s probably around 5% of them that get their own movie. DC and Marvel alone are responsible for god knows how many in total – I’m betting it’s into the thousands. And when you factor in your indie labels, you could be talking into 5 figures.
Some of these Superheroes have almost plausible origins; Batman for example. Rich kid sees his parents murdered, grows up pissed off, gets revenge times a million – I’m not saying every Batman moment from then on is entirely plausible, but this origin could pretty much happen.
But most of the time, Superhero origins are way outside the realms of possibility. And it takes a conscious effort on the behalf of the reader to suspend disbelief, something which has to happen if we’re to get behind what we’re reading.
Here are 8 such origins, ones that left me scratching my head in puzzlement thinking; ‘Hang on…’.
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2 Comments
In the first place, I agree with everthing you said with the exception of Hellboy. Putting aside the fact that when Hellboy was summoned his mind was a blank slate, which I’m sure you already know, you can’t believe Mignola wasn’t laughing his ass off the whole time he was conceiving the idea. Although I’ve never read or heard anything about the inspiration for the character, I do know that he first appeared in a comicon magazine. I’d guess he was created on a lark as a kind of joke, so if it sounds silly odds are it was meant to be.
And second, even though I agree with the rest, I completely disagree with the order. What you have here is very nearly the reverse of what it should be, apparently because you have a problem with the whole “radiation did it” scenario. Not that it’s not crazy to think of as a good thing, but at least when Marvel wrote that stuff it at least seemed semi-plausible. Lee wasn’t a scientist and not the many folks really understood it very well. And though more optomistic, it wasn’t all that different from what you’d have seen in a movie theatre back then. At least they were trying to write stories you that didn’t melt your brain.
As for the LSH, all of DC’s comics stories were stupid, stupid, stupid. They wrote for children and didn’t give a damn about the quality of their product. Put that stuff at the top where it belongs.
Great article, yo. Made me laugh all throughout. Can’t believe Superman didn’t make the list though. I mean aliens, green rock, flying, super strength, laser eyes, super breath, ice breath, super hearing, xray vision, invicibility, super speed, c’mon…