REVIEW: Silver Age Superfreaks

[Tom Russell]

Quoth Martin:

> I understand now.  But I did have the Kidder's goons wearing T-shirts
> with their code names on them.  Apes that actually can talk is not my
> style, however.

While that's a Silver-Agey type of element, it's still not the Silver
Age itself.  I came across something just last night that might serve
as the closest thing I know of to a definition.  In his annotations in
the Absolute Edition of the New Frontier (which I got for free, the
only way I'd ever get my hands on an Absolute Edition of anytihng!),
Darwyn Cooke says:

"With Kennedy, it was never the man that impressed me; it was the
ideal he embodied.  In that way, he typifies the spirit that charges
the super-hero stories of the Silver Age.  Not to be taken at anything
but face value, an impossible ideal that points up a better way to
live."

I think by ridiculing or undercutting the names-on-Tshirts motif, this
story is more in the Deconstructionalist mode; i.e., the story is, in
fact, anti-Silver Age.  Which is fine; deconstruction has its place,
even if its not my thing.

And I think Superfreaks is a deconstructionalist work, with all the
good and bad things that label implies.

==Tom