I typically spend a couple hundred bucks each month purchasing little magazines that I only read once, don’t collect, and never throw away. These tiny tabloids are usually filled with drawings of unrealistically fit people flying or hopping or teleporting around to save a person, tribe, species, town, city, state, country, continent, ocean, planet, galaxy, universe, alternate universe, or multiverse depending on who their super powered friends are and on which super villains don’t seem to like them very much. The heroes I read about do huge things with monumental ramifications (although with all their daring-do, characters rarely seem to die. Not really. And not forever at least.)
On any given day, one of my heroes might punch a planet or create a black hole that sucks all the negative matter threatening to destroy all known species into its utter blackness just before closing forever and reverting back into a tiny speck of life that will one day come back to kill a team of superheroes in the future. Or maybe one of the bad guys might rally an army of crazy alien soldiers with exotic powers and weapons, who are promptly defeated at the last possible moment by a regular human in a marsupial suit who has no super powers but who is very very clever and does a lot of push ups
Compared to my own daily goals, the folks whose stories I follow thru my weekly fix of comic books have me beaten hands down. At best, on one of my most heroic weeks, I might remove a tic from my dog, Rocky or maybe hold the door for an old lady. It’s not that I don’t want to save the world. I’m just not presented with earth-shattering scenarios on a daily basis! My average stressors are much much miniscule in scope, although I’m sure if given the chance I would rise to the occasion.
Since I’ll probably never get the chance myself to throw a car at a monster, sometimes I just sit around thinking what it would be like to be a god like Thor, for instance. I wonder to myself, WWTD? What would Thor do, in a given situation that I encounter in my every day life?
Let’s take that guy at work with the thick neck who is kind of nasty to me and often refuses to cooperate with simple requests. Let’s pretend that he says he doesn’t have the time to give input and review the slides the boss needs right away. Normally, I’d go ask his administrative assistant for her help. I’d work around the problem and get the job done with minutes to spare. But what if I was Thor? Would I sidestep the baddy and go to his admin? Not a chance! I can picture me now, all decked out in full Asgardian splendor with my little winged helmet and some odd metallic discs stuck to my front side. I would stride up to Thick-Neck Man and shove the deck of slides in front of him and with a snarl of my lip, I would take care of business in true super hero style.
“Ho, fiend! The All-Boss hath sent me on a quest to summon thy knowledge on yon arcane topic as depicted in these myriad charts! Verily, the fate of Midgard and your very neck doth hang in the balance. Thou shalt provide me with what I need or face the Thunderer’s wrath!”
And then I’d pull out my magical Uru hammer and whack him a few times until he…well, until he picked up his red pen and made his corrections on the hard copy of the slide deck. Then I would holster my hammer, run back to my computer, make the changes, get them approved, and maybe go out to lunch for some Chipotle. “No, foul food service vendor. I said the vegetarian beans!”
And speaking of eating, when do super people ever eat (other than Volstag), sleep, or even poo? Forget about punishing obstinate co-workers. I think the best part of being a super hero like Thor would be never having to bother with any of those human things that plague all of us normal people who don’t have a special mutant gene, or who never received a timely dose of gamma radiation, or who were never rich enough to spend all day practicing push ups or doing back flips instead of barely making it to the gym three times a week to lift a few dumbbells over our heads and pedal a few minutes on the exercise bike. Verily, having those perks of being a Norse god would free up a LOT of my time, and I have no doubt that after dealing with a few people at work, I would totally be out there smashing villains, throwing cars, and saving the world.
