while looking for reviews of Red Son i’ve seen a straightforward take about the hegemonic role of the superhero story in mass culture, where superheroes serve as secular saints, models of the individuals that the people are taught to expect themselves to be saved by; while i don’t want to say this is wrong i am much more interested in the ways that superhero stories have this apparently inevitable need to address the existence of power as a potential crisis by fabricating justifications for superheroes to both exist and hold power in the form of supervillains