My Life As A Super-Hero

     Note: April 29, 2012 marked the 20th anniversary of the Legion of Net.Heroes. Fellow LNHer Arthur Spitzer asked each of us to write an essay describing what the LNH meant to us. This was my contribution. To read all of the essays, visit rec.arts.comics.creative. 

     For a long time -- much longer than I am prepared to admit -- I believed I could become a super-hero.

      This was not as ludicrous as it might seem.

      After all, I was lucky enough to live in a small town that had its very own nuclear power plant. I also knew that before I was born, my father had been exposed to all sorts of dangerous -- and, hopefully, mutagenic -- chemicals during the Vietnam War. I believed it was only a matter of time before my nascent super-powers manifested themselves, and I could get down to the serious business of fighting crime.

      As late as my college years -- by which time I really ought to have known better -- I'd hang around my roommate's biology lab on stormy nights, hoping that an errant bolt of lightning might strike the racks of chemicals and change my life forever. At the time, it didn't seem any crazier than buying a lottery ticket.

      It wasn't the powers themselves that I craved. Don't get me wrong -- I'd love the chance to fly, or throw lightning bolts, or move at superhuman speed. What I really wanted, however, was not the powers themselves but what I thought they could give me: confirmation that, despite all available evidence to the contrary, I was somebody special.

      Because that's what I loved about comic books. They gave me a world in which that nerdy-looking guy on the subway -- the one with the messed-up hair and rumpled suit, whose glasses are crooked and whose aftershave is a little too strong -- might be Superman. Or Spider-Man. Or the Hulk. Anybody you met might have a hero, a monster, or both lurking inside of them.

      The heroes I read about in comic books seemed to have the same problems I did: trouble relating to other people, trouble getting a date, trouble finding time to do all of the things they wanted to do with their lives. What made them different was that, from time to time, those heroes had the opportunity -- and the courage -- to let their secret selves shine, to go out in their underwear and show the world what amazing people they really were.

      At some point I realized that I would never be a part of this world. Whatever hidden powers a lifetime of radiation and environmental toxins bestowed upon me had decided to stay hidden. I was never going to be a super-hero, so I decided to do the next best thing.

      I became a writer.

      Writing gave me the opportunity to exercise the kind of control over a fictional world that I'd always wanted to have in the real one. I could, like Woody Allen, make myself the hero of every story. I could give my characters the ability to work through situations I'd experienced and enjoy the kinds of happy endings I'd felt I'd deserved.

      (This could sometimes backfire. I once wrote a story in which the main character is so upset that his roommate has begun dating the girl he likes that he decides to kill his roommate. My own roommate -- who was, in fact, dating the girl on whom we both had a crush -- found the story, and was disturbed by how many of its details seemed familiar...)

      I took writing very, very seriously. I attended a college, Kenyon, that also takes writing seriously (one of my coffee mugs says "We did poetry at Kenyon, the way that at Ohio State, they do football.") My writers' workshops were full of very, very serious would-be writers like myself, who wrote about bad childhoods, broken relationships and terse, highly symbolic episodes that I did not understand at the time, but later learned were meant to be homages to Hemingway, Nabokov or Raymond Carver.

      I was well on my way to becoming a serious writer. And then something funny happened.

      I discovered the Internet.

      Not in the same way that Al Gore did, of course. The information superhighway arrived at Kenyon College, as most things did, about two semesters after it showed up at every other university. There was no World Wide Web in those days, just e-mail, FTP, Gopher and something called "newsgroups," which seemed to be bulletin boards where people with very strong opinions spent a great deal of time telling everyone else why they were wrong.

      It didn't take me long to realize that in the Internet I'd finally found the place I'd read about in comic books: a place where seemingly ordinary people could lead double lives as the heroes, or the monsters, or (in the case of one of my male friends), the attractive and flirtatious women they had always wanted to be. It made sense then, that there would be a place -- alt.comics.lnh, the home of the Legion of Net.Heroes -- for people like me, who had dreamed of becoming super-heroes, or at least writing about them.

      What surprised me was how good the writing was. Comics were supposed to be a second-rate genre (this was the time at which the world's best-selling comic book began with the lines "His name -- Spider-Man! His powers -- Extraordinary! His webline -- ADVANTAGEOUS!"). And yet here were writers like Dave Van Domelen, Ken Schmidt and Jeff McCoskey, telling stories that were funny, well-crafted and engaging about real people who just happened to be super-heroes.

      I was also surprised by how much broader and deeper the world of the Legion of Net.Heroes was than the world of mainstream comics that had given birth to it. The super-heroes of DC and Marvel Comics were, in the 1990s, mostly young white men who lived in the United States. By contrast, the men and women who posted on alt.comics.lnh came from Canada and Australia and New Zealand, from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds, and with a range of influences that rarely appeared in comics of the day -- pulp novels and manga, old cartoons and classic TV shows, comedy routines and music (there were at least two series featuring characters inspired by the band They Might Be Giants), all of which found their way into their stories.

      The thing that amazed me the most, however, was how friendly a place the LNH was. I'd come to expect writers' groups to be catty -- and a writers' group on the Internet, where one rarely has to encounter the object of one's scorn face-to-face, to be ten times cattier. Yet the harshest criticism I'd seen leveled on alt.comics.lnh was something along the lines of "that character's actions seem inconsistent with how he/she has been portrayed in the past." Everyone on the newsgroup seemed supportive of one another, and no one seemed to take themselves too seriously.

      It was, as a certain credit card company says in its commercials, everywhere I wanted to be.

      So I wrote my first story for the LNH. I created a character who was, like me, someone who had desperately wanted to become a super-hero, someone who had, in fact, gone so far as to subject himself to prolonged exposure to radiation in order to gain super-powers, and who had, as a result, gained the ability to glow in the dark and be detected at great distances with a Geiger counter. I called him Easily-Discovered Man.

      And because I had recently read Don Quixote, I felt that my hero needed a sidekick, someone who would act as the voice of reason and a point-of-view character for my audience. If Easily-Discovered Man was earnest and heroic to the point of obsession, his sidekick would be practical and a bit sneaky, someone who viewed the whole idea of being a super-hero as more than a little ridiculous. I called him Easily-Discovered Man Lite.

      To say that I had no idea what I was getting into when I posted that first story was something of an understatement. The Legion of Net.Heroes was more than just a writers' group, more than just a place online to read and discuss stories. It was a shared universe, where characters and actions in one story influenced events in another, and where an eclectic group of authors collaborated and competed and created a world together.

      When it worked -- when it really worked -- writing for the LNH was like what I imagine it would be to play in the world's greatest jazz combo. I'd toss out a riff -- a story, a chapter of an ongoing cascade, a response to someone else's post -- and the next author would respond with something even more brilliant and hilarious (or, in the case of Arthur Spitzer, completely surreal) and the whole thing would roll on, each of us constantly forced to reach down into that creative part of him or herself, each of us constantly raising our game to match the talent of the people surrounding us.

      That experience changed the way I write -- and by extension, changed me, too. I'd begun writing as a means of wish fulfillment, as a way to make myself feel special. But when you write in a shared universe, the story can't always be about you. The more I participated in the world of the Legion of Net.Heroes, the less I cared about being the star of the show -- and the more I simply wanted to tell the very best stories that I could.

      I started out wanting to be a super-hero when I grew up. I ended up growing up by becoming a super-hero. And for that, I have the authors, the readers, the monsters and the heroes of the Legion of Net.Heroes to thank.

      Long live the Legion.