9. Superman, Wonder Woman And Batman Don't Do Anything About Landmines
DC Comics hate the scourge of landmines so much that, to date, they have published three separate comics hoping to raise awareness of the ongoing humanitarian disaster. Batman faced a whole graphic novel about the problem in Death of Innocents, whilst Superman and Wonder Woman's one-shot encounters with them have been published in dozens of languages and distributed around the world by NATO. As with most PSA comics, it's an important message to get across, especially in areas of the word where active landmines are literally in people's backyards. It's just a little weird to place in the context of superhero comics. In the case of the Batman story, the lesson is muddied a little by it taking place in a fictional country called Kravia, implying that it's not a real-world problem. Plus at the end a kid dies from being blown up by a mine, which doesn't make the Caped Crusader seem particularly heroic. The Superman and Wonder Woman issues have the same problem. Their team up in the Hidden Killer still took place in an amorphous war-torn nation, but the message was deemed powerful enough that the comics was distributed to soldiers and children alike in countries where mines are still a big problem. In Supes' solo Deadly Legacy, meanwhile, he's explicitly saving a couple of Bosnian boys from getting killed. The real point of contention is why these superheroes are simply teaching kids about why landmines are dangerous, instead of doing something about it! Superman could x-ray and then heat vision ever single explosive in Kosovo, so why the heck doesn't he? The jerk.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
