....This time the coppers got me. I got hauled into my own paddy wagon while the Airman smashed my second set of wings into powder.

Nothing hurt so much, then or since, as hearing the crowd cheer while he smashed my wings. How the hell could they do that, you know? Didn't they know I was the one who’d been hurt his whole damn life? How I tried to be good, but it just wouldn’t stick? Sonsabitches. All of ‘em.

And that’s when it happened. I bet you had something like that, didn’t yuh Jane? We all had that moment, the one where we said ‘fuck it! I can’t be what they want, but I can be what they hate. I’ll be the bad guy, and I’ll shove it down their fucking throats!”

Yeah, we all had it. Me, you, Monocle, the Swami, Snowman. Hell, I bet if you could get the Hanging Judge to stand still for ten seconds and say something that didn’t have a legal pun to it, he’d say he had that moment too, where he realized that the capes who got to be the good guys was just another, crummy club, a clique, no different in the end from the popular kids in high school. But instead of it being decided based on who was good at sports or who had the biggest boobs, it got decided based on who could smile biggest for the cameras, or who could make nice with the government. Those guys, like the Airman and his buddies? Those guys got the spiffy base at the tops of high rise buildings. The rest of us at the bottom of the super food chain? We hadda go find some piece of real estate nobody wanted, usually underground or an abandoned warehouse or train station, and make do with that. Hell, remember that off-track train station we tried out as a base for a year during the Forties? Dank, filthy, and I still get nightmares of the spiders and the roaches that’d skitter over me when I tried to sleep down there.

Anyways, sorry. Remembering. Things didn’t go so well for a while after that. I made a few more versions of my wings over the next few years, each time I came closer to ‘getting’ the Airman. I never really had it in my mind I was gonna try to kill him. I was more like a dog chasing cars then, you know? What’s the dog gonna do when he actually catches one? I’d never wanna actually kill someone. If I did, it’d be a complete accident.

But I came close to taking him out, more than once. I knew that we’d just keep coming close, though. When we started to find each other, people with some kind of power or ability that made us different, but for some reason we couldn’t join the crummy superhero club, we started to find each other and group up, the way outcasts in any group will. Hell, supers are a pretty messed up bunch of folks to begin with anyway, ain’t they? Instead of figuring out a way to make money offa having powers, we put on weird getups and beat each other up in public. I mean, if I got into as many fights in a bar on Saturday night as the Airman did in the street in broad daylight? They woulda put me away for being a public menace.

But if he beat us up, the outcasts? Then he got his own comic book and a pile of money from a line of dolls made to look like him… sorry, action figures. Cripes, I get so tired of how everything has to be said a certain way these days. I hope it passes soon and people can get back to normal. Anyways, there we were, still trying to make our lives happen. Of course we robbed banks. What, we’d steal cars? We had to get food, clothes to replace the stuff that got ripped up when we fought the good guys. Can you trade a Cadillac for milk and bread at the local grocery store?

Yeah, that’s the thing: They made it all look so amazing to have an underground lair in the comic books. Like we just had to flip a switch and everything was all shiny, with computers that talked and a dozen snazzy super-themed cars to choose from. Reality? We were living in a fucking train station. An abandoned train station. One step up from a bunch of squatting hobos. Not like we could get an electrician or a plumber when things wouldn’t work. We all knew they’d tell as soon as the bill got paid. So, we’d either have to kill them, which would expose us to getting caught when someone’s husband or daddy didn’t come home for dinner that night [plus, when do we dump the bodies? Bodies smell, and we were already underground], or bribe ‘em and keep them on the payroll, making us have to pull even more jobs and more risks.

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Yeah, it was pretty much a lousy life at that point, even if they made it look good in the comic books. I’d left the mansion for a bit- aunt Rose had started to get a little ‘handsy’ with me lately, especially after she’d had a few drinks. Now, I think she was trying to get even with uncle Joe for cheating on her over and over again with just about anything that had a set of boobs and a skinny waist. Aunt Rose was starting to get a little chubby as she got older- not much to do besides chase the help and eat bon-bons if you’re a rich wife and don’t like doing charity work.

It was lousy, but when it was good it was really good. I mean, once we had you come on board, Jane, we already had that gal…what was her name again…Honey something, called herself Queen Bee. She wasn’t that great as a crook, but she was good at getting us to clean up the place. And once Monty got the place’s electricity going- you remember Monty? Long black hair, called himself Mister Monocle? Had all those weird little one-eyed glasses things that did all the crazy effects? He was a whiz with electricity, plumbing, you name it. Metri came over a couple of times to help us out with helping us find fuse boxes, getting us parts we needed and the like. Once he managed to get the place wired up so we could steal electricity from Con Ed and water from a bunch of other places, we were really in business. The Queen Bee could cook, and we got a stocked kitchen out of the deal. If we coulda stuck to robbing banks and stuff like that, we coulda made a decent living for a while. You know?

But, all good things. We lasted down there for about a year. We were able to turn the offices into our own rooms. Not as nice as what I had at the mansion, but still a step up from the house we had to live in back when I was a teen. By this point I was twenty, and college wasn’t even in the picture any more. For the first year we were pretty much intact and got to be a pretty good team. But then Queen Bee got busted by some palooka- what was his name again? The one who dressed like he was a guy outta the King Arthur stories? Yeah, the Champion. She got caught by him once, twice. After the third or fourth time, we figured out what she wouldn’t admit to: she had a thing for the guy, and was trying to get caught by him.

So, yeah, they got hitched. He quit the hero biz and became a cop out west or something, and last I heard they both turned Catholic and had a bunch of kids. They made a bundle when they took out a patent on that thing she used to fight with- that wand? Zapped you if she touched you with it? Called it her stinger. Yeah, when her husband brought it onto the force with ‘im the other cops all went nuts. Now, cops in any city gotta have one, so they made a bundle.

I was happy for her. Missed her a bit, though. I was twenty, remember, and she was a pretty thing. Well, when she was dressed up in her full outfit, especially, with all that tight yellow and black outfit with the high heeled boots. But oh well.

Well, then a few months after those two made nice and ran off into the sunset, Scarlet Swami found you at the carnival – I still think he was trying to hedge his bets, in case our thing fell apart – and brought you into our group. He was tryin’ to think bigger, get that one big score so’s we could move out’ve that dump and start doing some serious living. He saw what the bad guys in the comic books were living like, and he wanted that. Big buildings, big houses, gorgeous dames, like those Mafia guys were doing in Little Italy.

The trouble was, we weren’t anything like the Mafia. We were just a bunch of misfits [well, maybe you weren’t Jane] who wanted a piece of the pie, and we found the best way to do it was to get dressed up in a weird outfit and go try and rob a bank. The Mafia guys? They had a whole chain of command thing going on, with foot soldiers and lieutenants, and the leader safe in his lair at the top of the food chain. Us, we hadda be all those things.

And the worst was when those goddamn comic books started up. Making the guys like American Airman look like these perfect people, and us looking perfectly awful. I mean, I kinda liked how they gave me the whole ‘evil genius’ treatment, even after I went to the straight life. But it was still a pain. And I couldn’t not read the things, you know? Each month or week, or however they ended up on the newsstand, I just hadda spring the nickel and see ‘em.

So, if I remember right, by the time the Scarlet Swami brought you on board, it was you, me, the Swami, Mr. Monocle, the Queen Bee, that Mexican guy, Miguel, the cat burglar who called himself the Black Tiger, and the last one, that kid who called himself. . . the ice? The…

“Snowman.”

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TO BE CONTINUED...