It's always so satisfying when a writer puts words to an idea I didn't even know I had. This is from today's NYT and it's from a review of the new season of ALIAS. The reviewer, Virginia Heffernan compares the show to a comic book and goes on to observe oh so accurately:

Let's be honest. Many of us don't like comic books and have feigned interest in their jumpy bif-bam fighting scenes and the way they redeem loser guys, only to impress and minister to those loser guys. And now we can admit that while the redemption dynamic - little X-Men boys finding in their eccentricity and loneliness a superpower - is touching, there's nothing duller than listening to someone explain, in all seriousness, the Syndicate and the Shadow Force and the Hard Drive and the Plutonium Lance. And the characters: lame. One is good and the other is evil, and then one is evil pretending to be good, and then one is good pretending to be evil. Zzzzz.