An interesting set of thoughts on Superhero comics as Opera, starting here:
Further distorting most of the critical takes on super-heroes is the fact that writing about all comics tends to focus more on the writin’ than the drawin’, and while this isn’t a fatal flaw when the subject is Harold Gray or Harvey Pekar or E.C. Segar or Harvey Kurtzman, ever since Joe Shuster drew a picture of a dude in tights lifting a car above his head, the appeal of the super-hero comic has been primarily visual. I’ll have to save my post on Alan Moore and the folly of the through-written super-hero story for a later date, but 15 years after Watchmen I’m convinced more than ever that Stan Lee’s approach to super-heroes is the best. We don’t go to see a Verdi opera for the story, but to hear the music. We don’t read a Kirby comic for the words, but to look at the pictures. Working with Kirby and Steve Ditko, Stan Lee proved himself the finest super-hero librettist the comics world has produced. Fans who find humanistic depth in the stories in The Fantastic Four are as wrong-headed as critics who attack what seems to them to be these stories’ superficiality and simplemindedness.
Follow-ups here and here, in response to comments on other blogs.