Strange, because the teenage male for whom superhero comics are still written – a boy not at the top of the social tree – spends many an hour fantasising about what he’d do with invisibility or super-strength or flight. Ultimate Spider-Man asked the same question in a new century.īut otherwise there are relatively few contemplations of what the average comics reader would do if he were suddenly blessed with incredible power. Nova was Spider-Man in the 1970s, Firestorm – a personal favourite, I’m never sure why – was Spider-Man at DC. The Hulk is a monster movie, Thor’s a god, the Fantastic Four are a family, the X-Men are outcasts. His answer: given great power, most of us would use it to show off and make money until the loss of a father figure put us on the path toward good.īut even in Marvel there aren’t many other heroes addressing the question. Steve Ditko may have got Stan Lee to write a letter admitting Steve was the creator of Spider-Man, but Lee was the engine behind Peter Parker. Marvel have Spider-Man, of course, who answers that question full-on. DC created sidekicks for their younger readers to identify with, but they’re just fans of the heroes catapulted into the story. They make the hero some other guy someone who is definitely not you someone equipped with universal moral authority or empowered by a bottomless well of tragedy and cash or a test pilot or a police scientist or whatever. Most superhero comics, in fact, go out of their way not to answer it. It’s not a question they answer very often. Superhero comics beg a question: what if it were me? What if I were the guy with superpowers? What kind of hero would I be? To mark the release of the new hardback edition of Zenith: Phase I, Tom Whiteley, the author of the excellent Suggested for Mature Readers blog, has kindly allowed us to post an article on the story that he originally published in August 2012.

Zenith phase one