Last one, I've been working on a paper for my History and Theory of Rhetoric class about Stan Lee and ethical issues that a comic book writer faces in his particular form of rhetoric. I consider a lot of comic books to fall into that Sci Fi category so I think that it fits here as well. Stan Lee worked for about twenty years writing junk at the then Timely Comics. His publisher just wanted him to write stuff that was popular, for example, if war stories were big he wrote about war, if detectives were in he would put out a detective series. Stan writes in his autobiography, "Martin(the publisher) never wavered from his insistence that the strips be done the way they had always been done, with very young children in mind. He wanted the most basic plots, utilizing a vocabulary that could be understood by a child of six or seven. No words of more than two syllables if possible, no attempts at irony or satire or philosophizing. I often felt we were writing stories just one level above 'See Dick and Jane. See Dick run.'" Stan changed this in the sixties with his creation of dynamic characters, starting with the Fantastic Four, that faced real problems and made the characters interesting. He created many of the most popular heroes in comicdom: X-men, Spider-man, the Hulk, Iron-man, Thor, Dare Devil, the list goes on and on. Stan writes that it was his personal pledge not to write about politics or religion, but to write about characters and how they deal with life and the troubles they face. Stan wrote that he only had one lesson in his books, "Be good to each other." To me this seems to be a good policy with a worthy goal. These books get into the hands of a multitude of people with different backgrounds, religions, and politics and to attack one or say that one was better than the rest seems wrong, not to mention pointless, but to encourage people to be good to one another seems to be a good goal and one that could have a major impact on a reader, I know that my love of superheroes has made me into the man that I am today. What do you think? Should authors focus on these simple ideas of being good to each other, or do they have a greater responsibility to spread a different message?