Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Books in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett talks about civilian outreach and the nature of heroism.

You want a real confession?  Last week I bought an action figure.  I shouldn't have of course; the last thing I needed was to exchange a hard earned $20 for yet another piece of plastic that I'd admire for a couple of days before relating it to a shelf to gather dust (hey if I pay that kind of money you know that baby is coming out of its box) with the rest of my action figures.

But this was the really cool looking Marvel Legends Thing (my personal totem) figure, so what else could I do?

Almost as interesting as the toy, at least to me, was the packaging.  Buried in the instructions of how to put together the Build Your Own Ronan The Accuser figure was a prepaid postcard from Marvel Comics offering me '6 issues free!' ('Yes, It's Totally Free!' is repeated for emphasis) of Marvel Adventures Spider-Man.  Although I would have thought the Marvel Legends line would skew more towards an older consumer this card is definitely intended for kids, as it contains the admonition 'you must be 18 years old to order' and has places for both a parents signature and e-mail address.

It's a swell piece of comic book industry outreach -- my only question being, why doesn't ALL superhero related toys (and DVD's) contain something similar?

I hope you all got the chance to read the November issue of American Prospect magazine that featured 'The Revolt of the Comic Books' by Julian Sanchez.  It's a smart, well informed piece dealing with how current political realities are reflected in mainstream comics, though I do have to wonder how something this short managed to get the cover (unless an image of a superhero splattered with the blood of a dead U.S. President was just to irresistible not to use).  If you haven't it's still available on their website.

It makes any number of well-argued points about the 'embedded politics of superheroism' (i.e. the fascism inherent in the genre times the generally left of center leanings of the writers) and how both Civil War and Infinite Crisis were ultimately about 'how evil can arise from well-intentioned efforts to use coercive power for good ends'.

The piece ends with this paragraph:
'The failures and success alike show that if comics are to succeed as modern political allegory; comic writers cannot simply transplant real controversies into their fictional worlds.  They also face the daunting task of inventing a grammar and a vocabulary for a new sort of superhero narrative -- one capable of telling us that, sometimes, great power comes with the responsibility to not use it.'

Or as Scott McCloud once so succinctly put it in his classic comic ZOT; 'justice isn't a punch in the face.'

It appears some people are already at work at that new vocabulary if last week's issue of Thor written by J. Michael Straczynski is any indication.  In it Dr. Donald Blake works with a Doctors Without Borders type organization in war torn Africa; oddly enough this is the second Marvel comic in less than  year to deal with Africa (the first being the Squadron Supreme: Hyperion vs. Nighthawk miniseries written by Marc Guggenheim).  And both comics come to the same conclusion; American style superheroics are incapable of solving these kind of problems and well meaning foreigners should just go home before they make things worse.

Earlier I accepted as a given the popular presumption that the majority of comic book writers were 'liberal' when both Straczynski and Guggenheim (since both are also television writers does that make them double liberals?) reject the call popular in NPR circles to establish some kind of peacekeeping force to stop the genocide going on in Darfur.  Rather, both seem to see Africa's bloody civil wars as brushfires and it's better to let them burn themselves out rather than inadvertently causing more damage trying to put them out.

Now I accept that real change can't be imposed from outside by force and that it really is up to Africans to solve African problems, but this 'paradigm' essentially means turning a blind eye to the unbelievable death toll and unimaginable suffering going on every day  are just unfortunate 'growing pains.'  I don't know; I'm just a comic book guy and not all that sophisticated when it comes to world politics.  Maybe doing nothing is the prudent thing to do.

But I'll never accept that it's heroic.

The Customer of the Week award goes out to the woman who came into Dark Star looking for a recently released hardcover book that all her friends were talking about.  We didn't have it but when I suggested that we'd be happy to order it for her she said 'I don't buy books; I think it's a waste of money.'

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.