Heroes

Aside from playing too much scrabble through facebook, in recent days I have been watching the first few episodes of Heroes. Of heroes, Reagan said:

You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter, and they're on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They're individuals and families whose taxes support the government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet, but deep. Their values sustain our national life.

Unfortunately, he was wrong. Heroes are people who can fly, or shoot fire from their fingertips, or grow several extra pairs of arms, or whatever - and who will do so always with a mediocre quip on hand, and always in the service of good. The series seems promising. Based on a failsafe cool idea, it offers some innovation amidst a classy handling of traditional ideas - time travel, flight and saving New York from nuclear destruction. It's perhaps an unnecessarily complex plot, I'm finding the shadowy government (?) organisation hunting down our afflicted heroes a bit tiresome, and the suspense is less an "ooh wow! I can't wait to see what happens next!" than a Lost-esque "why won't they tell me what the hell is going on?!" It's also similar to Lost in that the characters, however enigmatic, are frustratingly obtuse when it comes to figuring stuff out. The concept stems from the tradition that has sustained and confined comic book culture for the past seventy years. It is a strange phenomenon, perhaps, that such a limiting (if hugely pliable) theme could come to define an entire medium, but it has created a massively rich and intertextual genre, of which Heroes is only a recent example.

The show pays homage to its forbears, to its concept's original birth-form; indeed, it is accompanied by the publication of a concurrent comic book. I read a few of these a while ago, and, oddly, felt that perhaps the story didn't quite suit the graphic form and would be better suited to a television series - someone should tell the writers. In its basic idea of "ordinary" people (such as a candidate for congress, or a heroin addicted painter) discovering "talents" within themselves brought on by over-explained genetic evolution it is a clear tribute to Marvel's X-Men. In it's content, though, there are overt references, and not only in the occasional ironic remarks about Super- or Spiderman. A comic book is in fact nicely included as a driving plot device: Japanese teleporter/time-jumper Hiro (do you see what they did there?) is guided on his mission by a comic book from the future about himself, and drawn by the aforementioned precognitive junkie painter.

There is some attempt at cerebral contemplation of the consequences and meaning of the emergence of superhumans, provided in the snippets of narration by geneticist Mohinder, who has no power unless it is the ability to accidentally stumble upon things hidden by his dead father, or by the suitably creepy supervillain Syler. It all seems a bit trite, however, and I wonder whether they will truly delve into the questions of how people might be changed by their powers, and how their existence may change the world around them. These have been questions explored relentlessly by recent generations of comics writers, whether in the teen angst and social conflict of X-Men, the celebrity heroes of Brian Bendis' Powers, or in the recent expansive, civil rights themed Marvel story Civil War, in which poor Captain America is assassinated after leading a resistance against governmental measures to restrict, regulate and segregate the power-blessed. Probably the best author to tackle these ideas has been Alan Moore, in his seminal Watchmen (soon, stupidly, to be made into a film - why can't they just leave well alone?), and even more so in his fantastic Miracleman, which due to copyright issues remains unfinished and uncollected (but can be found on the web in scanned form for all those scummy enough to fileshare). Miracleman takes the idea of the superman to its full Nietzschian limits, displaying the brilliance and wonder of power, and its horrific controlling potential. In its shadow is Mark Millar's Red Son, which imagines a Ukrainian, rather than Kansan, Superman, ruling the world through super-ability and Soviet ideology. Heroes is unlikely to become so drastic, but it really needn't, as long as gets the plot rolling and throws in a good fight scene or two.

Hiro gets all intertextual.