100+ Definitions 6

Invincible #6

Invincible #6 (I#6):  My story tells how Mark goes off to tour a college and tries to impede a skull-faced creature in a power suit.  Robot of the Teen Team is trying out for the Guardians of the Globe and disbands the Teen Team.  Mark’s parents have sex.  Mark’s friend discovers his secret Invincible identity.

Low-Frequency Listener (L-FL):  Would it be fair to add this element to the superhero definitions: secret identities are more fragile than Fabergé eggs and are just as easily cracked?

(I#6):  Yes, that definition works.  The breaking of Fabergé eggs reminds me of Geoff Klockw, a professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (the name sake for Matt Fraction’s villain Dokkktor Klockhammer).  In his piece “What Is a Superhero?  No One Knows—That’s What Makes ‘em Great,” Klockw writes that “I think a good definition of ‘superhero’ would actually obscure why superheroes matter.  The consequences of the impossibility of defining “superhero” are too juicy to give up, and are at the very center of the greatness of the superhero.  If you can’t say what a superhero is, then you can’t say what characteristics do not belong in any given story….

“It is my claim that superhero comics do not have clear definitions, and it is my claim that we, as comic book academics, should keep it that way, so that we will continue to accept the kinds of stories, in all their strangeness, summarized by Comics Alliance.  Lunacy is truly what makes superhero comics great.”

Would lunacy recede with more comic book academics?  No. No. No. No. No.