The Ant queen Aaron Alexander

I had only one Incredible Hulk comic growing up. The story had to do with Hulk having amnesia and working as a bouncer or something, but that’s not what stuck with me. What I could still remember years later was a parallel story line where some odd guy, possibly dressed in medieval minstrel clothes, just went around making people happy in slightly magical ways. He would make a bickering old couple suddenly see the person they fell in love with again, and a bunch of other pretty random things. It had nothing to do with bouncer-Hulk, and was probably a setup for some future issue that I didn’t ever read.* What really struck me was that in a comic about a guy whose super power is to lose his shit and punch everything into oblivion, this fruity guy actually had a way better super power.

In fact, in terms of having the most interesting life, best interaction/non-literal impact with people, and least chance of inadvertently punching, zapping or stabbing the wrong thing into oblivion, you’d be hard pressed to find any hero in the Justice League with a better set of powers. And given the complex personal, social and, for lack of a better word, spiritual nature of crime, his gift would probably have a better net effect on the crime rate as well.

What I didn’t know growing up was that this kind of thing is a “power