h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

it's great to see this sort of critique that goes for the deep stuf. in a ddition comic book superheroes have always been the sort of phenomena that convinced peiople that THEY WEREN'T GOOD ENOUGH AS NORMAL PEOPLE -- that they needed freaks with advanced extrahuman abilities to deal with life's problems.

there are defenses of course -- and the defenses are that powers and goodness of superheores have always stood for the miraculous abilities of saints -- things referred to in legends and in religious mythology -- but oddly rarely seen anymore -

and also the deep truth of comic book mythology is that while super beings like Batman or Superman are not real -- master criminals like Lex Luthor or Spider-Man's nemesis, the Kingpin of Crime -- IMMEDIATELY find recognizable analogues in the real world and the nmodwern day,

they always have -- and thus one of the things that makes superheor fiction a necessary and good part of modern culture is the fact that there are real life "kingpins of crime" -- but they seem powerful and the real world analogues of crimefighting prowess sadly seem rendered impotent by their presence.

Which is why comic book superheroes fight against whicte collar criminals and pety evildoers.

in the comics.

sadly.


one more point --

seeing where we are and what it is -- the Hitchhiker's guide -- it;s more than a little Scroogey for an article like this to appear utterly squashing someone eles'es good time.

if a bunch of artuiles appeared dashing the delight inspired by superheroes like Ford prefect, Zaphod beeblebrox and Marvin, the Paranoid Android, I aimagine Guide fans might feel like someone had sprinkled something foul and unpleasant onto their breakfast flakes.

One looks at the world objectively and it seems rather 'geek' to be blunt to take the noneexistant icons of children's fiction to task. It's very well written - but couldn't the writer find any REAL bad-guys to go against?