I went back to the van and put on my civvies, then the four of us—Samson, Preston, Koz, and I—met at an outdoor table in front of the bookstore to compare notes.
Preston reported that at that very moment agents from ICHHL were investigating Mervyn Goldfarb’s apartment. Sure enough, he was formerly employed by Dr. Joe Levitch’s lab years before when it was still located in Ann Arbor, and recently had taken to cooking up batches of homemade Mega-Soldier Syrup in his bathtub and selling it to unwary college students at a huge profit. Notes located already seemed to indicate it was an obsolete formula and the Mervyn hadn’t been too particular about following the recipe precisely.
“Even so, I’ve never seen such an intense over-reaction to the Mega-Soldier Syrup,” said Preston, who was still mystified. “But then, I haven’t seen every one of the lab’s failures. Obviously, this batch must have been completely incompatible with Mervyn’s particular metabolism. We’re lucky it didn’t result in more fatalities across campus, and we’re lucky it didn’t go on sale at the end of the semester, when it would might end up distributed across the state, or even nation. Anyway, we now have documents and samples of the stuff, so Dr. Joe will be able to design an antidote to infuse into the city’s water supply. That should take care of the other victims of the outbreak—or should I say, Mervyn’s unsuspecting customers. Naturally, you’re off the hook, Samson, although I hope you can understand why we had to follow procedure.”
Samson was relieved to have his ICHHL clearance restored, although the slight still stung. “Missy’s off the hook, too,” he reminded Preston. “This proves she wasn’t spreading any megahero virus—although I’m still hoping she’ll give me whatever she’s got to transmit. Heh, heh.”
“Oh, brother,” said Koz. “Dude, you’ve got to work on that pick-up line.”
Preston’s remark—about not having seen every one of Dr. Joe’s failures—made me wonder about Megatonic University’s less catastrophic accidents: the monsters, mishaps, and miscarriages that must have been the inevitable by-product in their quest for the perfect megahero. What had become of them over the years? If they survived the experiments, the training, the transformations, were they still human? Did Dr. Levitch keep his mistakes in a dungeon under his secret lab, wherever that was located? Or were they destroyed—conveniently turned into a green mist by an overdose that left no incriminating evidence?
I hadn’t had to run the risk of surviving some mad, scientific experiment to become Ms. Megaton Man. I had been born to it, as it were—a second generation megahero, and a bastard one at that. There was no other word for it. Really, I had been Ms. Megaton Man all along; I just hadn’t known it. I hadn’t been exposed to a sexually-transmitted megahero virus, or to more than trace amounts of authentic Mega-Soldier Syrup from an authorized batch intended for Trent.
But whatever triggered it, even if it was just toppling firewood, here I was—a full-blown megahero, arriving without warning and not necessarily fitting into anyone’s plans. Other than supplying me with a nifty uniform—especially the cool visor, cape and buttons—ICHHL appeared to have no idea what to do with me. Preston seemed to tolerate, refraining both from lecturing me when I misbehaved or offering instruction on how to be a megahero. Maybe he had no idea; mentoring just wasn’t his thing.
Come to think of it, why would ICHHL invest any time and effort training me, anyway? Why would they even trust someone they hadn’t chosen to be a megahero? What if I turned out to have a mind of my own—which I manifestly did? What if I displeased them in some way and went against their orders?
If I didn’t do exactly what they wanted, would they turn me into a green mist, too?
After all the late summer excitement, fall semester was predictably busy and uneventful, which is to say, filled with nothing but school and work. After the incident of the exploding Mega-Soldier Syrup bootlegger, there wasn’t much call for Ms. Megaton Man, so my uniform remained inside the garment bag in my closet—as much as my cape was loathe to hibernation. Aside from saving Trent and Preston from a falling pile of firewood and visiting the ICHHL satellite fondly nicknamed the Blow Dryer—and having my hair dyed burgundy—I hadn’t had much of a megaheroic career, except foiling a black market Mega-Soldier Syrup seller. Just as well—I had a full plate, what with my labor studies-urban theory double-major and waitressing at the Li’l Drown’d Mug Café.
The only occasion I had to use my megapowers—and my uniform—was to fly back and forth to Detroit to visit my family, and that was mostly to save time and to keep in practice. I worked out a routine where I would land about a block from my family’s house in the Boswick-Addison historic district, change into the civvies I brought along in my duffel, and either Daddy or Avie would pick me up at the rendezvous point and take me home. After a couple weekends of this, Mama caught on, and I guess Daddy had a talk with her. She decided it was okay for me to be Ms. Megaton Man and fly straight to our backyard, which was much more convenient. It also meant Daddy was right—Mama just needed time to get used to the idea that her daughter was a megahero. Although she might have expected such an eventuality, since she’d bedded someone with megaheroic traits in the first place. What galled me was that Mama wasn’t any closer to revealing to me who that person—my real, biological father—was.
During my stays at home, my half-sister Avie and I scoured the basement and attic for clues. Boxes of our parents’ belongings that we’d rummaged through when we were kids now had renewed significance; they could possibly yield clues now as to the secret origin of Ms. Megaton Man. Avie came up with all sorts of vivid theories—about the colorful life Mama must have led in her younger days—to account for her crossing paths with a megahero. Had she been an exotic dancer? A spy during the war? A femme fatale with a checkered past? Most of the photos in Mama’s old scrapbooks showed a conservatively dressed, studious young black woman in a neat, ironed dress with her modest, clean-cut negro friends—they were from the era when that term was in vogue. Only one photo of her in a dance class during college wearing a modest leotard and tights and a couple shots of her on Belle Isle in shorts or a one-piece swimsuit were at all racy, only because they revealed a fine, firm figure much like mine only heavier on top. This wasn’t much to go on to my mind, but suggested all kinds of erotic possibilities to Avie.
Each week, we sat up in her bedroom on Sunday nights going over the scant evidence we had gathered. “Maybe she was a lab assistant at your Megatonic University,” Avie whispered. “Or maybe she worked in the Doomsday Factory. Maybe Grandma Seedy and Uncle Rodney”—our two ancestors who had died before Avie and I were born—“got her a job somewhere; maybe they aren’t dead at all. Maybe their deaths are tied up in this whole mystery.”
“Now you’re just being morbid,” I said. “Just because they died under mysterious circumstances doesn’t mean they’re connected to who my biological father might be.”
“I’m just saying Mama keeps a lot of secrets,” said Avie. “That’s all I’m saying.”
The most tantalizing clue I had come across—because it was so incongruous and open to interpretation—was in one of those coverless comic books from the shopping bag Avie had delivered to me in Ann Arbor I had read a while back, the ones Daddy had brought home from local party stores for cheap, that Avie and I had pored over together a million times as children. I brought one particular comic book with me from Ann Arbor—along with my homework—for the weekend to study. I pulled it out of my book bag and showed it Avie.
“I don’t know what it’s called, because it doesn’t have a cover, but I think it’s a clue.”
Avie didn’t look at the stories inside the comic; instead, she read the indicia—the publisher’s information that I’d overlooked—located in small type at the bottom of the first page:
> Off-Brand Yuck,vol. 1, no. 7, April, 1969 issue, is published by the Marketable Comics Group, Office of Publication: 731 Mercantile Avenue, Megatropolis, N.Y. 10017. Published bi-monthly. Single copy price: 12¢…
“Off-Brand Yuck #7,” she said. “At least now you know what it’s called. It’s a shame it doesn’t have the cover—it’d probably be a collector’s item.” She sniffed the yellowed paper. “Don’t you love the smell of old comic books?”
I took the magazine from her hands and opened it to an interior page. “That’s not important,” I said. “What I’m trying to show you is this story here, where the Simpler-Era Mugging Strong-Man travels to another dimension on the Logistical Lazy-Susan to visit the Quibbling Quarrelsome Quorum. He’s white, but he makes out the Tie-Dyed Tabby, an African-American character—much to the chagrin of Professor Miles Soggybottom.” I pointed to key frames—what comic book readers call panels. “Don’t those drawings of the Tabby look just like Mama?”
Avie studied the drawings for a moment. “I don’t get it. What is this—a parody? A satire? Irony goes right over my head. It’s too inside.”
“We’ve had this comic for years,” I reminded her. “We must have read it a million times and never understood any of the jokes. But we enjoyed it.”
“It was never one of my favorites,” Avie confessed. “Frankly, it always kind of scared me. Did you bring any corny romance comics?”
“No, I didn’t. Just this one. And whether it’s funny or not is beside the point.”
I tried to get her to look at the body language of the characters, particularly the physical attraction that was evident between the Simpler-Era Mugging Strong-Man and the Tie-Dyed Tabby. “That’s pretty racy stuff for the 1960s, don’tcha think?”
“And the point is…?”
“It’s a spoof of real megahero characters—Mugging Strong-Man is obviously a take-off on Megaton Man; the Quorum is the Megatropolis Quartet…”
“I get that part,” said Avie. “I just don’t think the artist can draw women of color very well; it could be any sister with an Afro. Besides, she’s shown flirting with everyone and their uncle—like Josephine Baker on a bender, offering herself up for white male enjoyment. What kind of insulting portrayal is that of strong black femininity? Besides, who ever heard of the Tie-Dyed Tabby?”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“That wouldn’t be her real name,” I said. “It must be a spoof of some actual megahero character, just like Mugging Strong-Man is Megaton Man. See how his name is Clive Pflug and hers is Aline Janes? That could be Clyde Phloog—Trent’s cousin, and Aline Janes could be Alice James, our mama. There’s got to be some kernel of truth under these caricatures—you know, how you’re sometimes sarcastic but at the same time dead-on?”
“I’m always incisive and witty,” said Avie. “But not all humor is truthful—look at the legacy of racist caricatures, or anti-Semitic stereotypes, of gay-bashing and even Irish jokes. You can’t tell me that there’s some ‘kernel of truth’ under all that. It’s still not funny.”
My sister can be so dense.
“I’m not trying to explain to you why it’s funny, Avie. In fact, I’ll concede that it’s not funny all. What I’m suggesting is that it bears some relationship with an underlying reality. The Tie-Dyed Tabby was some kind of riff on a real woman—the Leapin’ Leopard or some such—and that real woman was our mama.”
“So, you think our Mama may have been a cat character back in the sixties because some made-up sister named Aline Janes is shown draped all over a white megahero in a coverless comic book. That’s not a lot to go on.”
“I realize that. But how do we know Mama wasn’t some cat character back in the sixties? She might have been a member of some megahero team—even the Quartet—before the See-Thru Girl came along. And maybe she wasn’t as loose morally as she’s shown. But she must have had sex with somebody, because I’m here.”
“I think you’re grasping at straws, Sissy,” said Avie. “I understand your impulse to find an explanation; to account for your megapowers, you have to believe your real father was a megahero; to explain how Mama hooked up with him, you convince that some campy comic from 1969 is proof she used to be a swingin’ megahero herself. But don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re creating your own personal origin mythology.”
“My own what?”
Avie pulled a book off her nightstand and handed it to me. It was a turquoise paperback entitled The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings by Otto Rank. One of her youth group counselors at church had loaned it to her—they thought Avie might find it interesting and inspirational from a dramaturgical point of view.
“Freudianism, Avie? Really? First it was McLuhan, then Stanislavsky—What next? Marx and Hegel?
“I’ll get to them soon enough,” said Avie. “I’m only in high school. True, Rank was in the circle of Freud early in his career. But they had a bitter break-up because Otto had a mind of his own and wouldn’t hew to Sigmund’s dogma. Otto went on to blaze his own trail, but his career languished in complete obscurity as a result. The point is, he wrote this ground-breaking treatise comparing the myths of heroes like Oedipus and Moses and Tristan and Hercules, pointing out how they all shared a similar pattern, particularly surrounding the legends of their birth, regardless of historical, cultural, and geographic differences.”
“Such as?” I asked.
“Like, they all these dudes had important, royal or divine parents, but had to be secretly raised on the down-low by humble peasants—or in some cases, even animals. But when they come of age, they realized they had been special all along, despite people telling them they were normal or peasants or whatnot. And despite everything, they went on to save the world.”
“Like Arthur, who wrests the sword from the stone?” I replied. “Or that jungle lord guy who thinks he’s monkey man?”
“Exactly, except they’re not covered by Rank. The point is, every young, insecure child imagines their parents to be divine, or magical, or royal at some point in their lives. We put our elders on pedestals, worship them all out of proportion, believe they’re omnipotent. Until they let us down. Then we convince ourselves we must be orphans, or adopted, and that the flawed, foolish people raising us can only be imposters—that our real parents must be kings and queens or gods and goddesses and so on, who just loaned us out and forgot about us. They live in some far-off kingdom, or in heaven, and are leading some adventurous life that precludes them from being at home to raise their beloved child themselves. We’re certain we have some divine destiny, but we have to discover it for ourselves.”
Avie turned again to her shelf and picked up another book: Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces—also on loan from her youth group counselor.
“Then we go on a quest—ooh,” said Avie. “That’s really cool.”
“Wait a second, Avie,” I said, waving my hands. “You’re forgetting one thing. I actually have megapowers. I must have gotten them from somewhere. We’ve ruled out viruses, and even Mega-Soldier Syrup by itself would have worn off long ago. Whether Aline Janes is Alice James, and whether she was the Tie-Dyed Tabby or some other megahero or not, she had to hook up with somebody with megapowers.”
Then, a disturbing thought occurred to me: what if Mama had been a megahero whose career was cut short by raising me, so that no one ever heard of her? That would explain why it was such a sore subject with her.
“Maybe you should fly to New York,” said Avie, “and pay a visit to the offices of Marketable Comics Group and get to the bottom of this.”
“I don’t have time to fly to New York,” I said. “I’m in school. Besides, I nearly got lost in Ontario again trying to get here on Friday. And what could some office in New York tell me, anyway? That issue was published so long ago; they’ve probably moved their offices several times since. And I’m sure the artists and writers are probably all different now. Even if I could track them down, they’d just say they made it up anyway.
“Or it was just some kind of inside joke.”
This remark really pissed me off. “Avie, you don’t understand. This isn’t like I signed up for classes or went to school to become a megahero. I didn’t ask for this. I met a woman who could turn naked with but a thought, then a skinny white guy who used to be Megaton Man, then a guy made of yarn and a talking cat. None of this had any reality to me; I didn’t take it seriously. Then I visited an orbiting killer satellite and a bunch of secret agents and aliens from outer space and whose only concern seems to be keeping their eyes on a baby who might grow up to be the mightiest megahero the world has ever seen”—I was shouting now. “And I watched a guy inject himself, turn green and explode, trying to give himself megapowers. And I see Stella intent on making the same mistake Mama made, planning on never telling that baby that his parents are megaheroes, hoping against hope that he just stays normal—until maybe it’s too late!” I was screaming now.
“What’s all the yelling?” Daddy called up from downstairs. “We’re trying to watch Hee-Haw down here.”
“Okay, Sissy,” whispered Avie, freaked out and trying to calm me down. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry.”
I took a breath. “But what I first need to be doing is to find that Megatonic University laboratory hidden somewhere on the Arbor State campus. If I can’t get to New York, at least I can tackle that.”
“If you find this lab, what are you going to do?” asked Avie. “They’re good guys, aren’t they? Don’t you work for them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Put a stop to their reckless experiments; free the animals they no doubt test their booster shots on; something.” I put No-Brand Yuck #7 back in my book bag and sighed. “It would all be easier if Mama would just tell me who my biological father is.”
“Maybe she can’t remember,” said Avie. “Anyway, put these in your bag, too.” She handed me The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Like I had time to read more books.
“Doesn’t your youth group counselor want them back?”
“You need them more,” said Avie.
Back in Ann Arbor, I did read those books—between studying for six classes and waiting tables at the Li’l Drown’d Mug. The birth of the classic hero type, I learned, was preceded by curses and prophetic warnings—evil people who were threatened by the advent of the hero and were set on destroying him. This was what caused the parents—or the mother—to place the child in the care of a servant, or set him off on a floating crib, or have some servant or hunter or somebody expose him out in the wilderness. But then at the last minute, the servant would have a heart, and give the baby to some lowly peasants instead—some barren couple who couldn’t have children or had just lost their child, or some she-wolf who would happen along and raise the young hero—sometime twins—as her own. There were all kinds of cultural variations on the pattern, but that seemed to be the gist of it.
Reading this stuff didn’t make me think so much of myself as it did about baby Simon—and then about me. Assuming he grew up to be a normal, healthy child, someday he’d find out that his parents were less than perfect, and he’d wonder who the megaheroes were who had dropped him off in Ann Arbor to be raised by schleps like Trent Phloog and Stella Sternlicht. What would he make of that, I wonder? Why had the Simpler-Era Mugging Strong-Man or some other megapowered dude and the Tie-Dyed Tabby left me with Mama and Daddy? Where were they now, to show me the ropes of being a megahero?
I finished that book and promptly forgot all about it. And I didn’t even start the other book, which was all about quests—the only quest I was on was for a college degree; psychoanalysis could wait. But I did wonder if there were any more clues to be found in old comic books—I wondered this each time I passed the Eye of Horus, the walk-up comic book shop I’d long since heard about on State Street. Now that I knew which comic book title the Simpler Era Mugging Strong-Man and Tie-Dyed Tabby were in, I could look for more issues. One, day, I finally took the plunge and trod up the stairs.
It was a dim, grungy place with peeling posters and the smell of disintegrating pulp. There was a young Jewish guy who sat behind the counter filling out an order with his distributor, while one his fanboy customers prattled on about who was stronger, Bulky Guy or the Incredible Hogweed. There were a couple of spinner racks of underground comix—all about drugs and sex and gay sex and alternative politics, a vestige of Ann Arbor’s counter-cultural past—but mostly megaheroes and science fiction ruled the roost at Eye of Horus.
I was directed to boxes of back-issues set up on a folding table while the Bulky Guy-Hogweed symposium continued. Man, those guys sure could intellectualize about all those muscles. Jeez, get a room.
Seemed there were twelve issues of Off-Brand Yuck published. The store had four more issues, with covers—at moderately steep collector’s-item prices. I’d have to send away for the others, or go someplace where collectors meet, such as a comic book convention, a lifestyle which interested me even less than actual megaheroics.
But those additional issues provided me with a few clues. It seemed that one of the “Benighted Bullpen’s” favorite things to do was not only to make fun of real megaheroes, but to mix characters up in stories that could never otherwise happen, owing to the fact that certain characters were legally owned by different publishers. But Off-Brand Yuck was able to do it—comedically—by concocting improbable spoofs of well-known characters. I didn’t know who any of these characters were to begin with, so it was all highly confusing.
But apparently Megaton Man—Mugging Strong-Man—visiting the Megatropolis Quartet—the Quibbling Quarrelsome Quorum—was just such an example of an otherwise impossible transgression, since Megaton Man was owned by one publisher and the Quartet by another. As the story had it, the two worlds or universes these characters occupied could only be traversed by use of the Logistical Lazy-Susan, a device that very much resembled the Time Turntable I’d seen in the Ann Street back yard.
Even more transgressive was the Tie-Dyed Tabby—whoever she was supposed to be—who was shown pairing off with a whole bunch of spoof megaheroes—among them Shaky Steve, whom the clerk at the comic shop later explained was supposed to be the Velour Vibrator; Captain Hookworm, who was a sly reference to Admiral Eel; and Spartacus Man, who was self-evidently a take-off on Roman Man. Avie was right; this was not the most flattering portrayal of a black female character. Come to think of it, it wasn’t Tabby’s behavior so much as the derisive remarks of the other characters, who end up shaming and shunning her for her romantic choices—presumably for laughs. It was definitely sexist and more than a little racist.
As dismaying as it was to see these backward gender roles depicted in a kid’s comic, even more distressing was the knowledge that plausible candidates for my biological father—the growing list of white, sometimes obscure megaheroes—seemed to have no end.