Editing Supers (section)

== Notable subtypes, (sub)genres and styles ==
* Street-Level: Characters, generally of low power, that fight local threats instead of global conspiracies and alien invasions.
* Mystery Men: Low power pulp heroes, especially powerless gadget wielders set before 1942. Chief examples of this genre are the Green Hornet, the Phantom, and Doc Savage.
* Cosmic: The exact opposite of the two above; if they're fighting deities on a regular basis, it's probably "Cosmic".
* "Silver Age" or "Four Color": More or less what comics looked like in the 1960s. Think thirty different kinds of Kryptonite, Jimmy Olson getting new powers every issue (and then losing them right after), and iconic characters becoming total assholes for no reason. These comics were frequently written cover first, with ideas being thrown around like ticker tape at a parade, paced so fast that a reader can get whiplash from the sudden turns, and riddled with excessively soap-operaish or melodramatic storytelling, science fiction so soft it makes marshmallows look like diamonds and dialogue that sounds about as natural as the food coloring on Cheetos. Note that, when used to describe something modern, "power level" doesn't enter into it; there were a '''bunch''' of incredibly silly Batman comics (go look up Superdickery for just a sampling) and other "mundane"/"low-power" Silver Age works; what matters is the sheer ''insanity'' and ''weirdness''.
* "Dark Age" or "[[Rob Liefeld's BLOODP.O.U.C.H|Liefeld Style]]": [[Edgy|Darker And Edgier]] works that are exactly as stupid as the Silver Age, just in a different way. In particular, expect needless death, anti-heroes where vastly more thought was given to the design and name than personality or backstory (which were frequently so flimsy as to be nonexistant), excessive everything (cynicism, fanservice, violence, detail, guns, pouches), and art that was dynamic as fuck, but also anatomically impossible and painful to look at. (Sometimes called "The Iron Age" by people defending it, but between a crash in the industry and the tone of most notable work of the era, the name "Dark Age" has more or less stuck.)
** There are also "Golden Age" (like "Silver Age", but with worse racism and more people dying or suffering horrific fates, mostly served as World War 2 propaganda and died with the Comic's Code starting the Silver Age), "Bronze Age" (what came between the Silver and Dark Ages, and featured something of a blend of both as Stan Lee went "fuck the censors" and killed Gwen Stacy, starting the Edgy stuff that actually had nuance, but devolved into the Dark Age), and "Modern Age" (roughly, what comics have looked like since the first Toby McGuire Spider-Man film). These are not as frequently used as models, for various reasons. The Modern Age is possibly on the verge of changing after several regular cosmic reboot failures from both Marvel and DC and things seems to be shaping up differently in the post-Covid world.
* Tokusatsu (特撮, literally "special effects") aka Henshin (変身, "transformation"): A Japanese genre of masked, transforming heroes (the better to change actors so they can film those scenes on the cheap). Often includes giant robots and size changing to allow fighting a multiple scales. Examples include Super Sentai (which Power Rangers recycles footage from), Kamen Rider, Ultraman, and the 1970s Japanese Spider-Man (which is a fascinating story all in itself).
* Magical Girl (魔法少女): Girls change into super powered forms to fight evil (though many of the early example used their powers for other things). Unlike Toku heroes, magical girl forms generally aren't masked but instead have some kind of physical element to the transformation that hides the user's identity. Despite being strongly associated with Japan, Fawcett's 1942 introduction of Mary Marvel is the earliest proper example.
* "Bad Girl" comics: One of the more durable trends of the Dark Age, above: Female anti-heroes (either cynical or outright "beyond good and evil", with greed and revenge being frequent motivators), usually dealing with even worse villains, not afraid to engage in some extreme ultraviolence, with some degree of supernatural powers going around, and a whole lot of sexy fanservice. There are two interesting factors: Their popularity among women was actually fairly high (Who would have guessed ''actually'' strong female protagonists would appeal to girls and women?  Even the fanservice was largely tolerated, as few wouldn't want to be badass and look good at the same time), and their popularity (although much diminished) extends to the present day, unlike much of the legacy of the Dark Age.
* "Deconstruction": There's a lot of not very well-thought-out use of this word in criticism of superhero comics. We'll go with the TVTropes definition, where deconstruction is more about taking a trope or story type, and either trying to play it out like it would in reality, or show the disturbing supporting tissue needed to uphold the plausibility.