The Lavender Menace

by Tom Cardamone

  A nuclear blast was the one thing that could kill Overman, you knew. It was thrilling, that final panel of Overman’s shadow burned across Capitol Hill and the question, “Is this the end?” It was excruciating.

  In the next issue though, “The Paradox Punch,” Overman’s origin is retold, updated. His hologram father reveals a wild twist: from the temporal shock waves of Overman’s death a whole new future-history erupts; now it’s a communist takeover of the US that’ll lead to the Earth’s destruction.

  You remember the hot July 13th you read that comic, in your treehouse, in another world.

  It all hinges on a hint that Overman is one of his own ancestors. By sacrificing himself before he’s passed on his genes, he’s created a future in which he was never born; but that means he never went back in time, meaning he didn’t die! “Reality warping in a great loop back to the very beginning of it all,” a new 51st century is forged. And luckily Overman’s father is able to detect echoes of the original history left in the fabric of spacetime by Overman’s Omicron-beams, able to warn his son.

  Nobody warned your brother, did they?

  You’d read the recap of Overman’s adventures in this remade continuity, all condensed to a montage of panels. You’d read the thrilling climax, where he again confronts his arch-enemy on the plane above Washington; only this time, with his Omicron-beam, Overman blasts a portal to the Fourth Dimension, hurls the A-Bomb through it just in time.

  The whole world rewritten! You had to tell someone. You scrambled down the rope-ladder, ran into the kitchen, the living room.

  Soldiers stood, hats in hand.

  Your mother sat on the sofa, crying.

  The first word you heard was “Korea.”

  You Can Never Go Home

  Shot down in the skies over Pearl Harbour, leaping from his plummeting P-36 Hawk without a parachute, Captain Steve “Steadfast” Sturgeon can only pray for a miracle. And a miracle he gets! Struck by lightning at that exact moment, he finds himself standing before the Archons of the Cosmos, with a choice between Eternity and Earth. But for Steve Sturgeon, no choice needs to be made.

  “Send me back,” he says. “There’s a war to be won!”

  There was talk of the movie having him shot down over Afghanistan, like your brother, who isn’t ever coming back, not ever.

  In the history books, it says there was no third wave to the Japanese attack, but any airman who was there that day will tell you those Nips were turned back by a strange sight in the sky… an angel sent from Heaven, an American Angel. And so began the daring deeds of the hero known as Captain Steadfast.

  “We’ll finish what you started, No-Joe Tojo!” he says in Captain Steadfast #13. “And that’s the truth!”

  The truth? you think. Yeah, and Nixon’s not a crook.

  Home for the holidays, you sit in your old bedroom, hiding from Christmas.

  To the people of Atlantis she is Princess Naia, half-mortal daughter of the Oceanid Queen Metis and her long-lost human consort. To the surface-dwellers she is Water Woman, sensual and spritely as Aphrodite, fearless and feisty as Artemis… Water Woman, Mistress of the Seas. When Princess Naia investigates a disturbance among her dolphin subjects, she discovers Ensign Hank Murray, the sole survivor of a German U-boat attack. “His strange skin… so… pink!” she says. (Top-Notch Comics #8)

  And though her people are sworn never to intercede in the affairs of surface-dwellers, she saves him.

  Exiled from her beloved Atlantis in punishment, what’s a girl to do but… fight Nazis with her electric eel-hide whip!

  They say you can never go home again; it’s all too true. Two years of college in New York and you’ve discovered the Village, sex, drugs and shoulder-length hair. It’s changed you, is still changing you. It was that drag queen in the Stonewall, dressed as Water Woman—that’s when you decided it was time to come clean, to come out. Like you weren’t already the beatnik black sheep of the family anyways, the stranger in their midst.

  Floating Through Time

  Professor Miles Quant is on the verge of replicating the primal state of matter in his physics lab, when he discovers one of his colleagues is a Nazi spy sent to steal the secret for the Germans. Knocked out and left in an overloading photon chamber, exposed to an “uncertainty field” beyond all measure, his atoms are thrown into pure flux. Able to transform himself into any element, to shrink or grow at will, even to teleport by swapping places with something of equal mass, he is no longer Quant, M., Phd., but is now the Quantum, Master of Matter!

  You take the joint from him, beautiful hippy farmboy with hair as blond as Captain Steadfast’s but long. It brushes across your naked chest as he shifts, tickles. Above you, the sky is a full colour painting in spattered light, Milky Way aglow in acid streamings, wheelings. Ancient gods battle in chariots that whirl apart to mandalas, Celtic knots of weaving dragons. You feel them in your serpent spine.

  “Cosmic, man,” he says, then laughs. “That sounds like a superhero, right? Cosmicman.”

  Screw college, you think. Screw Vietnam. It’s the Age of Aquarius and everything’s changing.

  You’ve got a boyfriend.

  “Turn lead into gold?” says Quantum in True-American Comics #3. “No, Dr Von Strann… Into the very stuff both elements are made of!”

  It’s only later, during AC’s Catastrophe For Two Worlds, in an attempt to simplify the morass of rationales for superpowers, that the Prof’s “primalised matter” is revealed to be none other than the proteanite toxic to Overman. Fortunately, it’s in an omicron-irradiated form harmless to the Man of the Future. Unfortunately, during AC’s Ultimate Catastrophe, the Fiend will reverse that omicron-irradiation, turn the Quantum into a doomsday weapon with which to kill Overman himself.

  You take the joint from him, beautiful sculpted surfer, hair as blond as Captain Steadfast’s but long. It tickles your naked chest as he shifts. Above you, the sky is a myriad of universes exploded to atoms of a cosmic man. Sand under you, surf crashing the beach, its spray aglow in acid glitterings, all is energy disguised as mass, imagination masked as energy, forever shifting, muscles of a horse beneath its skin.

  “You know we’re floating through time even as we lie here,” you say. “Or time is floating through us.”

  Later, you’ll forget why that felt so true.

  Vice Will Fall

  “You look great,” he says. “Dude, you look hot.”

  “I look like a douche,” you say.

  But you blush as much because the sleeveless wetsuit does cut a sleek physique in black and red, lean arms exposed, showing off your shoulder tats like a motherfucking rockstar. You feel so nakedly narcissistic, seeing the strut and stance in the mirror. Shit, however slick you look it’s not going to help when you fall off the board. You’re so not sure about these lessons. But…

  “I’m so doing the Fiend in this next Halloween,” you grin.

  “Mouse, dude. You’re such a geek.”

  Attacked by bandits and left for dead in the Sahara Desert, millionaire playboy Franklin Wallace stumbles on the lost oasis of a mysterious green-robed Moor, Amir Al-Hazred. Bound for centuries by an evil sorcerer’s curse, Al-Hazred plays on Wallace’s greed and gratitude to trick him into a death-match… where the true conflict is in Wallace’s heart.

  “Do I fight to win this ‘great treasure’ he guards? Or to give this poor madman the release he prays for… in death? I… I don’t know!”

  Only as Al-Hazred dies in Wallace’s arms does he reveal the truth:

  “You were led here, to take my life… and sacred duty. You are the Archon of the Earth now!”

  For only a man on the cusp of redemption, a man whose past is vice and his future virtue, can take up the Kamir Husam—a sword that can cut through anything, even spacetime itself.

  “When l
esser man and greater man, Together with a single hand, Strike out for freedom on command, Then vice will fall and virtue stand!” (The Green Blade #1)

  Hypnotised by Project Moonchild, it’s the Green Blade who opens the portal, unleashes the Fiend on AC’s multiverse.

  “You never talk about him,” he says, handing the photo back.

  “There’s not really much to say. And… well, ten years…”

  In truth, it feels like more. And less. The scar tissue of teenage grief is smooth, healed to an image, but ever tender. Every July 13th is that July 13th for you. But your heart remade, somehow it’s almost welcome, a reminder to live your life. To finish your term paper, phone Mom, get your ass to the Prop 8 demo on Saturday and… today…

  In the wetsuits, you look like Thunderbolt and Flameboy.

  “Come on.” you smile. “Surf’s up.”

  The Origin of the Fiend

  You were reading “The Paradox Protocol” the day the soldiers brought the news that your brother had been killed in action in France. You were reading “The Paradox Punch” the day the soldiers brought the news that your brother had been killed in action in Korea. Catastrophe For Two Worlds, Catastrophe For Universes, Ultimate Catastrophe. Vietnam, Bosnia, Afghanistan.

  You’re thirteen years old and you’re just finished reading Grant Milligan’s new graphic novel, The Origin of the Fiend, when the soldiers bring the news that your brother has been killed in action in Iraq.

  The Fiend’s name has just been revealed.

  They stand in the ruins of the Legion of American Watchers’ moonbase.

  “Animus Thrawn,” says the Secret.

  “Not any more,” says the Fiend.

  The story is fucked-up. That’s the only way to describe it. The Fiend who killed Kid Swift, the Fiend who killed Overman, the Fiend who turned AC’s entire pantheon of superheroes against one another in the Ultimate Catastrophe crossover event… that demon is from the Fifth Dimension, from a universe in which that pantheon is mere fiction.

  “From another reality?” says the latest Kid Swift. But the Fiend simply laughs.

  “There is no reality,” he says.

  You’re outside the five-and-dime store on Lincoln Street, flicking through a comic, but every page is from a different issue, a different year, a different era. Wait.

  You’re reading it in your treehouse, every turn of a page a different character, a different story, universe, July 13th. No.

  But you’re running inside, through years of kitchens, to a half dozen living rooms where soldiers of shifting wars stand, and where mothers sit on sofas, here, there, anywhere, crying. No.

  France, Korea, Vietnam. No.

  And the story is a kid screaming “NO!” because no superhero saved his brother.

  No.

  No, that’s not the story, you’re shouting as galaxies of lives explode around you. In every one of those lives, the story is healing, not hate. It’s college and Christmases and coming out; it’s bitching about Nixon, Reagan, Bush; laughing with beatniks, hippies, surfers; living; loving.

  It’s this moment of madness you’re denying.

  Except you can’t deny it, as you stand in the comic store, your boyfriend’s hand on your shoulder, as you open The Origin of the Fiend to this page, and are torn into infinities of fiction.

  And a red rage for vengeance rips out of your lungs.

  Each Botched and Broken Continuity

  A five and dime store on Lincoln Street, but it’s a city that doesn’t exist in your world, a blend of New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. Passers-by wear fedoras and Walkmans, G.I. uniforms and baseball caps; they come out of cars with running boards, talking on their cell phones. It might be 1910 or 2010, but you know it’s both and more besides—your story untold but unfolding across each botched and broken continuity. The Legion of American Watchers fight each other on the street, and you look on, laughing.

  It’s the Fiend’s first appearance.

  “Animus Thrawn! Fiend of the Hell Dimension, I bind thee to this world! I bind thee to my will!”

  The high priest whirls, his bloody hands raised to the thundering skies. The Green Blade stands behind him, entranced, sword aglow, lighting up the stone circle and the Acolytes of Armageddon, the hooded scientist-priests of Project Moonchild.

  “It’s too late!” Kid Swift is shouting as the Hookman slams into the high priest.

  Crouched in the bloody pentagram, you look into the boy’s eyes, remember his death; it’s already written. Rewritten. The Elsewhens one-shot series retold it in Edo Japan.

  “What’ll you say when they ask how Kid Swift died?” the Jester mocks. “By crook… or by hook?”

  Another scene. You’re looking down upon your handiwork—one dead sidekick, one hero on his knees—and you can feel your fucking glee in the destruction. So they wanted a fucking villain? But even as you laugh, you’re sobbing, focus freefalling through too many memories of malevolence to bear, to another:

  “…by sending his mind back and forth along his own timestream, between his past and future,” the Quantum is saying. “It’s really quite ingenious.”

  “That’s one word for it,” says Flameboy.

  Another memory, another, another. No, memory isn’t the right word; this is raw experience. You’re blowing up cities, snuffing henchmen, murdering Overman himself, resetting the multiverse in Ultimate Catastrophe. And you can’t stop, can’t hold to one moment, have no control. But the worst of it is that, as you’re shredded in the maelstrom of your future, you realise you will. Eventually.

  And you’ll be the Fiend. You’ll kill Kid Swift, destroy the multiverse itself. Even now you’re becoming your own demented future, knowing only fury at the brutal secret of your origin: your heart was pure until one day…

  The Origin of The Fiend

  Black with red details, the neoprene skinsuit fits snug to your form, enough stretch to carve your musculature in its shadows but in a hide thick as leather, not some tawdry film of spandex, lightweight and lurid as the 80s. It’s snakeskin jeans versus nylon tights, and you look fucking killer in it. Sleeveless, of course, to show off the black sigils graved in the scarlet skin of your arms. In the scar tissue covering your whole body, from being dragged through the searing omicron energy fields between your world and this one.

  Black gauntlets, belt and boots.

  You’re ready.

  You flex your fingers, spark up a ball of light in your palm. It’s pure illusion, but then so is this whole world, the whole universe, the multiverse. It’s not even a true superpower, your trickery, just the science of a few centuries into the future wired into your gauntlets; but that just makes it all the more satisfying, knowing what you’re about to do with it. How that tediously earnest paragon of reason, that ponderous fool, Professor Miles Quant aka the Quantum, will bend to your will, reconfigure his proteanite matter to the madness you conjure in his mind.

  Then you’re there, hand out like Flameboy blasting, fingers twisting, crunching thought; and the Quantum goes boom, Overman swallowed in the blast. You’ve lived this moment countless times, will live it countless more. You know this, remembering all the pasts and futures you’ve jumped back to here from. Time travel? No. Time is meaningless.

  Reality splits as the Paradox Protocol kicks in, a new multiverse born through the breach, a rebooted continuity in which Overman’s timepod will arrive in the early 90s. New to everyone but you, at least. You were still reading after Ultimate Catastrophe. In one life anyway.

  You flick through this new timestream to your other favourite moment, the finale of The Origin of the Fiend, the Law headquarters in ruins, the Secret crawling over the rubble.

  “Animus,” he begs. “You know this is insane.”

  You kick him onto his back, crouch to crad
le his head, pull the grey mask from his face. Your face.

  You were wrong, you know now. That shocking revelation? It wasn’t that the Secret would become the Fiend. No, it was that one day the Fiend would reach towards redemption, become the Secret.

  “Mouse.”

  “Not today,” you laugh.

  And snap his neck.

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