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Popular Culture Review
forehead didn’t make him especially interesting.” “We had eyes only for SpiderMan or Batman in those days, superheroes in two dimensions, with lunch boxes
and television shows and theme songs,” Everett tells us (119-120). The phrase
“superheroes in two dimensions” suggests that even in this “hyper-reality”
where a superhero might move into the neighborhood, there is still a distinction
made between those superheroes who exist in both worlds and those superheroes
who— lacking in range or depth—do not.
Everett tells us that Super Goat Man’s comic had a “five-issue run” and
then it was “forever canceled” making him a “minor star" (120-121). Even his
publisher, Electric Comics, “wasn't one of the major comic publishers'’ and the
stories themselves “were both ludicrous and boring": “Super Goat Man’s five
issues showed him rescuing old ladies from swerving trucks and kittens from
light ning-struck trees, and battling dull villains like Vest Man and False Dave”
(121). In the end, Everett finds the comics to be “embarrassing for myself, for
Super Goat Man, and for my dad” and dismisses them out of hand, as he does
Super Goat Man (121).
Umberto Eco wrote that “Real heroes are always impelled by
circumstances; they never choose, because if they could, they would choose not
to be heroes" (122). And this seems to be the maxim that the story seeks to work
through in the second part when Super Goat Man is called to act and does so
with tragic consequences: The year is 1981. Everett is a junior at Corcoran
College in New Hampshire and Super Goat Man has joined the teaching staff in
order to “fill the Walt Whitman Chair in the Humanities” (127). Toward the end
of Spring Term two frat boys climb up Campanile Tower on campus and begin
bellowing: “Baaahh, baaahh. Super Goat Man! . . . What’s the matter with your
goaty senses? Smoke too much dope tonight?” and so on (134). Obviously a
superhero associated more with saving kittens and little old ladies than with
super-valorous deeds may not be the kind of superhero needed in this situation.
Still, clad only in a silk kimono—which, hanging loose, might make a passable
cape—he shakes the cobwebs from his head and treks toward the Commons and
the Tower. Armed with giant sculptures of paperclips, the two boys wait. Of
course tragedy is also waiting and as one of the boys tries to balance on the roof,
he slips and plummets to the ground, shattering his lower body. Super Goat
Man, who had been climbing up to rescue him, had reached out in an attempt to
catch him, but came away only with the model paperclip. The boy survives fall,
but is paralyzed and spends the last year at the university as a kind of sad figure.
That he is alive, however, prevents any sort of mythologizing about the incident.
“Instead,” Everett informs us, “it was covered in clumsy hush” (136).
In the third part of the narrative, we learn that Everett finished his
studies and went on to graduate school and pretty much forgot about Super Goat
Man. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine, he
takes a two-year post-doc at Oregon State University and there he meets Angela
and marries her. She has studied at Oxford and is in America on a scholarship.