100+ Definitions 2

Invincible # 2

Low-Frequency Listener (L-FL):  Welcome, with us today is the second issue of Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker’s Invincible.  Please tell readers the plot of your pages.

Invincible #2 (I#2): Okay, you may have noticed I’m a lot like other comics in that I tell an origin of Mark Grayson.  His dad’s a super-powered alien and his mom’s an Earth native.  Flying after bedtime, Mark patrols the night and encounters the Teen Team (Robot, Atom Eve, Rex Splode, and Dupli-Kate) and briefly allies with them to defeat a pair of blue clones.  The issue ends with a confused kid waking up in a mall with a bomb strapped to his chest and exploding.

L-FL:  Will Brooker, a Kingston University, London professor of film and cultural studies, started his essay “We Could Be Heroes” with the claim,

“Superheroes are about wish fulfillment.  They’re about imagining  a better world and creating an alternate version of yourself—bigger, brighter, bolder than the real thing—to patrol and protect it.  That’s the way it’s always been, right from the start.  That’s how it was for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, misfit young men from immigrant families who dreamed up a Superman in the 1930’s; that’s how it was for Bob Kahn, a little later, sketching a Bat-Man  who could soar above the roofs of his run-down Bronx neighborhood.  Kahn even changed his own name, hiding his Jewish roots in a new brand—Bob Kane—and a carefully crafted logo; when he put his signature in Bat-Man, he also confirmed a new identity for himself, and he made sure it rhymed with Bruce Wayne.”

Based on your contents, how the events in your pages define “superhero”?

I#2: The existence of a single hero necessitates the presence of other super beings. Thus a superhero story carries the potential for other super creatures to arrive in the story to enhance the plot, as well as providing an avenue for readers to imagine themselves into a superhero role with the wish fulfillment of which Brooker spoke.  This trait of superheroes provides a democratizing element to the superhero genre.  

L-FL: Wonderful, thanks for that insight.  Do you have any parting words for readers?

I#2:  I’m happy to close with a “BOOM!”