Top five favorite superheros
So last week we were discussing Maddie and Lydia’s love of She-Ra – a series that predates them by twenty years….and it occurred to me that I have a similar affection as my girls, to characters that were popular and then almost forgotten, long before I was born.
If you’ve see some of the earlier Violent Blue strips, you’ll note I like top five lists. It’s a habit developed from watching “High Fidelity” too many times, but that only makes sense as it’s one of my top five all time favorite films.
If you ask me who my top five favorite superheros are right now I’d list off :
1.Superman
2. The Shadow
3.The Green Hornet
4.Spider-Man
5.Daredevil
Now those bottom two change around sometimes. I know that Nightwings been in there (until the book became too popular and Chuck Dixon left it), not to mention Batman or Green Lantern or Gambit. Those top three however….those have remained the same for over twenty years. You can find drawings of the Shadow and the Green Hornet in my sketchbooks dating back to fifth grade. There are Vhs tapes with the Green Hornet recorded off of a television station that no longer exists…probably around 1988. And Superman…well that just speaks for itself.
So why do I have such a fascination with these characters? It likely has to do with my father. My father and I are very different people and we don’t really get along these days. A few trust issues. However, when I was a child, we would watch the old George Reeves Superman TV show, and he would tell me stories about The Shadow…or The Green Hornet. I’d lament the fact that I couldn’t listen to those old radio shows he remembered. It saddened me I’d never read the pulps or see the old Shadow films. It made me seek these things out – a cassette of the Shadow radio show. A comic book here and there. I collected “the Shadow Strikes” from DC like mad. I jumped right on the NOW bandwagon when they were publishing “The Green Hornet”. The internet eventually allowed me to assemble a complete collection of the radio shows and the pulps.
There’s a connection to my father through these characters, just like my girls find a connection to me through characters like Superman and She-Ra. They can’t explain it, they can’t articulate it, but they sense it and it draws them to it.I believe that’s why they fight over my Superman fleece blanket and watch Scooby-Doo meets Batman. From that perspective those costumes they wear make perfect sense, and I hope, that if we ever drift so far apart that there’s nothing else between us, that they will still reach for this kind of common ground.
I believe they will, and I believe that to them, Superman will always mean Daddy….much like it does to me.
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