ICAD extra: To Create a Super-Hero

I’ve been watching an Amazon Prime series called THE BOYS, about a group of superheroes who not only, as Stan Lee once prescribed for such, have feet of clay beneath their super-boots, they also have a degree of wrongness to them that goes from corporate sellout to bad to the bone. My suspicion is that the title derives from the Shakespeare quotation “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

Be that as it might, it got me onto superhero conception and creation, and here is what I came up with. Townes Cryer, a talk-jock who has an emotional-catharsis program in the wee hours, gets hit with Earth, Air, Fire and Water one fateful night, when a mudslide strikes his station just as lightning hits the antenna and a fire springs up–and then the sprinkler system comes on, and a kindly Fairy-Godmother type of alien creature, a fan of Cryer’s show, effects his rescue, and a side effect of the instant-healing she subjects Cryer to changes him radically. He now has Magic Tears, no hair, and a row of cranial appendages that can fuel his lachrymal glands with moisture from the air, and can expel his tears as steam, as ice projectiles, as fog, or as saline.

Odds are I will do nothing else with this character, but that hardly matters. He lives.