I have jokingly referred to Batman--my favorite comic superhero--as a rich boy who beats up the poor and mentally ill.
But lately I don't find it so funny.
It has been said that Superman is one of the hardest characters to write. There was something about him that a lot of writers didn't seem to get, and I don't think it was because they were bad writers.
I think at the core of it, Superman cannot be both a symbol for good and a corporate product to be consumed by the masses. He cannot stand for justice while preserving an unjust system.
It always bothered me that Superman--such an enormous, transcendent concept--was ultimately just a product. Just a story competing with every other story for our attention.
Merely a servant to monied interests.
It's kind of like realizing you're in the Matrix. Suddenly you can see the system, the code, the forces at play.
And suddenly I find myself understanding Alan Moore's side--the curmudgeon who insists that superheroes are for children. He's put superheroes behind him, and maybe we should too.
The Boys manages to be relevant because it understands what it means to have power and what it means not to have it. We ultimately have so little control. It's an idea that so many of us have had to come to grips with this year.
The Boys understands that there is no version of Superman that could exist in our world in his idealized state. He could only exist as a lie. As propaganda.
So many of the problems we have stem from the fact that people do not see the world as it really is. They cling to a fantasy or the false memory of the way it should be, or used to be.
I've loved superheroes for a long time, and I think I will always enjoy them. But there's a reason why so many of the audiobooks I've listened to lately have been non-fiction--a genre I managed to avoid for almost my entire life.
I am starved for something real.
