This was the year that I’ve found myself ready to give up on Good & Bad or Good & Evil as terribly unhelpful and often harmful concepts that allow too many humans to get away with too many things that add up to planetary destruction – this was something that could almost be overlooked when humans kept their numbers under 3B but which has become intolerable now that almost 8B humans are actively trashing their home while constantly assuring themselves that they are, all things considered, good people.

Hench give us a view of superhero/supervillain land through the eyes of a relatively low-level hench person (superheroes have support teams and sidekicks, villains have hench people). In fact, this hench is a numbers-cruncher, a position that shouldn’t seem so lowly now that we’ve been exposed to the human “computers” in Hidden Figures, but facts are that the astronauts are the ones who graced all the magazines and Wheaties boxes in NASA’s glory days. Henches are by and large considered collateral damage – they chose the wrong side so one can’t get too upset when then wind up sustaining lethal or non-lethal injuries while performing their jobs. Except here we have a hench who does get upset and who doesn’t care for the performative gestures of apology that the superhero acts out in order to sustain the appearance of ‘goodness’ in the public eye.