Here’s the basic truth.
Every Hero I have ever gotten to know is entirely insane.
And I have gotten to know quite a few in my years.
For some reason they end up coming to me, sometimes by accident, mainly they hunt me down. Actually now if I get to know a hero it’s because they have made the effort to find me and have just kept pestering me until I let them in. I guess instead of having born again Christians coming to my door with pamphlets I get Heroes. If you look at it that way I guess I kind of have the better end of the deal. Although I still get the odd missionary knocking on my door. And I am currently living in a sub sewer. They are more tenacious than rats. And I mean that. I have three guard dogs. They are really vicious. I don’t have any rats near where I live.
There was a time when I went out looking for Heroes. I would befriend them, help them teach them, once I was a butler for one. But he was really crazy, and have you ever tried to deal with an alter ego. Let’s call a spade a shovel shall we, an alter ego is just a split personality with a mask on it.
But yeah… Nuts, crazy, not all there, a little off, koo koo banana leaves. You would have to be. To wear a mask, to fight crime, to come up with those comic book names.
Something inside them is switched and it only switches because of a “bad event” and that bad event makes them want to …. Well I guess it makes them want to run around in really tight clothes and use terms like “ evil doers!” that’s just not right. A doer of evil! By using absolute definitions all humans are evil doers but I guess the evil does that heroes chase down are doing dire evil. Scrape any Hero and you will find a traumatic event. There are one or two exceptions of course , but you get my point.
Case in point. And I’ll choose a Hero from the fifties who is probably dead and certainly retired.
When she was 13 her mother chocked to death on a button. This happened while the mother was sewing a costume for a stripper. Should I say exotic dancer? Anyway, little girl comes home from school, mom is dead in the kitchen. The strippers costume is pretty much finished it just needs one button to complete it. In my opinion that is a rather good costume for a stripper. Just one button and BAM nekkid. A little lazy but still good. Where was I?
Or right so the little girl in a state of shock takes the costume and buries it. I don’t ask why at this point. I stopped asking why right around the time what’s his name had all the corners cut off his table and let his best friend sleep with his wife. Y’know the guy who thought he would come back when the world needs him . Maybe he hit the snooze button…
Years later, the same girl is eating junior mints but one is too old and she’s laughing at a radio play and she almost chokes to death. I mean it’s really close to the pearly gates. But she falls out of her chair when she blacks out and good luck slips in an dislodges the junior mint.
She wakes up and goes to her old house in the middle of the night and digs up the Stripper costume. She very carefully sews a button on it and proceeds to go out and fight crime wearing this darned thing. An interesting factoid. The original stripper the costume was designed for was a size 2 with a 34 b chest , Our aforementioned Hero is a size 8 with a 36 DD chest. I don’t need to tell you that there were some very innocent and law abiding citizens who considered a life of crime just to get arrested by her. Or would have been if she didn’t kill almost every one she went after.
Why did she do it? She said the Ghost of her mother told her to. She was enhanced, errr I mean she did have a few powers. One of them seemed to be the ability to run in spiked heels the other was the ability to distract almost anyone. Those and limited telekinesis. She brought down a lot of bad guys and I’m sure of one good guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And she was revered by many people as opening the gates for scantily clad heroes.
But still , her elevator didn’t go to the penthouse.
And don’t get me started on Villains….
