Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett writes about comics in the real world, and an animated superhero film you may not know about.

Well, yesterday the NeverEnding Story which was the 2016 Presidential Election finally ended and, most surprisingly, on an actual note of hope.  First on Facebook, people of every political affiliation were posting “No Gloating” pleas regardless of the elections results.  Then there the unexpected nonpartisan “Please Vote” campaigns, not vote for or against anyone, but just vote.  Without any prompting, hundreds of people have been visiting the gravestone of suffragette Susan B. Anthony, a woman who died without the right to vote, and covering it in “I Voted Today” stickers until only her name was visible.  The cemetery even extended their hours “to accommodate those wishing to celebrate their vote.”

My favorite example of extolling the virtues of voting occurred in Ms. Marvel #13.  Written by G. Willow Wilson and drawn by Mirka Andolfo, it features a sequence where Kamala Khan meets with resistance when she attempts to get out the vote in her New Jersey neighborhood.  Sadly, it won’t arrive in stores until November 30, but Marvel was wise enough to make a preview of the pertinent pages available; you can find it online various places, but I found it in an L.A. Times piece by Libby Hill titled “Ms. Marvel Urges Americans to Vote.”

Torn from today’s headlines stories, superheroes are actually interacting with normal humans. These are the kind of things we don’t see nearly often enough in contemporary superhero comics.  They’re just the sort of thing that pushes all of my buttons, and demonstrates one of the reasons I like titles like Ms. Marvel.  Not because it features a female protagonist, but because periodically it’s actually about something other than selling more copies of whatever the ongoing company-wide event is.  Cosmic is nice, there’s nothing wrong with epics, but there really does need to be so-called street level titles involved with more human concerns.  Which is also a reason why I’m enjoying such new titles like Occupy Avengers (even if the appellation “Occupy” is now seriously past its sell-by date) and Champions.

I haven’t brought up the Doctor Strange movie because I haven’t seen it and probably won’t, anytime soon anyway.  I don’t doubt that I’ll enjoy it, Marvel has yet to make a major cinematic mistake, but I also enjoyed Ant-Man, and I somehow managed to wait until I could get a copy of it from my local library.  As I keep on saying, I’m always looking for something I haven’t seen before, which is admittedly a difficult proposition when dealing with genre material.  If we can go by the internet, I’m not the only way to think that Doctor Strange kind of looks like Iron Man crossed with Inception (which instead of entertained, left me confused and visually overloaded).  A “superhero” movie that looks sufficiently different enough for me to take a chance on is Phantom Boy.  It’s a French animated film directed by Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli, who previously collaborated on 2010’s Oscar-nominated A Cat in Paris.

It’s about Leo, an 11-year-old stuck in a hospital who (maybe) has the power of astral projection and “The Man with the Broken Face” (who was supposedly inspired by both the Joker and The Invisible Man, but he looks more like a Dick Tracy villain than a supervillain to me) who’s threatening New York City with a computer virus.   It has a unique look and is getting solid reviews. and while it’s on Netflix it’s not currently available for instant streaming. I’m hoping it will be soon.

For the record, I voted yesterday.  It took me twenty minutes to find a parking spot, but I earned my own “I Voted Today” sticker.  Immediately after participating in the process, I must confess, I felt a wave of relief and entered into an admittedly short-lived state of vague, unsupportable hopefulness.  Because I’ve found that it never hurts to take a moment to appreciate what we have here.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.