SHANNON MUIR’S THURSDAY THOUGHTS on THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF are observations from the site administrator on her writing life, or the industry at large. Anything Shannon Muir thinks about goes – check the blog on Thursdays!

Recently, I spent time at San Diego Comic-Con 2017, which has exploded over my twenty years of attendance to a larger celebration of the popular arts as the “super hero” began to take a prominent role in other art forms – movies, television and video games, just to name a couple. Even though there will also be SF and fantasy comics, movies, television video games and  other media that do not involve a super hero, it still seems the concept of a person on Earth with powers the rest of us do not possess remains the most prominent concept at Con. Even then, not all “super heroes” are from other worlds or have super-human powers; Batman and Green Arrow come to mind as a few who are  heroes by virtue of very acute skills possessed by human beings, and yet they are classified in the same group.

I got to wondering why that would be. Is that because these “super heroes” exist in a world that we as readers otherwise can strongly relate to, versus having to work to immerse ourselves in a whole new culture? That’s not to say people don’t find these far away places of SF and fantasy interesting; in fact, I’d definitely say that their prominence is on the rise more than ever before in terms of cosplay at conventions. Yet, the “super hero” refuses to completely be eclipsed by this.

I don’t know all the answers to this one. If anyone has thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Please feel free to comment, but do understand comments are moderated to prevent spam. Any non-spam response I’ll be happy to share with the readership.

Until next time…