Who’s your favorite superhero?
The other night, Harrison and I had a conversation about our favorite superheroes. He’s only five, and hasn’t been exposed to many, so he’s mainly familiar with the Big Names: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, The Hulk. None of these are his favorite, though. He has an astronomy book featuring drawings of the Justice League of America, and he likes some of the more obscure members of that group: Plastic Man, J’onn J’onnz. He doesn’t even know these heroes’ stories, he just likes the way they look.
Who’s my favorite superhero? That’s a hard question to answer. It was never Batman or Superman — I always thought Superman was pretty lame: “Oh, look: it’s God in a colored tights. Whee!” I liked Spiderman for a time when I was younger, but that infatuation was short-lived.
I can’t remember having a favorite hero. I always had favorite superhero teams. Though I preferred Marvel comics to DC, it was the DC superhero teams that I liked: Justice League of America, The Legion of Super Heroes, etc. These teams always seemed BIGGER and more important than Marvel’s Avengers or The Fantastic Four.
The one exception, of course, were the X-Men. What kid doesn’t love the X-Men? The answer in the late-seventies was “many kids”. The X-Men were a marginal group with a small but devoted following in the comic world. I came on just as they exploded into popularity, with the Dark Phoenix saga. (Issue #135 was my first X-Men comic.) For six years, the X-Men were my favorite superhero group, and my favorite comic book.
But I didn’t care for Wolverine, everyone’s favorite. I didn’t buy his mini-series. I didn’t like the subplots with his rage and his quest to find himself. I liked Cyclops, the stoic leader of the team. I liked the energy rays that shot from his eyes. I also liked Arial — Kitty Pryde — who had the ability to “phase” through matter, like a ghost. Her powers were lame, but she was my age, and cute. It’s true: I had a crush on a comic book character.
If I were forced to choose a favorite superhero, it would probably be Daredevil, the “man without fear”. He was one of my favorites when I was a boy, and one of my favorites when Frank Miller was in control. I haven’t read any Daredevil since Miller left in the mid-eighties, in fact. But based on what I did read at the time, I liked Daredevil: a blind attorney who works for the poor, whose superhero powers (radar sense, acrobatics, intelligence) are a little unique yet also very plausible. Daredevil’s a good guy. I like him.
Dana recently pointed me toward the This American Life episode about superheroes. In one segment, people are asked, which superpower would you rather have: flight or invisibility? Why?
I’d rather have flight. I’d love to be able to soar around, to see the world from above, to get away from it all. I’d also like — provided I could fly at a suitable speed — to be able to bypass traffic, to commute by air. I’d like to be able to fly for purely self-indulgent purposes. I would not use my power to fight crime.
Which power would you prefer? (And, once you’ve answered that, if you could choose a single superpower, what would it be? Or, if you have a superpower already, what is it? (For example: my superpower is the Power to Organize Objects. I can sort books or CDs or clothes or cans of soup like nobody’s business. You can’t touch me when it comes to organizing objects.))
Though I was fairly well integrated with my classmates in grade school, by the time I reached junior high I had gravitated toward a clique of geeks. Junior high is a time of cliques. I spent all of high school striving to transcend these cliques and never quite succeeded; all I did was alienate my existing friends. (Fortunately, college offered a fresh start.)
Dave and I were best friends from fifth to eighth grades. We lived close enough to do a lot of stuff together. And we did. We played D&D, we went hydrotubing, we argued the merits of comic books (I liked Marvel, he liked DC), we played computer games together on our VIC-20s. Later, we listened to music together. (The first time I heard Michael Jackson’s Thriller was in Dave’s room.) Dave and I had a falling out in high school. Or, more precisely, I underwent a drastic change, became (as Dave puts it) “a Bible-thumping sheep” and discarded old friends. For a time, we hated each other. We’ve patched things up over the last decade, though, and now 
Andrew and I were in Mrs. Onion’s first grade class. We weren’t geeks then, of course; we were squirrely little munchkins, just like all the other boys. As we grew, I spent some time at his house. I remember seeing Star Wars with him once. I remember fishing for crawdads in his creek at one birthday party. I remember that his family owned a single-volume version of The Lord of the Rings made up to look like The Red Book of Westmarch. I remember that in the late seventies his father had, in the house, some sort of computer that could dial in with a modem to play a networked D&D game with wire-frame graphics. As we grew older, Andrew became less squirrely, more stoic. Still, his birthday parties were always fun. One year, Dave and I pitched together to buy Andrew the live Styx album, Caught in the Act. That was the year we all stayed up late watching Octopussy. Andrew left Canby for Lakeridge (or Lake Oswego?) after his sophomore year of high school. He went to Stanford for college and now brings the world lots of exciting gadgets as the VP for product development at 
Ah, John Kern. I haven’t seen John in twenty years. I always thought John and I were very similar — smart but prone to stupid things. He and I could be very silly together. John lived in Charbonneau, a wealthy community between Canby and Wilsonville. I loved to go over to his house because it was so enormous and beautiful. John didn’t go to Canby for high school; he went to LaSalle, and gradually the rest of us geeks lost touch with him. In junior high, he held two computer parties. We all brought our machines over to his house and stayed up all night doing geeky computer stuff. (Or at least as geeky as you could get with 
I met Darren in fifth grade, drawn to him because he was interested in comic books. For a couple of years, we were pretty good friends. I spent a lot of time at his house playing D&D (and Villains and Vigilantes — or was it Champions?), leafing through his comic books (like Dave, he preferred DC), and playing on his 
Mitch was a strange duck, but I liked him a lot. (After all, he introduced me to 
Jonathan was a kid that everybody loved. He was certainly a geek, and part of our group, but he was also cool enough to hang around with the regular kids. The teachers loved him because he didn’t goof around. Rather, he goofed around, but he knew when to stop. He was the funniest in our group (though John Kern was close). He was a great joke-teller and song-singer. One day in 
Poor Jeremy Martin. He was most certainly part of our group; he was a geek, and in all of our classes. But just as the other kids picked on us, we picked on Jeremy. He carried his Dungeons and Dragons books with him to every class. He didn’t try to hide his geekiness. Most of us knew enough to try to pretend we weren’t geeky, even though everyone knew we were. Jeremy had no shame. So we picked on him as others picked on us. Still, I liked him. I went over to his house to play 
Dave was my best friend for the four years beginning in fifth grade. Paul was my best friend for the following four years. Neither of us can remember how we met. Apparently we knew each other in junior high because he signed my yearbook. It wasn’t until our freshman year that we began to hang out together, and by our sophomore year, he was my best friend. (Tom Stewart was another best friend for Paul, I think.) Whereas I was staid and liked planning, Paul was all about spontaneity and fun. The combination worked well. We also had great arguments about life, the universe, and everything. Once, after a Newberg-Canby football game, we sat in the car and argued about the nature of God for more than an hour. (I was for God, he was against). By our senior years, we were so in-sync that once, while were driving down a country road, he began to tell me something and I said “I know” — “How do you even know what I was going to say?” he asked. We compared notes. I had known what he was going to say, though it was a completely unrelated to our previous conversation. Paul and I have kept in contact (with varying degrees of closeness) all our adult lives. It’s always great to get together with him. He still brings spontaneity to my well-ordered life. Paul’s a regular commenter around here.
I never knew Tamara well. She was a sweet, good-natured girl who was in all of the advanced classes with us geeks. We had a teasing kind of acquaintance, each of us making fun of the other. She was important to me mainly because first Dave and then Paul had a crush on her. It was strange to go from one best friend to the other and to have both of them infatuated with Tamara. I didn’t keep in touch with Tamara after high school, but for a couple of years in the mid-nineties I’d bump into her at concerts and events around Canby. She was happily married, had adopted a child, and was running a 
While both Dave and Paul had a crush on Tamara Brunson, I had one on Tami Sale, my dentist’s daughter. Tami made my heart ache, and I’ll bet she never knew it. She was beautiful. She was smart. She was popular. And, best of all, she was nice to me. She didn’t treat me like dirt. We had a computer class together in eighth grade, and sometimes we’d collaborate on projects. I went to the eighth grade graduation dance — my first dance — solely because I knew she’d be there. I asked her to dance three times, and she said “yes” every time. We danced to “Open Arms” by Journey, and for the entire summer I melted whenever I heard that song. Poor Dave had to put up with me pining for Tami Sale all summer long. Then high school came along and I forgot all about Tami. I saw her in class, of course, but my crush had evaporated. Ironically, we were cast as husband and wife in the play our senior year (![[photo of Simon sprawled on the couch]](/photos/simonsleep.jpg "A good afternoon nap can make one's toes curl with pleasure...")
![[photo of Nemo playing in the grass]](/photos/nemograss.jpg "Nemo contemplates the many insect choices available to him.")
![[photo of cherry tree in bloom]](/photos/cherrytree.jpg "Cherry trees don't normally buzz, do they?")
![[photo of a bee gathering pollen from a cherry blossom]](/photos/beeblossom.jpg "The digital camera doesn't like to get close, so this is the best photo of a bee that I could obtain.")
My favorite is definitely Spiderman. He’s strong, but not that strong. His main ability is his super-agility, just dodges his opponents until something clever occurs to him. He’s also one of the few superheroes who consistently has a sense of humor. That was my big problem with Daredevil. When I was reading comics regularly, the 80s, DD never cracked wise, just ran around being tortured and noble.
Gotta go with invisibility. I don’t think this is because I’m a sneaky person, or that I want to watch women shower… hmmm… NO, it’s just that invisibility is so much more useful than flight. Especially for fighting crime: “Oh, look, there’s a guy flying up to catch me and take me to the police. Allow me to blow him away.” With invisibility, there’s no “Oh look…” moment at all, it’s just WHAM!- crook knocked unconscious with a frying pan they never saw coming.