Somewhere there's an interesting article to be written about people's fascination with childish cartoon characters dressed in garish spandex, living in a simplistic world of good guys versus bad guys. What wish-fulfillment, what surrogate dreams, are being satisfied? How is the absurdity of the genre, with its dress-up and its emotional repressions, not risible but instead attractive? Of course we humans have always wanted myths about larger-than-life creatures, whether they struggle with gods and giants (Gilgamesh, David) or ogres (Beowulf). But our modern incarnations seem akin to fast food: full of elements that automatically trigger desire regardless of how insubstantial the actual offering is. Hopefully someone, at some point, will write something truly interesting about this phenomenon because I suspect it will reveal something important about our modern sensibilities.