I’ve been thinking a lot about heroes and villains lately – here in Parkes we just ran an event called Big Box Battle where teens made Godzilla-like monsters and kids built heroic cardboard robots to fight them; last month in Sydney I spoke at an event about monsters and villains in children’s literature; and, on a darker note, my Twitter stream just yielded Dean Trippe’s comic Something Terrible, courtesy of Dylan Horrocks. Trippe’s comic shows how fantasy heroes can be a beacon of hope and goodness in even the most terrible of real-life circumstances.
Given the huge part protagonists play in our own notions of what it means to do the right thing, I find myself exhausted by the long and seemingly unending trend for dour superheroes on our movie screens.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 