Super Heroes!
It's almost sum-sum-summertime. The super hero movies are popping up like mushrooms growing in the dark out of damp theater seats wet with spilled soda, and lord knows what else.
This summer of 2011 it is the adventures of imagination for the heroes Thor and Green Lantern. This Thor looks more like Brad Pitt than the 60s chiseled muscleman with the long ironed blond hair of the time of his invention in Marvel Comics. When you look back on him now though, the Care Bear magic rainbow he travels on to the Norse Olympus seems terribly innocent in this dark 21st century dawn.
The other summer superman is DC Comics Green Lantern. He is not the original Green Lantern, but rather the GL from the 1956 #1 'Origin Retold" comic book that re-imagined the hero for the new G-g-g-generation. When you actually look at his story, an average Joe test pilot who finds a crashed spaceship with a busted alien and a special ring that is recharged by an old railroad lantern, that turns the wearer into super do-gooder with a green and black spandex suit to dire for. Of course all these swell new powers are not powers at all against the color yellow. Aiee, when you actually read these hero tales of the mid 20th century they just do not to quite seem to carry the water of belief very well.
There were many times many comic books and heroes of all stripes invented for the children of 1960. Thor and Green Lantern were really lower-upper-tier personas compared to Spidey, Superman, Batman, Hulk, X-Men, Ironman and so on. No telling where that leaves Flash and Aquaman. Wonder Woman - you are on your own. Ewww, a girl.
In the spirit of nostalgia might the author suggest some odd-men-out in the comic book pantheon? Those little known B-side players, who were much more interesting to some just because they were not the prim and proper A-listers with the PR machine behind them. Face it, the X-Men are kinda stiff and square, no free thinkers there.
The Metal Men were more real than the X-Men, Avengers, and The Justice League of America, although Doom Patrol was interesting too. The metal boys were taken right out of the Periodic Table of the Elements, right down to poor little Tin, and even had a solid Platinum babe with them. The simple metallic adventures told tried to manage their powers according to the behavior of the real elements. A-listers were mentioned once or twice in their stories and how they themselves were more Ghostbusters than Red Cross Knights slaying mighty dragons on the big stages.
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