ABSTRACT
This essay begins with the once-fugitive pleasures of reading superhero comics, and then moves to consider the extrapolated pleasures of actually being a superhero. It is also, in many ways, part of the never-ending battle to fi nd the right language to discuss the fragile niche that fantasy occupies within the waking experience of the real. In search of a rhetoric, I’ve recently been drawn to writings about popular music-pop music and superhero comics having much in common. For example, Sasha FrereJones wrote in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “Popular music is good at using speed, physical sensation, and unmediated language to articulate the experience of life” (Frere-Jones 2005). And this fi nds an echo in Geoffrey O’Brien’s evocation of late 60s culture (including Jim Steranko’s comics): “Wherever you looked there was the possibility of fi nding the aesthetic essentials-urgency, immensity of perspective, speed, depth, improvisational ecstasy, and unwobbling balance-if possible, all at the same time, packed into a single image or a single note” (O’Brien 2004a,120).
