I. Absurdly So Two components of the fictional world of superheroes that have been routinely ridiculed, both from within the subculture of comic book fandom and within mainstream culture, are the superhero costume and the adolescent sidekick. Both seem ludicrous in the abstract as well as their mimetic representations; but the idea of hypermuscular men and women dressed in revealing spandex and masks, adorned with capes, and marked by iconographic designs, followed around by similarly dressed adolescent girls and boys who share their heroic ideologies, is the very heart of the superhero genre. If transposed into the real world, the iconography would simply buckle under the weight of its own absurdity--a man dressed as a bat, followed by an adolescent dressed as a robin? As Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine make abundantly clear in their satiric look at the genre, How to be a Superhero (1992), "The heyday of the Boy Wonder was really the 1940s--before the concept of the modern teenager had been invented. Today's youth is, frankly, far less suited to crimefighting--and far more suited to sweeping up at the local 7-11" (102). In M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable (2000) both costumes and sidekicks are eschewed in order to achieve a more realistic superheroic vision--only by stripping the hero of his iconic costume and the presence of a sidekick (although it may be argued that the protagonist's son plays a similar role), can the hero operate within Shyamalan's mimetic representation of the "real" world rather than its mythic representation as portrayed in comic books.
