Comic Book Questions Answered – where I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).

Reader Lynn J. wrote in to ask about something they had heard used in discussions about Superman's infamous CGI face in the Justice League film, which is "uncanny valley." Lynn wanted to know what it meant and where the term came from.

It's not really a comic BOOK question, but eh, it's tied to a comic book MOVIE and it's an interesting subject, so heck, let's get into it!

Ernst Jentsch was a German psychiatrist who wrote about the "Uncanny" in his 1906 book, On the Psychology of the Uncanny.

From Jentsch's perspective, the "uncanny" was anything that is uncertain. From a fictional standpoint, it's that eerie feeling where you don't know if a house is haunted or if you're talking to a human or a ghost. Basically, the more adjusted you are to your surroundings, the less likely you are to find anything "uncanny."

The famed Austrian neurologist (founder of psychoanalysis), Sigmund Freud, took Jentsch's concept and expanded on it in a number of works, but most famously in his 1919 essay, "The Uncanny."

Freud discussed uncanny under the auspices of things that are eerily familiar and unsettling. A notable example would be how creepy lifelike dolls were to people. You know, they're familiar, but not QUITE, and so they freak us out. Obviously, Freud had a ton of theories as to WHY they freak us out, and a lot of them had to do with sex.

Anyhow, in 1970, robotics professor Masahiro Mori discussed this basic concept in terms of robots...

Essentially, Mori argued that the more life like robots get, the more they kind of freak us out, since they're obviously not COMPLETELY life like, just like how dolls are not COMPLETELY life like, and our brains look at that slight difference and the familiarity but slight OFFness of lifelike robots freak us out...

Essentially, the closer something comes to truly human looking, then even small imperfections become big deals.

In 1978, Jasia Reichardt wrote the book, Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, and in there, she translated Mori's theory using the term that Jentsch and Freud used, "uncanny." Reichardt described that gap between where a robot is perfectly lifelike (and thus indistinguishable from an actual human) and the point where most lifelife robots exist as the "uncanny valley." If you get close to life like but don't quite get there, it's actually MORE disturbing than if you don't try at all.

A perfect example is Pixar's early work doing lifelife human CGI animation...

It never quite works and freaks people out a bit, so Pixar has mostly concentrated on non-human characters, as our brains are less freaked out by them...

In other words, if you can't get all the way there, then it's better to just do non-human characters where it doesn't matter.

That brings us to Justice League, where the film used CGI to remove the mustache that Superman actor Henry Cavill had grown for his part in Mission Impossible: Fallout (and so he had it when they filmed additional scenes for Justice League).

The result was just off enough that it fell into that "uncanny valley" for viewers and freaked lots of people out. Even now, looking at some of the closeups of his CGI-generated mouth/upper lip is so darn disturbing.

Thanks for the question, Lynn!

If anyone else has a comic book related question, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!