(*Be forwarned I'm procrastinating writing the final moments of a very tough scene and I don't feel like getting emotional before work - after work while waiting for rugby is a completely different story. So presenting the rambles!)
Perhaps it's just the circle of friends I have but occasionally the topic of superheroes comes up. This of course covers comics and everything else under the sun. So I present:
The Evolution of My Heroes.
Around the time I was 12 I saw 2 movies that definitely started out my Hero worship. Before then I really liked the Batman tv show and read some Spidey and Batman comics but I also read the Children's Encyclopedia cover to cover so I think at first I liked the words more than the men they were about. Then came The Crow and Wyatt Earp. In 1994 my world twisted a bit. I liked each for different reasons but in the end they don't let evil (and that is what both were fighting) go unanswered even if their methods could be considered morally questionable. When people called one of these a 'murderer' I, in my 12 year old glory would get royally mad and list of people on his side who had been off'd. For good or bad the very gray area they sit in on the chart of morality is interesting to me.
When the superhero movies first started to come back most people (some in my circle included) were enamored with Spiderman. Don't get me wrong, web slinging through NYC would be pretty freaking sweet but he lacks the Grrrness I like in my Superheroes. Enter the next Gen (or the Old Guard I guess since everything is kind of circular) Wolverine and Himura Kenshin.
Wolverine is just all kinds of awesome. Case closed.
Kenshin, especially in the manga is very much aware of what he is and what he has done. Reading it is like watching a great white shark domesticate itself. He's learning how to live with people and how to live with Kenshin. Very tragic stuff at the core but in the end still some of the coolest stuff I had read/watched by my late teens and early 20's. (You get a sense of this from the Samurai X movies but that is really the before picture and manga is the aftermath.)
So that leaves just the late 20's. Who do I root for now? Well, Iron Man for one. I read a good chunk of the comics in Jr. High and loved them. The movies? Awesome and anyone who can blow shit up with a flick of a wrist gets major bonus points on the Hero chart. I really can't wait to see how they work out the cluster^%$# that is the Avengers. (Sorry, I have issues with Captain America.) Tony Stark is morally tortured character with anger issues. I'm really interested to see if they touch on what him so interesting to me in Iron Man 2 (shiny suit aside, ooo shiny.)
My other hero is Karsa Orlong. 99.9% of the world have never heard of him but his all kinds of "In you face" awesome. He's a character in the Malazan Books of the Fallen and he is right now smashing his way through that world in a fury that would make even the Hulk jealous. Is he a hero in the sense of the others stated and anyone your mind can bring up? No. He's a hero like Beowulf is a hero. The kind of hero who's an ass but who also rips off your arm and beats you death with it. (That's Beowulf not Karsa, well not yet anways.) They take the world and make what they want, unapologetically. They are the very opposite of passive. In theory, on the page that's pretty freakin cool and yeah I cheer for Karsa and Beowulf every time they show up.
(FYI I still don't think Wyatt Earp was a murderer. I'm just sayin.)
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