I know they’ve been around for a long time, first Superman, Batman, then eventually more and more of them, wearing goofy costumes and fighting crime with weird super-powers, secret identities and trendy neuroses. They’ve taken over lately, not just comic books any more, but very big-budget Hollywood epics, starring some of the world’s finest actors and sporting spectacular special effects.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, we all have our guilty pleasures; myself, I’m into sword-and-sandal epics, grade-Z horror flicks, cheap science fiction and disaster movies, other people are queer for westerns, gangster films, slasher flicks, sword and sorcery…whatever. There’s nothing wrong with that. Its not just that some folks find super hero stories move them in some deep way. What gets me is that suddenly a great deal of people have hopped on this genre, and it is attracting a lot of money and talent. There must be a reason, not why people like super heroes, but why suddenly a whole lot of folks are loving super-heroes. A few years ago it was zombies, remember? And that genre has yet to play out. Hordes of Mexicans, Muslims, foreigners pouring across our borders like the walking dead. maybe there’s the connection.

If that’s what inspired the Zombie trope and Donald Trump, what will Aquaman, Thor, Wonder Woman and the Justice Leaque lead to?

Is there some deep, psychosocial phenomenon manifesting itself here? A group psychosis propagating via pop culture?Are we, as a culture, expressing some need to confront the world with some godlike power because we feel it has become increasingly impossible to deal with its madness in any other way?

This isn’t just happening. There must be a reason for this.