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 talks about how comics can be used in positive ways, or reacted to in ways that are not.

For some strange reason the usual suspect comic news sites have been surprisingly quiet about a movie with "Superman" in it's title, and I don't mean Superman/Batman: Apocalypse.  Maybe it's because the movie in question is Waiting For Superman, a documentary that shows how students have been failed by the American educational system.  If you were wondering what Superman has to do with that it uses stock footage of actor George Reeves as Superman from The Adventures of Superman TV series as a way of underscoring how our schools are in desperate need of rescue.  It's definitely a troubling film to watch but I'm made strangely hopeful that there's a way out of this mess by the fact our schools have been in this kind of trouble before.  I place into evidence this public service ad from a late 1940's comic book.

I was reading the September 24 online edition of the New York Times and began reading a piece called "Afghan Equality and Law, but with Strings Attached" by Rod Nordland, never expecting it would have anything to do with comic books.  But I came to a full stop when I got to the second sentence of the first paragraph.

Hundreds of children would gather on the iconic Nader Khan Hill in the capital, Kabul, on a gorgeous Friday in September and fly kites emblazoned with slogans lauding the rule of law and equality for women.  The kites, along with copies of the Afghan Constitution and justice-themed comic books, would be gifts of the United States, part of a $35 million effort "to promote the use of Afghanistan's formal justice system."

All of which seemed like a great idea, until I reached the part of the festival celebrating the rule of law where the Afghan police stole dozens of the children's kites.  And as for the comics...

The law and justice comic books were also a big hit.  Some of the boys snatched them up and hid them under their shirts so they could come back for more.  At one point, fed-up policemen, most of whom cannot read, just tossed piles of them in the dirt.
 
I realize that predicting this doesn't exactly make me a Nostradamus or anything I know but still I totally called it when in a previous column (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy -- What I should Have Said Was Nothing") I said a backlash against the Teshkeel Media Group's The 99 was inevitable.  Well the first salvo in the assault has come in the form of a piece called "Meet the Muslim Superheroes who are Ready to Indoctrinate America's Kids" written by Adrian Morgan, editor of the Family Security Matters Website which has been posted on half a dozen other like minded websites.  With a title like that I admit I was expecting bigoted vitriol but the piece itself wasn't nearly as bad as the comments to it which were, uniformly dark, ignorant and hysterically hateful.

It's hard being hopeful after reading something like that but on the same day I found another story, "Muslim Superhero Comic Book to Make its Debut" which got picked up by quite a few web  sites, Fox News included.  It was about how a group of disabled young Americans and Syrians got together to promote better understanding between the West and Muslim and at least one of the results was the creation of a new superhero, tentatively titled The Silver Scorpion.  Liquid Comics is putting their character into a comic book that will be published in both Arabic and English; 50,000 copies of it will be distributed in Syria and a free digital edition will be available on the Liquid Comics website, with an American print version to follow.

The retailer in me of course wonders if we actually need any more superheroes, no matter how well intentioned, like the nerd wonders if Liquid Comics is aware that Marvel has a Golden Age Silver Scorpion who has made some recent appearances (my last confirmed sighting was in 2002's Citizen V and the V-Battalion: The Everlasting).  But if there's a better way to combat stupid fear and prejudice than through comics, I don't know  what it is; I only  wish Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes (with its anti-racism storyline) was made mandatory reading for some of our elected officials.

But the comic is also notable because (as far as I know) this is the first time a disabled superhero was created by someone actually in the disabled community. And as Sharad Devarajan, co-founder of Liquid Comics said in the article one of the most interesting things about this project is that none of the young people wanted their hero's power to be something that cured their disability.

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.