Sunday 21 August 2016

Untrained Crime Fighters

On p. 140 of Operation Luna (New York, 2000), Steve Matuchek again mentions his daughter's secret real name.

He continues:

"Neither Ginny nor I  believed that, as a general rule, untrained, unorganized, unauthorized individuals could really fight crime, whether or not they wore silly comic-book costumes." (p. 140)

Garth Ennis wrote an entire comic book series, The Boys, to prove this precise point. A government faction pulls back the Air Force so that analogues of Superman and his colleagues can intervene in 9:11 - with disastrous results. The "supes" know how to kill hijackers but not how to fly a plane. They get everyone killed and the fiasco has to be covered up but meanwhile the CIA employs a secret team to monitor the supes...

The result is mayhem.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Oh, boy! Now THAT's a grim satire on the superheroes genre! And using a real atrocity like 9/11 underscores the point that for some things only a trained police and military will do for the job.

Sean