The Type 1 Superhero Society: Powers go Wide

So in the last essay we talked about the Type 0. The current state of development, if you will, that the big American publishers have kept as the status quo for a good long while. It was the Golden Age, and amounted to power being given to those willing to maintain the status quo.

So what’s next? As we move into the Type 1 Superhero Society we graduate out of the single heroes and into broader applications of superheroing.

In the sixties, as the company we now know as Marvel was coming into it’s own it changed the game somewhat. A lot of people would say that their big idea, was to give the powers and spotlight to more relatable characters. Superman is a god walking among us but Peter Parker is just an everyman. The X-Men are an allegory for just about everyone you could call an underdog.

Examples of the Type 1 are comics about trying to build a superhero community. When enough people have power that it looks something like a counter culture or a sub culture then it does a scattering of vigilantes. The X-Men aren’t ever presented as just a superhero team, they are heralds of a whole race of super people. In the age of Marvel comics had been around long enough that we could see that super people beget more super people. Often in the form of villains, but also in team ups and growing families. By now there were whole Noah’s arks full of kryptonian animals and cousins and clones and what have you.

Philosophically, this period created what we can probably think of as the true superhero. They are ostensibly tragic figures, and beset by not only everyday problems but also commiseration with fellow superheroes. I mean issue 2 of the series that spawned Spider-Man had him trying to join the Fantastic Four.

And the same can be said for villains. They are still representative of the mustache twirling world domination types, but we also see smaller villains with more personalized reasons for their audacious crimes. We still aren’t dealing with the whys and wherefores of criminality and still assuming you can punch someone into unconsciousness, throw them in jail, and call it justice. But at least it seemed like we were starting to look in the direction of what we really want from superheroes.

To be honest there’s not very much interesting about the Type 1, as I’ve defined it, that hasn’t been talked to death. We’ve lived with this kind of burgeoning idea in comics and manga for years, and very few have taken that idea beyond simply recreating the community building of the real world and adding in superheroes. Team building is a basic human activity. We build tribes that make civilizations.

Are these the Tim Scotts of the Marvel Universe? ….you know what I mean.

But at this stage we still haven’t really evolved, we’ve just gotten bigger. The concepts of what a superhero is hasn’t really changed. The X-Men for many decades weren’t about protecting mutants as much as they were about maintaining the status quo. They protected humans from their own kind who were out there ready to tear the system down and start something that mutants could control. But the X-men decided it was better to live in the human world then try to make a mutant one. Because they weren’t ready to commit to the messy and sometimes violent change that accompanies the transition to the Type 2 Super Society. The mess and violence that accompanies all societal growth and change.

And listen, these transitions are never going to be short. Just to get to a Type 1 civilization you have to totally control the energy output of the planet. We have yet to complete that ourselves, so we know our transition to Type 1 will essentially be the entirety of human history up to the point that it happens. Our scale for these fictional societies won’t be that cosmically large, but certainly on the scale of relative decades of fictional time.

I hope you are enjoying these, and I have to tell you that Type 2 is going to be the most fun. The Type 2 Hero Societies are some of the most recent and we are going to have a great time tearing them apart.