People ask on social media to share gifs of the superhero they imagine themselves to be (when they aren’t fetching coffee for the office team or replying to emails from people who hadn’t read the original email). I don’t join the sharing, because I don’t daydream in previously defined types like this.
Sometimes I imagine catching a falling meteor and it setting my body ablaze, and maybe that’s the signal flare from an extraterrestrial being needing my help. Or I imagine I’m the one who can talk to either large, invisible beasts or poltergeist-like forces nearby, telling them no to tear up the door I’m walking through.
Lately, I’ve taken a different tack. I’ve imagined confronting the bad guys with their full names, telling them they’re on my list, and saying no one would die here except them. If they run, because maybe they shoot at me to no effect, I follow them, like the stalking killer of a horror movie. I’m not so much a superhero in this line of thought as a force of nature, literally an agent or ambassador for the office of Death. No power to use or abuse; only select authority dispassionately exercised.
That sounds like a boring character or a side character at best. But thinking on those lines got me thinking of the flipside, of someone who can heal anything. I’ve imagined putting a hand on the back of someone’s neck and getting an expanding, somewhat undefined sense of their nerves, tissues, and organs, recognizing broken parts or dead cells, and restoring them to life. Sometimes it hurts the healer, sometimes the patient. Sometimes emotional pain rushes out causing both to weep.
There may be a story with a character like that, but more likely it’s fruitless imagination.
Batman: Tim Burton’s Batman was released June 23, 1989. Michael Keaton donned the cowl in that film and again in the sequel, Batman Returns. He and Burton would have returned for a third film, but the studio didn’t like the results of the second well enough to allow it. Now that Keaton is Batman again in the recently released The Flash, Jesse Schedeen tells us what Burton had intended to do in a third film and what the DC Comics series Batman ’89 does to fill in the story.
BTW, it was Keaton who gave us the line, “I’m Batman,” when he was scripted to say, “I am the night,” according to All the Right Movies on Twitter.
Super Movies: What are the best superhero movies, in your opinion? ScreenRant has the original Superman with Christopher Reeve and Blade with Wesley Snipe at the top of their list.
Novels: Superhero novels aren’t big sellers, from what I can tell. I’ve heard writers say the boom in movie sales hasn’t translated into book sales. I heard another writer recommend against any new writer attempting to sell a superhero novel. FWIW, here’s a list of superhero novels that aren’t graphic novels.
Americans: Nabokov on “The Simplicity and Kindness of Americans” and insightful barbers.
Favorite Books: No doubt, you were asking yourself just the other day what would be Umberto Eco’s favorite books. His son, Stephano, provides few titles, including “one of the most beautiful in the world,” Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Todd Miles, professor of theology at Western Seminary in Portland, Ore., spent most of his allowance on comic books for many years back around the time each book cost a quarter. He would browse the drug store rack weekly, reading most issues while in search of the few he would redeem with his not-so-hard-earned dollar. Many years later (after the experiments of a mad scientist would ruin his ambition to become the first man to circumnavigate Mars in a weather balloon), he connected his theological training to his comic lore fascination to make this conclusion: “Every bad idea about Jesus can be illustrated by a superhero,” at least the biggest bad ideas can. He ran with that idea in a Sunday School class, later a youth retreat, and with much encouragement wrote a book on it.