Sometimes it feels like there’s very little magic in the world. I think a lot about that line in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End when Barbossa says, “The world used to be a bigger place,” and Jack Sparrow responds with, “The world’s still the same. There’s just…less in it.” This goes hand in hand with Hellboy II when Prince Nuada says, “We die…and the world will be poorer for it.” They’re both getting at the same thing: gone are the pirates and the fairies and the elves, and in its place is a lack of imagination and creativity. There’s less problem-solving because there’s an app for everything. There’s less reading because our brains are too shorted to stay focused. There’s less art given the space to create any sense of wonder because it’s all fed through the meat grinder of ‘content’. The world hasn’t changed size. But sometimes it certainly feels like there’s less in it.
Which brings me to the Summer of 2019. My wife and I tip-toe down creaky wooden stairs into a New Zealand glow-worm cave. As we become immersed in the darkness, a light glows to our right, close to the ground. There lays a giant bone, like a femur from a large animal. We’ve just been told how animals would sometimes unknowingly sink through the grass above us and fall into the caves, their lonely bodies wasting to bones. The most common victim of this disappearing spell: cows. But this bone? This is not a cow, they explain. This giant bone comes from a Moa, one of nine kinds of flightless New Zealand birds. The largest of these birds grew to be 12 feet tall and 540 pounds. In other words: absolutely terrifying.
It’s very possible they were just joking with us ignorant tourists. Moas have been extinct for over 6 centuries, after all. But I chose to believe. It was far more interesting to do so. It made the world feel a little bigger, like it still retained just a little bit more magic.
Something pretty damn magical happened in 1973, when Action Comics’ Issue #425 had Superman fighting a Flying Moa. You did not misread that. A. Flying. Moa. The story, as it turns out, is about a hunter who unknowingly kills the last Moa on earth. Regretting his actions, he makes a commitment to finding a Moa egg. Upon finding one, he doesn’t seem to realize that the egg – engulfed in flames – may be superpowered and brings it back to Metropolis to help create more Moas. The hunter is being interviewed by none other than Clark Kent when the egg hatches and out comes a flying, screeching Moa. It’s wild. The sweet thing about this is that the Moa has no intentions of killing or hurting anyone – it just wanted to go home. So Superman does the Superman thing and brings him all the way back to New Zealand where he sets up a Moa reserve. The fact we haven’t heard about this in the years since the issue tells me it probably didn’t last very long. But at least the dude tried!
I find little bits of bizarre comics trivia like this rather inspiring. It’s a window into a time when, yes, they were probably really grasping for narrative straws in the face of having to produce so many issues in such a short period of time. But the focus on quantity over quality meant some really crazy, even magical ideas could squeak through. A little bit of magic could sneak in through the door and make the world, once again, feel a little bigger.
