The Evolution of Science Fiction discussion

A lot of comic books are SF. What ones do you like? How good is the science? How much does it matter?

I never really thought of comics as being SF, but Stan Lee mentioned it in his autobiography Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir & said he never worried about the science at all. Robert Bruce Banner became the Hulk & turned gray (later green due to printing issues) from gamma radiation simply because it sounded like a cool idea.

I don't see much difference between his reasoning & that of Edgar Rice Burroughs' in the Barsoom series. ERB just uses radium & 9th rays, but the science is just a fantastic vehicle for a western.

The magical nature & fixes this has allowed irritates me at times, but overall has made for a lot of pleasurable hours. I've named a lot of my servers & other computer devices for comic book characters. Years ago, my Primary Domain Controller was Magneto while the BDC was Mystique. Beast was the database server & so on. When I upgraded, the new DCs were Cyclops & Storm. Just makes sense, right?
:)

Jim wrote: "I never really thought of comics as being SF, ..."

Comics is a medium, not a genre. Comics can be about anything, just like any other literature can be. The majority of 20-page floppy comic books are probably superhero comics, but there is so much else available as well. There is history, memoir, journalism, crime fiction, romance, children's stories, philosophy, religious tracts, pretty much whatever you want. For example, one of my recent reads was about the sex lives of Iranian women.

(Some people will insist on terms like "Graphic Novel", "Sequential Art", or some such thing to distinguish the more high-brow works. But many of us just say "comics", even for works that aren't the least bit comical.)

My real-world comic book reading group meets tonight, and I can't wait to find out what everyone is reading!

If you want to know what I'm reading, just peruse my comics shelf. One benefit and curse of comics is that they usually can be read pretty quickly, so they take up a big part of my collection here, even though I only started reading them regularly in the last few years.

As a boy I loved the SF series The Trigan Empire by Englishman Don Lawrence. Later on he made the series of Storm. Storm - The Collection v. 1: The Deep World / the Last Fighter I collected them all. These comics must have been my first SF readings. It's still great to pick up one of those issues at my parent's home and see the magnificent drawings.

Ed wrote: "Comics is a medium, not a genre. Comics can be about anything, just like any other literature can be. The majority of 20-page floppy ..."

Good point. I guess I put that badly. I guess I was asking more what people thought of comics as a vehicle for SF. I tend to equate them more with gaudy pulp fiction, but I was a real fan of Creepy, Eerie, & Vamperella back in the late 70s. Heavy Metal & some others did some pretty good, thoughtful stories.

I've got several graphic novels too & tend to lump them in with comics. Not my favorite, but a nice change of pace occasionally. The Illustrated Roger Zelazny is pretty good & has a Shadow Jack story that's only found there.

Well, as Theodore Sturgeon's law says "Ninety percent of everything is crap". There is a lot of "gaudy pulp fiction" in comics, and that is probably what sells most, but there is also some high quality and highly-original work.

While Margaret Atwood may dismiss SF as mostly "talking squids in outer space", she just hasn't done her research. (Besides, talking squid stories can be good, too.) (And she maybe made a misstep with her comic book, as well.) Likewise, many people dismiss comics as being only for immature males. Some of it is. But skip past the 90% and there is much more.

I think the big publishers (Marvel and DC) put lots of constraints on their authors that make it hard for them to be really original. (Though some authors shine even with the constraints.) Other publishers (Image, Fantagraphics, etc.) let the creators do their own thing.

Some differences between comics and prose:
* Comics tend toward show-don't-tell. You don't need long pages of description about your space ship, alien, whatever -- you just show it.
* Comics are usually collaborations. Script, drawings, colors, and letters can all be done by different people.
* Comics are slower to produce. It takes time to draw all that stuff!
* Comics are often serialized before being collected. That can lead to the use of cliff-hangers to get people hooked. It also means that they often have to hook the reader from the first issue, or else they won't be able to sell later issues.
* Comics are more expensive than prose novels, but take less time to read.
* Comics stores are intimidating to some people. (Sometimes because the owners/employees are condescending jerks. My local stores are not like that.)

If you really want to learn about the medium there are plenty of books about it. A good start is Understanding Comics.

Personally, I don't read much "pure" SF in comics. I read all sorts of genres, and sometimes there are SF elements, but I guess my comics readings tend more towards fantasy and non-fiction.

Here are a few of the SF comics that I like.

O Human Star, Volume One. SF for people who like stories about human relationships. If your dead lover suddenly appears in a new robot body, and neither of you know who brought him back, should you date him? Should you tell him that your child was cloned from his DNA? [Available to read for free on the web.]

Alex + Ada: The Complete Collection. Alex' mother buys him a girlfriend robot which he doesn't want. Then she develops consciousness.

A Distant Soil, Vol. 1: The Gathering. "The story of a young girl, Liana, who is born heir to an alien religious dynasty and is the most powerful psychic being in the universe."

I found this volume 1 a little juvenile. But, the author was 12 when she started it, so I can forgive that. Somewhat a classic, so I'll probably continue with more volumes someday.

In Real Life. Graphic illustration of a story by Cory Doctorow. I read it in Spanish as a challenge. (I've studied, but don't really speak Spanish.)

Trees, Vol. 1: In Shadow. Giant alien tree-like structures appear suddenly on earth. The aliens completely ignore us. How would we react? [Ongoing series, so there is a danger the story will never be finished.]

Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street. Feels like cyberpunk, though the action is in the real world rather than a cyberspace. Concerns a degenerate journalist in a dystopia.

Grandville. Volume one of a 5-part steampunk detective story with talking animals. Love it!

Saga, Vol. 1. Super popular SF/Fantasy. Despite the bizarro characters, the real meat of the story is about family.

Agatha Heterodyne and the Beetleburg Clank. First part of the popular steampunk/fantasy/sf web comic "Girl Genius". [Free to read on the web.]

The Longest Day of the Future. Wordless story of a dystopian future where two giant corporations control everything and fight with each other.

Quantum Vibe Volume 1: Nicole. SF webcomic with libertarian leanings. One main character looks like a fat version of Dr. Who (Tom Baker era). [Free to read on the web.]

Artifice. An android soldier is ordered to kill some scientists who know too much. Instead, he falls in love with one.

Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft. Very popular, very good Fantasy/Horror. [There is also an audio version.]

I could go on....

Finished all 10 volumes of Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned. I loved the first 3, 4 or 5, but started to get bored of it by the end. Maybe I'd have liked it more if read gradually as the volumes came out.

While I love feminist SF Bitch Planet, the spin-off Bitch Planet: Triple Feature, Vol. 1 is less appealing. It is a set of short stories by other authors set in the world of BP. While some of them are quite good, they are all too short and I want more of the art of the series regular artist Valentine De Landro.

Read A.D.: After Death for a book group. It is an SF tale of what happens after a cure for death has been found. The art is great, but I didn't love the story, partly because it is confusing. It switches between several time periods and the narrator is not reliable due to memory lapses. Also this falls somewhere between a graphic novel and a regular novel with illustrations. I think I'd prefer it to be purely one or the other.

I finished watching "Antman & Wasp" last night & realized that was the last time I'd see a Stan Lee cameo. Here's all of them in one 13m YouTube video. It's a great trip.
He'll be missed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0faB-...

Here's a pretty good article about Stan Lee. It explores the comic industry, too. There's a lot of dispute as to credit, but it makes for interesting reading.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment...

I didn't see anything that disagreed with Lee's own autobiography, Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir, IIRC.

Jim wrote: "I finished watching "Antman & Wasp" last night & realized that was the last time I'd see a Stan Lee cameo...."

I hear he'll be in Avengers 4 also.

Sorry to see Stan Lee go. Personally, I don't read many superhero stories, which is most of what he did.

In my comics group last night someone brought in Planet of the Apes: Visionaries which is based on the original movie script by Rod Serling. She recommended it highly. Although similar to the movie that was eventually made, there are differences that are probably mostly related to budget. The ape city, for example, was intended to be a larger, more modern city.

I liked Prentis Rollins work so much in The Furnace that I ordered Survival Machine. The first copy went astray in the mail so I ordered it again. Not as good as The Furnace, but still pretty good. I'll write a review later. He is really good at drawing SF scenes. He even wrote a book about it: How to Draw Sci-Fi Utopias and Dystopias.

The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture written & narrated by Glen Weldon was great. I knew Batman had undergone a lot of changes over the years, but finding out the extent & why was educational. The narration made it a lot of fun, too. Great job all the way around. I gave it a 4 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I agree that comics are a medium, not a genre. How about superhero comics then? Are they science fiction?

You can almost always find science fiction elements in them. From Guardians of the Galaxy, and aliens from Krypton, to advanced technology in Batman's utility belt, and web-shooters, nearly every superhero can be tied to one science fictional element or another.

Nevertheless, I think extending the boundaries of science fiction to encompass superhero comics is a start down the slippery slope towards meaningless distinction. For example, aren't superhero comics on one level or another also almost always about stopping super-villains? Doesn't this also center superhero comics squarely in the genre of crime fiction? If you read Golden Age superhero comics in an archive edition, are you also reading historical fiction? If not then surely reading Roy Thomas's Invaders series or Justice Society of America stories set on Earth-2 qualifies as historical SF crime fiction. Right? I hope you see my point that superhero comics can be stretched to say they are encompassed by many genres. What's the benefit in doing this though?

I'd rather just say superhero comics are their own genre. In this sense Stan Lee is a master (the master? the founding father?) of this particular genre.

Dan wrote: "I agree that comics are a medium, not a genre. How about superhero comics then? Are they science fiction?"

Not to me. To me superhero stories are their own thing. And not a thing that I enjoy on its own.

But, like most types of stories, they are rarely "purely" one genre or another, but mix elements of multiple genres. The more they mix, the more likely I, personally, am to enjoy them. There are many comics where I could see myself checking the tags for both "SF" and "Superhero", and maybe also "Fantasy" and "Humor" and other things all in the same book. One story can have many things.

Genres are always slippery slopes. I've seen people argue that FTL makes an SF story fantasy. Shrug. Life is too short to argue about pigeonholes. I generally consider comics more of a genre of their own simply because of the difference in medium. They also have their own subgenres & sets of rules that don't apply to most books except the pulpiest(?) of series. (No one dies forever, story lines change & get rebooted every decade or two, etc.)

Stan Lee certainly was a very important player who helped remake the comics when they needed it in the 50s when they were caught between Witherspoon's censorship & flagging interest, but he did that more as a front & idea man. It was
a very important role, but I'm not sure how much of the credit he really deserved for creating superheroes.

First, there was so much ripping off of characters in the industry that founders are tougher to pin down than genres. They ripped each other off as well as everyone else. The early Superman is so like Hugo Danner, the hero of Gladiator, that it's ridiculous. Any vaguely successful superhero would find his costume & name changed as he showed up in a competing company's offerings. Harlan Ellison's head would have exploded if he lived back then.

Second, Lee would come up with an idea, but most of the real work seemed to be done by others on the team. They'd do the actual drawings & dialog based on ideas that Lee had. He says so a couple of times in Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir. I think it's telling that many of his old work buddies quit working with & speaking to him. He was more of a Bob Kane, who came up with an idea for Batman, than a Bill Finger who made a LOT of changes & actually drew him. A lot of the same thing went on with Lee & artists like Jack Kirby. Still, it's money that makes the world go around & Lee managed to sell. I don't think the other artists would have done that.

Dan wrote: "Stan Lee is a master (the master? the founding father?) of this particular genre [of superheros]...."

He certainly had an influence larger than most others in that field. I only follow that history at second or third hand, though.

Jim wrote: "Lee would come up with an idea, but most of the real work seemed to be done by others on the team...."

Yeah, that is my impression, too. Ditko in particular was angry that Lee wouldn't call him a co-creator of Spiderman. Lee would praise Ditko and would admit all the work that Ditko did, but simply wouldn't take the tiny extra step of calling him co-creator.

Dikto was bitter about that forever. He was a very black-and-white thinker, much influenced by Ayn Rand. Something was always either Right or Wrong and there is no in-between. Lee's refusal to call Ditko co-creator was wrong to him.

Ditko expressed his objectivist views in Mr. A. (Not generally considered good.)

I mentioned that I generally put comics in a class of their own, but just finished reading Judge Anderson: Year One, a novel that really should have been a comic. It was very much like the Judge Dredd movies. It was fun & well narrated so I gave it a 3 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

For all that it is set in a post apocalyptic future with robots, mutants, & PSI powers, I don't consider it SF. It probably isn't any further off the mark than the Lensman series, but it just doesn't read like SF to me. It's just comic action-porn dressed in fancy clothes.

I'm not quite old enough to remember this, but there used to be an SF or Science Prediction comic in newspapers called Closer than we think by Arthur Radebaugh. Sadly it has not been collected in book form.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...

Interesting. Thanks, Ed.

Popular Science put together a list of "Sci-fi graphic novels that will keep you up late and make you miss your train stop"
https://www.popsci.com/story/shop/bes...

Those are good, but not the ones I would have picked. For recent Sci-Fi graphic novels, I'd go with Paper Girls and The Handmaid's Tale: The Graphic Novel.