So you should read about Chris Kyle in this article.

This is how superheroes are going to appear in the real world. It’s not going to be what Grant Morrison thinks that it will–Superman isn’t going to show up. The Silver Age scientist-hero isn’t going to come save the world.

Instead, we are going to have more efficient killers. We are going to have enhanced soldiers, people built for war, supersoldiers. I mean, isn’t Kyle just a modern day Captain America? A man from simple roots fighting the good fight against the enemy? He even has his own meatphysically-given superpowers:

The son of a Sunday-school teacher and a church deacon, Kyle credits a higher authority for his longest kill. From 2,100 yards away from a village just outside of Sadr City in 2008, he spied a man aiming a rocket launcher at an Army convoy and squeezed off one shot from his .338 Lapua Magnum rifle. Dead. From more than a mile away. “God blew that bullet and hit him,” he said.

And that’s superhuman, right?

That’s the logic of comics. A man with a power and ability above all others. A hero that uses his powers to the maximum (the masculine pronoun is important to comics ideology , as well).

Let’s keep reading:

For Kyle, the enemy is a “savage” — there’s no room for gray, only black or white. His Charlie platoon even adopted the insignia of the comic-book vigilante The Punisher, spray-painting skulls on their body armor, vehicles, helmets and guns.

On some level, this proves a few arguments that I have made right. The character of The Punisher becomes one that can be emulated. It gives a certain justification to vigilante action–but special ops are not vigilantes. They are state-sponsored, efficient murderers. It’s easy to see the world in black and white when you have superiors denoting who the “savages” are for you.

In any case, these are our superheroes, and it should make us shudder.