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ICAD extra: To Create a Super-Hero

July 30, 2019
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2019 0730 superhero

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.

Orange Pig on Greenmetal

December 1, 2015
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You’ve been recruited. You’re in a cadre of superheroes whose sigil is the profile of a straightbellied orange pig against a deep gunmettally green background. Your superpower and your mission are identical: you alchemize food service into performance art.

Or: You wake up at 2:45 AM, shower, floss, brush, dress, do your flight-check of absolutely essential items, walk four-odd miles in the dark pre-predawn to the northwest terminus of the Valley Metro Light Rail, catch the 5:00 AM edition of the Light Rail and have it convey you to 44th and Washington, get on the escalator, get on the moving walkway, get on another escalator, get on the Sky Train, hear the automated voice botch “East Economy Station” for the kajillionth time, get out at Terminal Four, and call a manager at 5:53 AM to escort you through TSA testing at the security checkpoint. Your clockin time is 6:00 AM.

Or: in three days you’ve done a ton of watch&learn, and the first thing you ought to learn, but don’t, is to get out of the way. “Walk with purpose,” one of the wait staff, loaded with meals and right behind you, says, and you finally get it. Later you’ll learn to hurry without seeming to. But your head is full of the table numbers and the names of everyone and where you need to be most of the time, a few crucial times, almost never (the bathroom, for instance–act accordingly!), when you need the manager’s override, where you cannot go without an escort, and how to field frequently-asked questions.

Or: a LOT of people are getting to know you awfully fast, and it’s a kaleidoscope of welcome-to-my-worlds when you get to know them. One is AMAZING!! LIVING the DREEAM! One is a magician who arranges a table for five in a split second. One is a bartender with the self-assurance of Zeus. One is a cross-country runner with a full trophy case on the rez. They’re special, and they’re treating you like one of them. You’re “Buddy” and “Baby” and “Brother,” and that’s just the Bs.

Or: You’ve been on your feet for six solid hours with no letup. You’re OK above the ankles but your left foot has decided to cramp at odd intervals and you can’t always walk it off. Finally you get philosophical about it. Bring it on, you stupid foot.

Or: You press the CLOCK IN/OUT part of the screen, slide your card, assure the machine, which sometimes scolds you, that you ARE clocking out and you’re NOT taking a break, and your receipt/record of a week’s worth of work comes sliding out, and you realize that you’re where you should be right now, doing exactly what you should be doing.