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The world's first superhero comicbook (that you're STILL reading)


Superhero Comics are a lot older than  you think. And I'm not talking just to the dudes for whom comics didn't exist until Toby Maguire became famous. The modern comic as we know it was written long long long before you can imagine, and is still being read all over the world. You've read it too. You've probably read it today, and you'll probably read it tomorrow. No I'm not talking about porn damnit.

But now that I think about it...

The first comic came out over 4000 years ago. No, that's not a typo, keep reading. The first comic accurately captured the complicated moral and emotional spectrum of human character. And by accurately, I mean simplified to a level that it could be expressed with a binary digit. There were only 2 kinds of people in the world- absolute good guys who would sacrifice their lives for you and scum-of-the-earth bastards who would sell their mother's prehistoric wheelchair to pay off debts no doubt incurred while gambling and whoring. If you are not in the first category, you are obviously in the second. This extremely complicated chart that explained the many shades of human psychology was lauded by people world over, because fuck anything we have to actually think about to understand.

Now you know why this pile of dung broke box office records.

Then there was the first superhero. Unlike today's multi-layered characters with their many weaknesses, the original superhero was and still is extremely two dimensional,. He (it's always a He, because sexism) had a list of powers that would make Superman's red tights turn yellow- healing powers, flight, thunderbolts, teleportation, immortality, shape-shifting, any power the writers could think of, they put it into the first comics. The stories were pretty simple- the superhero would embark on a journey of ass-kickery, burying the bad guys under a shit-mountain of righteous fury and wrath, and occasionally help out the good guys with small favours like raising them from the dead, granting immortality, walking them across the middle of an ocean  etc.

There might be some collateral damage but everyone's totally okay with that.

Before law and order were invented, humanity fucking itself over was a given thing. Getting killed, robbed or raped was the ancient equivalent of your colleague stealing credit for your work- you internally cursed yourself before moving on to dying of some disease at the ripe old age of 30. So this idea of the bad guys getting their well deserved punishment was pretty advanced, because there was no concept of good guys vs bad guys to begin with, everyone was pretty much a douchebag anyway. And that's where the first comic's simplistic binary classification of people into Scumbag Steve and Good Guy Greg really caught on with everyone, taking it to the top of the prehistoric best seller list.

It even beat the ever popular Horse-sex books.

What happens when a thing becomes a trend?  The sheep effect begins. Everyone starts doing it, and once the trend starts dying, it gets ripped off and sold under a different name, because fuck originality. The same thing happened with the first comic book. Once the avenging superhero trend caught on in one place, the core idea of good guys and bad guys and an all-conquering super good guy was repackaged, making some changes to the superhero's origin story, the extent of his powers and aspects of his personality, and the book was sold in a new market. Before you knew it, the whole world was reading different versions of the same damn book.

The Justice League, because 'Same guys with different powers' League is not as marketable.

Now comics in themselves are fine, especially when there are multiple versions of them. It keeps the competition pretty stiff, makes sure they try their best to outdo each other by getting their superheroes to live up to the superhero model code of conduct- which is basically doing jawdropping feats of awesomeness to make the world a happy and peaceful place. Take DC and Marvel today- they are different, but that doesn't make them hate each other, especially because they sort of stand for the same thing. Stan Lee and Bob Kane didn't hate each other, they were actually buddies, and the same goes for their creations. On the rare occasion superheroes do cross each other, they end up working together, as has been documented time and time again.

Batman & Spiderman team up, because just one animal-themed superhero is not enough damnit.

While it has been established that the superheroes from different comics don't hate each other, and this was true for the first comic too, but for some reason there was this hatred between different fan clubs. And the reason for that can be summed up in a single word- fanboys. Fanboys are not the same as the ordinary fans. Every comic book has its own group of fanboys, whose anal-level obsession can only be matched by your obsession for that girl in class 9 you had a crush on. Fanboys know their superheroes inside out- they know which page in which issue the superhero farted, how many volts of lightening he had to throw at the bad guy from volume #326, what the name of his schoolteacher was...

... the power of his farts.

Unlike the casuals, fanboys are the minority. But they are the most vocal section of the fanclub, because nothing requires more activism and worldwide attention than the contents of a book. Because of this, these guys are perceived to be representing the entire fan club, which ruins the fun for all the casuals who end up embarrassed for being a fan.

With great power comes great chutiyapanti.

Fanboys spend their time trolling and flaming other superheroes, because masturbating to their own superhero comics is just not enough to show their tremendous love and loyalty. Fanboys also have their own interpretation of the book, and fly into a murderous range when someone has a different version of it. For example, the people who petitioned the Whitehouse against Ben Affleck being the new Batman, or the people who flew a goddamn plane into a building to prove they had the better superhero (yes that happened, read on).

Raging on the Internet in CAPS just didn't cut it any more.

Fanboys, and to an extent the casuals, also took the first comicbooks way too literally for their own good. Think of it as when Batman wore a dark blue suit in his early days, Batman cults declaring blue to be the only legal colour ever. This was stupid, especially because as an evolving work of complete fiction, the first comic book continuously underwent retcons- which is a really fancy word for what is basically the writer fucking up and having to fix the backstory without looking like a moron. Retcons were inconsistencies created when the comic was updated to reflect the times, like when a man who started out wearing a red thong outside his pants became less selfless-avenger and more sexual-offender, and his costume had to be changed.


Although the new costume still needs to go a long way before it can lose the sex-offender tag.

But way back then, before such things as transfer of intellectual property and ghost writers existed, people hung on to your every word and going back on it probably led to explosions of rage among the readership. Point being, in prehistoric times, the work of an artist was literally cast in stone once he was done with it. And by literally, I mean literally in the way it's supposed to be used in a sentence and not in the "I literally died when I saw that" way.

Literally cast in stone.

Although there were a number of inconsistencies in the first comics, they largely did not receive the benefit of a retcon, because once a comicbook gets old enough, it is revered no matter how retarded it is. What this meant was they were stuck in an age and fashion that your dead grandparents would consider outdated. But thanks to the fanboys, and to an extent the sheep effect, everyone kept reading them anyway, and pretending they were cool. Sort of like people pretending Christopher Nolan is cool. Sure he is okay, but if you didn't think so, it was obviously because you were stoopid and didn't understand his oh-so-intellectual movies. To put this in perspective, think of how it would have been if Batman never retconned and updated himself.

This would have been the plot of The Dark Knight.

The point of all this being, humanity today is hooked to comics written more than 4000 years ago. It has a lot of great content, which is why it's still very relevant, but the world could use a few retcons right about now, especially considering how a lot of people are losing their shit over it. Comics have always been beautiful man-made works of art that let us aspire towards a better world. Don't be a hardcore fanboy and make it into something more, it ruins the fun for everyone. And there's nothing wrong in checking out other comics- the superhero might have a different gimmick and superpower, but the story never changes- the good guys win in the end.

Here's wishing you Eid Mubaarak, Shubh Diwali and a Merry Christmas- special editions of Religion, the world's first superhero comicbook.

Pictured- The original Justice League.


This post first appeared on Stagg Land- Tales From The Infinite Pit, please read the originial post: here

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The world's first superhero comicbook (that you're STILL reading)

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