Comic books and philosophy

"I sometimes wonder how many radical libertarians began as Comic Book Geeks," writes Chris Matthew Sciabarra in an interesting essay called "The Comic Book Geek Revolutionaries," which quotes liberally from another interesting essay by philosophy professor Aeon Skoble called "Superhero Revisionism in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns," which appears in a book called Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice and the Socratic Way.

You probably do need to be a comic book geek to appreciate such observations as:

"There are many important ways in which we can be led by Watchmen to rethink the superhero concept: Could anyone ever be trusted to occupy the position of a watchman over the world? In the effort "to save the world," or most of the world, could a person in the position of a superhero be tempted to do what is in itself actually and deeply evil, so that good may result? Is the Olympian perspective, whereby a person places himself above all others as a judge concerning how and whether they should live, a good and sensible perspective for initiating action in a world of uncertainty?"

Sciabarra's "Not A Blog" is an interesting blog, though I am amazed at how prolific he is. I took home the new four-disk set of "Ben-Hur" last night after learning about it from his blog - mostly, I might add, drawn by the opportunity to have the 1926 version with a stereophonic score. How the man manages to write so much and still appreciate a DVD set that will take several days for me to digest, it beats me.