HEALTHY HEROES!

My greatest fear, spiders leaping out of my bananas.

I'm disinclined to take health advice from Wal*Mart, a chain of stores which I'm fairly confident would be absolutely comfortable selling beef jerky made out of up to eighty percent styrofoam. With that being said, however, I guess I trust superheroes, despite the fact that so many of them gain their powers by sticking their heads into radioactive isotopes and drinking whatever serum happens to be closest under the lab hood.

Fuck apples.

So I guess that resolves my conflicts with Healthy Heroes, a comic and activity book distributed by Wal*Mart and starring a host of Marvel superheroes in their 90s outfits for the most part, even though the book was released in 2004. I guess they were waiting for the latest insights from the Food and Drug Administration.

The story involves Spider-Man swinging around downtown, where he's joined by Storm, and they start arguing about where to get lunch which is why those two don't hang out anymore. Spider-Man ends up suggesting that they go to "a friend's aunt's" place (can't the aunt also be your friend, Spidey?) to engage in some arcane endeavor called the "5 A Day The Color Way Lunch," which is basically a means of getting your roughage and nutrients via the color spectrum as understood by the ancient Greeks. "Bronze cherries, bronze blueberries and bronze bananas sound good to me" say Euripides, wondering what exactly he has to pay for.

Ultimately, they're joined by Captain America, Wolverine and the Hulk, which is always what happens when you make workplace lunch plans - some nerds overhear you and now you're stuck eating with Marcie from Accounting. Ugh, Marcie and her cat stories! Someone, please!

If the comic has particular charms, it's two-fold; First, the heroes simply cannot stop saying "5 a Day the Color Way Lunch" in every circumstance, no matter how irrelevant. Everything is related somehow to the central theme. "Thanks to our 5 A Day Cool Fuel, that truck won't have a chance against your powers, Hulk" says Storm, while elsewhere Wolverine coos "After that healthy lunch the 5 A Day Way, my mutant senses are even sharper than usual." It's all they're talking about, the kids love it!

The other charming bit is that, when the five heroes confront a truck driving, out of breath Sabretooth (he's either weak from lack of a 5-A-Day Color Lunch Style Eating Theory Philosophy or he's rolling coal and sucked in a lungful), they choose to berate him about his diet instead of beating him up. "B-but I'm not used to eating 5 to 9 servings a day!" Sabretooth cries before Wolverine severs his jugular. Now he'll learn.

This is more or less all Storm accomplished in this story.