Are You a Hero?

Comic books provide an escapism from reality, where by simply ingesting their panels and pages, we get to become Heroes. Does any of this carry over? Why does ‘Kick-Ass’ still not really exist?

And Kick-Ass asked the question “where are the real heroes?”.
Heroes are a rare lot. Selfless people (or other beings) that are willing to put others before themselves and do whatever they can when they can. Jesus is one of the earlier recorded heroes, himself being based off of a mash up of earlier legends. What the stories of Jesus still tell us, is that he made himself a ‘hero’ by putting himself in harms way for others, by taking the blow that he knew he could survive when you could not.

2000 years later, we are still entertained by imaginary stories of incredible beings doing amazing things. Heroes.

And we are still all struggling internally with what a hero is. Firefighters are unquestionably heroes. But I’d imagine if you interviewed 1000 of them, 999 would say they are just doing what needs to be done. This is the driving force. Comic heroes take many shapes and forms, from ‘what needs to be done’ to ‘this happens now’. Comics are a unique medium that let us explore modern mythology and the idea of heroes together in a safe and familiar way.

Stories.

Do heroes exist outside of these stories? Absolutely. But what is it about these sequential works of art that make us want to read more each and every week? The tales of heroes in comics silently inspire us to wish for more. Comic book heroes provide an escape from our reality. We can fly in comic books. We can deflect bullets with our bracelets in comic books. We can be the heroes we wish we were in comic books.

Heroes in comic books do things that we, normal people, cannot do, or would never do. We are now taught to read our dreams in pages written by other people. To see our greater selves materialized in Hollywood’s vision of a hero. The proliferation of media availability makes us stop looking inward, and just peer outwardly, dully, as we are shown things we need to see.

Heroes are people every day that do something extraordinary. This word, “HERO”, perhaps holds too much weight. People seem to be afraid of it. I hate to say it, but the idea that heroes can exist among us as ordinary people is being forgotten.

As we all become more connected digitally, we become more disconnected in reality. The digital world has no real need of heroes. Tron doesn’t exist. But in this still very real world we all live in, there are people and things that need to be championed. That need everyday heroes. You can be this, you just have to care and try. We are all our own heroes. This is not why you are here, nor why I am writing however.

You know what, I really just want to talk about Wonder Woman

What makes Wonder Woman a hero? If you go old school, her origin (regardless of clay or rape) is simply lust. She wants Steve. And is willing to abandon all she knows for the love of him. The amazons must have had some kind of upbringing that instilled this sense of righteousness into her, but it is driven and caused by lust. The first man she ever sees.

Does fighting for lust make a hero?

Thankfully Wonder Woman has evolved in the last 70 years (though not as much in some ways as you’d hope) and she is no longer driven by pure lust. She is now also given the pure warrior strength of a true amazon. So why is she a hero? Because she puts others before her? But if she knows she won’t be harmed, how altruistic is this motion?

I would stand in a fire too if I knew I would not get burned.

Knowing what will happen to you is a human quality and fear. Not knowing and still doing is the quality of a hero. Wonder Woman and all other paper heroes have this quality deep in their core character. They are unafraid of what may happen, instead focusing on what IS happening. Perhaps being a hero is not so far from our natural state.

Then again, maybe we are all just shut off, disinterested. Anti-heroes every one. You deal with you and I’ll deal with me, but just stay out of it. Digital communication has sliced the humanity out of ourselves. Wonder Woman doesn’t text, because it takes the voice out of the message. Taking the voice away dehumanizes it. Emails and texts take the immediacy out of human communication. So we can be distracted by the maybe.

Perhaps if we choose to focus on what IS happening over what might, we could all be heroes. Yoda said it best.

“Never his mind on where he was, hmm, what he was doing..”