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Years ago, I and my three brothers spent part of every Sunday afternoon lying on the living room floor or sitting around a table reading the weekend ‘funny papers’. There’d be Tarzan and the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician. There were Jiggs, Dick Tracy and Popeye.

Outside of the Sunday funny papers, there were comic books. Here we’d open the pages and find Batman and Robin, Red Ryder, and Combat Kelly. In another comic we might see Superman or Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel never measured up to Superman, though. Try as he might, somehow, the Captain just couldn’t match the ‘caped wonder’ with the bid red S on the front of his blue tights.

Those old cartoon characters are fun to look back at now.

Dick Tracy was a square-jawed police detective. He always wore a snappy fedora hat with a wide black band, and always had a high-tech gadget that he used in his detective work. Dick’s favourite and most-used gadget was his wrist radio. He’d just raise his hand and speak into this wrist radio and he could get in touch — it seemed — with anybody anywhere in New York City — he was an NYPD dick — and could summon up instant help, instantly. Rather like the Bermuda Police do today.

Dick’s gadget of yesteryear is with us all today in the form of cellphones and Blackberrys and Bluetooth. High-flown childhood fantasy has become ordinary reality.

Superman, though, was a special guy. Really special. It seemed that he started life on another planet, and — if I’ve got the story right — ended up crashing onto planet Earth in a rocket and was the only survivor of that crash. He was a cuddly baby at that time.

Baby Superman was adopted by an ordinary Earth family and was cared for as though he was an ordinary Earthling.

Turned out he wasn’t. He could see through walls with his X-ray vision. He could punch through concrete with his baby fists.

He could even fly through the air at supersonic speed — even before people knew that there was such a thing as supersonic speed. It was even said that he could fly at the ‘speed of light’ and, contrary to Albert ‘What’s-his-name’ theory about E=mc2 [or is it F=nd3], and not melt down into a burst of atomic energy in the process.

Anyhow, Superman grew up to be a real nice guy who used his phenomenal powers to do good. He out boy-scouted millions of scouts by going around and doing hundreds of good turns every day. To do that, his bespectacled ‘alter ego’ Clarke Kent was always popping into phone booths and quick-changing from a non-descript business suit into the much flashier designer garb of the Caped Wonder.

After a while, all that quick-changing got to me. I began to wonder. Did Clarke Kent get a new suit after every quick-change? I had to ask because something had to happen to the suit that covered the Superman tights; and I never recall Superman with a back-pack, though he might — I suppose — have super-crushed the suit into a super-small ball. But if he did that, surely the suit would have needed steam-pressing to get rid of those super-wrinkles. Come to think of it, that’s probably how it all worked.

Good turn done, Superman would duck out of sight, super-steam press the super-wrinkles out of the super-crushed suit and dress at super-speed and then saunter, nonchalantly, round the corner as the innocuous Clarke Kent.

Ah well! So sad! All those print media superheroes have disappeared. They have been replaced, it seems, by flat screen characters skulking around in darkened X-Boxes and similar acronym-ed technologic devices that seem to hold the bug eyed tongue-stuck-out attention of so many people.

However, I am heartened. It seems to me that flitting about our Bermuda, there might be a genuine Bermudian super-hero.

He’s the guy who got those catamaran hulled super-fast ferries [though they seem to break down with some unpredictable regularity]; and he’s got some Dick Tracy-like GPS stuff in the taxis [though the taxi-drivers seem reluctant to turn them on]; and he’s got across-the-board lower cost tickets so that it’s now cheaper to fly to Bermuda [though the airline people keep forgetting the taxes when they tell us the price].

In all, though, we may have ourselves a Bermudian superhero.

It’s Super-Doc....Gee! Gosh! I can’t remember his name! Can you help?[[In-content Ad]]

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