With this project came a renewed sense of purpose, and for a brief time I even imagined that one day I could return to my life of crime. Now I know that isn’t in the cards. I buried myself in this book, keeping strange hours, pushing myself hard. One morning I passed out, somewhere around sunup, lying on the couch in my parents’ living room. I was exhausted. I don’t know how long I slept, but when I woke, I was not alone. Mr. Negative was sitting on the arm of the couch, watching me.
Instantly, by instinct, I put him away, but the significance of this development was not lost on me. Finally, I realized what I probably should have figured out years ago. I wasn’t simply gaining greater control over Mr. Negative. Mr. Negative was getting stronger. Every time I let him out, he emerged a little more powerful. More substantial. And, I was starting to believe, more autonomous. The trouble I’d been having lately with the rubber band could surely be explained by Mr. Negative resisting my efforts. What if my control over him was just an illusion, something he allowed? How could I be sure?
I thought perhaps I was still the stronger one, and if he came back I could just stick him underground until he became corporeal enough to suffocate. I also believe it is far more likely that I will awake some morning and he will be waiting for me, only this time Mr. Negative gets to stay out and I will be the one who goes back in. Which raises a lot of questions for me. What kind of man will he be? If he truly is a man, and I have let him out into the world only to force him to steal, then what kind of brother have I been? When I put him away does he disappear or has he been my mute prisoner for decades? When he puts me away, will he ever let me out again, or will I just disappear?
I don’t know what my legacy will be once I hand over the reins of the rest of my life. Before that happens, I am determined to see Your Changing Body: A Guidebook for Boy Super Villains become a new standard in developmental education. This book will help generations of evil, angry, and just plain lonely boys answer the most important question an adolescent criminal can ask: What kind of man do you want to be?
The Origin of the Fiend
Hal Duncan
Hal Duncan’s first novel, Vellum, was published in 2005 to some acclaim, garnering several award nominations (Crawford, Locus, BFS, World Fantasy Award,) with US, French and Finnish editions subsequently winning the Gaylactic Spectrum, Kurd Lasswitz and Tähtivaeltaja awards respectively. Along with the sequel, Ink, he’s also published a stand-alone novella, “Escape from Hell!”, various short stories in magazines and anthologies, and most recently a full poetry collection, Songs For The Devil And Death. A member of the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle and a regular online columnist at Boomtron, he also wrote the lyrics for Aereogramme’s “If You Love Me, You’d Destroy Me,” on the Ballads of the Book album, and the musical, Nowhere Town, which premiered last year in Chicago. Homophobic hatemail once dubbed him “The… Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” (sic). He’s getting a t-shirt made up.
That Accumulated Potential
A five-and-dime store on Lincoln Street, just round the corner from Sam’s Malt Café. You stand at the comic rack, captivated by Overman on the cover of Adventure Comics. Circus strong man’s leotard in white, blue trunks, boots and cape, he’s knocking seven bells out of a robot army straight from the Flash Gordon strips. You guess they’re part of some criminal scheme of Overman’s arch-enemy, the mad scientist, Rex Roman, but you know you’re not supposed to read the comics in the shop, so you beg your big brother for the ten cents. Only ten cents.
We all know Overman’s origin story. Sent back in his timepod from the 51st century, a newborn babe arrives in 1920s California where he’s discovered by spinster sisters, raised on their orange orchard. On a visit to San Angelo at age 16, he dives in front of a runaway tramcar to throw a child to safety, little suspecting the impact will activate his “hyper-evolved cells.” Able to absorb the kinetic energy of any blow, he’s invulnerable to bullet or blade. Focusing that power in fists or feet, he has “a punch like a piston, a pounce like a panther.”
You wish you had that famous red “O” sigil in your chest, wish it would project a hologram of your father. He’d tell you you’d been sent back to escape the destruction of the Earth itself. Later, in issue #5, you’d discover you can use this Omicron-beam as a weapon, unleash the kinetic energy built up within your body. And where at first your creators simply had you “leaping leagues in a single spring,” so many would read those bounds across the sky as flight that soon the misreading would become mythos, that accumulated potential, as ever, the rationale.
You’re just like Overman in his cover identity of Grant Cooper, a young law student and intern at the DA’s office, investigating cover-ups and thwarting diabolical plans. Not that you investigate cover-ups and thwart diabolical plans—that’s not you on the cover of Adventure Comics #19, punching a fighter plane from the sky. You’re only ten. But you might study law when you grow up. And you’re shy and quiet like Grant Cooper is, bespectacled too. You once yearned to be The Shadow, as you sat by the radio on Sunday evenings, in your pyjamas, but not now.
The Paradox Protocol
The character’s popularity (and power) grew like your scrawny limbs, his nemesis’s reach scaling up too, Roman gradually recast as war profiteer selling weapons to both sides. Then came the “big turning point,” (according to Donald Black’s Overman: The Century of a Saviour) in Overman issues #23-24, “The Paradox Protocol,” where Roman has a minor villain with mesmeric powers, the Fiend, hypnotise the Saviour of the Century and suggest he kill Hitler to end WW2, issue #23 finishing with Overman in flight over the Atlantic.
Your big brother was in France then. If only Overman was real, you thought.
At the last minute, as Overman’s about to raze Berlin, his hologram activates—Wait! No! An evil ploy is afoot: if he kills Hitler he’ll change history such that he’ll never be born; worse, Rex Roman himself will become President. The issue ends with Overman instead saving a crashed fighter pilot (whose features bear a remarkable resemblance to Overman’s: “Like a long-lost brother, or even… ancestor!”) then returning home with a solemn vow to fight wherever he can because “the smallest battle may win the greatest victory.”
You read it in your treehouse, one hot summer day.
July 13th.
According to Jeff Steinman, writer and co-creater with artist Jim Schweitzer, “the whole paradox thing was largely an excuse, a convenience. See, we kept getting letters from kids asking if Overman could stop the war so their dad could come home. And we thought, what are we going to do here? How do we answer this? Then we hit on the idea that this all-powerful character couldn’t do just anything, because if he did the wrong thing, well, it’d mean he was never born.”
You read that interview… when? In college, in the ‘70s, wasn’t it? Or ‘90s?
As Black writes, “From the Paradox was born a true Paraclete. Expedience or not, in this sacrifice of all-conquering omnipotence on the altar of contingency, the Overman became Everyman, the messiah became mortal, a salvator with strings attached, bound to his terrible cross of consequences. That he fought the smallest battles, on our soil, in our skies, in the streets of our cities, by day or night—this made his struggle ours, the struggle of the human spirit against history itself.”
But if his struggle was ours, your struggle was never his, was it? He didn’t have your secret.
Red Shift, Blue Shift
Polio-stricken cub reporter Gary Gordon may walk with a cane, but when he shouts the magic word three times in a second–”Thunderbolt! Thunderbolt! Thunderbolt!” (try it, kids!)—it activates the powers given him by a mysterious wizard masquerading as a doctor, and Gordon transforms into the fastest man on the planet: the Human Blur, the Blue Streak… the Thunderbolt!
Well, of course, that’s the Golden Age origin. The Thunderbolt who heralded the Silver Age with his 1956 revival had his particles accelerated to the speed
of light by blue omicron rays… but that’s another story.
You remember both.
Caught in the blast of a meteorite, its exotic alien minerals vaporised on impact, permeating every cell in his body, Jake Walker wakes up in the crater, apparently unharmed but for a weird golden glow to his skin, fading even as his head clears. With his thrill-seeking nature though, it’s not long before a practice run in an abandoned Speedway track reveals the truth… that when excitement sparks in his heart, that spark ignites his very molecules, transforming him into Flameboy—Flameboy, the Comet Kid, shooting fireballs from his fingers, blasting through the sky like a human rocket. You…
You love them both. You desire them both. Thunderbolt can run rings round the super villain, save the planet, and get the copy in before the Globe’s star reporter, “Slick” Jackson has even finished his coffee. Often with some friendly banter aimed at fellow Legion member Flameboy along the way. Fighting villains for the fun of it, ribbing the other Legion members, (only to wind up doused by an irate Water Woman or blown out by the Thunderbolt,) Flameboy’s rogueish charm is… hot.
“You’re light on your feet for a hoofer, Twinkletoes,” he joshes. “But me? I’m just plain smokin’!”
“Yeah? Well, light me up a Lucky, hotshot,” says Thunderbolt in Legion of American Watchers #18. “I’ll try not to snuff you with my slipstream.”
That friendly banter between “the Blunderdolt” and “Ginger, the Dancing Zippo” (a reference to Ginger Rogers as much as Flameboy’s red hair,) was condemned by Dr Werther Fredericks in The Corruption of the Young (1954) as “blatant homoerotic flirtation, rife with innuendo.” Still, it’s the most popular pairing in comics, the limited series “Flameboy and Thunderbolt: Red Shift, Blue Shift” one of AC’s all-time bestsellers.
At thirteen you drew fan art of them kissing.
In Cold Pointed Steel
Fredericks didn’t know shit, you think. Overman and Hookman at AC Comics, Monkeyboy at Wonder—none of the Big Three could possibly be “inverts,” as one of the least vicious terms had it back then. The Golden Age was an era free of faggots, devoid of deviants… in the surface text, anyways. Captain Steadfast wasn’t no queer. The Secret ain’t some homo. The Quantum’s kinda gay, but not in that sense—in the sense that he’s lame. He doesn’t kick ass like the Green Blade or Warhound. Warhound rocks; he’s the only modern superhero even close to those classics.
The Hookman does sort of resonate with you though. His origin is dark—mother dead in childbirth, father shot before his very eyes, for gambling debts. That image, the reflection in the young boy’s eye, the man hanging by his cuffed wrists from an abbatoir meathook… if you were that kid you’d have his nightmares. Little wonder young John Flynn grew up on the streets, his only break being sent to juvie, where a gruff boxing coach steered him right, put the punk on the straight and narrow.
“Work on that hook, kid,” growls Coach. “It’s the hook’ll floor ‘em.”
Coach gets Flynn a job on the docks, a stevedore hauling cargo, hook in hand. By night he trains for his first pro bout, fixes up an old Indian Scout motorbike, or reads.
“Brains and brawn,” says Coach.
Goons in the dressing room, threats—throw the fight or else.
Smack! Crack!
“Tell that to the Shark! Tell him to find another patsy.”
But the next day Flynn is down on the docks and there’s something in the water, a body. Hauled out with a boathook, Coach’s limp form lies on the jetty. And that night, the barbed beast is born.
In his steel blue skin-tights with midnight blue trappings—trunks, boots and gauntlets, cape furled around him, he carves a cool silhouette. It’s the hooks that are his trademark though, glinting in the shadows. Part welded helmet, part sewn-together mask, his cowl sports the scariest—a metal mohawk, a centurion’s crest in cold pointed steel. Spring-loaded hooks built into his gloves slash out for combat or for climbing, fire into the air as grappling irons. He has no superpower but his will—to bring a reckoning down upon all racketeers.
He has his sidekick too, Kid Swift.
Who You Might Be
There have, of course, been a number of Kid Swifts over the years, with various origins. Your favourite was the second, Todd Jonas, an orphaned street kid like Hookman himself (by then, the “the” in the character’s name had largely been dropped,) he survived by his wits, “hustling and grifting” until the Hookman took him in.
You’ll never forgive the fan-voted outcome of the controversial late-80s storyline, “The Costume in the Closet.” You’ll never forgive the fact that the world’s first homo superhero is no sooner out than he’s suffering and dying. You’ll never forgive, never forget, never…
You dressed up as Kid Swift one Halloween—red t-shirt and pants, yellow trunks and cape, green mask and belt. That was the year Derek Mason dressed up as Water Woman and all the kids made fun of him from then on, called him queer. Shit, you were all so young, did you even know what it meant? Well, maybe. When Kid Swift on TV said, “Golly gosh gumdrops, Hookman! I don’t think it’s just the Jester’s laughing gas that’s making me feel so gay!” you got the word’s… other meaning.
Didn’t stop you taunting Derek though, scorning him.
Him being a sissy took the heat off you, of course, and with a name like Animus Thrawn you needed a scapegoat. Annie-Mouse, they called you, Annie-Mouse Prawn. Even your friends called you Mouse, the nickname sticking long past the point when anyone but you even remembered it was a taunt. You didn’t mind so much after you found this old Gollancz Classic in the library, a science fiction book with a cool street-thief character called Mouse. He sort of merged with Kid Swift in your daydream doodles of who you might be if you weren’t you.
But, no. They couldn’t let you have that. As if AIDS and Mutual Assured Destruction weren’t enough, they had to put a bullet in your very fantasies of a future. Cold steel in Todd Jonas’s gut. The Jester’s laughter echoed like some creepy carnival automaton as he stood there watching; Hookman kneeling over the dying youth; the Fiend standing over him, behind him, the pure malevolence that had played the City’s Sentinel like a puppet, shrouding his mind with illusions to tear.
“What’ll you say when they ask how Kid Swift died?” mocks the Jester. “By crook… or by hook?”
Hide Your Sins in Silence
A villain wakes from a nightmare, heart pounding, hands grasping the bedsheets in panic. What was that noise? A whisper? An echo? A moan of the soul, a groan of terror in a guilty heart? A fedora shadows a featureless face, a longcoat billows and, in the dark, a grey shape slips away, for the Secret’s work is done. Dream on, you wrongdoers who think your soul is safe! Imagine that no one knows your foul deeds! But there is one who walks among the sleeping, one who can damn you with a single word whispered softly into your dreams.
His origin unknown, none can say from whence his powers came, whether his terrible torments are magic, mechanics or mesmerism. But of this you can be sure: you can cover up your crimes, hush up and hide your sins in silence, but the Secret will haunt you to the grave!
“An iron cage?” he scoffs in Awesome Comics, #40. “Hah! There are some secrets that cannot be kept, my friend. Whatever you do, they will… slip out.”
And in a little trick of the pen, perspectives shift from one panel to the next: the Secret’s free and the villain caged!
You used to love listening to The Shadow serials, but for all that the Secret is homage standing a hair’s-breadth from plagiarism, something about the Master of Mysteries has always soured you to him. Vengeful to the point of vicious, shaping the dreams of criminals to drive them to insanity, he exploits hidden shames to enforce his merciless morality. With that callousness and the similar powers, you could easily believe the rumour: that the Fiend was introduced not just to kill Kid Swift, but with a shocking r
evelation planned—that the Fiend was what The Secret would eventually become.
“It does too work,” you argue with Keith Johnstone. “See, in Catastrophe For Universes, Project Moonchild only think they’ve brought a demon from another dimension. Really they’ve brought the Fiend from the future, and that’s why he knows everyone’s secret identities just like the Secret does, because he is the Secret.”
You’re in your room, comics strewn around you on your brother’s bed—vacant since he was called up for Iraq.
“So how come the Fiend can move in time?” says Keith. “The Secret can’t move in time.”
“Because Project Moonchild doesn’t bind him properly. They make him like that.”
The Fabric of Spacetime
Of course, later writers were to use the Paradox Protocol as the basis for numerous retcons of AC’s continuity. The earliest and still most controversial example came in the wake of Steinman’s blacklisting, at the height of the McCarthy era, with “The Red Menace” story arc, where new writer Edgar Franklin had Overman discover that—shock! horror!—Rex Roman has secretly been in league with Stalin all along. To prevent a Communist takeover of the US, Overman has no choice but to sacrifice himself, punching the A-Bomb Roman tries to drop on Washington, exploding it high in the atmosphere.
The Lavender Menace Page 23