This is the first of the gods know how many part series of posts I have long wanted to write about my favourite storybook heroes. Ironically, I start with an anti-hero.
There is no mistaking Doga for one of Raj Comics’ cleaner heroes. He doesn’t have the powers to avert natural disasters or tackle alien menaces. The human menace on the other hand, is just his element. He gets his hands dirty. He kills.
As a kid, I was racked by guilt each time I read a comic book. They were banned in the house. Reading comics was not permitted, bringing them home was unpardonable, buying them was unthinkable. My mother’s sensibilities having been formed by voracious reading of Sarita, a magazine that stood for new age thinking (bah!) in the late eighties.
Though she was totally against my reading Raj Comics, my mother quite encouraged Champak, Nandan, Balhans and the like. Mostly because they had goody-goody stories about children my age (dealing with cute little problems like an upcoming exam or a class bully) and were published by reputed publications but also because they weren’t high on action, like the books I preferred more.
I love Superman. I love him almost as much as I love myself. And I love him considerably more than I love Batman. But you know why Batman stories take the cake? Because they are so much more than just fistfights.
Superman is generally pictured as the leader of all DC heroes. This is attributed to several things including his smalltown upbringing and his level-headed nature. I couldn’t agree more. It is because of this that I am the Superman fanatic I am. But let’s go over the idea of the ‘leader’ again.
Batman wasn’t particularly happy about the fact that he had a desk job at the Justice League Watchtower (an orbiting space station). While Superman and the others got to go out and duke it out with asteroids and maniacal galaxy conquerors, he sat in front of the big screen and did ‘research’ (mostly googling). He resented the fact that his finer detection skills were going waste.
Something moved. In the room. Behind him! Batman ticked off the Flash in his head. It couldn’t be him. He was in the kitchen, visible in one of the screens. Besides, this was something bigger, lumbering and with nothing of the Flash’s swiftness.
“If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.”
Funny! The ‘book of quotations’ I took this from tags Bertrand Russell a controversialist. Those were the days! You could make a career out of being controversial. It would be, if nothing else, stimulating. Think of the rush that would come upon you with all the death threats, imagine the excitement of possible banishment from your country, not to mention the infamy.
Long ago, when I small, tiny, miniscule, microscopic (you get the idea), I used to tuck a twig in the back of my shirt and climb some place high (two or three stairs for example) and cry, “Wha wha whaaah wha wha wha!” holding the twig aloft.
Much later, I figured it was actually, “By the power of Grayskull!” I watched He-Man on Sundays and thought about it for the rest of the week. That was the time when there was little else on TV by way of kiddie entertainment. So I was really nice to read this piece by Sam Anderson on Slate.