Does This Cape Make Me Look Fat?: Pop Psychology for Superheroes

Now available at your local Big Lots!, this is a fun little tome that's silly all the way.

It's a semi-serious take on a self-image-boosting book for any superhero stupid enough to believe something they'd read in a self-help book.

Covered are topics such as that addressed in the title/cover image, what sidekick choices reveal about your parent/child issues, how to select a costume or superhero name that's impressive yet not trashy, and so on.

It's a fun little read, peopled by variations on ten or so figures in varying versions of a few outfits, giving you the literary impression afforded on the TV screen by Filmation's DC superheroes cartoons.

Smart yet silly, flashy yet trashy, this is a really fun book.

More Ultraterrestrial Observations: Enter Jacques Vallee

Jacques Vallee was hired in the 1960s by the French government to collate and do data-entry computer surveys of UFO reports in France and Europe. Like John Keel in the USA, the more he analyzed, the more he noticed that there were PATTERNS in the data of reports.

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These patterns -- the physical appearance of "aliens," their times of day or location of appearance, and other things -- suggested that these critters were somehow conforming to stereotypes that were familiar to Earthlings, but that wouldn't be apparent to little green guys from the planet Kwatloo.

How would an extra-terrestrial know to appear and reappear in the location of a fairy ring mentioned for centuries in local, word-of-mouth folklore? How would he know to repeat certain familiar phrases spoken hundreds of years ago by local gypsies?





Maybe these appearances had more to do with "Inner Space" than "Outer Space."

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Then, in more recent cases, a human element seemed to appear. Could human intelligence agencies be mimicking the alien experience for their own ends?

Read the books and study on the idea yourself.

By the way, the character of the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was based entirely on Vallee and his research.