Through the Eyes of my 11-Year-Old Brother

Well, he's almost twelve. That was irrelevant to the article.

My brother's still in that 'comic books are way awesome' stage. So when he wakes up every morning (which is at the bloody crack of dawn, around the time I retire for bed) and announces that he's Wolverine or Spiderman for the day and proceeds to jump on my bed, and in the process, splits the ligaments in my limbs, I can't help but get a little bit annoyed.

I mean, I'm all for justice prevailing or whatever, but I need my sleep!
So today, in a somewhat frisky mood, I counted down all the reasons why superheroes kinda suck. Like if you were the Hulk - at the rate at which you keep ripping your clothes, you'll probably go bankrupt in a month. And how do you expect to be saving the world when you're out shopping for new shirts all the time?

The puke-green and immense strength would also make
things extremely awkward in bed...

The twit came back with, "I could be Flash."

Aha! Finally those physics lectures could be put to use. "Yeah, sure. But if you ran around like that all the time, the friction between your body and the air molecules would be of such a high magnitude that you'd probably set yourself on fire."

"Really?! That would be cool," grins the little heathen.

I started thinking fast. "Uhh...think about it. If your clothes all burn, you'll be back in the mall like the Hulk."

"Oh," came a tiny, dejected voice that spiraled my sadistic self into a volley of sustained laughs.

And even if you don't catch on fire, there's always
the fact that you might blind yourself to death.

"Maybe Superman?"

"Too bright."

"Cyclops?"

"Too girly."

"Wolverine!"

"Too hot."

"Batman...?"

"Too cool."


This went on for about another three hours. Or maybe it was just a couple of minutes. I dunno, I usually don't grasp time and sanity when I'm woken up against my wishes.

But I somehow managed to crack into his infantile conscience and scare him to the point of no return. See, it turns out, when you completely smack down the childhood idols of little kids and tell them exactly why you'd like them to shove it, it tends to throw off their balance in a way I find slightly unsettling, yet somewhat cynically hilarious.

So when he ran out of the room crying and yelling "Moooooommy!", I exhaled a long sigh, adjusted the air-conditioning to the lowest temperature possible and went back to fuzzy dreams of me being Batgirl to Heath Ledger's Joker.

Some comic-book fantasies you can never quite escape.
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