"Dad, I want to be an Eco Superhero"

Yesterday I had lunch at a small diner in Brooklyn, and at the table next to me a small boy was eating with his familly. He was wearing a t-shirt with his favourite superhero and I came to notice the assisting headline: ”Your ECO SUPERHERO is here to save the planet”. Wow! That was really something. It seems the children are fighting the environmental problems on their own, already... okay, maybe with a little help from the local fictional superhero.

But as I sat and noticed this boy and his almost political statement, I came to think that comics are not just fun and fiction. The defining feature of the superhero is the motif of 'double identity'. We recognise Superman not by his ability to freeze objects by blowing on them but by his second life as Clark Kent. The writer Umberto Eco called Superman: "an epic-eternal Hero who exists outside time (the Man of Steel), and a ‘consumable’ romantic-novelistic Hero (Clark Kent) who gets older every week". So in many ways kids get to have a light perspective between what oneself (as a human) can do to save our Planet, and how we all (just like the Hero) must take all disasters 'really really personal' and keep on fighting untill we all "lived happily ever after".

All kids grow up and so does the World of Fiction...sort of!

In 2009 the 'green version of CNN'* called the 'Mother Nature Network' (MNN) launched, and so did the cartoon movie 'Captain Planet and the Planeteers', advocating environmentalism and the tale of good fighting evil defending the world from pollution, criminals, and natural disasters using the four classical elements — Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water — as well as a fifth element, Heart, which represents love. Planet Earth is terrorised by Ecovillains that are well aware that what they do is wrong, yet do it anyhow, moved by greed, selfishness, overconsumption, or a desire for power....Doesn't sound like a story that's only meant for kids, right!?

Another example of how fiction has blend into our daily lives, is the Washington Posts weekly environmental advice column The Green Lantern written by Slate, which is a reference to the comic book Green Lantern (seen on picture above) - a character which has been related to yet another superhero: Al Gore - the Green Policeman. If some uf us didn't already know this superhero my guess is that we're all going to see the upcoming movie next year, starring Ryan Reynolds as the Green Lantern.

So as you can see you're not alone. There is no reason to hide your inner Superhero, anymore. Just let it out and enjoy the fight!