Practical comic book heroes?

[nancylebov]

Here's an essay raising the question of why good superheroes don't use their powers for their own good.

I don't sign on to every idea in the essay, but I'm curious about whether any good comic book characters make decent or better livings by using their superpowers. If not--and I can't think of any who do, but I'm no comics expert, then why not?

Comments

[madfilkentist]

It's the notion that self-advancement is somehow evil. Superman's expected to save the world repeatedly without any reward except applause; he's merely paying a "debt to the community."

It's not just superheroes. On the TV series "Charmed," there's a rule that witches can't use their powers to earn a living. If they try, it backfires on them.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Self-advancement is not evil, just irrelevant to being a hero. But super-self-advancement, that's hard to reconcile with super-heroism.

[madfilkentist]

You've said you don't want to deal with the egoism-altruism debate, so I'll leave that aside for the moment. But another angle on it is that it's just too easy for people with major super-powers to use them to make a lot of money. It wouldn't make an interesting story. For much the same reason, superheroes spend more time fighting villains than doing things that could really improve the world; I'm sure Superman could come up with a way to reduce the amount of heat reaching Earth from the sun, for instance. Superheroes have to be under artificial constraints in proportion to their powers.

"Kiki's Delivery Service" is a charming story which offers an instructive counterexample. Her only "power" is the ability to fly a broom, she's under the limits of being a child, and she uses what she has. If she had major powers, it would be much harder to make an interesting story of her using them for a living.

Is there a business case for super heroes?

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

I have a sudden urge to write a minor paper called "the economics of super powers."

Here's the problem: if you don't want to break the law, and there are no supervillains around to fight, and you don't want to join the military, how do you make money from your super powers?

Take Superman. Pretty much everything he does can be replicated cheaper by mechanical devices. The one exception I could think of is ferrying satellites and other space stuff up into the sky. But that's self-limiting, since a smart government or business would use such a service to get self-sustaining industry into space. Then stop.

I'm not so sure Superman could "come up with a way to reduce the amount of heat from the sun," at least not one that we know for sure would avoid nasty side effects. And if so, how much would he charge?

And that's superman, the business case for other super heroes would be even harder to develop.

Oh sure, it could be done. But it's not so easy and it doesn't lead to quick millions.

Re: Is there a business case for super heroes?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Oh a Superman could make money for more than putting stuff in orbit. Think of all the heavy lift operations that are difficult or impossible that he could do. Trees, giant cooler units to the top of buildings, mountaintop removal, etc, etc. Plus there are the entertainment options as well. What would Hollywood pay for a real life flying man who isn't endangered by an stunt? That would fit nicely with a career as a dogooder as well. All those saving the world and little kitten things? Free publicity. Ditto a number of other powers.

Iceman would have very useful powers for making a great deal of money on out of season winter sports or even upping the snow pack/getting the lake frozen early for resorts. I bet he could make $100,000+ a year.

The Flash has an obvious in to more money by just doing lots of work very fast. Terribly useful. Though probably not as remunerative as some.

Someone with shrinking powers, like The Atom, would actually do a bunch better than someone with more combat useful skills. Look at how much surgeons make and then imagine what could be charged for the one person who can shrink down in size to excise a tumor that convention techniques cannot get at.

Spiderman... Well he's harder. Other than giving people thrill rides along with him, and I wonder if any city would allow that, I'm having trouble thinking of anything.

Re: Is there a business case for super heroes?

[inquisitiveravn.livejournal.com]

Spiderman? He'd make an excellent bodyguard. Think about it. Extraordinary reflexes, super strength, a non-lethal ranged weapon that does a remarkable job of immobilizing threats, and danger sense. Okay, the danger sense seems to work on threats to him personally, but if he's sticking close to his client, then any threats to the client are likely to have him in the splatter zone and therefore be something he could detect.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, this is it exactly (I was trying to express this after four hours of sleep, while waiting for some pain to subside so I could go back to sleep) -- it's just not a story if a person uses superpowers to make a good living, unless you throw some constraints at it.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Well, the fellow in question seems to be irritated by altruism in general, so I probably can't help much. I mean, I cant have much of a discussion with a person who thinks that collective virtues are tiresome and that individual promotion is a virtue in need of strenuous defense.

But anyway. Superheroes are generally called on by the pliot to take on fairly extreme situations. That's what makes them superheroes. If a person undertook to use superpowers in extreme situations to benefit themselves, they'd not be heroes -- heroes are people for whom the public feels some admiration and gratitude. You can't be grateful to someone who is helping themselves and not you. And in the case of the misunderstood and persecuted superhero, there's juist no point in it if the guy's not really altruistic -- he's just a criminal if everybody thinks he's benefitting at other people's expense and it turns out to be true. Or if the most you can say is "well, he's not really hurting anybody, he's just making himself rich."

It's a very important thread through folklore that the magical entity cannot help itself: and it's another important thread through folklore that the most powerful witches and heroes are to be found among the marginal, the poor, and the powerless.

Anyway, Bruce Wayne is rich. Clark Kent is comfortable. A whole lot of other superheroes have really fancy digs, advanced hideouts, mysterious technology -- somebody had to pay for all that.

Peter Parker in particular was designed to express youthful alienation and anxiety. The nice fellow points out that the comic book faltered when he successfully married a beautiful woman and got a steady job and stopped being considered a criminal. His whole schtick is that even when the world is against you in so many ways, you have to steop up and do the right thing as best you can. And when you've got things to feel bad about, you have to try at least to live right in the face of it. And there's really no way to define "live right" except in the context of other people's welfare.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

If you read more of his blog, you'll find that he's trying to deal with a strong general habit of squelching himself. I'm hoping he'll find some balance in the course of his experiment.

In any case, I was asking about the superhero angle. Superheroes generally have their powers all the time, not just in emergencies.

What's the difference between a saint and a professional? A professional gets paid. I believe this is told as a doctor/nurse joke.

Fire-fighters are generally considered heroes, whether they're paid or volunteers. Maybe part of what's going on in the comics is that due to the desire for ongoing characters, superheroes are almost never really risking their lives.

It might be possible to have a good story about superheroes that get salaries (even substantial salaries) for being on call to deal with emergencies. Why shouldn't the grateful city say it with cash as well as a parade? I'm not saying that every story should have well-off superheroes, but if there aren't any, something interesting might be causing it.

Is it really a standard folklore trope that magical entities can't use their magic to help themselves? It's certainly likely that the story will include a magical entity that's trapped at the moment, but that just means its powers have limits.

Bruce Wayne is rich. IIRC, he runs a big company. He doesn't have any superpowers, so he obviously isn't using them to help run it.

Superman is an interesting case. Arguably, he doesn't need money. Clark Kent is how he supports his hobby of being with humans. Still, he sort of counts.

Yes, a lot of superheroes seem to be rich, but how? It'd be nice to have sometimes get a little more sophistication than "it's more interesting if the superhero has a big lab, so he or she (is it ever she?) has a big lab. Don't ask--it's time for the next fistfight.

Possibly a lot of superpowers aren't much good for making money. What would the Human Torch do, especially with vaudeville being over? On the other hand, if there were some superheroes on stage (and flying above it, of course), maybe vaudeville wouldn't have died. In any case, I've found out the hard way that my imagination can't cover the possibilities nearly as well as decades of comics writers and fans do.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Magical entities who can't help themselves:

-- "the grateful dead" type of story, where the hero (usually a youngest-son or discharged-soldier type of hero, the poor and wandering kind)helps out the seemingly helpless (the dead, an old beggar, a trapped animal, ants, even, in one case I read, an overburdened apple tree . . .) and the seemingly helpless turns out to have some magical properties that come to the aid of the hero.

--djinn, though, that may be a special case of the "grateful dead."

Something else is tickling my consciousness, but I can't think of what it is.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Most comic book universes assume that vigilanteism will continue to be illegal. Peter Parker can't make a living off of using his powers and still fight crime with them, or else he'd go to jail. But there are examples of superheroes making money off of their powers in various ways. Somebody already brought up Reed Richards; Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne both also come to mind. Booster Gold makes a steady living off of product endorsements.

Perhaps the best example I've seen, though, is Marvel comics' The Avengers during the 80s and early 90s. I'm not an expert, but I gather that some time around the 1970s or early 1980s the Avengers signed up as a government-supervised superhero team, specifically to get around the vigilante issue. They're allowed broad autonomy but are subject to government oversight; in exchange the government covers the legal expenses, the insurance, and a small living allowance for any Avengers who are on active duty. At one time or another virtually half of the superheroes in the Marvel universe have served as active duty Avengers; once they leave the team, they carry Avengers reservist cards and are on call for emergencies the way that the Army Reserve is. Of course they've weirded this all up lately, effectively making every American superhero join a variant on that system and everybody who doesn't becomes a top-priority supervillain. So yeah, in the Marvel universe, saving the universe is a salaried position.

But then, everybody brings their own politics to the interpretation of superhero mythology. Randroids whine about superheroes not getting paid. FDR liberals like me whine about them being above the law.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

In fact, Clark Kent does use his superpowers to make a good living--he's a more successful reporter because he's got the scoop on Superman's deeds.

The Fantastic Four all live off of Reed's inventions and discoveries.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Is Reed's inventiveness a superpower?

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Some have argued so, though I don't think it has ever been stated in canon.

The most radical version I ever heard was that Reed's *real* superpower is that physics actually conforms to his theories, not the other way around.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I would say that it's his main superpower. Stretching is only an adjunct.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

And Peter Parker uses his Spider-Man identity to make a living. He carries a camera and takes pictures of what he does as Spider-Man, and sells the pictures to his newspaper.

At least he used to. They managed to make me feel like an idiot for sticking with the series back in the 80s. For all I know, he's a crossing guard now.

Okay, this is long.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Several years ago, there was a superhero group in DC called "The Power Company", headed by a lawyer named Josiah Powers, who'd accidentally got super abilities during a freak accident that activated his metagene. He didn't realize this until they manifested in court one day, and he got fired from his law firm.

So he started this group organized as a law firm - some would be partners, owning shares, and some would be associates, getting salaries. The firm provided medical care, transportation and equipment repair for those who needed it. And they did work-for-hire (pickups, I believe, bodyguard work, publicity help) as well as "pro-bono". Kurt Busiek did the writing, and it was fairly well-done, but it was never popular plus all of the characters (nicely inter-racial and Powers himself was both black and, in an entirely incidental way, gay) and was canceled after about a year or so. Only two of these characters have shown up since in other comics.

In the just concluded weekly "52", the character Booster Gold, who has always been an opportunist looking for a deal, actually got sponsorship deals - wore their logos on his costume and everything. This was played for humor until it ended badly.

Part of Bruce Wayne's fortune now comes from his toys - he does extensive R&D, and gets consumer electronics, plus he invests in other firms that make devices he can use. (Luthor, I think, has done much the same thing.)

For about ten years, Wally West as the Flash was supported by a foundation so he *was* a superhero for a living. I believe the same goes for Roy Harper as Arsenal (as opposed to Speedy.) However, the only way this could work would be for them to NOT have secret identities - everyone knew who they really were. Can't pay a mask, after all. I'm not sure what's going on with them now, given the upheavals in the DC universe.

Re: Okay, this is long.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thank. So it's rare (and possibly hard to make work as a story, especially with secret identities), but it happens.

Of course you can pay a mask. You might require a small demonstration of the superpower as proof of identity. Or the superhero could set up a bank account. Maybe not Swiss anymore, but I'd be surprised if there isn't someplace which protects identities.

Or was that an X-man reference?

Speaking of the Flash

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

ISTR a group of super-speedsters from the USSR, who were his enemies for a while, then defected to the U.S. They formed a courier company, essentially doing a FedEx like service; moving small packages across the U.S. in a matter of an hour or so.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

I haven't posted comments because I have difficulty rememebring what my user ID and password are over there and just don't have time.

It''s been a couple of years since I followed the genre, but a few reactions occur to me.

First, there are plenty of comic books over the years that have explored various aspects of this. Everything from Miracle Man (in which super powered people take over the world "for their own good") to DC's "Booster Gold" (who travels back in time to make his fortune in the past) to John Sable (Bounty Hunter).

Heck, the Fantastic Four, under John Byrne, made a nice living off various patents and endorsements and so forth.

Second, comic books are genre fiction -- often highly stylized and running on various conventions. For years, they were escapist literature targeted at a specific audience looking for a nice simple, high adventure storyline: good trashes evil. After the collapse of the comic book code, various writers and artists started playing with the genre and the conventions etc. This achieved some following and some critical acclaim, but baiscally did not sell as well.

Why? For the same reason formulaic romances sell reliably well and more complex romances with more realistic settings sell less reliably (i.e., they may be huge sellers, or total flops, but they don't have the same reliable consumption pattern.) Ditto any set of genre fiction or even endless sequels by best selling authors. Because people like the conventions. They enjoy them. Not as their only choice of literature necessarily. But as a guilty pleasure of relaxing read or whatever draws them back month after month.

People can live in the real world, and like reading about super powered people who decide to set aside their own self-interest and save the world. IF they want soemthing else, they can usually find it somewhere else. The on-again off-again indy market shows that there are people who will pay a premium for a different kind of hero story. But the current conventions appear to keep a stable audience happy.

Third, the use of powers to save the world, rather than merely for self-advancement (or additionally for self-advancement), provides you with a bunch of interesting storylines. Superman trying to figure out how to make a living from super powers without committing crimes is perhaps an interesting puzzle (it really isn't as easy as one might think), and it is pretty boring. But using your powers to stop Apokolips from taking over Earth? That's cool.

In the end, I will fall back on the old Libertarian saw that if the market wanted different conventions, we'd have them. Anyone who wants to start the adventures of Enlightened Self-Interested Person is free to do so. If it makes for good stories, people will read it.

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

If it makes for good stories, people will read it.

Some will. In the SF-TV world the USS Enterprise had adventures with no examination of what it took to economically support it and was a huge hit. Serenity's captain cut maintenance corners to meet payroll and the show failed on the big and little screens.

I assume a superhero trying to balance his budget with free-lance metawork would have a similiarly small (if devoted) fanbase.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

On the other hand a superhero series, Angel, by the same creator dealt with a lot of money issues in its five year run. While another superhero TV series much closer to the traditional spandex suit superhero type, The Tick, didn't last even one season.

Conclusions: The sample is probably too small to come to any. But I speculate that creating a new series is harder than spin offs like Angel and Enterprise.

[laughing-fox.livejournal.com]

I think it goes back to the whole 'power corrupts' idea. The good guys are usually the underdog, because the bad guys are always willing to use their powers to make tons of money and huge doomsday devices. And therefore always have the advantage over the altruistic hero. The bad guys are the ones in power, and have been corrupted by it. The hero can only stay a hero if he avoids the temptations of wealth and power.

It's like all those hollywood starlets - they get a bit of fame and fortune, and suddenly it goes to their head and they get out of control. Now add to that mix a super-power, and you have a recipe for disaster. Not everyone falls into this trap, but then they usually have a good family and/or support system, like Aunt May and Mary Jane, to keep them grounded. Batman has the loss of his parents to keep him focused (no powers, but he has money and brains). Superman has his farm-boy upbringing.

And some people just can't sit by and do nothing when others need help. Doesn't matter if they're a doctor, firefighter, or a superhero. Not everyone is built to be a bystander, some are just hard-wired to take action. I think the movie the Incredibles took a suprisingly good look at that aspect of super-heroism. Of course, the question there is - are they doing it for the thrill, the adrenaline rush, as well as for altruistic ideals? And is that bad as well, or do you need to be an adrenaline junkie to be a superhero? When does it cross the line from courage, to show-boating, to an addiction? When is it a calling or avocation, and when is it a mental health issue? (bruce wayne really walks the tightrope on there)

Yeah, the story lines that focus on these issues can get preachy and moralistic, which the original article complained about. But the point is that they make you stop and *think* about these things, even if you don't agree or identify with them.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There's always Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. He at least made noises about wanting to get paid, although I don't know how often he actually got to cash a check. These days (or at least up to Civil War) he worked as a metahuman body guard. Strong Guy was Lila Cheney's body guard. DC had Hero Hotline, which was a group of low-grade supers who used their powers to help clients.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

"Luke Cage -- Hero For Hire."

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Nicoll, you gosh darn guy! That wasn't there until I hit "send"!

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

I avoid superhero comics, so I'll mention a couple novels instead. On top of my to-read stack is Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible which opens with this:

This morning on planet Earth, there are one thousand, six hundred, and eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otherwise-superpowered persons. Of these, one hundred and twenty-six are civilians leading normal lives. Thirty-eight are kept in research facilities funded by the Department of Defense, or foreign equivalents. Two hundred and twenty-six are aquatic, confined to the oceans. Twenty-nine are strictly localized--powerful trees and genii loci, the Great Sphinx, and the Pyramid of Giza. Twenty-five are microscopic (including the Infinitesimal Seven). Three are dogs; four are cats; one is a bird. Six are made of gas. One is a mobile electrical effect, more of a weather pattern than a person. Seventy-seven are alien visitors. Thirty-eight are missing. Forty-one are off-continuity, permanent emigres to Earth's alternate realities and branching timestreams.

Six hundred and seventy-eight use their powers to fight crime, while four hundred and forty-one use their powers to commit them. Forty-four are currently confined in Special Containment Facilities for enhanced criminals.

And Shepherd's Cassandra Kresnov isn't exactly a superhero, but she's still stronger, faster, and smarter than everyone else on the planet (except for a couple others like herself).

Soon I Will Be Invincible

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

is a great little book.