Superman has faced impossible odds countless times, but there is only one enemy who has bested him: Doomsday. Wait, no, there are only two enemies who have bested him: Doomsday, and global famine. It's the latter of these two adversaries that the Man of Steel faced in Heroes Against Hunger, a title that came hot on the heels of Marvel's similarly-titled Heroes For Hope and aimed to raise both awareness and money for charities in Africa. It was the Live Aid of comic books, basically. Batman and Superman both find themselves in Ethiopia, where shipments of aid are being destroyed in transit. Supes manages to track down the culprit, the imaginatively named The Master who feeds off of human misery and despair. Whilst his pal's busy dealing with what sounds like the personification of Western capitalism, Batman is in Metropolis convincing Lex Luthor to put his gargantuan brain to producing a super form of plant feed to stem the tide of malnutrition in the African nation, to succeed where the Man of Steel failed. Heroes For Hope is unique amongst PSA comics in that it's pretty realistic and bleak. Once you set aside the people flying about in tights, anyway. Superman defeats the Master, sure, but the assembled might of him, Luthor and the Dark Knight aren't enough to solve the famine. A character patiently explains to them - and the reader - that it's a multi-pronged problem that isn't easy to fix, which is kind of a downer, especially when you consider that it's still a huge issue across the world. Eep.
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/
