Superhero MEME

Sassybear (the dear!) celebrated National Superhero Day by posting a Sunday Five-style meme. My responses were getting too long for a comment, and ain’t nobody who wants to read my ignorant thoughts about superheroes anyways, so I’m posting the responses here.

Super Power

1. If you could have any super power (only one and you can’t say omnipotence) what would it be? Ideas: super strength, super speed, fly, turn invisible, phasing (walk through solid objects), elasticity (super stretching), teleportation, telepathy, time travel, etc. Be creative and feel free to come up with a superpower you’d really like having.

My usual answer here is a cheat: selective omniscience, in the sense that I could quickly and easily know the correct answer to any question I pose. There are lots of questions I would not want to pose (do I really want to know the state of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s love life? No, no I don’t) but there are many things I would like to understand.

Of course, this power is trivially Omega level: all I would have to do is ask “How can I become omnipotent?” and then I am cheating according to Sassybear’s definition. On the other hand, we are collectively moving towards this superpower. Wikipedia exists, and part of the reason we are all so wowed by ChatGPT is that it seems to have coherent answers to everything. Those answers are not always correct, but the technology will improve.

The most interesting superpowers are tradeoffs, which is why Superman is kind of boring. This can be taken to an extreme (hello Hourman) but lots of powers have interesting Shadow side effects. (I suppose selective omniscience would be one of them, in case one ever idly speculated about the nature of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s love life.)

Perhaps a fairer superpower would be an empathy ray. Anybody hit by the ray would immediately feel the emotions of those with whom they interacted. Thus if somebody is being difficult to Sassybear at work, I could zap that person with an empathy ray and they would feel the pain they were inflicting. The Shadow side of this power is obvious: just like guns we buy to protect ourselves at home, somebody could turn the empathy ray on me and then I would be miserable all the time.

2 Why this power? How would you use it?

Selective omniscience has obvious benefits. I really like Robzilla’s power of luck, but knowing the answer to any question means one could play games of chance lucratively. But one would also be able to answer more important questions and find solutions to things that currently feel hopeless.

I would like to think that an empathy ray would make us better people, but who knows?

Culture

3. Who is your favorite fictional superhero? If you don’t have one, who is one you are most familiar with?

I don’t know that I have a favorite. I once read a printed encyclopedia of superheroes, which I think was published shortly after Crisis on Infinite Earths. In that book I was drawn to Havok (Alex Summers) the brother of X-men leader Cyclops. Playing second fiddle seemed interesting, being able to focus one’s energies seemed interesting (do I have undiagnosed ADHD? Maaaaaaybe), and his powers seemed cooler than being able to shoot laserbeams out of one’s eyes. Having said that I am not sure I have ever read a comic where Havok makes an appearance.

I don’t honestly read many comics, although I am drawn to the postmodern deconstructions of the genre (you all know about Strong Female Protagonist, right?). In that vein I am drawn to superheroes whose powers are kind of ridiculous.

Acknowledging that I am going to sound ignorant in writing this (given that I am sure there is lots of canon behind this), the Riddler strikes me as being particularly weird. Sure: most of the Batman villains are manifestations of psychological issues, but even here the Riddler stands out. This guy has enormous resources (where does he get all these wonderful toys?) and could make a decent living putting together puzzles for the New York Times or designing video games or doing scientific research, and instead he puts together elaborate crimes deliberately hoping to get caught? I guess that is not so different from serial killers who leave signatures of their crimes out of hubris, but a compulsion to leave clues when committing crimes seems like a real liability. The Joker as an agent of chaos makes sense. The Penguin makes less sense, but at least he is a criminal mastermind who owns a nightclub (and has the ability to control birds? Maybe that was just the Tim Burton movie). The Riddler does not have good motivations for what he does other than creating interesting plots for Batman comics, and that is interesting to me.

4. Have you ever read or owned a comic book? Besides me, do you know anyone who reads or collects comic books?

I have read comic books, but at the risk of excommunication I admit that many superhero comics irritate me. The X-men universe is especially frustrating: it is a convoluted soap opera for boys who turn their noses up at actual soap operas. Try reading the Wikipedia page of any mainstream Marvel hero and you will fall down a deep and depressing rabbit hole.

I have owned comic books, although I have never owned too many, and I have never collected them. Mostly I have read comic books from the library.

I have collected other forms of comics, though. When I was a child my family subscribed to the local newspaper. Many of you will be too young to remember newspapers. They were like news websites printed on cheap paper and published several times a week. Their best feature were the printed comics, which is not saying much because even as I child I could see that most syndicated newspaper comics were terrible. Nonetheless they published syndicated comics IN COLOR on weekends, and I collected those. I bound them together into a big fat book for years and years. It is one of those things I wish I still had from my childhood, but I am pretty sure my parents threw it away when I ran away from home. There were a few gems in that collection, including a comic called Simple Beasts which was pretty funny but which nobody remembers now.

On the Internet I know several people who read comics, although I am not sure I know anybody who collects comics as extensively as Sassybear does. In person I probably know people who collect comics, but I am not aware they they do so. (Despite common stereotypes you cannot distinguish comic collectors just by looking, you know. Comic collectors are everywhere. They could be your neighbours, your siblings, your children, or your coworkers. You might not agree with their lifestyles but as long as they are not harming others we should not persecute them, and we should be mindful of the comic collector jokes we spread around. We never know when a comic collector might be listening and deeply hurt by our crass comments.)

5. Have you ever been inside or even seen a comic book store?

Oh, I see comic book stores regularly, although many of the ones I walk past have focused more on collectible card games and dolls (oops. Collectible figurines.) than actual comics these days. I like looking in the windows, although I don’t enter them that frequently.

I have browsed through comics at the comic book stores, but I am wary of doing so because I have no financial control, and comic books are an expensive and space-consuming addiction.

Actions

6. Can you recall a moment when you witnessed true heroism? (Hey, maybe it was you!)

I assure you it was never me.

There have been moments when people have stood up to the challenge of their situations. Once I was at a work picnic and somebody was choking on a hotdog. Somebody else administered the Heimlich Maneuver and cleared the victim’s air passages. That was pretty heroic in a conventional sense.

Overall I think there are a lot of people who struggle with a lot of unfair circumstances, and do so with grace. For example, there are parents who are raising difficult children, or people trapped in jobs they dislike but have to keep for other reasons. There are also people who do difficult things with care and compassion I do not possess. In a former job I had coworkers who did street outreach, and many of them were saints.

7. Last but not least: Have you ever done any of these….

…the Wonder Woman Spin?

I have spun, but have never become fabulous by doing so.

…the Bionic sound when running or lifting something?

I have made strange sounds when trying to move, but they weren’t the sounds from the Six Million Dollar Man or The Bionic Woman, neither of which I actually watched.

…bumped fists with someone and said “Wonder Twin Powers, Activate.”?

It’s a bold claim to suggest that anybody would want to touch me, even for a fist bump.

…shouted “SHAZAM!”?

I am pretty sure I have not attempted this marvellous feat. When I am invoking superhero transformations it is most often hulking out in rage (which happens far too often for my own good). For all my lofty talk of empathy most of the time I just want to be powerful and smash things.