SPIRITUALITY & WELLNESS
Lloyd Den Boer
Which kid does not love a good superhero? I did, even though the comic books that told superhero stories were banned in my childhood home.
Fortunately, our family’ s barber hadn’ t read the 1954 bestseller Seduction of the Innocent, so he had no way of knowing that comics were supposed to contribute to juvenile delinquency. Consequently, his small shop was well stocked. Eventually, I located every comic book he owned, finding them interspersed between back issues of farm magazines and battered copies of the Reader’ s Digest. As haircut followed haircut, Superman became my favourite.
I’ m not sure what drew me to stories about superheroes, but whatever it was, it draws other people too— we humans have told stories about heroes from time immemorial. I found my hero stories in well-thumbed comic books, but imagine a child born centuries ago when storytellers travelled from place to place. In that time and place, a child might slip unnoticed into a fire-warmed room to hear a bard recite the deeds of a favourite hero in stirring verse. Imagine how he would be thrilled by stories about men and women slaying formidable enemies in battles, subduing threatening monsters, and surviving unbearable physical challenges!
Hearing the stories, this child would do what children everywhere do— aspire to become someone with qualities like those of their heroes.
What would those qualities be? Battle prowess, certainly, although a hero known mostly for physical strength is a hero on shaky ground. Atlas and Hercules are examples of that. In our best-loved stories, a hero’ s character and intellect matter more. Take the stories about Odysseus, King of Ithaca, from ancient Greece. Odysseus devised the ruse— the infamous Trojan horse— that brought Troy down. In his ten-year journey home from defeated Troy, Odysseus tackled ordeal after ordeal with enough cunning to get himself home to his wife and son. Odysseus displayed courage, ingenuity, persistence, dedication to home and family, and the gift of eloquence.
These stories of ancient Greek heroes are a window into the kinds of human qualities that the people of that time and place admired. What do stories about superheroes suggest about us? First published in 1938, the early Superman comics set the mould for many superheroes that
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