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It's funny, I was having a conversation about this with a friend of mine yesterday. She asked her boyfriend, who is quite the devout Tibetan Buddhist, who he looked up to when he was a little boy. He told her superheroes and she was kind of surprised by this dynamic. So we started talking about the sort of moral lessons found in idolizing one's childhood comic book gods.
For me, superheroes were sort of my way of co-opting and utilizing my abuse from bullies into something I could use within myself. And what was 'villainous' and what was 'heroic' became really my first moral code.
And they were a balm against the abuse. All my comic book heroes were 'freaks' like I was told I was, but it was their very freakishness, their abnormality, that gifted them with their unique abilities (The X-Men and the Jokers of the WILDCARD series were my favorite). A pariah at school, I ended up finding that comics gave me a chance to rise out of a lot of that oppressive atmosphere. They taught me a lot. The X-Men taught me to celebrate my uniqueness. In Batman, I grokked that if you worked your ass off, you can accomplish anything. Superman taught me to think about other people, to do what is compassionate and noble, that you don't have to be a native or a pureblood, to be a contribution to humanity, that in fact you can be abnormal and accomplish great things. Like any good mythical story, they shoveled lessons under the curtains.
Without them, I don't know who I would be today. Probably president or emperor of the world.  |
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