Power Bloat and the Bank Vault Problem

If you read nineteenth-century American authors, you might recall Poe's tale, "A Cask of Amontillado," where some poor soul ends up bricked into a wine cellar to perish in the gloom. Those of us who have run into some unfortunate situation of confinement, if only the inability to find a door out of a room during a blackout, can relate somewhat to such themes of imprisonment.

Poe's piece worked out to a complete short story. In the case of superheroes, though, similar events would not amount to a complete tale; in fact, a writer might find himself in difficult straits to attempt to stretch such a situation through a whole page. The situation itself does not create this problem; instead, we must look to the excessive horsepower of the modern superhero, the culmination of a trend that reached maturity in the Silver Age.

How can a writer create an interesting story when nothing in the real world would present a real challenge to a modern superhero? Yet life-threatening problems amount to little or nothing to many of them, seriously detaching them from a human scale.

To benchmark this problem, let us consider a situation that could cost any one of us (theoretically-)normal humans our lives. Imagine becoming locked in a bank vault until the air runs out.

And, before despair sets in - recall the hypothetical nature of the problem - consider the Justice League in similar circumstances.

The Justice League in the Vault

Given the Justice League from the end of Grant Morrison's run on JLA - a lineup we could declare the canonical Justice League - we see that the bank vault problem wouldn't take more than a panel or two of the heroes' time.

By sheer muscle power, the Justice League could break free. Superman, the Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman together or singly could pound away a few strokes at the walls of the vault until they gave way. Should some clever villain seek to reinforce the vault against Superman by putting a layer of Kryptonite behind the metal, or somehow magically protecting it, the other three heavy hitters could do the work. A more-prepared villain could add a fire trap to thwart the efforts of the Martian Manhunter. Neither solution would affect Wonder Woman or Aquaman. If the editorial side decided that an underused character should take the honors here, Failing this, and given a long enough swing stroke, Steel could batter through the walls with his hammer.

By some form of zap, ray, or burst, Superman, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, and the Flash could singly or collectively render the walls into debris without touching them. Heat vision might do it alone; its Martian equivalent could serve as an able understudy; green rays, fists, or battering rams from a power ring could add some variety to the approach; or some ad hoc application of super-speed could vibrate the vault walls into debris.

Should storytelling needs render the previously-mentioned methods inappropriate or untenable, we could add to the repertoire the ability to pass through walls. The Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, and Flash could do this.

Imagine, though, that something prevents any of these approaches from working. Then we might turn to Batman, who could devise an explosive from the contents of his utility belt; or similarly cobble together some magnetic gizmo from this same belt to move tumblers in the vault locks; or simply crack it in the fashion of a safe cracker (how, from the inside, he might do this we could leave to the writers for details).

Individually, no one of the aforementioned heroes need worry much about the bank vault problem. We need only direct our concern at Plastic Man, who might have a problem; however, should the vault prove less than perfectly airtight, he might repeat an old Mister Fantastic trick where he squeezes out through some microscopic crack.

What Makes This a Storytelling Problem?

Part of what made superhero comics fun once upon a time relied on the contrived manners in which they could figure out how to escape from their contrived traps. The story conventions involved putting one or more superheroes in some situation where doom dared to impend, then, with hope exhausted, seeing them prevail nonetheless.

If the heroes get out of the bank vault in a panel or two, this offers little to the reader. Hence the problem. The more power the heroes have, the greater the scale of the problems they must confront; and the greater this magnitude, the less a merely-human reader might find something with which to identify in the heroes or in their circumstances.

In fact, I've tended to favor the notion that the greater the power a character enjoys, all other factors held constant, the less he has to offer in terms of keeping a reader awake. Hence a sentimental attachment to the Golden Age heroes, particularly those with limited abilities. A man barely greater than human still confronts some of the same menaces that beset us all. A man who can level a city with a wave of his hand might win in some kind of dumbed-down Spandex-hero roshambo, but fails to compel.

To support this claim - lest it appear too dubious - let us consider a few examples of the bank vault problem as applied to a variety of super heroes from an age before the super became more important than the man.

Doc Savage and Company Entombed

If I entrap Doc Savage, this entitles me to, at the same time, enclose his canonical companions in the bank vault. The conventions of heroes with entourages allow this.

Doc Savage himself might well contrive an escape in the same manner as Batman, in the earlier example; however, one might expect a little more hard science by way of explanation in the details of the escape.

For a better story, however, we might expect something like a drawn-out argument between Ham and Monk about whose mistake got them all in trouble in the first place.

Pounding the vault walls would not do more than bruise the members of this company. Though Monk enjoyed the physical attributes of a 400-pound gorilla, though Renny could pound through doors, and though Doc himself represented a kind of physical perfection that seemed to defy agreed-upon limits of human ability, none of this extended to the point of ripping steel apart or having the power to turn concrete to powder with triphammer like blows. Nor could Ham do much in this regard. Stabbing the wall with a sword cane while one looked good in clothes would do little either for morale or for resolving the essential problem.

Johnny, as well, could offer little remedy to their imprisonment. He might have a rock hammer handy from some archaeology/geology tools typical of his specialty, but one would not expect him to dig a hole big enough to matter in time for anyone to benefit from it. However, he might manage to liven the scene up somewhat by injecting some pompous, yet vitriolic, multisyllables describing their situation.

Renny, if in character, might smirk a bit - he tended to display inappropriate affect, scowling at things that should have made him happy and conversely registering amused expressions when the circumstances did not warrant mirth. However, his feel for engineering might incline him to notice some weak point in the design of the bank vault that they might exploit for an escape.

Then, in the end, perhaps some chemical doo-dad that Monk or Doc had worked out in the lab might show up in someone's pocket, and allow Doc Savage to blow the requisite hole in the wall necessary for ventilation and/or egress before the clock ran out on them all.

Or, instead, one might see the theme of specialization return to the forefront and Long Tom would handle the matter through some application of his electrical engineering knowledge. Assuming the vault operates on an electrical timed lock, Long Tom would figure out some way to thwart it in time to leave the vault and adjourn to some parlor where he might defame the opposite sex in comfort.

One might note, here, that Doc Savage and his companions would present a more entertaining escape from the bank vault, precisely because they would have to work at it. It would require more than the one or two panels one would expect of the Justice League.

The Spirit Entrapped

In the case of the Spirit, I don't think he would find a way out of the vault at all. Either some kid sidekick would come through and let Commissioner Dolan in on the problem before the air ran out and he died there in his domino mask and naked ankles, or the ill-used Ellen Dolan would, once again, prove more able than the Spirit had admitted earlier in the story.

Alternately, some cosmic irony might save him, like a mad-scientist's bomb set to blow up the Spirit within the bank vault might malfunction, dissolve, and eat through just enough of the wall to allow the Spirit some air and the ability to call for help.

Failing any available rescue, we still need not write off the Spirit. In his original conception, criminologist Denny Colt became the Spirit after an accident with a chemical vat put him into a deathlike coma and the world at large recognized him dead. A hero who can elude death through one coma can do it again, sometimes even unto the point of triteness (consider, for example, the case of Adam Warlock).

In general, I would expect some detail of story rather than a raw exercise of power to get the Spirit out of the vault. And here we see a significant point. Back in the sixties, Julius Schwartz recalls during his editorship of the Batman line of books that sometimes he would attempt to brainstorm situations Batman could not escape, and then brainstorm the escapes. Heroes who get out of everything with no real effort require little of the writer and give little to the reader.

The Shadow Imprisoned

At first thought, one might fail to see how hypnotic invisibility (clouding men's minds) and blazing .45s could do much to get Mrs. Cranston's most heroic son out of the now woefully familiar bank vault.

One might expect the Shadow to fail to escape in this situation, something beyond the general possibilities of conventional modern superhero comics. However, this failure on his part would mainly serve story flow until some significant development forced the opening of the vault in time to prevent his death from suffocation.

We might, however, deem it unfair to compare pulp heroes to superheroes, in that the fundamental definition differs. Pulp heroes, in general, might or might not possess some unlikely superpower, but they remained soundly mortal regardless. So, perhaps, we should return to superheroes for further exploration.

Captain America Confined

Captain America generally loses the few fights he loses do to his weak point - his lungs. Back in the early days of his reintroduction in the 1960s, villains who wisely realized they couldn't out fight him tended to gas him. Little has changed in the age of the Jurgens Captain America, with the gas generally playing the role of Kryptonite to Captain America's Superman.

The occasional variant of this weakness - an inability to prevail in circumstances where fighting does not appear in his options - allows suffocation to take Captain America down before the scene where he reawakens, strapped to a table or chained to a wall or otherwise impeded just before he, or the Falcon, or Bucky, might do something to really make the bad guys regret having messed with him, and, by proxy, with America.

In general, though, Captain America has eluded too much power bloat since the 1960s. Occasional excursions into super-strength never really brought him to the point that nothing could challenge him; and his superhuman skill as a fighter did not, as in the case of Batman, extend to the point of making him the most accomplished human being in every field of human achievement. In essence, Captain America remains limited to an ability to outfight almost any human being and the frequent costumed villain. However, none of the "can do anything given adequate time to prepare" nonsense pollutes the character.

Little Nemo in the Tank

For a little variety, let's step outside of pulps and the superhero comics they spawned and explore how a character well outside that framework might confront the problem. Why, you might ask? Well, the needs of story, in presenting a challenge to overcome, remain relevant even where the conventions differ.

Most likely, Flip would show up and either cause some completely ridiculous commotion such that the faux pas presented a greater threat to the collective well-being of Nemo and any other bank vault prisoners handy, and then Nemo would wake up with one of his parents telling him to stop snacking before bedtime so he wouldn't have those dreams.

Or, should we go back to an early phase of that strip. Nemo would approach the solution to the bank vault problem through some Land of Wonderful Dreams-specific method that Flip would blow for him by making him wake up before he could profit from it.

The Remedy?

Too much power makes problems too easy to solve and thereby denies superheroes a challenge. Furthermore, too much power can undermine the essence of heroism. For a mortal man to risk a hail of bullets to apprehend some horrible criminal appears, obviously enough, heroic; but when a bullet proof hero like Superman does it, we see a fairly routine activity of no risk and no particular demands on character, perhaps on the scale of taking out the trash.

While the problem of power bloat strikes the occasional web-enabled comics curmudgeon (such as, perhaps, myself), readership in general do not have a single, unified opinion on the matter. For many readers, a character becomes more interesting as writers and editors invest him with more and more power.

Nonetheless, I could, by noting the criticisms attaching to stories about overpowered characters, extract some indirect confirmation of my essential premise. Take the case of "cosmic" characters, the space- and dimension-spawning heroes who typically enjoy enough power to blast the atmosphere from a planet. How many of these can sustain their own titles? How many survivors of the dwindling comics readership actually want such titles?

In other cases, we see heroes who built a fan base before they became too obscenely powerful. Superman and Captain Marvel started their careers with the ability to bust through walls, perhaps repel the occasional bullet, and leap great distances (and shortly thereafter, fly). By the sixties, however, Superman (the sole survivor of this pair of book-ends) definitely had moved up the power scale. He could shove planets around like furniture. He could burn with a glance or freeze with a puff of wind. He had total recall and enhanced senses so acute that one dabbled in the ridiculous in simply attempting to describe them. And, by the late sixties, Superman editors realized that they needed something to fix the character, a fix they would allow, then abort, from Dennis O'Neil's depowering of the character.

However, no widespread editorial policy exists (or has become known to the public) that sets an upper cap on the power of heroes. This, in itself, represents a considerable oversight. A general rule that would keep superheroes human enough to relate to ordinary men, and might otherwise serve to balance tendencies to overpopulate and over-empower heroes, would do much to give the writers of the form some storytelling space that would allow their characters both to overcome challenges and still inspire the imagination with greater-than-human deeds.

Something so simple as a bell-curve model might help impose some order. As a degree of power grows greater, in such a model, it must also become rarer. The magnitude of the increase of power should correspond neatly with its rarity. Perhaps a planet with six billion humans on it could support a single Superman; ten heroes with one-tenth the power; one hundred with one-hundredth the power; and so on. Mind, no specific metric suggests itself for a numerical comparison, and we should always expect the rules to bend on a story basis to allow heroes a way out of particular binds, even if these exceptions do not amount to a recurring and ongoing increase in power.

In the absence of such a policy, however, we face the problem of the Justice League and the bank vault in some other form. These heroes might easily repel an alien invasion, but how many readers have actually witnessed one? They might undo a mad scientist's scheme to crack the earth into bite-sized pieces, but how many of us have endured such a risk? A single lunatic opening fire on a crowd in a post office represents plenty of threat for the people who must endure it, but offers very little story possibility for superheroes or superhero teams whose abilities outstrip dangers to ordinary humans by too large a margin.

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Column 205. Completed 16-DEC-2000.