Superheroes and Death Rays

Ah, back from my summer hiatus (pretty tidy excuse, everything considered).

I've been on a bit of a superhero comic kick lately, which is as notable for me as it is decidedly not-notable for people like me, for most every other white male twenty-something bachelor who grew up in the 80's. I've never really been into comics. I'm very into the concept of comics -- I find their ADD-friendly form factor fantastically alluring, but I haven't come across too many that pack the kind of soul-battering psychological heft that gets me through the day. The new Batman movie helped, spiraling me into a week-long mini obsession with the more 'distinguished' Batman comics: The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Returns, what have you. The best of these for me was Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, where Batman visits the Joker in Arkum Asylum because he's genuinely concerned about their relationship. He's realized somehow that he and the Joker are not really people but actually the manifestations of polar opposite logical extremes, and as such will be perpetually locked in battle until one finally kills the other. This is really disheartening to Batman, and he wants to see if they can't just talk it out.

In general it seems like the Batman archetype has been especially fertile soil for comic writers, and almost every heavy hitter in the medium has had a crack at telling the Bat story at some point in his or her career. This might be because Batman is one of the few A-list superheroes who isn't actually a superhero, doesn't have any superpowers to speak of (other than the dubious power of 'super detective', attributed him whenever writers have to explain why Superman would ever want his help with anything).

Now, I'm not going to turn this into some kind of Batman blog (for the same reason that I am never going to ever mention Star Wars), but I do think superpowers are kind of a strange literary creature when you really think about what they are. I think about science vs. magic alot, how science has gradually replaced magic as our goto tool for causing miracles in a non-religious context. Literature (and perhaps reality) once relied on magic to both invoke and explain away supernatural phenomena - teleportation, curing disease, levitation, etc. At some point, maybe once Frankenstein was convincingly brought to life, we switched our metaphor from magic incantations to chemical formulas, the wizard traded in his wand for some brightly coloured test tubes, and we haven't really looked back since. My mythology relies heavily on technology as a foil for spiritual or supernatural 'magic,' and I'd argue that most allegories choose either one or the other (sometimes both) to get their ham-fisted point across.

But superpowers, they aren't really either. They've got elements of both, and sometimes lean more generally towards science (as in the cases of those countless misfortunate souls who fell into a vat of radioactive something-something and came out the other side with glowing eyes and a sweet leotard), but Superman's not a biological aberration, and he's definitely not a wizard. Maybe he's from a magic planet or something? I'm not really sure what to do with superpowers, but they're a pretty firmly entrenched pillar of the American mythology. If you're just following pop culture, watching the seemingly endless train of superhero blockbusters that grace our cineplexs, you might think that they were the only form of escapist fantasy the western world was really into. Maybe they're popular just because they require no background. They don't echo the traditions of ancient cultures or reflect the strange possibilities of human invention, they just simply are. Superman can fly, the Flash can run really fast (because of a ring? What's that all about?). End of story. Bring on the bosomy villainess and let's get on with this thing.

So, yeah, that's all I've got on that. In an almost unrelated note, I'd like to briefly mention some real life technological magic that's pretty entertaining. I'm referring of course to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (read: massive death ray), taking up 27 km of prime real estate on the France-Swiss border. I don't have any real reasons to bring this up, but I do have two fake reasons that I'm willing to justify if I must.

1) This thing actually might help bridge the disconnect between superpowers and technology, since photographs of it look eerily like they were pulled straight from a comic book:


(more photos here)

2. Trying to grasp even a basic understanding of what this thing does requires accepting statements that sound like the brainchild of Arthur C. Clarke on his third cup of coffee.
From wikipedia: "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons...When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics..."

The best bit is where the article admits that because an experiment of this magnitude has never before been attempted, no one knows for sure exactly what might happen. It has been cited by some (yes, actually) as a doomsday device, "as high-energy particle collisions performed in the LHC might produce dangerous phenomena, including micro black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles." If you have any free time I would really encourage you to pursue the fractal depths of this subject. I've found that the deeper you go, the more the material shakes off its conservative scientific mantle and fully embraces the pure indulgent joy of magical surrealism.

I will leave you with this gem, from the wikipedia article on vacuum bubbles (one of the apparently plausible apocalyptic repercussions of flipping the switch on the LHC). I will have you know that this excerpt is both a) properly cited from an honest-to-goodness scientific journal, and b) "the best piece of English writing" that my friend with a PhD on the subject of English literature has ever heard.

"The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."

Alan Moore's got nothing on that.