"Doctor Diablo Goes Through the Motions", short story from Strange Horizons

I like that Strange Horizons publishes a lot of superhero prose. I always get a kick out of superheroes and supervillains taken out of the comic book medium and thrown into others.

And I liked this story, "Doctor Diablo Goes Through the Motions," but I couldn't figure out why at first. The ending seemed quite odd.

But now I see it as being about despair, about being trapped in a cycle where people don't address the real problems of the world. Which is a great point to make; I saw the same idea in a StormWatch volume that I was looking at just last night...it was expressed in the form of 'our group was just a band-aid, I want to go after causes not symptoms.' Of course, doing that led StormWatch in terrible directions; I just want to get it out there that this idea, while not new, is a great nuance on the superhero paradigm.