Exceptionalism in France and The Incredibles or: How to stitch together two unrelated topics
The online only Q&A section of The New Yorker for the 22 November 2004 issue, posted on Monday, 16 November 2004, has an interview with Jane Kramer about her article about "the French 'veil law,' which prohibits the display of religious symbols, including Islamic head coverings, in French public schools." Unfortunately, the article itself is not posted on their site; however, the Q&A raises several interesting points, such as: "Just as the United States was reintroducing religion into the concept of the state, France was busy reaffirming the secularism of the state." (Which is a new wrinkle on Jello Biafra's observation several years ago that the more freedom that gets doled out to the Iron Curtain countries, the more they take away in the U.S.)
This exchange between Ms. Kramer and Ben Greenman (who is conducting the Q&A) shows that "Dubya" and his fundamentalist Christian followers have common cause with French Muslims who protest against the "veil law:"
In America, at least, if you want to be educated and also display your religion, you can go to a parochial school. Why not in France? Is it an economic matter, or is it more about protesting the state’s insistence on secularism?
The state supports parochial schooling up to eighty-five per cent. There is no one who cannot get assistance, and as a result there are very good Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish schools. But a parochial school has to meet all the educational standards of any French school. That doesn’t always sit well with Muslims who want out of the French school system. It’s a no-win situation, and it’s coupled with what you said: the larger protest is against secularism or, more specifically, against the separation of church and state. Oddly, it’s a George Bush argument.
Ms. Kramer also offers this observation about the dangers that fundamentalist French Muslims pose to the French state:
"There are many people who don’t feel that they are served by the government, and who in turn do not serve it. They have a social contract not with the French government but with their god. And as a result you have enclaves of cultures that have opted out of the state. The problem is that you cannot have democratic or republican structures this way. The basis of constitutionality is formed through the contract of citizenship. That has to be everyone. Exceptionalism is a grave danger to that. [Emphasis added] That’s what this law, successfully or not, is trying to untangle."
I'd like to use this line -- "Exceptionalism is a grave danger to [constitutionality]" -- as a cue for a segue to some mostly fanboy-type ruminations on the movie The Incredibles, the new film from writer/director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, based on Ted Hughes' book The Iron Man), a movie which celebrates exceptionalism, although it seems to be a matter of some contention as to how much Mr. Bird hews to Ayn Rand's objectivist line.
First off, I'd like to state that The Incredibles is the best superhero movie I've yet seen, bar none. I realize that part of the reason for this is because it's not based on anything (never mind that The Incredibles' powers echo those of the Fantastic Four, save for the Human Torch; still, I'd much rather see the Torch replaced, if replaced he must be, by a guy with super speed than by an obnoxious, putatively "cute," pear-shaped robot acronymically named H.E.R.B.I.E. [Humanoid Experimental Robot, B-type, Integrated Electronics], as happened with the late, decidedly umlamented cartoon series from the late 1970s), and, therefore, I don't have prior expectations to be disappointed; still, I would argue that even the much-vaunted Spider-Man 2 fails to reimagine its superheroics for the silver screen because the script goes madly off in all directions, and thus fails to establish a consistent, psychologically believable milieu. For the most part, The Incredibles succeeds in doing this -- as my better half observed at the end of the film, I grinned like an idiot the whole way through.
I certainly don't wish that The Incredibles could've been turned into a Ditkoesque regurgitation of Randian "philosophy," but it would've been nice if at least some counterpoint to The Incredibles' triumphant exceptionalism was made; this could've been done most subtly by having at least some people in the crowd at the end come to sneer at, not praise the fighting foursome, as usually happened in Marvel Comics' various superhero titles: some people could've blamed The Incredibles for wrecking the city, for faking a disaster so that they would again be viewed as heroes and allowed to publicly operate. The lack of even a single crank at the end is singularly odd, given how "the supers" were driven underground largely due to public opprobrium in the first place. (J. Jonah Jameson's enmity towards Spider-Man can be read as the outrage of the common man against the exceptional, and is informed at its root by jealousy, as a rare soliloquy by Jameson in Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1, #10, demonstrated. Jameson's tolerance and admiration for Captain America in subsequent comics is the exception that proves the rule.)
Related to this, the absence of any politician, media pundit, leader of a nominally "grass roots orginization" like Focus on the Family, or talk radio windbag fulminating against the return of "the supers" at the end of the film is equally glaring, since the beginning of the movie made it obvious that it was just these types of folks who stirred up the masses into demanding the mothballing of the exceptional. Again, all that was really needed were a couple of soundbites to give the sense that not everybody was united in their adoration of the superheroes; and, in all fairness, as Ms. Kramer pointed out, there is a legitimate case to be made against exceptionalism: anti-superpower lobbyists would be more interesting if they were shown not to be comprised solely of jealous killjoys or unstable cranks. Rather like Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands," a cautionary tale against over-reliance on technology, one danger of superheroes is that, rather than inspiring the "normals" to be all they can be and more, they will induce even further complacency, and over-reliance on the superheroes -- themes partly explored in Alan Moore's Miracleman (originally Marvelman) and Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme.
Then too, there should've been some quick reactions from "the man in the street" and/or newspapers or television news anchors from other cities, demonstrating that many of the inhabitants of the country were "from Missouri," i.e., dismissive of the existence of any superheroes or supervillains, simply because they didn't see any where they live; Marvel Comics continued to do this up until shortly before they upset their toybox with the "Onslaught" and "Heroes Reborn" storylines, showing that there were still sheriffs in benighted places like Ohio that didn't even believe in Captain America.
It would've also been nice if there was some suggestion as to how other countries dealt with their super-powered folk and/or viewed the U.S.'s proliferation of same: Did the U.S. have a monopoly on the supers, and that's partly why the government agreed to retire them because they were too destabilizing (i.e., too threatening to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, yet not powerful enough to serve as a human missile defense shield against a preëmptive nuclear strike, or to simply overthrow their regimes)? On the other hand, if the Iron Curtain countries had their own "supers," it doesn't make sense that the U.S. would put its "supers" out to pasture; have them operate clandestinely, sure, but not retire them. Unless there was a superpower disarmament treaty that called for both sides to mothball their "supers"....
Again, all that would really be needed here would be a few quick soundbites or newspaper headlines.
On another note, Mr. Incredible didn't have enough of a reaction upon his discovery of Gazer-Beam's corpse; even if he didn't know or hated the guy, he should've at least had a "Whoa....!" moment. If you want to argue that he didn't really have the luxury at the time of discovery to have such a reaction -- which I readily concede he didn't (though this could've been deftly conveyed in comic book form by a thought balloon) -- at minimum Bob and Helen Parr should've been shown having a conversation towards the end, during some down-time between the resolution of the Syndrome affair and the commencement of the Under-Miner affair, discussing the deaths of many of their confreres at the hands of Syndrome. Again, even if they didn't know a lot of them personally, they definitely would've talked about their being bumped off.
I also would've appreciated a better idea as to what kind of retainer the government put the Parr family on at film's end: Were they openly paid by the government, or did Bob have to find another "day job"? (If the latter, what kind of job could he have that would continue to employ him even in the face of his many sudden, sometimes lengthy, always unexplained, absences? Website administrator? Software consultant?)
My other quibbles are more in the line of comic book fanboy whinging -- which doesn't mean that they don't impact the movie's plot -- and of less interest to people such as my wife who enjoyed The Incredibles but continue to have no interest in reading, say, The Fantastic Four to see how its family dynamic could often make for compelling adventure stories:
1) The power levels of The Incredibles were never really made clear, particularly Elasti-Girl's. Without a somewhat clear idea of each character's power levels, it's hard for the audience to be overly concerned by any situation they may find themselves in; and each "last ditch effort" feels that much more like a cheat. Admittedly, this is a problem that is shared by many of the Jedi Knights in the Star Wars series, particularly in Attack of the Clones.
2) Elasti-Girl didn't appear to be terribly imaginative in the use of her powers, unlike Plastic Man in JLA; this does make her a good analogue to Reed Richards' Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four (even with John Byrne having Reed use his super pliability to subtly alter his features for a new civilian identity), but I'm not sure how closely to the FF's power template Bird wanted to adhere. That said, there is no way that I believe that Elasti-Girl could hold that RV in that rocket-jet thing that The Incredibles used to race back to the city to stop Syndrome's vile plan, anymore than I believed that The Thing could, in a Marv Wolfman-scripted issue of Marvel Two-In-One, hold onto the wing of the jet he was flying with one hand while piloting with the other. Nuh-uh; there's some things that even the biggest comic book nerd won't accept, and that's one of 'em.
3) Violet's force-fields proved to be much too reliable, given the initial build-up of how tentative they were; they should've been more hit-or-miss than they were towards the end, with only two instances of their fully coming through in the clinch.
4) The punches that Dash threw at super-speed should've been a lot more effective than they were in the movie; if Syndrome's goons were enhanced or had a force field, something should've been said. Dash didn't even deck the goon whose helmet he knocked off; as John Byrne pointed out regarding Aurora in Alpha Flight, even if a character with super-speed isn't super-strong -- or even if that character doesn't work out much -- if he or she can land several dozen or even several hundred punches in the space of a second or two, a normal person on the receiving end of them is definitely going to feel it.
5) Mr. Incredible's strength level was too fuzzily defined for my taste; my best guess is that he could lift (press) roughly 50 tons, making him a little more than twice as strong as Spider-Man (at least the pre-"Heroes Reborn" Spider-Man). He didn't seem to be as strong as the She-Hulk, let alone the Fantastic Four's Thing after he fully mutated.
6) Syndrome's wealth should've been better explained: Did he gain it largely through criminal enterprise (i.e., robberies, embezzlement, fraud, etc.)? If so, did he use a different identity, or have agents working for him? Did he gain it through the sale of his inventions, á la Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four)? If so, what inventions did he sell while keeping his best goodies for himself? (Admittedly, Marvel Comics has been infuriatingly vague on this matter as regards Reed Richards.)
7) It makes no sense that there were absolutely no people in the city once the final battle got under full swing; superhero comic books are notorious for the lack of civilian casualties during punch-outs between superpowered antagonists, but the best of them at least show some civvies getting in the way, experiencing numerous close shaves as the heroes shield them, whisk them out of the way, etc. I realize that there are very good, technical reasons for this -- more work to animate, probably not enough money to do it -- but the absence of any innocent bystanders or rubberneckers detracts from the excitement of this big battle sequence. At minimum, there should've been a sequence of some of the Parrs herding the civilians to safety; Helen and the kids could've done that task quite handily between them while Bob ran interference with the Omnidroid.
8) I would've also appreciated a suggestion or brief glimpse of various "non-super supers," whether they were totally non-super-powered (i.e., Batman, The Question, Green Arrow, Hawkeye), possessed of subtle super-powers that didn't have an obvious direct affect on their ability to combat evil (i.e., Daredevil), or relied entirely on technology (i.e., Iron Man, Steel).
9) Syndrome's girl Friday: Why call her Mirage if she doesn't have any super-powers? This makes absolutely no sense in a superhero setting; at minimum, Bob should've asked her if she had powers, then evinced surprise when she confessed that she was normal, but her mother had a thing for a "super"-sounding name. (Since our world has people named "Dweezil" and "Moon Unit," it would be really incredible if a world inhabited with super-powered folk didn't have at least a few parents saddling their kids with "super"-sounding names in the hopes that they'd turn out to be mutants or something.)
Finally, I thought I'd list the homages to various comic books that I spotted:
1) As noted above, The Incredibles are The Fantastic Four (albeit with the classic elemental motif scotched by the substitution of a flame elemental -- the Human Torch -- for another air elemental -- Dash [Violet being the other air elemental of The Incredibles]), even down to a baby who seems to promise to be more powerful than the other four members combined (Jack-Jack Parr in The Incredibles, Franklin Richards in the Fantastic Four).
2) As various commentators around the Net have noted, the plot of "supers" being forced into retirement echoes Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen mini-series from the mid-1980s.
3) Syndrome's plot to make everybody equally exceptional -- and, therefore, equally unexceptional -- recalls the minor J.M. DeMatteis villain Everyman, from the pages of Captain America and Marvel Team-Up. (It also recalls Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s short story "Harrison Bergeron," but that's beside the point.)
4) Bob Parr's job as an insurance claim adjuster strongly recalls the Marv Wolfman character Brock Jones -- ex-pro football star turned one-man publicity spot for an insurance company -- who became the second Torpedo in Daredevil Vol. 1, #126. The notable difference, of course, is that Brock was never shown to aid the common man in his day job, either before or after he glommed onto his Torpedo suit, unlike Bob.
5) Syndrome's personality strongly recalled how Steve Englehart wrote Magneto's former stooge Toad (this is the original, pre-X-Men movie Toad, who wasn't a buff martial artist with an apparently prehensile tongue) in The Avengers and the second Vision and the Scarlet Witch mini-series: a dweeb extremely admiring of and besotted with a superhero whose love curdles into hate after repeated rejections by his objet d'amour/objet d'esteem.
6) Frozone's movements in the big fight sequence at the end were more suggestive of Slyde (one of the better third-stringer villains that Tom DeFalco concocted for Spider-Man, and one whom I have an absurd fondness for) and the Silver Surfer than they were of the X-Men's Iceman, his most obvious template.
7) Under-Miner = Mole Man -- also in keeping with The Incredibles' being modelled after the Fantastic Four. (Mole Man was the FF's first villain.)
8) Syndrome's scheme to save the day after siccing his Omnidroid on the city strongly recalled Henry Pym's/Yellowjacket's plot in The Avengers Vol. 1, #213, scripted by Jim Shooter.
9) Bomb Voyage seems to be a Frenchified take on the Joker, with a mime motif being substituted for a clown one.
And what's up with the nod to the lamest Star Wars movie thus far, The Return of the Jedi, in the sequence where Dash and Violet are being chased on Syndrome's island? At least Bird gave props to the best action scene in RofJ, but still....
This exchange between Ms. Kramer and Ben Greenman (who is conducting the Q&A) shows that "Dubya" and his fundamentalist Christian followers have common cause with French Muslims who protest against the "veil law:"
In America, at least, if you want to be educated and also display your religion, you can go to a parochial school. Why not in France? Is it an economic matter, or is it more about protesting the state’s insistence on secularism?
The state supports parochial schooling up to eighty-five per cent. There is no one who cannot get assistance, and as a result there are very good Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish schools. But a parochial school has to meet all the educational standards of any French school. That doesn’t always sit well with Muslims who want out of the French school system. It’s a no-win situation, and it’s coupled with what you said: the larger protest is against secularism or, more specifically, against the separation of church and state. Oddly, it’s a George Bush argument.
Ms. Kramer also offers this observation about the dangers that fundamentalist French Muslims pose to the French state:
"There are many people who don’t feel that they are served by the government, and who in turn do not serve it. They have a social contract not with the French government but with their god. And as a result you have enclaves of cultures that have opted out of the state. The problem is that you cannot have democratic or republican structures this way. The basis of constitutionality is formed through the contract of citizenship. That has to be everyone. Exceptionalism is a grave danger to that. [Emphasis added] That’s what this law, successfully or not, is trying to untangle."
I'd like to use this line -- "Exceptionalism is a grave danger to [constitutionality]" -- as a cue for a segue to some mostly fanboy-type ruminations on the movie The Incredibles, the new film from writer/director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, based on Ted Hughes' book The Iron Man), a movie which celebrates exceptionalism, although it seems to be a matter of some contention as to how much Mr. Bird hews to Ayn Rand's objectivist line.
First off, I'd like to state that The Incredibles is the best superhero movie I've yet seen, bar none. I realize that part of the reason for this is because it's not based on anything (never mind that The Incredibles' powers echo those of the Fantastic Four, save for the Human Torch; still, I'd much rather see the Torch replaced, if replaced he must be, by a guy with super speed than by an obnoxious, putatively "cute," pear-shaped robot acronymically named H.E.R.B.I.E. [Humanoid Experimental Robot, B-type, Integrated Electronics], as happened with the late, decidedly umlamented cartoon series from the late 1970s), and, therefore, I don't have prior expectations to be disappointed; still, I would argue that even the much-vaunted Spider-Man 2 fails to reimagine its superheroics for the silver screen because the script goes madly off in all directions, and thus fails to establish a consistent, psychologically believable milieu. For the most part, The Incredibles succeeds in doing this -- as my better half observed at the end of the film, I grinned like an idiot the whole way through.
I certainly don't wish that The Incredibles could've been turned into a Ditkoesque regurgitation of Randian "philosophy," but it would've been nice if at least some counterpoint to The Incredibles' triumphant exceptionalism was made; this could've been done most subtly by having at least some people in the crowd at the end come to sneer at, not praise the fighting foursome, as usually happened in Marvel Comics' various superhero titles: some people could've blamed The Incredibles for wrecking the city, for faking a disaster so that they would again be viewed as heroes and allowed to publicly operate. The lack of even a single crank at the end is singularly odd, given how "the supers" were driven underground largely due to public opprobrium in the first place. (J. Jonah Jameson's enmity towards Spider-Man can be read as the outrage of the common man against the exceptional, and is informed at its root by jealousy, as a rare soliloquy by Jameson in Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1, #10, demonstrated. Jameson's tolerance and admiration for Captain America in subsequent comics is the exception that proves the rule.)
Related to this, the absence of any politician, media pundit, leader of a nominally "grass roots orginization" like Focus on the Family, or talk radio windbag fulminating against the return of "the supers" at the end of the film is equally glaring, since the beginning of the movie made it obvious that it was just these types of folks who stirred up the masses into demanding the mothballing of the exceptional. Again, all that was really needed were a couple of soundbites to give the sense that not everybody was united in their adoration of the superheroes; and, in all fairness, as Ms. Kramer pointed out, there is a legitimate case to be made against exceptionalism: anti-superpower lobbyists would be more interesting if they were shown not to be comprised solely of jealous killjoys or unstable cranks. Rather like Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands," a cautionary tale against over-reliance on technology, one danger of superheroes is that, rather than inspiring the "normals" to be all they can be and more, they will induce even further complacency, and over-reliance on the superheroes -- themes partly explored in Alan Moore's Miracleman (originally Marvelman) and Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme.
Then too, there should've been some quick reactions from "the man in the street" and/or newspapers or television news anchors from other cities, demonstrating that many of the inhabitants of the country were "from Missouri," i.e., dismissive of the existence of any superheroes or supervillains, simply because they didn't see any where they live; Marvel Comics continued to do this up until shortly before they upset their toybox with the "Onslaught" and "Heroes Reborn" storylines, showing that there were still sheriffs in benighted places like Ohio that didn't even believe in Captain America.
It would've also been nice if there was some suggestion as to how other countries dealt with their super-powered folk and/or viewed the U.S.'s proliferation of same: Did the U.S. have a monopoly on the supers, and that's partly why the government agreed to retire them because they were too destabilizing (i.e., too threatening to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, yet not powerful enough to serve as a human missile defense shield against a preëmptive nuclear strike, or to simply overthrow their regimes)? On the other hand, if the Iron Curtain countries had their own "supers," it doesn't make sense that the U.S. would put its "supers" out to pasture; have them operate clandestinely, sure, but not retire them. Unless there was a superpower disarmament treaty that called for both sides to mothball their "supers"....
Again, all that would really be needed here would be a few quick soundbites or newspaper headlines.
On another note, Mr. Incredible didn't have enough of a reaction upon his discovery of Gazer-Beam's corpse; even if he didn't know or hated the guy, he should've at least had a "Whoa....!" moment. If you want to argue that he didn't really have the luxury at the time of discovery to have such a reaction -- which I readily concede he didn't (though this could've been deftly conveyed in comic book form by a thought balloon) -- at minimum Bob and Helen Parr should've been shown having a conversation towards the end, during some down-time between the resolution of the Syndrome affair and the commencement of the Under-Miner affair, discussing the deaths of many of their confreres at the hands of Syndrome. Again, even if they didn't know a lot of them personally, they definitely would've talked about their being bumped off.
I also would've appreciated a better idea as to what kind of retainer the government put the Parr family on at film's end: Were they openly paid by the government, or did Bob have to find another "day job"? (If the latter, what kind of job could he have that would continue to employ him even in the face of his many sudden, sometimes lengthy, always unexplained, absences? Website administrator? Software consultant?)
My other quibbles are more in the line of comic book fanboy whinging -- which doesn't mean that they don't impact the movie's plot -- and of less interest to people such as my wife who enjoyed The Incredibles but continue to have no interest in reading, say, The Fantastic Four to see how its family dynamic could often make for compelling adventure stories:
1) The power levels of The Incredibles were never really made clear, particularly Elasti-Girl's. Without a somewhat clear idea of each character's power levels, it's hard for the audience to be overly concerned by any situation they may find themselves in; and each "last ditch effort" feels that much more like a cheat. Admittedly, this is a problem that is shared by many of the Jedi Knights in the Star Wars series, particularly in Attack of the Clones.
2) Elasti-Girl didn't appear to be terribly imaginative in the use of her powers, unlike Plastic Man in JLA; this does make her a good analogue to Reed Richards' Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four (even with John Byrne having Reed use his super pliability to subtly alter his features for a new civilian identity), but I'm not sure how closely to the FF's power template Bird wanted to adhere. That said, there is no way that I believe that Elasti-Girl could hold that RV in that rocket-jet thing that The Incredibles used to race back to the city to stop Syndrome's vile plan, anymore than I believed that The Thing could, in a Marv Wolfman-scripted issue of Marvel Two-In-One, hold onto the wing of the jet he was flying with one hand while piloting with the other. Nuh-uh; there's some things that even the biggest comic book nerd won't accept, and that's one of 'em.
3) Violet's force-fields proved to be much too reliable, given the initial build-up of how tentative they were; they should've been more hit-or-miss than they were towards the end, with only two instances of their fully coming through in the clinch.
4) The punches that Dash threw at super-speed should've been a lot more effective than they were in the movie; if Syndrome's goons were enhanced or had a force field, something should've been said. Dash didn't even deck the goon whose helmet he knocked off; as John Byrne pointed out regarding Aurora in Alpha Flight, even if a character with super-speed isn't super-strong -- or even if that character doesn't work out much -- if he or she can land several dozen or even several hundred punches in the space of a second or two, a normal person on the receiving end of them is definitely going to feel it.
5) Mr. Incredible's strength level was too fuzzily defined for my taste; my best guess is that he could lift (press) roughly 50 tons, making him a little more than twice as strong as Spider-Man (at least the pre-"Heroes Reborn" Spider-Man). He didn't seem to be as strong as the She-Hulk, let alone the Fantastic Four's Thing after he fully mutated.
6) Syndrome's wealth should've been better explained: Did he gain it largely through criminal enterprise (i.e., robberies, embezzlement, fraud, etc.)? If so, did he use a different identity, or have agents working for him? Did he gain it through the sale of his inventions, á la Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four)? If so, what inventions did he sell while keeping his best goodies for himself? (Admittedly, Marvel Comics has been infuriatingly vague on this matter as regards Reed Richards.)
7) It makes no sense that there were absolutely no people in the city once the final battle got under full swing; superhero comic books are notorious for the lack of civilian casualties during punch-outs between superpowered antagonists, but the best of them at least show some civvies getting in the way, experiencing numerous close shaves as the heroes shield them, whisk them out of the way, etc. I realize that there are very good, technical reasons for this -- more work to animate, probably not enough money to do it -- but the absence of any innocent bystanders or rubberneckers detracts from the excitement of this big battle sequence. At minimum, there should've been a sequence of some of the Parrs herding the civilians to safety; Helen and the kids could've done that task quite handily between them while Bob ran interference with the Omnidroid.
8) I would've also appreciated a suggestion or brief glimpse of various "non-super supers," whether they were totally non-super-powered (i.e., Batman, The Question, Green Arrow, Hawkeye), possessed of subtle super-powers that didn't have an obvious direct affect on their ability to combat evil (i.e., Daredevil), or relied entirely on technology (i.e., Iron Man, Steel).
9) Syndrome's girl Friday: Why call her Mirage if she doesn't have any super-powers? This makes absolutely no sense in a superhero setting; at minimum, Bob should've asked her if she had powers, then evinced surprise when she confessed that she was normal, but her mother had a thing for a "super"-sounding name. (Since our world has people named "Dweezil" and "Moon Unit," it would be really incredible if a world inhabited with super-powered folk didn't have at least a few parents saddling their kids with "super"-sounding names in the hopes that they'd turn out to be mutants or something.)
Finally, I thought I'd list the homages to various comic books that I spotted:
1) As noted above, The Incredibles are The Fantastic Four (albeit with the classic elemental motif scotched by the substitution of a flame elemental -- the Human Torch -- for another air elemental -- Dash [Violet being the other air elemental of The Incredibles]), even down to a baby who seems to promise to be more powerful than the other four members combined (Jack-Jack Parr in The Incredibles, Franklin Richards in the Fantastic Four).
2) As various commentators around the Net have noted, the plot of "supers" being forced into retirement echoes Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen mini-series from the mid-1980s.
3) Syndrome's plot to make everybody equally exceptional -- and, therefore, equally unexceptional -- recalls the minor J.M. DeMatteis villain Everyman, from the pages of Captain America and Marvel Team-Up. (It also recalls Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s short story "Harrison Bergeron," but that's beside the point.)
4) Bob Parr's job as an insurance claim adjuster strongly recalls the Marv Wolfman character Brock Jones -- ex-pro football star turned one-man publicity spot for an insurance company -- who became the second Torpedo in Daredevil Vol. 1, #126. The notable difference, of course, is that Brock was never shown to aid the common man in his day job, either before or after he glommed onto his Torpedo suit, unlike Bob.
5) Syndrome's personality strongly recalled how Steve Englehart wrote Magneto's former stooge Toad (this is the original, pre-X-Men movie Toad, who wasn't a buff martial artist with an apparently prehensile tongue) in The Avengers and the second Vision and the Scarlet Witch mini-series: a dweeb extremely admiring of and besotted with a superhero whose love curdles into hate after repeated rejections by his objet d'amour/objet d'esteem.
6) Frozone's movements in the big fight sequence at the end were more suggestive of Slyde (one of the better third-stringer villains that Tom DeFalco concocted for Spider-Man, and one whom I have an absurd fondness for) and the Silver Surfer than they were of the X-Men's Iceman, his most obvious template.
7) Under-Miner = Mole Man -- also in keeping with The Incredibles' being modelled after the Fantastic Four. (Mole Man was the FF's first villain.)
8) Syndrome's scheme to save the day after siccing his Omnidroid on the city strongly recalled Henry Pym's/Yellowjacket's plot in The Avengers Vol. 1, #213, scripted by Jim Shooter.
9) Bomb Voyage seems to be a Frenchified take on the Joker, with a mime motif being substituted for a clown one.
And what's up with the nod to the lamest Star Wars movie thus far, The Return of the Jedi, in the sequence where Dash and Violet are being chased on Syndrome's island? At least Bird gave props to the best action scene in RofJ, but still....