Flying faster than a speeding bullet, becoming invisible, and shooting fireballs out of one’s palms. The nature of super heroes is that they do supernatural things. But what really makes for a good super hero and heroines is a healthy dollop of mortality. Which is why the recent re-launch of the comic book series Batgirl was so contentious.

For the past 23 years, Batgirl (the alias of Barbara Gordon), has been paraplegic. But with the recent overhaul of DC Comics—also home to the Superman, Justice League, Watchmen, and Batman franchises—Gordon was miraculously cured of her spinal disability, able to walk around, fight evil, and otherwise kick tail like a conventional comic book heroine.

“Adding insult to injury,” writes Aaron Broverman for New Mobility, a publication serving active wheelchair users, “Gordon had become a beacon of pride for readers with disabilities, thanks to her post-injury identity—Oracle—an enterprising super-hacker relied on by all DC heroes for her intelligence-gathering skills.”

The Batgirl recovery, argues Broverman, is just the latest manifestation of the “miracle cure narrative,” a plot device that ensures a happy ending, but also stigmatizes people with disabilities. Other examples include Colin Craven in The Secret Garden, Clara in Heidi, and, oh, you know, all those folks that Jesus healed. Broverman explains the problematic of this narrative device: “Like these characters, if you’d worked a little harder or gotten a little more fresh air, you’d be cured, too.”

To be fair, DC claims that the company-wide re-launch set the clock back to five years after the inception of the DC comic universe—a convenient bit of timeline rewriting and rejiggering. “[I]n a universe where dead superheroes can come back to life,” cedes Broverman, “[where] aliens are real, time travel is possible and artificial intelligence has advanced past the singularity, it’s actually more unbelievable that this woman has had something so comparatively minor as a spinal cord injury for so long.”

Source: New Mobility (subscription required) 

Image courtesy of DC Comics. 

“The ocean’s power is so big,” writes The Smart Set’s Stefany Anne Goldberg, “that it not only generates our worst disasters, it recycles our tragedies for later consideration, just when the whole fuss finally starts to die down.”

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What is more expensive: to send a criminal to prison or to send a student to Princeton?

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When Pleasanton mom Siah Fried and her co-author wrote Tales from Swankville, a book about hyper-competitive parenting in suburbia, they didn’t expect their neighbors to take it so personally.

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See the 30-year history of the AIDS epidemic as portrayed through public health campaign posters.

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Funny Honey: “More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce,” according to Food Safety News. Pollen is frequently filtered out, which would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world’s food safety agencies.

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Here’s a helpful guide for what to say when people ask why you’re still single. One solution: “Tell them how terrible your personality is, you even use the word ‘irregardless’ and have no idea the difference between ‘then’ and ‘than.’”

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What states let you take a gun to happy hour? What about Saturday evening mass? A map from Mother Jones lays it out.

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As belts get tighter, philanthropy gets tougher. Now you can donate to charity without even trying.

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For the love of Suess, what have they done to the Lorax?

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Learn why old books smell so good.

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A spectacular sight in the sky over the River Shannon: a murmuration of starlings.

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If you care about the environment, writes federal prisoner and Utne Reader visionary Tim DeChristopher, it’s time to play dirty.

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Donating a lifetime of comic books.

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A blog about bystander intervention in cases of sexual assault, all the more relevant given the Penn State Sandusky scandal.

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Smuggling pecans and canned pumpkin into Italy for an expat Thanksgiving.

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Americans are packing more heat than ever thanks to a nationwide parade of looser gun laws.

Image by Yashna M, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Superman was born from the creative minds of two Jewish teens whose boyhoods were steeped in comic books and science fiction. At age 18, co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster first drew the caped superhero that would capture the imagination of future generations. Academics have attributed the boys’ inspiration for Superman to the lofty pages of literature (Shaw), philosophy (Nietzsche), and religion (the Golem). But a far more likely muse, according to Reform Judaism magazine, was something much more accessible to a couple of sci-fi geeks:

[O]f all the speculative theories surrounding the creation of Superman, one exceedingly likely influence has been virtually ignored—a real-life Jewish strongman from Poland who 1. was billed as the “Superman of the Ages”; 2. advertised, on circus posters, as a man able to stop speeding locomotives; 3. wore a cape; 4. looked—with his chiseled movie-star face, wavy hair, and massive upper torso—like the future comic book idol; and 5. performed his death-defying feats in 1923 and 1924 in Cleveland and Toronto, Siegel and Shuster’s respective hometowns, when they were impressionable nine year olds.

Thus Superman’s creation story expands into the utterly accessible realm of a 1920s-era traveling circus strongman named Zisha Breitbart. If you’ve got a little comic book worship in you, check out Breitbart’s life story and his superman stunts of bending iron, wrestling bears, and withstanding beds of nails. And imagine the seeds of America’s favorite superhero being planted in two young minds.

Source: Reform Judaism 

Image by greyloch , licensed under Creative Commons.