I finished up the second chapter, ready to start on the third today! Feeling good about that. I’m generally in a better mood, as it feels like I’m past a big hump. I also finished rereading One Piece, so I don’t have that in my life anymore. Not only does that mean I’ve freed myself from my own attention vortex, but I have one less thing in my life to fill time, besides drawing.
On that note, I think there’s a big missed opportunity with Laboon, the island whale at the entrance to the Grand Line. The Straw Hats’ relationship with Laboon is treated as a unique thing, and no one else knows about him. But that can’t be true; he’s the size of an island and has been ramming his head against Reverse Mountain for five decades. Laboon should be famous. Everyone should have their relationship with Laboon. Of course, I don’t want to change the unique relationship the Straw Hats have with him. Especially with the Worst Generation pirates, we should be using Laboon as a touchstone. Apoo and Urogue don’t even know Laboon, so they’re outsiders. Law and Bonney like him, Kid tried to kill him. Hawkins read that his fortune would turn in a few years and blithely ignored him. Like, there’s stuff to do with Laboon to give all pirates (all sailors from outside, really) entering the Grand Line a common first experience that helps define how everyone feels about one another. A personality test. Any of my specific hopes aside, it’s strange that only the Straw Hats seem to know about him, you know?
I’ve also been thinking about power scaling in action stories, especially with the new Superman movie out. Side note: If you haven’t, go see it, it’s a perfect movie. In that movie, Superman isn’t as overwhelmingly powerful as he’s often depicted. I like that a lot, I like that the first thing we see is him bloody and beaten and getting back up. I am often confused when people argue that Superman has to be the most powerful being in existence, able to blow out stars and throw people between galaxies. I’m very much of the mind that he should be sufficiently powerful, but still well within reason and imagination.
The basic idea of Superman is that he’s very powerful, enough so to shape the world to his will, and he chooses to use that power to help others. He’s a product of the Great Depression, a reinvention of the classical hero, on the side of the people when the government and industry failed them so immensely. So, he necessarily needs to be a figure of power that can rival that government and industry. Once he’s reached that point, there’s diminishing returns with making him stronger and stronger. No human or organization has as much power as we imagine they have, it’s just that the power they have is over us; our power in relation to that should still easily fit within our common frame of reference. “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to easily leap tall buildings in a single bound.” We know these things in actual experience. We don’t know punching planets in half.
There’s also the issue of narrative tension. If Superman is too powerful, then there’s no tension in any conflict with him. He can easily beat any villain, solve any trap, fix every problem. I know the argument against this is that you give him problems that can’t be solved with strength, but there’s two problems with that viewpoint. First, we keep giving him strength problems. We like big strong guys fighting each other, and it’s a lot easier to write that story long term and between creative teams than it is Superman being a God-like figure taking industrialists and ne’er-do-wells on moral lessons to set them straight. Even if we did more of that (which DC is too cowardly to do), there would still be feats of strength that ring completely hollow when there’s no doubt he can do it so easily. I remember this radio show that had a Superman story, and the line that sticks with me is that “it’s not brave to run into a burning building when you can’t be burned.” Instead of a heroic act where you hope he can do it in time, you get a split second of “obviously that’s not an issue” and then the story continues. I genuinely believe that there’s a point where you leave the realm of practicality for storytelling. No matter how powerful you want him to be, you also want drama and excitement and danger, and those two things diverge after a while.
Second, there are no problems that can’t be solved with strength when you’re as strong as Superman. At his most excessive, he could reshape the global climate by pushing his palm forward at the speed of light for one centimeter. I mean, maybe not that exact thing, since I didn’t check; point is, when you have the amount of physical force at your disposal that Superman has sometimes had, doors open to you that you can’t even imagine. That’s the real issue here, that it’s power at a scale you can’t fathom. There’s no use in a character whose capabilities outpace your own as the creator. Giving Superman the level of insane power he’s had in the past removes him from any common frame of reference and thus makes him unmanageable. You say he does this big thing because it’s cool and narratively necessary, but then forget he’s capable of solving the next problem, since it would be inconvenient for the story if he solved it easily. The struggle is what makes the triumph worthwhile. If you’re going to make someone with power at a universal scale, you have to know what that actually means and put them in a context where it’s actually exciting to see that power. Quite frankly, I don’t think even astrophysicists understand that scale, because it’s far beyond our human experience. There’s a reason Batman is so much more popular.
Obviously, I’m not expecting people to keep track of everything, I just want some consistency and a workable, human scale of abilities. Something we can understand, based on our experience of life and things we can observe. Like, we all know boats and how oars work to push against the water to move forward. Jesus lizards, with their specialized feet, demonstrate the general principle is that if you go fast enough, you can push off the water, similar to rowing an oar. People can see and understand that, so we get it when the Flash runs across water. Similarly, in One Piece, there’s a martial art called the Six Powers. If you become a master, you can use six foundational techniques that make you a living weapon. One of those powers is Moon Walk, where you kick the air hard and fast enough to propel yourself off a cushion of air and functionally fly. It’s the same principle as running on water, and it’s basically how birds fly, so we get it, even if the amount of leg strength required is a bit nebulous. One of the coolest things that action manga do is have characters explain some real world phenomenon that’s usually performed by nature or a machine, and then having a character do it by their own power. It’s a cool trick, and one that only works if you understand how it fits into the rest of the world consistently. If you can’t conceptualize what the character can actually do and how it consistently works, then you’ve made a mistake.
There’s a leash you have to put on a character like Superman, so that you can make a sensible world around him. Like, internet debates about this often come down to whether you like Superman or not, with those in favor of infinite power saying people like me are nerfing him. That we’re taking something away from him, and thus hurting him, because we hate him. It’s not an issue of like or dislike of a character, though. It’s a purely practical issue of effective storytelling. Some people can tell good stories with excessive levels of ability, but most can’t. Certainly for a long term narrative, one that is passed down between different creative teams, it’s better to keep things in a common frame of reference. I also personally believe it’s better for the audience, since most people like Superman for reasons besides mind melting power.
Life in the Gutters 