Remember the archetypal lone hero? Wields a sword and rides a horse. Saves lives, protects innocents, and beats evil-doers. Yes that’s the one. Well, he has my respect. Not just because he does what he does. But also because of the way he does it. He has good sense when it comes to choosing his accessories. I am talking about the horse and the sword.

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.

I link to herothings again. This time, its a nice piece on Superman written by Neil Gaiman and Adam Rogers. It also addresses some of the questions I found when reading this thread.

He has evolved into a folk hero, a fable, and the public feels like it has a stake in who Superman really is. Schwartz quit writing Superman because his bosses were telling him to put in things that he thought were out of character. That was admirable, but really, the specific stories we tell about Superman - the what-happened and what-he-did - don’t matter that much. Superman transcends plot. We retell his tales because we wish he were here, real, to keep us safe.

Before GI Joe, before even the mighty Transformers, there were the soldiers of the Spiral-Zone. Anachronism however shows no mercy.

On June 18 2007, renegade military scientist Dr. James Bent - code named Overlord - uses a hijacked space shuttle to drop his deadly Zone-producing Generators across half of the Earth. Thus is born the SPIRAL ZONE.

SPIRAL ZONE - Earth’s Most Powerful Soldiers!

Thanks a lot Raja Sen for the link.

I wouldn’t say kids actually aspire to ‘be’ them. There are no kids as stupid as that. At five, one may be taken by the muscles and the gadgets and the colours that define superheroism, but man is born sane and faith in the super only comes after the ‘real world’ beats you to squishy pulp.

There is something in a super that kids really appreciate. I think I speak for all kids when I say that Superman wouldn’t be half as super if there was no Clark Kent. Superman is a lot of things (truth, justice, freedom, blah blah blah…) but what is Clark Kent? Just a clever disguise?