...[W]hile I also relished entertainment that was absolutely age-inappropriate for me when I was a small child, sneaking late-night viewings of horror and action films which my parents had deemed far too violent for my sensitive eyes and impressionable mind, it didn't take me all that long to realize that this wasn't what I wanted from superhero stories.
Yes, the aggressively sanitized blandness of the Super Friends left me hungry for some kind of transgressive break from those characters' musty old status quos, but when all that the "deconstructionist" comics of the '80s did was live up to the most shallow and literal definition of their label, all I could think was, "Is this all there is?"
Because it felt like all that could be done with those characters was to either hermetically seal them up in an artificially sustained Silver Age, utterly removed from the real world, in which Superman's only real dilemma would be how to prevent Lois Lane from figuring out what Clark Kent looked like without glasses, or to smash all the toys to bits and assert that their fans were stupid for wanting to find inspiration, in solving their own real-life problems, from such silly fictional characters.
... [I]t's been a long time since I've been a child (chronologically speaking, anyway), but I damn sure well remember what it felt like to be a little kid in the '80s, when every newspaper and TV newscast was telling me to be afraid of AIDS and acid rain and Ayatollahs and the Mutually Assured Destruction that seemed to be the inevitable end game of our arms race with the Soviets.
And yeah, I liked to dip my toes into the deep end of the pool every once in a while, and feel the fear that came from facing Freddy Krueger or the chest-bursting creatures from the Alien films (back when there was only "Alien" and "Aliens"), but at the same time, I was also scared shitless of a world that seemed to be governed by nothing but crazy goalpost-shifting grownups with grudges on all sides, whether they were Communist caricatures or brinksmanship-playing cowboy actors, so I still needed someone, somewhere, to tell me that heroes could beat the bad guys, because when I ran short on that supply, those were the moments in my childhood when I literally didn't believe that I would live to see puberty, and worse yet, I didn't even want to, if it meant that the best I could expect from the future was to live long enough to bury my parents in the post-apocalyptic wastelands that I saw in the Mad Max films.
But then again, it's not like kids today need any kind of similar reassurances, right?
After all, it's not like they've grown up in the shadow of the fallen Twin Towers, during an ongoing and intentionally endless "War on Terror," which is consuming young people as rapidly and mercilessly as a lawnmower cutting down blades of grass.
So, yeah, I'm sure none of today's children feel traumatized or shellshocked simply by the utterly fucking horrific state of the modern world, which makes my own Cold War childhood seem like a goddamn Candyland by comparison, so you just go ahead and keep feeding them a steady diet of amputations and nihilism, from one of the few places where they're entitled to be offered some minor, meager measure of hope, however silly its spandex-suited superheroes might seem.
