(Superheroes themselves would tend to be fairly health conscious I imagine. That and/or they share their metabolisms with Hoppy the Marvel Bunny.)

But as I was saying: The superhero genre can and will devour every other genre it is left alone with.

Action? *Gulp*
Crime? *Gulp*
Fantasy? *Gulp*
Comedy? *Gulp*
War? *Gulp*
Sci-Fi? *Gulp*
Mystery? *Gulp*
Horror? *Gulp*
Melodrama? *Burp*

     'cuse me.

To put it in full-on geek terms, the superhero genre's hunger is SO insatiable, it deserves its own herald*.

Today we examine the weird wide world of superheroes. In broad strokes. We know that superheroes don't EQUAL comics, but we also know that all 99% of the best selling comics are superhero comics. So we ask:

And, as always, how can we turn this information to our own, fiendish advantage to become the greatest writers the industry has ever seen?

For the next several weeks, we'll be looking back to look forward, as Think Like Tomorrow beings to...

The first thing worth mentioning about the superhero genre (beyond its dining habits) is the fact that it is not a proper genre at all. In fact, we only call it a genre because it went and ate all of those other perfectly nice genres, and it won't vomit them up, no matter how far we shove our fingers down its throat.

The superhero "genre" is really just a plot device. At best it's a character trait. "Superhero" isn't really a genre anymore than "unusually plucky" is. Or "works at a hospital."

We can think of television, where shows based around certain professions (police, doctors, lawyers) are extremely common. There have been doctor comedies (Scrubs), doctor dramas (ER), doctor melodramas (General Hospital), doctor war stories (M*A*S*H), doctor mysteries (Marcus Welby, M.D.), etc. All different kinds of shows. All different genres.

Now, obviously, there are comedies that AREN'T about doctors. There are dramas that AREN'T about doctors. There are melodramas that... Well, you get the idea.

But in comics, there's nothing else to compare them to. If you're going to do comedy, it's superhero comedy. If you're going to do drama, it's superhero drama. And so on, and so on.

Again, 99% of the time.

     These superheroes will eat us all.

So where did superheroes come from? We can speak vaguely about all the inspirations for superheroes--the myths and legends of past generations. We can talk about beings of great power. We can talk about epic struggles between good and evil. About heroes and their journeys.

     But we're not going to.

I'm not going to define "superhero" here, but let's agree that Superman is a superhero and Batman is a superhero. They both have codenames and costumes and secret identities and special abilities that they use to fight crime. Again, this is more of a description than a definition, but it should serve us well in the coming discussion.

And the key elements that separates Superman and Batman from say, King Arthur, is the secret identity. The codename and the costume are a natural extension of this idea. They are at once a disguise and an expression of some "other self."

Masks and disguises are millennia old concepts--certainly Shakespeare told his share of mistaken identity tales--but the modern concept of the secret identity is lifted rather directly from a play written just over 100 years ago.

The playwright's name was Baroness Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy. ("Emma Magda-whatever" to her friends.) The play, which she adapted into novel form in 1905, was called The Scarlet Pimpernel.

For those who are not familiar with the story, The Scarlet Pimpernel is set during the French Revolution. The eponymous hero is a mysterious swashbuckler who, when not fighting the agents of the revolution, lives the life of an English aristocrat as Sir Percy Blakeney. Blakeney, like Superman and Batman years later, pretends to be weak and ineffectual to help maintain his secret.

Remember, when people talk about superheroes being a guy thing, that the inventor of the secret identity was a Hungarian baroness.

Move forward a decade and I would argue that you will find your first superhero. A quarter century before Superman or Batman appeared on the scene, Frank L. Packard created a character called the Grey Seal in a collection of stories he wrote called The Adventures of Jimmie Dale. Dale was rich and bored, and he took to thieving to entertain himself. He wore a mask and called himself the Grey Seal, after the special insignias he would leave behind at his heists. Of course, Dale was in it purely for the sport, so he never actually took anything. And soon enough, Dale was drawn to the side of the angels, using his talents to fight crime and defend the innocent.

If Batman is a superhero, then so was Dale. A masked hero who used his special talents to fight crime? And this was 1914.

Four years later Johnston McCulley invented Zorro. McCulley was probably familiar with both Orczy and Packard's work. Zorro is another period hero who pretends to be a fumbling aristocrat to hide his true intentions. Like the Grey Seal, we wears a black mask to hide his face. A second superhero, and we're still 20 years away from Action Comics #1.

Radio, the pulps, and newspaper strips gave us heroes like the Shadow, the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet, and the Phantom. Meanwhile, we were getting stories of men with extraordinary talents and special powers in novels like Phillip Wylie's Gladiator, in pulps like Doc Savage, and in the comic strip adventures of characters like Mandrake the Magician.

What Superman did was fuse these two types of crime-fighters together. Superman's secret identity wasn't just to conceal his vigilantism. His secret protected his unearthly origin. In Superman's case, the secret identity became escapist metaphor.

"If you only knew. Beneath this loser facade, I am a hero. A god."

And overnight superheroes exploded. There were literally hundreds, verging on thousands of superhero characters created in the next decade, mixing and re-mixing these early ideas.

With all of these characters debuting one after the other, what happened next is hardly surprising. But it was groundbreaking.

     Chomp. Chomp. Chomp.

Come back next week to witness the birth of continuity and the devouring of worlds.

This is one of Drew's classic Think Like Tomorrow columns.

* I felt guilty about writing this line until I realized that said herald would surely wield "the power comics."