I ‘ve never gotten the knack of Google Earth and those other geological search services, but based on what I’ve been reading lately you could probably hone in on any grand desolate expanse of land—desert, icecap, mountaintop—and find a wailing godforsaken Marvel superhero there.
I don’t ordinarily keep close tabs on that particular universe anyway, partly because of that same exhaustive existentialism. If I want to read about a superpowered individual undergoing a spiritual test in the wilderness, it’s hard to beat the fourth chapter of Matthew, verses 1-8.
But a recent free sampler assortment of impending storylines, stuffed into my comic-store shopping bag on a recent Wednesday, shows inwardly directed
angst run amok in wide open spaces.

These are not the batcaves or fortresses of solitude found in more psychologically stable universes. These are last-ditch get-away-from-civilization-before-you-hurt-it dilemmas—though it must be said that with Power Girl battling clones in the arctic and Green Lantern’s galactically grandiose “Brightest Day” excursions turning out to be not all that brighter than his “Blackest Night”s, the DC universe needs careful psycho-policing as well. But heck, at least it seems more social.

Alas, comic books don’t get closure, only cliffhangers and spin-offs. And these frantic isolated self-examinations, which usually involve flying about madly crashing into stuff, never have the calm open-ended fade-out of, say, Waiting for Godot. Who waits for Magneto?