Muir in the Contra Costa Times!

Hey folks, I'm quoted today in Chuck Barney's article about the new show Heroes (and superheroes on TV...), in The Contra Costa Times. It's called "TV Heroes Show Their Powers," and it's a good commentary on the state of the genre now, and where it's been.

Here's a sample of the Barney piece:

"Kring's grounded-in-reality approach is partially why "Heroes" has managed to go beyond the comic-book crowd and cross over into the mainstream, according to John Kenneth Muir, author of "The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television."

"The show has avoided some of the crazier conventions of the genre's past," he says. "The characters aren't saving the world on a weekly basis. They're not facing a cast of colorful freaks like the Joker or Penguin ..."

"...We want to see our superheroes do extraordinary things. We want to see Spider-Man, for example, fly from building to building in spectacular fashion," says Muir. "But television usually hasn't been able to pull that off. We briefly got a live-action Spider-Man on TV in the late '70s who wore clunky wristbands and whose eyes looked like ski goggles. He simply wasn't the Spider-Man we all envisioned."

Check out the rest of Mr. Barney's article here.