Heroes' powers....?!

[Van Plexico]

Just a thought: Back in the day, we would have a pretty good idea of the various powers of all the characters in a comic we read, after maybe three issues, max. Maybe even just one issue.

Today...

If you started reading NEW AVENGERS today, would you have any idea about the powers of the various characters? Even after a year or more?? I mean, they hardly ever do anything, so how would you know??

[dlw66]

If this were the Legion, there would be a mad contest to see who could earn the name "Boredom Boy".

[BigDuke]

dlw66 said:

If this were the Legion, there would be a mad contest to see who could earn the name "Boredom Boy".

Spider woman could be Duplicitous Girl and Sentry could be Angst Lad.

[dlw66]

Spider-Woman = Mammary Maid?

Sorry...

[uberwolf]

I thought Power Girl was Mammary Maid...

It's true VAN, if some brand new reader hit NA he/she/it wouldn't have a clue other than Spiderwoman emits pheromones ( heh, almost wrote hormones ) and once every ten issues Iron Man can use repulsor rays. How does this title keep getting sales??? Back in the day you knew no matter what comic you picked up there was going to be a fight. If there was a guest hero on the cover you knew the two were going to throw down for at least a couple of panels. Today the covers have nothing to do with what's inside and NOTHING ever happens. I don't get it, I really don't.

[Bored Yesterday]

Fascinating -- the super hero genre has evolved into something else entirely. So what is it, if the people aren't heroic and don't demonstrate their super abilities? No wonder there aren't many new readers! The whole appeal of super heroes is their powers and fights. That's what the genere is all about. It's as if every episode of Star Trek took place on that 1940s ganster Earth world that appeared in one episode.

Super heroics is dead!!!! -- AND MARVEL KILLED IT!!!!! You can't have super heroes without super powers.

[Bored Yesterday]

My point being, that if the powers aren't used -- they aren't central to the narrative anymore.

[dlw66]

DC is doing some good stuff. I enjoy the tpb's of Teen Titans, and Waid's Legion is pretty good. Paul Dini is doing one-and-done stories in Detective that are good (and illustrated by my pal Don Kramer). Not sure what is going on in the Superman universe. Justice continues to be good.

For Marvel, I'm just reading Ultimate FF, Ultimates, EMH II and that's about it. I spend most of my comics reading time on the Avengers and FF DVD-ROMs.

[Engage]

I think the move away from fighting into more dialogue-driven comics is simply the continuation of the rejection of the 90s and the rebuilding of comics that occurred around 2000. The powers of the characters took a back-seat to the character as comics tried to re-legitimize themselves.

The powers of a character like Spider-Woman have always been pretty poorly defined, but in a series where there simply isn't a fight every issue and the approach to fighting is much different than in more tradition Avengers books the fact she has powers at all is forced to take a backseat. While a better effort really needs to be made to teach us about these people (Seriously, whats the deal with Spider-Woman?) it needs to be done differently than it would have before. It needs to be done in a more FF style, through the mundane use of powers supplemented by the extraordinary when used in combat.

New Avengers is weakly written in this area. Comics can be done without constant (or even often) fighting, but they need to be supplemented with interesting plot and relationships. We should know a lot more about these characters than we do.

DC has a tendency to go too far the other way when they get away from their top characters. When I open a Green Arrow comic I want him to be taking on a challenge that he can't possibly fight. Way too often is it all about shooting arrows and blowing stuff up. There needs to be a balance between the explosion side of comics and the story side of comics. Just because there is minimal fighting in New Avengers doesn't make it automatically weak in this regard, the fact that we don' t know anything about the characters and don't know anything about their powers does.

Also, I what exactly is the deal with Spider-Woman? I just don't get it.

[uberwolf]

I had the original Spiderwoman series and they went the creepy angle with her. Her big arch enemy was Morgan Le Fay of all people.

[The Night Phantom]

In the “good ol’ days”, sometimes even feature characters had fairly nebulous powers. I think this was more common among the women, and so it was tough to get a handle on what characters like Crystal and the Scarlet Witch could or could not do. Still, generally speaking, Stan and company sooner or later would give you a fair idea of a character’s abilities that could be summed up in one or more single words or short phrases (“super-strength”, “ability to fly”, etc.), even if the hairy details (the kind you might find in the OHOTMU Deluxe Edition) were nowhere in sight.

I think Van and Engage are right about the reasons as to the loss of this kind of information from Marvel stories. I’d like to add that another reason would be the tendency to avoid story-internal exposition altogether, be it in captions, dialogue, thought balloons, or flashbacks (the major exception to this tendency being the “previously” blurbs often appearing at the beginning of Marvel comics). Traditionally, that exposition often helped explain the characters’ abilities. Much of the time the art alone does not make it clear what kind of power is being invoked. Even “obvious” cases are not always obvious: for instance, if a character is seen lifting a heavy-looking object like a pickup truck, the most likely explanation is that the character has super-strength—but other possibilities exist, such as the power to negate gravity or some power of illusion. In olden days this unusual sight would often be explained one way or another, but these days it seldom is.