Daily Inspiration Quote by Len Wein

It sounds like a throwaway childhood wish, but in Len Wein's hands it doubles as a mission statement for the entire superhero-industrial imagination. "Fire rays out of my fingertips" is deliberately specific: not just to have power, but to project it, on command, from the body itself. Fingertips are where we touch, draw, write, and point. Wein is quietly linking creation and force, suggesting that the urge behind comics is the same urge behind superpowers: to make an invisible feeling become a visible effect.

The line also carries the dry self-awareness of someone who spent his life turning fantasies into monthly deadlines. Wein co-created characters like Wolverine and helped usher in the 1970s X-Men revival, a world where "rays" can mean lasers, psychic blasts, rage, or identity made impossible-to-ignore. Read that way, the quote isn't only about spectacle; it's about articulation. For kids (and plenty of adults), superpowers are a metaphor for finally having an outlet that matches the intensity inside you.

There's subtext, too, about limits. Wanting to shoot rays implies the frustration of being ordinary, stuck with hands that can only do so much in the real world. Comics become the workaround: if you can't change the physics of your body, you can redraw the rules on a page. The fingertips matter because they're the tools of the trade. Wein couldn't fire literal rays, so he did the next closest thing: he helped invent the characters who could, and he handed that power to readers.