Superheroes: The Modern Mythology

Mikayla Leskey | Arts and Entertainment Editor

Girl wearing superhero costume and mask for Halloween doing flying pose. / Photo by 'DC_Studio', licensed by Envato.com.

You know what I’ve always wanted to see? A TV series or short film or whatever about our everyday heroes in a superhero universe. Y’know our firefighters or teachers or nurses working together to save the civilians or clean up the city whilst Superman or Captain America are in the background defeating whatever supervillain decided to try and take over this time. 

I’m not sure why I’ve always wanted a film about this. Maybe it would make these movies and big personas feel a little more real. Seeing the little guy or woman or person in a story that’s already about making the weirdos and unusuals bigger than life. Not that Oliver Queen or Tony Stark are “normal” per-se, but that’s not the point.

The point is that superheroes are larger than life, there’s something to aspire to but never to be achieved. I mean, it’s not like there’s radioactive spiders running around giving people the ability to stick on walls or aliens coming down from outer space to protect Earth; that we know of, at least. 

I only started getting into the DCU recently, but I’ve been a Marvel fan since middle school. So much of one in fact that once, when I saw a video of an interviewer asking the marvel cast what ‘SHIELD’ stood for, I decided to memorize it. To this day, I can still recite Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division without batting an eye. Here’s the thing, when I started getting into the DCU and talking to one of my friends about it, he, of course, gave me all the lore to every character. But the most important thing I realized about these two universes, or important to me I guess, is that they’re basically just modernized Greek and Roman mythologies. 

This realization has probably been made before but as someone new to the DCU and always been interested in mythology it’s like something clicked. There’s this Mythology book I’ve read once, by Edith Hamilton and in one of the very first pages she states “The Greeks made their gods in their own image. That had not entered the mind of man before. Until then, gods had had no semblance of reality. They were unlike all living things. [...] With its coming, the universe became rational.” (Hamilton #7) 

Before Greek Mythology, there was no such thing as human-like Gods. They were all beast-like in some way, shape, or form. Some historians call this the “dark times” where human sacrifice was just as common as the sun shining, or rain, I guess—when we were terrified of the dark. That’s why the Gods were made in the first place, to give people hope and to inspire them for a better future. It’s the same reason why superheroes are so popular. 

They give us hope, or they’re supposed to. They give ordinary humans the belief that good always overcomes evil, that the innocent and good will always prosper. They also bring a belief that only one person is needed to change the world; and in some way this belief isn’t wrong. It only takes one person to start the movement, but it takes thousands to finish the revolution. So many people are waiting for that one person to be Wonder Woman or Ms. Marvel when that’s not going to happen. Some people need to believe that changing the world starts with them. 

Superheroes, just like Greek Heroes and myths are symbols of courage and passion and hope and most of all, entertainment. Believe it or not, quite a few of Greek mythos started out as entertainment, just like comics. Sure, their original intent was probably to give some hope to the world, but when it came down to it, a lot of it was for entertainment. Some people found Zeus cheating on Hera funny or relatable, just like how they found Peter Parker relatable because he’s a teenager, and nothing is impossible when you’re a teenager. 

That’s what I’ve been trying to get at this entire time.

These superheroes are in place to fight the fight that feels like too much, they can do the impossible. They’re our modern mythology, closer to us than Greek or Roman or any other mythos. They’re our reason for courage and hope; getting us through trying times and reminding us to keep walking through hell if we find ourselves stuck in it. 

They served as a reminder that even if you’re some kind of billionaire like Bruce Wayne or a science experiment like Steve Rogers or just someone who wants to change the world like Dave Lizewski, you can. We raise Superheroes to such pedestals knowing we can’t achieve it because we want someone to save us. We don’t want to be the saviours, all of us have a little bit of wanting to save the world in us, but we’re not superpowered.

Most of us don’t have the amount of money it would take to end world hunger or bring world peace, the only thing we do have is our voices and our courage. That’s what superheroes teach us, to rely on ourselves when all else is doomed. 

Sources

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Edited by Steele Savage, Little, Brown, 1998.