So what we always suspected turns out to be true: superheroes aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and Batman it appears is the worst of them all. A recent study by the University of Leicester showed that gliding with his cape from a building 150m tall would mean that he would hit the ground at about 50mph, almost certainly killing him on impact. The report concludes, “this inability to perform even the simplest of superhero feats suggest Batman would struggle to get off the ground, let alone save Gotham from the likes of the Joker and Bane”.
Presumably it’s this awareness of the impossibility of the feats of superheroes, that leads us to enjoy the stories without any realistic expectation that should be find ourselves in dire straits, that they will come to our aid.
Jesus was a man who generated the most incredible stories of superhuman feats, from walking on water, calming storms, raising the dead and everything in between. But unlike our caped crusader these stories didn’t arise from the imagination of writers at DC Comics, but from the eyewitness accounts of those who were there and whose lives were changed forever. This superhero it turns out is the real deal, willing and able to come to our aid, and make more of a difference than we might dare to imagine.
