I have a fantastic idea for a science fiction story.
It’s about this guy who’s recruited by a couple aliens to go and explore a mysterious and ancient structure that’s been discovered. It’s built in the shape of a massive ring around a star, and it’s full of all sorts of strange creatures. I haven’t read a lot of sci-fi, but I can tell you this is an awesome and original idea.
Now, if I were serious about that, you would be quite correct in assuming I’m a moron. My “idea” isn’t even remotely original – it’s essentially Larry Niven’s Ringworld. It was published in 1970, and in the 30 years since there have been several sequels and any number of variations on the “ancient cosmic structure” theme. Whether I’ve read 100 science fiction books or none, my idea has been done many times before. One of the most important rules of being a writer is to read as much as possible – if you’re not doing some sort of research, how can you expect to do anything new or original? Robert Sawyer makes this point in a review of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake — Atwood seems so desperate to avoid being seen as a “science fiction author” that she ends up practically ignoring past work in the field and presents her ideas as original and groundbreaking when they’ve been done many times before.
This all leads to an article in the Toronto Star about the return of Heroes (accompanied by a Cameron Stewart illustration). Creator Tim Kring makes many of the same comments I referred to a couple months ago: Essentially, he claims to be radically overhauling the superhero genre. What’s worse, the Star seems to agree with him:
The freshness of Kring’s approach – no capes, no secret identities, just danger and mystery – has reached beyond the comic-book geeks to thrill a mainstream audience. No surprise that Kring himself has no deep ties to the comics heroes of yore.
“Because I don’t have a vast knowledge of the superhero genre, I kept finding I was reinventing the wheel over and over again.”
It’s one thing to take an idea that’s been done before and try and put a new spin on it. It’s entirely another to claim you invented it entirely on your own. The premise of Heroes, of regular people with super powers has been done many, many, many times. As early as Marvel’s New Universe line, up to the more recent Rising Stars, Supreme Power, or even Demo. Much of Wildstorm‘s recent output has been based on a world with superpowers and vigilantes, but without as much emphasis on costumes and traditional clichés, with Wildcats 3.0 being probably the best example.
Kring cites The Incredibles as one of his primary inspirations for Heroes, and it would be hard to do better for a film version of superhero themes. but The Incredibles is itself a mix of Fantastic Four and Watchmen, among others. In taking that film as a starting point and adding his own “twist” to the genre, Kring is missing out on decades of evolution within the genre. He’s obviously not obligated to read every superhero comic out there, but neither should he be passing off his ignorance as a virtue. He’s merely the latest in a long, long line of writers and artists to modify the superhero formula, to modernize the spandex and superpower stories that have been around for 60 years.
Heroes has its strengths and weaknesses, but to claim it’s truly revolutionary in any sense is pure ego. It’s good that Kring isn’t mired in faithfulness to the past like many comics publishers, but he should at least show a passing interest in the genre he claims to be revitalizing and acknowledge some of the many works that paved the way for Heroes‘ success.