"Who wants to watch a Superhero Wannabe?"

Who says this isn't The Marvel Age of. . . well, what exactly is it supposed to be
"The Marvel Age of -" this time? Reality TV? Lowered Expectations?
Cynically Snickering at Comix Fandom?

Biff! Bam! and Zowie! live again, despite decades of Damage Control
and Marvellous efforts to rid comics of the public perception of campy drivel.

Face front, Stan! True Believers probably cannot see one character in this lot
with even the potential shelf life of that Marvel classic, "Night Nurse". Nope.
Instead of the promise of possibly pulse-pounding pulp-paper page-turners to be?
Well, we get something that looks like escapees from "Let's Make a Deal" stuffed
into MTV's "Real World". (Wasn't there a cartoon on Comedy Central that did
something similar?) One cannot really imagine a Graphic Novel waiting in the
wings for any of these rookies.

Okay, so even the most classic of comic book icons have not-entirely-original
concepts. Superman gets compared to Doc Savage, and both of them owe a debt
to Philip Wylie's novel "Gladiator"--amongst other inspirations--while Batman
follows in the footsteps of Zorro, The Shadow and a bit o' Sherlock Holmes.
For that matter, Zorro cribs Robin Hood's old act. Whatever. Truly NEW ideas
are few and far between. In the end, there is inspiration from what has gone before
OR there is lack of originality which brings nothing new to the table.
Any guesses what we have in this show?

Meanwhile (as they say), it projects the overall image that comicdom's fan-base
is just what the non-comic-book-buying public has always suspected, a sad lot of
ForbushMan-wannabes. The sort of nebbish who, they imagine, still lives at home
with his parents at age thirty-five, has neither social skills nor a social life,
and still reads "that trash". Could be worse, I suppose.
He could be addicted to "Reality TV" . . .

When did "Excelsior!" become just another word for packaging fluff, Stan?
'Nuff said!