Unsought Input

A few months back we wrote about the comedic possibilities of super heroes confronting real life.  In the last few years there has been a flood of super hero comics, movies, and TV shows and many of them place people with extraordinary abilities in ordinary situations.  Witness the blockbuster Spider-Man movies, or heroes like Hiro from Heroes.

But beyond the world of fiction, what kind of super powers can we find in real life?  Sure, it’s fun to come up with speculative pseudoscience explanations for Superman’s heat vision, but that’s not likely to produce any results.  Even non-powered heroes like Batman rely too much on poor comic book physics and unrealistic survivability to produce real-life counterparts.

We’ll find our real-life super powers in less obvious places.  In the 1980s Marvel had a character named Cypher, or more properly Doug Ramsey.   Doug wasn’t known by his super hero name because his power wasn’t flashy or very useful in battle - Doug was genetically gifted with the ability to understand languages.

This amazing ability to learn languages (along with numbers, dates, etc.) is something you can find in real life, often linked with disabling autism.  Often, but not always.  Watch the video to see the life of Daniel Tammet, the boy with the incredible brain.

(more…)

Spider-Man 3 seems like a shoo-in to join Spider-Man 1 and 2 in the top ten highest-grossing films of all time, but reviews have been mixed. Right now it’s running about 60% positive at Metacritic and 61% positive at Rotten Tomatoes.

So is it any good? I thought so, but this isn’t a movie review. As an internationally-recognized expert in Spidey Studies, I thought it would be important to point out where Spider-Man 3 gets it right, and where it get things wrong. I’ll start with the bad news first, with the good news to follow in the next day or two.

Please note: this is not a series of gripes over deviations from the “cannon” of the original Amazing Spider-Man comic books or anything like that. Spider-Man, like many of his his comic book and other literary brethren, has been written by many different people over the years in many different media. Instead, I hope to point out where Sam Raimi deviated from the crux of the characters or missed opportunities that presented themselves.

(more…)

Super heroes. We see them in movies, watch them on TV, and if you’re a nerd, read about them in comics books. The Internet is home to countless arguments over which super hero has the best powers, whom could beat up whom, and what would happen if Lois Lane and Superman finally did hook up.

It used to be that the life of a super hero was predictably unrealistic. Most super heroes are more likely to travel through time and fight dinosaurs than run out of toilet paper. In the past decade there have been a number of comic books that took on this dichotomy and tried to depict what life would really be like if you were invincible, but otherwise just a normal guy. This hasn’t really filtered down to popular television and movies, with the possible exception of the TV show Heroes and to some extent the Spider-Man movies.

That’s why today, we’re going to look at some of the rare depictions of the real life of super heroes.

There is nothing more real than the Real World, so we need look no further than Real World: Metropolis:

(more…)