So I was sitting at an intersection listening to an incredible story on NPR while I watched a man sitting stopped in the middle of the street for no reason. NPR was talking to a woman who had written an op-ed about how disturbed she was when Batgirl suddenly went from being wheelchair bound to normal due to some shake up at DC comics. She said she was physically ill when she read about how they’d revived Batgirl. She loved reading about the trials and tribulations that resulted from Batgirl being in a wheelchair and her only complaint was, that up to the point of Batgirl’s revival she wasn’t quite as miserable as real handicapped people. But it was a start. This reflection of real life in the comic books, especially the acknowledgment of differently abled people, was a real positive step. The man in the middle of the street finally realized that he was not sitting at a stop sign or a red light and so I suppose some light bulb went off in his head allowing him to start driving again. Well at that very moment he started rolling a light bulb went off in my head too. I rushed to my office and began working on what would be a most momentous endeavor. In those first hours at my office I created and produced my first issue of “Liam, the Morbidly Obese Retarded Superhero.” It was pure genius. When my agent pitched it to DC comics they snapped it up with a contract that would make me immensely comfortable for the rest of my life. The first issue went out and within a week my house was firebombed, my car covered in epoxy glue, and my contract with DC comics suspended. We were all utterly astonished. Here we’d put out a comic that reflected reality with the precisely same techniques used to reflect reality in all the past years of comic book production. I mean, in the first pages you are introduced to Liam as he sits at his mother’s table. He is sitting in a chair that is bowing out at the legs because Liam weighs about 590 pounds and every time Liam’s mother turns around Liam plucks another cat turd from the litter box and pops it into his mouth. Because of his facial features and the fact that he is eating cat turds you know right away that he is retarded. But the speed with which he maneuvers his massive body over to the cat litter box next to the refrigerator and back to his chair without his mother noticing lets you see that he clearly has super powers. In this first episode, Liam’s mother leaves him alone in the house while she goes to buy some more gourmet cat food to feed one of her 34 cats that she adopts from the SPCA at every opportunity. (I wanted to flush out the family life of Liam so as to put in my two bits with regard to the nature vs nurture controversy which, in truth, I didn’t want to hear another word about having read one too many issues of The New York Review of Books) So she leaves Liam alone in the house sitting in front of a massive flat screen TV. She leaves a plate of nuts, bananas, lettuce, watermelon, and cantaloupe on his giant TV lap tray and turns on some news program assuming he won’t understand what he’s watching anyway. The second she walks out the door Liam throws the tray of health food up in the air with such force that it goes through the ceiling and in a flash he is sitting back on the couch with the cat litter tray in his lap. It just so happens to be the tenth anniversary of Sept 11th and so Liam sees a replay of the jets slamming into the World Trade Center buildings. You can see his eyes bulging out of his head as a few hundred brain cells comprehend something. You see him running down the street in his underwear thinking that somewhere behind the TV set is the burning WTC. Our drawing here was superb. It really conveyed very beautifully and clearly that Liam thought the problem was somewhere behind the TV even as he was running down the street. After a few frames you see Liam standing in front of a couple sky scrapers. A policeman walks up to him to confront him about being out in public wearing nothing but underwear. Here we show a little thought bubble indicating that Liam thinks the cop is a muslim. Basically we just put a drawing of the cop in the bubble with a turbine on his head. But it isn’t just a regular turbine like the Arabs wear. It’s actually a wind turbine! Again, this subtile trick implies that Liam doesn’t see things through the eyes of a normal person. He sees things like a real American! Anyway, he rips the cop’s head off with one hand and then, again using subtile thought bubbles, we show that he forgets that he just tore a Muslim’s head off and thinks he has a bowling ball in his hand. He sees a bunch of people walking down the sidewalk and uses the head like a bowling ball to knock them all off their feet whereupon they all remind him of giant bubble gum stains and he runs over to them and starts eating them raw. Now a bunch of police cars and fire trucks show up along with news helicopters and onlookers. Then for ten frames we just have Liam standing there looking at nothing with empty thought bubbles over his head. I have to admit, this rather worthless use of space was my tipping of the hat to the dude who’d stopped his car in the middle of the road for no reason in real life. After all, he fired up my lightbulb! When Liam comes out of his stupor and starts thinking like, well, like a retard again, he tears into the police and firemen ripping off their arms and legs like they were daddy long leg spiders. He then smashes all the police cars and fire trucks and tears open a gas pipe going into the side of one of the skyscrapers starting a conflagration of epic proportions. The entire city is burned down to a pile of dull grey ash and you see Liam walking down an empty street with a little thought bubble over his head that shows a cat taking a dump. That was basically it. We didn’t see how it could fail to be a sensation! Well after things settled down a little bit DC comics did some polling and determined that people were furious simply because we used the word “retard.” Evidently, If we’d called the comic, “Liam, the Morbidly Obese Mentally Differently Abled Superhero” we would have captured the hearts of everyone of the now fifty and sixty year olds that were still obsessed with comic books. Well the results of that poll made ME furious and so I wrote an op-ed about how there was a serious flaw out there some where. People wanted reality in the comics. In reality, when people hear mentally disadvantaged or mentally differently abled, they, in fact, think “retard.” After my op-ed was published my house was firebombed again and my car was turned upside down in the front yard. I gave up. I realized that my ultra enlightened country could not deal with reality unless it was real in a comic book which, I know it’s a shock, is a comic book, where, now hold on to your hat, sometimes things aren’t really real!
