City of Heroes (part 3)

Interesting enough, why is there a preconception against reading comic books?

I ask this question as a reader of speculative fiction who knows that there are the same preconceptions against books I read. Is it the same? I don't know. Maybe? Is it because people think that reading comic books is for kids? Worse, for the females, is it because people think reading comic books is for boys only?

Of course, looking at the past two comic books I've reviewed, these can be described as boys' "reading material." You have the the men and women in skin-tight and colorful costumes, sometimes masked, most of the times not. You have these characters battling it out for one thing or another: sometimes for good and sometimes for material gain; most of the time it's for reasons as varied as normal people have in deciding what milk they're gonna get at the store.

On the other hand, Brian Michael Bendis' EisnerAward-winning Powers is pure police procedural: it looks at superheroes from the side of a regular police force. If you're a regular Joe Cop and you have a dead super-guy on your hands, what the hell are you gonna do? The CSI can't determine what killed the super-guy because their equipment isn't strong enough to dissect the guy's super-skin. The super-guy has more super-enemies than he can shake a stick at. Heck of a question, right?

Likewise, J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars posits the creation of the 'Pederson Specials', a group of children who came in conception at the moment a comet hit the outskirts of Pederson town. This, of course, resulted in a group of super-powered kids that grew up to become the world's first super-heroes. And like everything, the world starts to revere them... and fear them.

In terms of story, both series are alright except for one or two hitches. At first glance, Bendis' work seems like a one-note affair: police investigating homicide cases involving superheroes. Bendis makes this work by adding a noir, almost pulpish-feel to the series (think Sin City but less graphic and more cartoonish).

In Straczynski's case, his series is almost a science-fiction work: how would the normal world react to an "alien"? "Alien" in this case being the super-being. Of course, unlike a science-fiction story with alien beings, Straczynski's "aliens" have very human characteristics. In this case, these beings are terrified of the world's fear and act accordingly: they hide, they fight, they beg for mercy, and they act treacherous.

And, compared to the first two books reviewed, these latter two books are more focused on characters. Whereas there's more violence and flash in Moore and Ellis' works, the super-battles seemed to be more toned down in Bendis' and Straczynski's series.

So in completion, I suppose the latter works can be recommended to non-comic books readers as these can be likened to a detective and a science-fiction work respectively. Of course, such genres are also "boys' stories" in pulpish terms. And this still doesn't address in how to get people to read what believers have called as sequential art or grafiction (a term which Dean also favors).

Ah well, I'm done...