Superheroes Are Lame
I have a confession to make: I'm not a very good geek.
I don't like Star Wars or Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or anything else that has the word "star" in its name. I think role-playing games are a waste of time. LAN gaming only holds my attention for a short while. Most of the really exciting new music is coupled with lyrics that sound like they were written by a marginally-literate thirteen-year-old girl, and all the really innovative new movies have either too much escapism or not enough of it. Anime squeaks too much. Comic books...
Comic books are different. I have never understood the appeal of comic books, nor do I understand why they so lack appeal for me. They're books, right? With more pictures than usual? Why all the disdain on my part?
I think it's the superheroes.
Superheroes are to comics what pasta is to Italian food. Most Italian food doesn't even involve pasta, but when people hear the phrase "Italian food," they think of spaghetti. When someone says "comic book," most of us think of a handful of fellows who wear too much spandex and share the same last name (Man).
The trouble with most superheroes is that I just don't understand their motivation. What is it that makes a guy with superhuman strength don a cape and perform acts of vigilante justice? Unless there’s vengeance involved, I just don’t get it. Real people with superhuman strength don't get it either, apparently, since last I heard they were doing things like governing California.
Aside from motivation, the special abilities of superheroes just strike me as kind of ridiculous or at least grossly misused. Ant-Man, for example. Ant-Man can shrink to the size of an ant. Just think of all the unique and exciting opportunities you'd have if you could do this! I'd spend all my free time looking upward in one of the fitting rooms at The Gap. Does Ant-Man think of this? Noooooo. Instead he teams up with The Wasp and together they fight crimes. Very small ones.
How about Aquaman? Aquaman can breathe underwater and swim really fast. Useful? I guess. He can also communicate with sea creatures. I recall having read in my high school biology textbook that most fish have a short-term memory of three seconds or less, so I can only imagine how often this power comes in handy:
My friend Jim recommends the Savage Dragon. I hadn't been familiar with Savage Dragon before, but a quick stroll around the official Savage Dragon website (which I'm not linking because I like to be difficult) shows me that Mr. Dragon's abilities boil down to his superhuman strength, his bad attitude, his inappropriateness for children, and that silly fin on his head. I'm not impressed (not that I'd say it to his face).
Some superheroes have cool powers, but look absolutely ridiculous. Mighty Thor wields all the powers of his Norse god namesake, but when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him in the early '60s, they failed to see the impending advent of hair metal. By the time 1984 rolled around, the extended ASCII character set had been developed and popular bands had names like Skjøllegöttëhămmërjung and Mjøljængaard and Sñügglebúnnÿ. Mighty Thor still holds his hammer, but he looks to me like he oughta be carrying an axe (get it? Axe? I kill me!).
Not all comic book characters are intrinsically lame. Some of them are pretty cool -- especially the villains.
Bad guys in comic books are usually cooler than the heroes who fight them. They have better costumes, better ideas, better catchphrases... The reason for this is that villains tend to be proactive, as opposed to superheroes who are more reactive. Bad guys are the ones who build killer robots and doomsday devices. The good guys spend all of their time catching up. If he never had to keep The Joker from shrink-wrapping Gotham City, Batman's biggest achievement would have been the Batspresso Maker in the Batmobile. That or Battoast™.
Of course, every villain isn't (to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain) "balls-out wicked awesome." Some of them (Grammaman, f'rinstance) are pretty useless.
Ultimately, it all boils down to personal taste, and that's where the super villains have the superheroes beaten. Villains -- the best villains -- always come in packs. The more variety the better. Batman has enough bad guys to keep the story interesting, but a lot of them are average, run-of-the-mill jerks working for one of the handful of real villains in the story. The real villains sit up at the top and order their minions around, rarely bothering to make an appearance themselves. It's a good way to avoid being captured, but it's boring. In He-Man, even the henchmen were cool, and provided something for everyone:
My personal favorite, though, going on cool bad guys alone, is Dick Tracy which is simply unbeatable when it comes to variety. Dick Tracy probably has more villains and panels, a meager fraction of whom are pictured below:
Bottom row: Pruneface, Big Boy, Flat Top Second row: Ringo "The Nose", Four Eyes, Babyface, Mop Top Third row: Ernie "The Iceman", Bert "The Butcher", The Sacred Spud Back row: The Infringement Brothers Not pictured: Chuck, Bernie, Spinachchin, Pinkydick