There Are No Superheroes on Earth

I was born into a normal family.
Not poor enough to be tragic, not wealthy enough to be distracted.
We had food, routines, and rules. What we didn’t have were choices.

There were no shelves stacked with toys that mirrored every new release.
No instant access to the latest superhero arcs, no endless universes to scroll through.
There was no internet to fall into.

There was only television.

And television, back then, was a narrow pipe.
A few channels. Fixed schedules. Carefully filtered stories.
Heroes arrived at appointed hours, behaved as instructed, and disappeared when the program ended.

My generation didn’t discover stories.
We consumed whatever was fed.

Creativity wasn’t encouraged by abundance.
It was forced by absence.

So when the screen went dark, the story didn’t end.
That’s when it actually began.

I had to invent my own heroes.

Not the polished kind with licensed suits and predictable morals.
Mine were rough. Incomplete. Sometimes contradictory.

Their powers didn’t come from cosmic accidents or divine blessings.
They came from necessity.

A hero who could bend time—but only when alone.
A hero whose strength grew with guilt.
A hero who could save everyone except himself.

I didn’t know it then, but what I was really doing was thinking.

Not consuming narratives—but constructing frameworks.
Testing cause and consequence.
Exploring what power actually costs.

When you grow up without constant stimulation, imagination becomes a muscle.
And like all muscles, it grows strongest under resistance.

Then adulthood arrived.

Along with money.

And suddenly, the gates opened.

Every comic. Every storyline. Every reboot, remaster, multiverse, and “definitive edition.”
What I once had to imagine, I could now buy.

So I did.

Not out of greed—but out of revenge.

Revenge against a childhood of limitation.
Revenge against missed stories.
Revenge against a world that once said: this is all you get.

Each comic felt like recovering a memory I never lived.
A strange nostalgia for something that had always existed—but was once unreachable.

Yet the more I consumed, the more something felt… off.

The heroes were too clean now.
Too optimized.
Too morally aligned.

They saved the world, reset the damage, and returned everything to normal.

And that’s when the question surfaced.

Who are the real superheroes around us?

Not the ones in costumes.
Not the ones who pose at the end of a panel.

But the ones who actually change trajectories.

The ones who make decisions that don’t fit neatly into “good” and “evil.”

That’s when I realized something uncomfortable:

I had always been on the side of the villains.

Not because I admired cruelty.
But because villains were the only characters who acknowledged reality.

Heroes preserve the system.
Villains challenge it.

Heroes fight symptoms.
Villains attack roots.

Heroes want things to go back to how they were.
Villains believe how they were is the problem.

We’re told villains are short-sighted.
But most of them think longer-term than any hero ever does.

They’re willing to be hated.
Willing to be misunderstood.
Willing to sacrifice their image for an outcome.

Evil, in stories, is often just unpopular foresight.

As a child, I imagined heroes because I lacked stories.
As an adult, I question heroes because I’ve seen too many.

The world doesn’t need more saviors who punch monsters and restore balance.
Balance is often just injustice that has learned to stand still.

The people who actually move the world forward rarely look heroic in the moment.
They break rules.
They disrupt comfort.
They force change before permission is granted.

History only calls them heroes after the consequences settle.

Until then, they are villains.

Maybe that’s why there are no real superheroes on Earth.

Because anyone who truly tries to change things—
not symbolically, not theatrically, but structurally—
is immediately recast as dangerous.

And maybe that’s fine.

Because if being “evil” means thinking long-term,
accepting blame,
and acting without applause—

Then maybe the real hero was never meant to wear a cape at all.

Maybe he was meant to be misunderstood.

Part II — The Silver Skin

As I grew older, I started to notice something unsettling.

The heroes I imagined as a child always paid for their power.
They lost sleep. Friends. Pieces of themselves.
Power was never free — it distorted them.

But the heroes in the stories I was now consuming as an adult rarely paid anything real.
They suffered, yes — but safely.
By the next issue, the city was rebuilt.
The consequences were reversible.

Reality didn’t work that way.

That’s when the metaphor revealed itself to me.

There are superheroes on Earth.

They just don’t look like heroes anymore.

They look like founders.
Tycoons.
Architects of systems so large they disappear into abstraction.

They don’t wear capes.

They wear balance sheets.

The moment a person accumulates real power — not symbolic power, but structural power — they stop being human in the eyes of the world.

They are plated.

Covered.

Turned silver.

The Silver Surfer isn’t a fantasy.
He’s a warning.

The silver skin was never armor.
It was distance.

Once you reach a certain altitude, you stop hearing individual voices.
People become data points.
Cities become markets.
Lives become curves on a chart.

And hovering above it all is Galactus.

Not a villain.
Not a god.

Just The Market.

An algorithm that doesn’t hate you.
An appetite that doesn’t care.

It only asks one thing:

At first, the deal feels noble.

You tell yourself you’re doing this to protect something fragile —
your idea, your family, your vision of how the world should work.

So you agree to scale.

To optimize.

To grow.

That’s when the contract is signed.

Not with ink —
but with dependency.

From that point on, every action must justify itself in returns.
Every moral impulse must survive a meeting.
Every act of mercy must pass a spreadsheet.

You still have god-like power.

But no freedom.

You can move mountains, but only if they generate yield.

You can save a planet, but only if it’s profitable.

This is where the story breaks from childhood fantasy.

Because this is where heroes stop.

And villains begin.

Villains are the only ones who look at Galactus and say:

Not because they are kinder —
but because they are willing to be destroyed.

A villain understands something a hero refuses to accept:

If you serve the machine, you are the machine.

Heroes ask how to use power responsibly within the system.
Villains ask whether the system deserves to exist at all.

That’s why villain stories feel more honest.

They don’t promise salvation without cost.
They don’t pretend you can change the world and remain clean.

They understand that to break something ancient,
you may have to become monstrous first.

As I revisited comics with adult eyes, I noticed a pattern I’d missed as a child.

Every true act of change begins as villainy.

• Ending empires looks like treason
• Breaking monopolies looks like chaos
• Giving away power looks like madness

The world only applauds after the smoke clears.

Until then, it sharpens knives.

That’s why the Silver Surfer’s tragedy isn’t that he served Galactus.

It’s that when he finally stopped —
the universe didn’t know what to do with him.

A being with power who no longer wanted growth.

A god who refused scale.

A herald who turned around.

And maybe that’s the final metaphor.

There are no superheroes on Earth because the moment someone gains real power, the world rushes to coat them in silver — to separate them, insulate them, and aim them at consumption.

The ones who resist are not celebrated.

They are labeled villains.

And maybe that’s not a failure of storytelling.

Maybe that’s the most accurate story we have.