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maandag, juni 06, 2005

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no...it's a blasted blogging meme.

Despite my best efforts with this blog to be contemplative and sober (well, scratch that last one if you feel that the two Jamesons I've recently poured myself counterveils such a comportment), I have just been tagged in the way that bloggers are from time to time. The Bionic Octopus is attempting to proliferate a 'meme', as I believe these things are depicted, and I have been caught in her six-million-dollar tentacles.

The theme is comic books, something that were once dear to my heart, but then were not for a long time, but which have now once more found themselves to be of some assistance to me as I exploit them to (attempt to) advance my French, here in Brussels, the global capital of comics (Didn't know that? It's
true).

Suped Up: The Post-Human Quiz

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why? (Assume you also get baseline superhero enhancements like moderately increased strength, endurance and agility.)

As much as flight or invisibility or being able to fart nuclear fireballs would be pretty neat-o, I reckon mind control has to be the sweetest superpower. I would with my supersonic mentalism instantly wash away all the timidity, disillusionment and apathy within the working class.

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you fancy, and why?


I haven't read the X-men for years, so I don't know if she's still 'existing', but when I was around eleven or twelve I remember being decidedly stirred, in the way that twelve-year-old boys tend to be stirred, by the way that John Byrne drew Rogue in the eighties. Make that Storm and her Tina-Turner-out-of-Mad-Max-Beyond-Thunderdome haircut as well. Oh, and now that I think about it, Havoc, too.

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you hate?

All of them. They're superheroes, right? So powerful they could battle Galactus, the Swallower of Worlds, yeah? But they couldn't take on pantywaist slapheads John Negroponte and Otto Reich, Swallowers of Central American Countries That Dared to Elect Progressive Governments? (I'm still stuck in this eighties time-warp, here) Well, what use are they, then?

The conception of or need for superheroes thus can only be an expression of the fascist impulse: A pessimistic rejection of the possibility our own collective power as an international working class to 'put things right'. Ahem.

OK, here's the tough one. What would your superhero name be? (No prefab porn-name formulas here, you have to make up the name you think you'd be proud to mask under.)

Okay, you're all gonna kill me for the fromage factor here, but, how about The Worker!

For extra credit: Is there an 'existing' superhero with whom you identify/whom you would like to be?

Well, that's easy. I always wanted to be Tintin, also of Brussels. You say he is not a superhero? Pshaw. He has the plainly superhuman ability to be employed by a broadsheet as a foreign correspondent before the age of thirty.

I guess in a way I am living the Tintin life I wanted: I'm overseas and attempting to make a living as a journalist. It's not a bad life, really, although I do wish I could afford a place with plumbing that worked. A talking dog would come in handy too.

Oh, and by the way, I'm totally down with
Magneto, who's supposedly a supervillain. But he's like the Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael of mutants, to dripping daisy Professor X's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bit of a pussy. If the humans are oppressing the mutants, surely they have the right to fight back - By Any Means Necessary.

Up the Brotherhood of Mutants!

Pass it on. Three people please, and why they're the wind beneath your wings.


Erm, Darren of
Inveresk Street Ingrate - because while he may be an impossiblist member of the SPGB, he's got cracking taste in music; Doug, of If There Is Hope - because most Canadian leftie bloggers are NDP wets, but he ain't; and John of Counago & Spaves - because there are almost no anarchist bloggers, and, dammit, there should be.

Update: It seems somebody else is hot for Rogue.