Superheroes are juvenile power fantasies. This, at least, is the conventional wisdom. But if that's the appeal, then why are some of the most popular superhero comics so incredibly cynical and depressing? Is IDENTITY CRISIS, for example, still a power fantasy in any recognisable form?

Let's leave aside the "juvenile" bit, since I've written about that side of things before. (Suffice to say that the argument was that the appeal of superheroes and stupid action stories to adult readers is hugely underestimated by those who would like to believe that there is a vast untapped audience crying out for Art, and that the problem with American comics isn't that they're too lowbrow, but that they're lowbrow in the wrong way.) Instead, let's turn to the subject of the power fantasy.

Back in the Golden Age, of course, superheroes were indeed straightforward power fantasies. Mind you, you could say that about almost every type of action story being published at the time. It's not like the superheroes were remarkably dumb compared to the industry standard of the period. Still, the early superheroes are straightforward characters. They have incredible powers. They thwart evil, usually fairly quickly. They're the generic heroes. They're admired, effective, and they always win, and therefore they're a power fantasy. This is the basic template of the Golden Age and holds true for most of the classic DC characters.

'If superheroes are power fantasies, why are the books so depressing?' On the other hand, even from the earliest days you also have the slight oddity of the dual identity device. Some characters only seem to have them because it's a genre staple. But Superman and Spider-Man in particular have got endless mileage out of the fact that they have civilian identities as complete losers. Superman is at least pretending; as we get into the Silver Age, Spider-Man is genuinely a put-upon nerd, and while Peter Parker evolves into a more acceptable figure of identification over time, he's still beset by financial problems and the like.

The psychology here is pretty obvious. The reader is meant to identify with the unjustly hassled hero, and the fantasy is that you too could actually beat the crap out of everyone and get what you wanted if only you weren't so damnably good and decent. It's the "if only they knew..." version of a power fantasy.

Spider-Man takes this a step further by having his efforts go unrecognised even as a superhero. He doesn't get any adulation, but at least he gets to swing around, make wisecracks, and beat the living crap out of passing supervillains, while facing relatively minor soap opera difficulties of the 'I'm going to miss my hot date because I'm fighting Dr Octopus again' variety. It still seems like fun - and we know that Spider-Man's a hero, even if the people of his world don't, so it's not like he's completely unappreciated.

But once we get past the Silver Age, things start to drift. In the 1970s, characters like Wolverine and the Punisher start to crop up. It's hard to imagine that many readers really want to be an amnesiac torture victim or a psychopathic vigilante whose family are all dead. These guys still just about qualify as power fantasies in that they get to kill loads of people and get away with it. They appeal to the darker side of the audience's power fantasies and the fact that they're technically heroes is more of a get-out clause to justify the reader in identifying with them. Plenty of villains have achieved cult success for more or less the same reason.

And by the time of the 1980s, the concept is slipping badly. By now the superhero genre has spent 20 years assimilating large chunks of the soap opera genre. The spandex soap opera has become the house style for the major publishers. Long-running ongoing storylines and melodramatic relationships are everywhere. Angst abounds. The superhero now has to double as a soap opera character.

'By the 80s, the superhero genre has spent 20 years assimilating soap operas.' But soap opera characters are not power fantasies. They exist for readers to empathise with their emotions in an entertainingly absurd context. The stock-in-trade of soap opera is unearned misery. In soap opera, a happy character is generally one who's between storylines at that moment.

Welding this function onto the characters is a major compromise on their status as power fantasies. The emotional appeal of soap characters is entirely different. As straightforward power fantasies, the 1980s X-Men are a bit rubbish - they get beaten up on a regular basis, they rarely score a convincing win over their villains, they make virtually zero progress on their stated goal of global harmony, and an apocalyptic future looms over the whole decade no matter what they do about it. If that's a power fantasy, then you're setting your sights a bit low. The core appeal of the book lies at least as much in the characters and the soap angles; it's the hidden community where you might fit in, basically.

To my mind, this is the point where the superhero genre has mutated so far from its original roots - which had none of this soap opera stuff - that the 'power fantasy' tag is no longer really accurate. And of course, soap is hardly the only genre with which superheroes have been hybridised. There's superhero-noir, superhero-horror, superhero-sitcom and so forth - all of which impose other roles on their heroes besides 'power fantasy'. It's not that people don't make straightforward power fantasy comics any more, but they're hardly the cornerstone of the genre.

The result is that we now have several generations of readers trained to regard their superheroes not particularly as power fantasies but as some sort of hybrid protagonist figure obeying the conventions of a genre which, for the last couple of decades, has been defined by angst and misery far more than triumph and success.

This is why readers are prepared to accept such grindingly depressing stories, and perhaps goes some way towards explaining the popularity of books like IDENTITY CRISIS outside the ivory tower of critical consensus. (The critics generally hated it, partly because it was riddled with plot holes, but partly because they just didn't like the concept.) If the function of the superhero is to be an emotional whipping boy in an action-melodrama, then that sort of story doesn't drag the characters off course at all. It simply sums up where they've ended up, after years of cross-breeding with genres whose protagonists were built to suffer.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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