Supreme literature communicates; savage and charismatic, it loves you and bends you to its love. And then there was the american comic book, home of the superhero. Everyone loves the superhero. He finally drives multi-million, mass-consumption, summer blockbusters. We remember him from Saturday's cartoons and childhood's halloweens. But there's not much to him. Comic book superhero is a simple pleasure, a plebian metaphor for the complexities of life, a throwback to a less sophsiticated time, our, respective, lesser sophistications, loved and retained for sentimental value. Real literature is hard. The superhero is easy. Real issues sting, and superhero shall always triumph over real issues once inked and tri-colored and inserted into that childhood world. This in lieu of our own triumphs.
But when we were young, we wanted to be superhero. Granted, we wanted to be firefighter and veterinarian and president and astronaut and circus performer too, but superhero was no less a legitimate possibilitiy of our future world. And those were to be our triumphs. Not metaphorically. Not for pretend. For real. At some early enough point, it was going to be real.