Superheroes used to be myth.
There was a time when a cape meant something. Superman wasn’t just an alien in tights. He was an immigrant parable with laser eyes. Batman wasn’t just a billionaire cosplayer. He was grief made flesh, vengeance stitched into shadow. Spider-Man wasn’t just a teenager with sticky hands. He was guilt and responsibility webbed together. These characters weren’t designed to be binge-watched. They were mythic avatars of humanity.
Now? They’re algorithms. They’re quarterly earnings reports. Studios churn them out the way fast-food chains roll out new dipping sauces: one more flavor, one more gimmick. Spicy ketchup. Chimichurri. Hot honey glaze.
The Burnout
We know the whole thing before the first superpowered punch is thrown: reluctant hero, tragic sacrifice, semi-noble reawakening, CGI battlefield, and a mid-credit sequence winking at the next link in the chain. Escapism is as routine as going to work.
Classic comics asked big questions:
- Is it possible to be human when you faster than a speeding bullet?
- Is it criminal to terrorize criminals?
- How can a young man who can’t pay rent find the time to fight evil?
Modern blockbusters mostly ask, How do we keep the brand profitable next year ?
Some stories still live up to the predecessor’s standards. Logan cut through the noise with an elegy, Into the Spider-Verse reinvented the whole medium, HBO’s Watchmen turned pulp into a reckoning on race. But they’re rare exceptions. Most superhero stories today feel like product placement.
Blood, Guts, and Giggles
And when the big screen starts to falter, streaming platforms swing the other way: gore, guts, and gallons of shock value.
The Boys, Gen V, Invincible—shows that promise to “deconstruct” superheroes but often land in a different place. Heads explode, limbs fly, bodies are pulverized in slow motion. At first, it’s shocking. Then it’s just numbing. The violence gets so excessive it tips into slapstick. A geyser of intestines played for laughs. The cruelty becomes parody; the parody becomes indulgence. Like bad pizza: it doesn’t completely suck, so it’s OK.
There are sharp moments. The Boys skewers celebrity worship and corporatocracy. Characters in Invincible see humanity as ants, and people seem to accept it as a part of life. But too often, the satire hides behind buckets of blood. It mistakes splatter for substance.
We’ve swung from too clean to too grotesque, and in the process we’ve lost the middle ground where power and morality actually wrestle with each other.
Why I Still Write Them
Superheroes still let me ask questions no other genre does: What does power do to us? Who gets to use it? Who gets crushed beneath it?
I learned to read from superhero comics. Not primers or picture books…comics. I wasn’t only drawn to the abilities and the graphic fight scene and two-page space spreads, I was drawn to the characters. To Peter Parker fumbling with rent money. To Bruce Wayne staring into the abyss of his own trauma. To mutants who weren’t accepted even when they were saving the world. To Ben Grimm a misunderstood monster and an everyman noble. Powers were cool, sure, but it was the humanity that hooked me.
That’s why I wrote SUPERPOWERLESS. Not to glorify spectacle. But to examine foundation.
My Dissection Table: Stories from SUPERPOWERLESS
- “Keeping Up With the Times Via World Domination” A washed-up villain once dreamed of world conquest. Now he dreams of trending hashtags. His real weapon isn’t a death ray, but a desperate rebrand. It’s funny, sad, and painfully familiar in an era where clout beats conquest.
- “Smash! TV” Forget saving cities. Contestants fight for blankets and clean water. The prize isn’t glory, it’s survival. It’s late-stage capitalism grafted onto superpowers: spectacle intact, nobility rotted.
- “The Neighborhood Protection League of Superpowered Boys and Girl” Four runaway kids with strange powers hide in a makeshift clubhouse, dreaming of heroism while haunted by the scientists who experimented on them. When Soviet holdovers come hunting, the children discover their mysterious benefactor is none other than a forgotten Golden-Age heroine, and their fight for survival becomes their first true test as heroes.
- “Proud Boy Onychophoran” Dustin “The Velvet Worm” Deeley sets out to be remembered as a killer, not a failure. But when two gunmen beat him to the school, his violent plan twists—he saves the children instead, hailed as a hero while hiding the truth of what he intended
Each story uses the superhero skeleton but strips away the fantasy muscle. They’re not power fantasies. They’re power autopsies.
The Point of the Mask
Yes, the genre is oversaturated. Yes, audiences are exhausted. But we’re not sick of myth. We’re not sick of ordinary people colliding with the extraordinary. We’re sick of shallow spectacle, whether it’s glossy quips or cartoonish gore.
Superheroes at their core are about masks. Not what we hide by wearing them but what we reveal, and what that revelation costs. I’m not chasing the machine. I’m wrestling the myth. And until humanity stops needing myths, I’ll keep writing them even if the mask is a little worn.