Keep reading.

You’ll find out.

This was the introduction to Eddie Campbell’s Deadface, volume 1: Immortality Isn’t Forever, 1990.

Confessions: On Astro City and Kurt Busiek

Listen, now. Read this carefully, because I am going to tell you something important. More than that: I am about to tell you one of the secrets of the trade. I mean it. This is the magic trick upon which all good fiction depends: it’s the angled mirror in the box behind which the doves are hidden, the hidden compartment beneath the table.

It’s this:

There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean.

That was it.

Doesn’t seem that important to you? Not impressed? Convinced you could get deeper, sager advice about writing from a fortune cookie? Trust me. I just told you something important. We’ll come back to it.

There are, in my opinion, two major ways in which superheroes are used in popular fiction. In the first way superheroes mean, purely and simply, what they mean on the surface. In the second kind of fiction, they mean what they mean on the surface, true, but they also mean more than that—they mean pop culture on the one hand, and hopes and dreams, or the converse of hopes and dreams, a falling away of innocence, on the other.

The lineage of superheroes goes way back: it starts, obviously, in the 1930s, and then goes back into the depths of the newspaper strip, and then into literature, co-opting Sherlock Holmes, Beowulf and various heroes and gods along the way.

Robert Mayer’s novel Superfolks used superheroes as a metaphor for all that America had become in the 1970s: the loss of the American dream meant the loss of American dreams, and vice versa.

Joseph Torchia took the iconography of Superman and wrote The Kryptonite Kid, a powerful and beautiful epistolary novel about a kid who believes, literally, in Superman, and who, in a book constructed as a series of letters to Superman, has to come to terms with his life and his heart.

In the 1980s, for the first time writers began writing superhero comics in which the characters were as much commentary upon superheroes as they were superheroes: Alan Moore led the way in this, as did Frank Miller.

One of the elements that fused back into comics at that time was the treatment of some comics themes in prose fiction: Superfolks and The Kryptonite Kid, short stories such as Norman Spinrad’s “It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!,” essays like Larry Niven’s (literally) seminal “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”

The resurgence that hit comics at this time also surfaced in prose fiction—the early volumes of the George R. R. Martin–edited Wild Cards anthologies did a fine job of reinvoking the joy of superheroes in a prose context.

The problem with the mid-eighties revival of interesting superheroes was that the wrong riffs were the easiest to steal. Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns spawned too many bad comics: humorless, gray, violent and dull. When the Wild Cards anthologies were turned into comics what made them interesting as commentaries upon comics evaporated, too.