Foods Touch Item
Dave Intermittent has an interesting response to Suspension of Disbelief about “superhero law.”
Sort of related: I got a notion on a related topic somewhere in the most recent discussion of gay marriage, marginal effects, communitarianism and social conservativism. The common feature of traditional superhero comics is that you have vigilantes and authorized deputies over here, and superpowered criminals over here. It was decades of real time before the Wally West Flash took a job as a courier or She-Hulk’s law firm hired a shapeshifting process server.
That seems silly, right? Why use your super strength to rob banks when you can use your super strength to get rich in a thousand ways?
Hypothetical answer: it’s the law! You could imagine that “ordinary citizens” are so disquieted by the threat of superhuman competition that the government passes laws making it illegal to use superhuman means to gain or keep employ. Or maybe the government just makes it burdensome from a regulatory perspective. (Consider that Golden Age superheroes came along at the height of labor union power . . . ) Boom. In the name of protecting “what it means to be human” and suchlike, you’ve just taken away the comparative advantage of a whole lot of people. End result: for quite awhile, the things that superpowered people do in comic books are the things that make the most sense according tot he rules of that society.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have another graphic novel proposal to write up.
Comment by Avram —
April 15, 2005 @ 2:51 pm
Wow. I’m just sitting here trying to imagine what being a Flash-powered messenger in NYC would mean.
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“This package needs to be across town in ten minutes. Now, it’s very important that it not be late, because– what just happened? Where’d the package go?”
“Ah, I delivered it while you were talking. Now could you sign my sheet? I still got a hundred more deliveries to make.”
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With that level of speed, the limits on how much business he could do would be the interactions at pickup and delivery. He’d get a significant boost in business by using a web-based system to take orders, because multiple customers can interact faster with a web server than with a receptionist. But figure one minute at each end of the delivery for interacting with ordinary humans, and that’s a mere 240 deliveries per eight-hour day, max.
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I think a typical messenger (at least in San Francisco) gets maybe four or five deliveries in a typical day. So our speedster can soak up the jobs of 45-50 normal bike messengers, and doesn’t have a bike to risk being stolen.
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In actual practice, I expect he’d probably just get one or two dozen deliveries a day, but they’d be all the high-paying, high-urgency ones.
Comment by Jim Henley —
April 15, 2005 @ 3:09 pm
FWIW, in one of the early adventures in our MURPG campaign, I had a hurricane bearing down on Newport (our Metropolis analog) and a weather-controller named Coriolis offering to stop it for X dollars. The PCs convinced him that the publicity value of doing it for free would more than make up for the amount he was asking in piecework.
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Our campaign was low-population metahuman, and I hadn’t come up with the employment law idea yet.
Comment by Ray —
April 15, 2005 @ 5:27 pm
A typical courier will do more like 20 to 40 deliveries a day (multiple deliveries from the same source, chaining routes etc etc). The Flash’s advantage is that he can go coast-to-coast as fast as across town. Still, I can’t see the courier business being his best earner.
I don’t buy the union-enforced Harrison Bergeronism either, tbh. The union reaction to superheros would probably be more akin to their reaction to new technology – “Sure, you can hire the Flash/buy computers to sort and deliver all internal mail. As long as you find other jobs for the mailroom staff.” (And that’s also assuming that the meta-human in question ia a weird alien from another planet, and not the spotty teenage son of Bob from sector 7G)
Comment by Avram —
April 16, 2005 @ 5:02 pm
Actually, (I realized later last night) the Flash’s real advantage is that he can run across an ocean in a fraction of a second, assuming the power level of the ’70s Flash I grew up reading. No normal security system can even detect him, much less stop or intercept him. Need to get something from the US to some Asian or European country right away, without cops or the feds knowing?
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Though the real benefits would come from working with the government. “Here’s a photo of a guy who we think is somewhere in this Iraqi city. How long would it take you to find — oh, thank you.” Lots of fun til the Iraqi supers start getting in on the action. (Just “supers”. One man’s supervillain is another man’s superhero.)
Comment by Gary Farber —
April 16, 2005 @ 5:31 pm
“I’m just sitting here trying to imagine what being a Flash-powered messenger in NYC would mean.”
Depends which Flash. I’m still grumbly over the version who showed up in the first season of animated *Justice League* in “The Brave And The Bold” (an otherwise nice tribute in various homages to early Silver Age Flash and GL) in which the Flash spent minutes and minutes chasing a truck up and down various highways, somehow unable to catch up to it. This made me want to throw things at the tv.
Although barely a sequitur, somehow this entry makes me want to ask you, Jim, if you’ve ever read any of the Wild Card (book) series? Certainly there was a fairly wide range of uses powers were put to in it, with a rather vague delineation of Good and Bad sides.
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Oh, right. Sigh.
Trackback by Cartoon Central —
April 16, 2005 @ 5:43 pm
Superhuman Competition
New theories of superheroes developed here:…