Comics as Metaphor

After working on that last post about super-heroes in media other than comics, a related topic occurred to me: The use of super-heroes as metaphor.
One of the standard criticisms of comic-books is that they’re a wish-fulfillment power metaphor for teen and pre-teen boys. As comics writer Kurt Busiek pointed out in the intro to Astro City: Life in the Big City, that’s actually a plus. Comics appeal to teen boy dreams—being powerful, being able to affect the world, being desired by women, being recognized as someone special under your glasses—because that’s their primary market. If comics can do that, however, they can serve as a metaphor for anything.
In Charles Moulton’s Wonder Woman stories, for example, the emphasis was very much on female empowerment: That any women could do what Princess Diana did if she had Amazon training.
In Robert Mayer’s Superfolks, the Superman-character’s loss of power becomes a metaphor for midlife crisis and the loss of youthful dreams.
In X-Men, of course, being a mutant can represent any group that’s discriminated against: gay, black, trans, Muslim, whatever.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer—certainly a super-hero of sorts—uses the supernatural horrors she fights against to reflect the real-world horrors of high school.
And then we have ABC’s new fall series, No Ordinary Family, which is one of several TV creations that use super-powers as a metaphor/vehicle for exploring family relations.
The basic concept: While on a vacation in South America, the family are exposed to something that endows them with super-powers. The wife discovers she has the super-speed to keep up with her busy day; the husband sees a chance to make his mundane, boring life matter (much to the distress of his wife, who doesn’t want him using the powers).
Previously we’ve seen family dynamics at play in Up, Up and Away (a TV movie in which a non-super son worries he won’t measure up to his crime-fighting parents dreams for him), Sky High (high-school relationships at a school for superhumans) and, of course, The Incredibles (accept yourself instead of being ashamed for who you are). In comics, there was the awful 1960s Web series (aging hero whose exploits just aggravate the relationship with his nagging wife and mother-in-law) and the early Grant Morrison Animal Man (in which Buddy Baker’s family treat his crimefighting as an eccentric hobby), and Gerry Conway’s recent Last Days of Animal Man (in which Buddy’s super-hero career has damaged his family as much as any workaholic careerist could).
Or, of course, there’s the sixties parody Inferior Five, in which a group of decidedly inept super-heroes are forced to step into their parents’ crimefighting shoes (this series sent up DC Comics’ “legacy heroes” concept before it even existed).
Super-heroes don’t have to be a metaphor. There’s nothing wrong with a fun story about colorful people doing awesome deeds (I should know, I have the comics collection to prove it). But if you want, super-heroes can be a great many other things as well.