Heroes and Villains

Heroes and Villains

When I was a kid, I had a bad combination. Little shrimpy body, oversized head for my ill-concealed genius, and a big mouth. And it was this big mouth and my bad temper that got me in trouble. And it got the shit kicked out of me on a semi-regular basis.

Shocking, I know.

Actually, it wasn't that I honestly had a bad temper. It was that I didn't know how to control it at all. Of course, the young bastards that populated my schoolyard were looking for a little sport. They knew, somehow, in that way that bullies always seem to know, that I would be useful for some fun. So they'd bait me until I lost my temper, or until I cried... and then my sight would go all red, and when it would all clear off, I’d be on the ground, with my ass firmly kicked.

Never learned how to turn my anger into strength like the Hulk. I read a LOT of comic books.

I learned to read early. I had Sesame Street and just before first grade, the Electric Company too. When I was given my first book to read in school, I gave it back to the teacher and asked for another. It was supposed to last me all year. She hadn't believed me of course, so she asked me about some of the stories, and I told her what I thought about it.

I got another book. Ill-concealed genius. Remember?

Mom says I was always doing shit like that. She told me I never crawled. That I would sit and scoot around on my butt, and when I got tired of that, I got up and walked.

Back in those days, comics were 50 cents unless it was an Annual or something. Most of my money went to comics.

Because some things were right, and wrong. And that was the way it was.

Reminds me of the line from "Garden of Allah" by Don Henley.

"I can remember a time when things were a lot more fun around here. When good was "good" and evil was "evil." Before things got so...Fuzzy.”

The bulk of my life is dealing with the "Fuzzy" But back in those days. It was a little clearer.

At least it seemed that way.

In any case, I got the crap kicked out of me on a regular basis as a kid. I don't like to fight, because for the most part I suck at it. That's fact one.

Fact two was, that I had a girlfriend. The path of my romantic troubles leads back to the fact that I never really had a latency period. I always was interested in girls. I probably would have been better off if I’d had that period that most boys had where I thought that girls were icky. But I was, in this, a prodigy as well.

I was sweet on a girl named Lisa. I don't know if Lisa was ever sweet on me. But we would play together and when we did, life was fine. At least, I thought so.

One day, I was on the monkey bars. Not a huge fan of the monkey bars, but variety is the spice of life.

Until I saw Ricky Bates chasing Lisa and another friend of mine across the playground. I heard a scream.

Ricky, was a fairly chunky lad and certainly bigger than me. One of the pack of slightly older kids that made my life a living hell. He seemed to be chasing Lisa, and another girl, Robin, also a friend. As I said, there was a scream. It did not appear to be a scream of young people playing. It seemed to be a scream born of fear.

And in putting these things together in my head, I came to a conclusion.

I swung down from the monkey bars, rather fancy like Batman, and when I hit the ground. I was no longer Pete Sears. I was an avenging fury. I ran up behind him and before he even knew what was happening, I had dotted both of his eyes, and was savagely throwing my shoulder into his breadbasket.

Needless to say, recess was cut short for me.

I was unceremoniously dragged in front of my second grade teacher, a nice lady named Mrs. Shepherd and I was quizzed about my violent behavior in front of the whole class. I told my side of course. Sans poetry, I couldn't really focus very well. Adrenaline was juddering all up and down my young body.

Of course, my "girlfriend" and my other friend were horrified. "We were just playing!" they said. And you know, it's possibly true. It's certainly possible that they were just playing. Ricky certainly had the fucking chutzpah to look like a "victim." It's certainly possible that the scream wasn't something life-threatening. It's possible that I misread the whole thing.

But at that time, and in that place, the fact that they'd defended him seemed like the keenest betrayal. I had done the right thing. I had protected someone that I cared about. And I frankly did NOT understand, why she was looking at me as if I were some new weird creature.

I looked around the room. I saw them looking at me, with their bovine eyes. Fear. A little hatred. I had never thought that I was different from my classmates. It had never occurred to me that I was different from everyone I knew.

I was wrong. And now, I could see it. It was a hard thing to see and know at the tender age of seven.

Comics have shaped me in a number of ways great and small. They taught me the concepts of morals and ethics. They showed me, as I was beginning to understand intangible mental constructs, that there was justice, and injustice, and if you were going to have justice, you were going to have to take the fight to those who were trying to tilt the playing field. They showed me that NO ONE is truly indestructible.

I started with the Flash, Batman and Green Lantern. I went into my teens with the X-Men and now my reading habits are all over the map.

The reason why I bring this up is because I think I understand why the comic books movie craze has done so well here in America. After so many years, comics were no longer solely in the hands of geeks and nerds. Now they're part of the mainstream landscape.

We're hungry for heroes. We, as a society, are in dire need of heroes.

Who can you put your faith in these days? The armed forces? Not so much. Between PTSD and the horrors of war in the field… It's hard, even though those people make horrific sacrifices in the name of our country.

The police? Sorry. Not feeling it. For every good cop out there there is at least one bad cop and probably more.

Teachers? Firefighters? EMT's? Sure, but not really sexy enough and attention grabby. In fact, those people suffer from a sort of reverse egotism. People, when they think about it at all, think how big a hero could those people be? After all, they're just like us and live right here.

Nah, People want Batman, or Iron-man, or Superman,

Which is sad, because no one can be a hero in this age. Take the most virtuous person you know and you can find some damn thing on their Facebook page or on their browser history that you can hang on them and make them seem like a fake or a hypocrite.

And worse, we don't even have a decent class of villains to inspire heroism in response. Evil in this world is so ubiquitous but utterly banal. Our world isn't ruled by tyrants and mob bosses. It isn't a playground for assassins and high-end cat burglars. It's run by bankers, and corrupt politicians, and sociopathic CEO's. And THOSE pricks create more suffering per capita than Doctor Doom could ever manage. Each day we suffer to have our souls and our pocketbooks nickel and dimed. And we suffer this because it's become the accepted norm.

Our world needs an enemy.

Worse, our world needs someone to take up the heaviest mantel and wear it until they drop.

You never know though. Someone may swing down from the monkey bars...