Is this thing on? Okay. Right. Almost ready then. Want a drink?
No? Good, more for me.
Okay, shoot.
Do I still remember the first time I saw him? No, not so much. By then he was everyday, y’know? Business as usual. But I remember my mom telling me about the first time SHE did. The first time anyone did.
So my mom was walking down the street, right? And she’s going to the bank. To drop off a cheque. And there’s this van parked in front of it, – a plain white van – and as she’s walking down the street these guys come running out of the bank. And they’ve got covered faces, and they’re holding guns – no, she didn’t say what kind – and they start piling into the van.
So my mom said she was a bit freaked out then, right? Which is normal. An armed robbery right in front of you freaks you out; she was worried about the tellers, too, one of them was a friend of one of her friends. And she sort of ducks into a shop doorway because she isn’t sure if it’s safe to stay on the street or not, but she doesn’t want to run away because she’s worried about the teller and she doesn’t want to get closer.
And as she’s in the doorway there, she hears this big loud voice yell “STOP, VILLAINS,” or something. I think it was ‘villains.’ And she looks up and she said she always remembered that the first she ever saw of the guy was his ass. He was swooping down as he aimed at the van, and his ass was level with her eyes as he scooted along. She said his tights were baggier back then, but it was still a pretty firm butt.
What happened next was pretty fast, and she was still a bit in shock from the whole robbery thing, so she always said it got a bit blurry in her head. But the papers corroborated her memory the next day: he picked up a car and hit the robbers with it. It was a little Volkswagen Beetle, Christ only knows what would’ve happened if he’d used their van or a truck or something, because he could’ve; he picked it up one-handed.
So he beat these four or five guys with a Volkswagen for maybe ten seconds – three or four whacks, full-arm, god knows how many bones he broke on them – and then he ripped out its muffler, the whole thing, and he wrenched it around them and twisted it together. A tight fit. And then he yelled again “CRIME DOESN’T PAY, BOYS!” and shot off into the air and he was gone.
That’s my mother’s story, and that was the first time anybody saw the Super-Maniac. Nobody called him that yet, though. The papers hadn’t thought that schlock up yet. He never seemed to mind, I’ll give him that. He wasn’t self-aware enough.
We all waited with bated breath for a few weeks after that, she told me. Nobody figured it’d be a one-in-a-lifetime thing. Not even the guys desperate enough to hold up convenience stores made a move for a month. Quietest, tensest time the place had seen since the bomb scare.
And then, some idiot jacks the mayor’s car. Hotwired the thing right in the parking lot and takes off. He’s dumb, he’s young, the cops have a blockade set up, everything’s all ready to sort itself out, and then “STOP, EVIL-DOER,” and down swoops a streak of crazy in electric blue tights. Picks up the mayor’s car, flies it over the harbour, and starts shaking it. Shaking it like a rattle. The kid’s getting smashed around like crazy, he’s crying and sobbing – he didn’t belt himself in – and finally the lunatic tips the car the right way and the kid’s foot hits the door latch. Out he falls, into the bay, head-first. Sheer luck his spine didn’t snap, even more that he wasn’t unconscious when he made contact with the water.
God, the pictures the press got when he hauled them in, car in one arm, idiot in the other. Such a big, cheerful, friendly, beaming grin. The most genuine expression of happiness you’ve ever seen in your life.
God help us.
No, really. That was the headline that the Post went with. A bit extreme sounding at the time, but in retrospect, well, I mean it was perfect. The next decade alone was –
Ah, damnit, I’m losing track again, aren’t I? Let me start over.
But first, another drink.
Right. The first time I saw the Super-Maniac was when I was ten. My mom and dad and all of us had gone down to see a ball game. Just a good old fashioned, all-American ball game. I think we even bought hot dogs, ferchrissakes. No giant foam hands at least. And it was a pretty good game, you know? I mean, baseball was never my thing it turned out, but we had fun and the scores were close and I still remember sitting in my seat as I watched a home run go flying up, up, up, up…. And then realizing that it was heading right for me. All I had to do was reach out and touch it, it was almost there, then WHAM. Ball’s stuck inside an ice cube, drops like a rock, almost smashes the brains out of the man sitting in front of us. I think it broke his thigh.
Now, I can’t recall the exact details of the speech made by the man who ran out into center field just then – I was too busy staring at his ridiculously loud, clunky, shiny steel suit. But I remember the cliff notes: he was Doctor Igor Madderson, this was his magnificent robo-fridge armour, and he was going to prove that he was better than the Super-Maniac once and for all something something unless he showed up he’d freeze us all solid in our seats.
Well, he showed up fast all right. The ball players barely had time to run for cover before there was a helluva fistfight going on at the pitcher’s mound – the noise was terrible, like a tractor trailer fucking a conveyer belt coated in sandpaper. Some of that freeze ray ended up being sprayed everywhere; half the bleachers got frostbite. And at the end of it all, the Super-Maniac stood victorious, after tearing every single bit of moving metal out of the suit and smashing it everywhere, then hurling its inanimate body through the billboards and proclaiming it a “HOME RUN.”
And then he smiled.
Then he stripped all the ice off the “INNOCENT BYSTANDERS” by shooting lasers out of his eyes. God there were a lot of burns. Scalding water, you know? The paramedics had a field day, and they already had a full plate just making sure ‘Doctor’ Igor (he had a BASc – well, most of it) didn’t go into cardiac arrest. That fall almost killed him outright, good thing he wasn’t in half bad shape for a man in his fifties.
Oh, and he’d crushed four cars in the parking lot when he landed. One of them was ours. Just about put us out of house and home; dad had to work weekends for a year solid to get us sitting pretty again. Didn’t see my father’s face except at night when he came stumbling home, but you know how fast kids adapt. That was just business as usual.
That was the beginning of it. Doctor Igor was a has-been, a nobody, a nothing. Some poor chump whose medical fees almost bankrupted him, who lurched his way through the prison system, retired in poverty, died in obscurity. His obituary was the most press he ever got, and it was only because of historical note: the first nutcase who ever picked a fight with the Super-Maniac.
Why couldn’t he have been the last, huh?
The summer that Doctor Igor showed up was a busy one. By the time fall was on its way out, Clonemageddon, Laser-O, and Mister Matchstick had already popped up and popped a shot at the guy. And in retrospect, we really should’ve seen this sort of thing coming. The local, everyday crime was dead and gone by then, and the organized stuff wouldn’t set foot in town. Too dangerous and too unpredictable for too little gain. Word spreads, and eventually it kept reaching the same people: total nutjobs with axes to grind. And god was Super-Maniac a perfect grindstone. Most people looked into that big happy smile he flashed the papers and wanted to go home and hide for a while. The crazies looked at it and saw a target.
Clonemageddon got cancer back in the seventies. All of him. Laser-O was another Doctor Igor – I think he actually went back to university and got a physics degree. Mister Matchstick, well, we all know about that.
Anyways, we all kept hoping it’d calm down. There were only so many lunatics in the country with so much time on their hands, right? Wrong. We hadn’t even scraped the surface of the barrel and it turned out the damned thing was four miles deep. Hell, two months after my fourteenth birthday, the cops six counties over in Oakfall City started finding guys tied up black-and-blue outside their station. One guy, three guys, four guys, six guys. Some of them they were looking for, most of them they had no idea who they were – muggers, pickpockets, or just somebody’s kids. Never a damned clue. The one common connection: they were always beaten to a bloody pulp. Some of them acted like they’d been pepper-sprayed too, but worse. Some kind of gas. The best they could do was get them to the hospital.
It took six months for any sort of photos of Oakfall’s nighttime predator to get out there. And god that was a feeding frenzy – photographers, reporters, everybody out trying to solve that mystery, get that shot. I guess I sort of fell into that same trap, huh? Started fooling around with my granddad’s camera and look where that got me.
Well. Let me tell you where it got me then.
It was four years later, and I was out looking for a target to shoot. Something big, something bold, something that’d make an editor sit up and take notice. Just me, an ancient, sorta-shit camera, and a pressing urge to get as close as possible to the chemical fire down at the plant to get the finest angle available of the really weird flames in there. They were practically candy-coloured, and the smells were amazing – god knows what kind of cancers I skirted by inhaling all that. Anyways, I was close enough to see what everyone else wasn’t, which was someone banging on an emergency exit’s window. Must have gotten stuck thanks to shitty contractor work. Business as usual, just a little more evil than average.
Now, because I was young and eighteen and therefore immortal, I ran straight in there and started trying to get the handle working. And it was creaking and groaning and I like to hope it was about to give when all of a sudden FWOOSH half the lake falls on my head.
It was Super-Maniac, of course. He’d seen the fire brewing from miles away, and decided to pick up a tugboat, immerse it in the lake, and then upend it over the chemical fire. God almighty, the stink and the smoke – a lot of things in that blaze didn’t care for water at all. That’s where I got this little cough of mine from, you know. I guess I got lucky, got that raspy barroom crooner voice without having to smoke a pack a day for two decades. Never was much of a singer, though.
They never did find whoever had been on the other side of that door, but Super-Maniac found me as I washed up against a pile of rubble, half-drowned. Hauled my sorry ass up by the scruff of my shirt and told me that “Fires are DANGEROUS, CITZEN! Leave this sort of thing to ME!” and so on and I was really half-concussed at the time so mostly what I said was ‘huh?’ and ‘awuhhur’ and stuff like that. But I guess he appreciated it, because he flew me down to the hospital before up-up-and-awaying off into the distance.
It turned out Mister Matchstick had started the fire or something, testing out his new chemically-derived pyrokinesis. It fried a few dozen workers, and that was new. That was ugly. We’d all known it’d come to this, but we’d all HOPED it would just… fade away. No more nutcases, no more collateral damage, all gone and over with before it got any sloppier.
I had a bit of a close-up view on all this next part, as you know, but I should explain how I got it. See, a week after the chemical fire, I was talking to a homeless man in a parking lot about the upcoming elections. He was pretty upset about the frontrunners, and he was getting energetic about it – arm-waving, shouting, stomping, and so on. Well, out of nowhere, he gets yanked into the air and hung off a lamppost by his jacket, while Super-Maniac’s lecturing me on how I’m “A REGULAR MAGNET FOR TROUBLE, AREN’T YOU?” and laughing at how he’s “PRACTICALLY GOING TO END UP BEING YOUR MOTHER AT THIS RATE.” I tried to tell him to take the man down, but he perked up at “A ROBBERY AT MAIN AND GRAND!” and left. We had to wait for the fire department.
Now that was a bit disconcerting, but the very next day I was taking pictures at the opening of the new dam up the Calley River when Mister Matchstick decided to showcase his new powers. He was more than just a nut with a flamethrower, he was a walking furnace. Why he decided to attack a dam was beyond me though – after a pitched fight that set half the place on fire, Super-Maniac threw him off it. He superheated so much water that the steam clouds took days to fade, and of course he got away scot-free because Super-Maniac had recognized me in the crowd of “INNOCENT BYSTANDERS” and had stopped to talk to – talk AT – me and my “CONSTANT SCOOP-HOUNDING.” And then he gave me that big smile and told me all about his problems and how swell it was that he had a good buddy like me.
That was how I became Super-Maniac’s official “BEST FRIEND!” and personal reporter. That’s how I got up close to most of things I’m talking about, and I’d rather not go too much into it because it makes me feel sick. Suffice to say that I followed the big stuff, and in return he paid enough attention to me to make sure that none of it squished me. At least, not as often as the typical bystander. God, the casualty rates just went up. Like I said, it was a trend. We hoped it was just a temporary thing, that the destruction would die down over the winter or something, that it was cyclical and would stabilize itself. That this wasn’t the new normal.
But it didn’t, and it was. Ever year there were more nuts, more fights, and more deaths. Oakfall’s thug calls himself The Creeping Vine (they started naming themselves after the newspapers christened the Super-Maniac – guess they learned that lesson fast enough), and gets in full public view for the first time battling a guy called Alley Gator, who looked like, well, guess. Soon he’s got a pack of loonies after him too, one of whom – a failed sitcom star calling himself no-shit Hugh Larious – turns into the biggest news since the Super-Maniac fought Bob the Blimp over the city during a thunderstorm, when he threatens to gas the whole city if the Vine doesn’t reveal his identity. The psycho snuck around behind everyone’s backs and punched him out instead, risking about four and a half million people against the chances of him getting turned in for vigilantism. Six months later he was charged with more than that – footage during a brutal outdoor brawl with a gang of honest-to-god ninjas showed that he had a kid with him, a little kid whose balls hadn’t even dropped yet running around in some stupid little getup trying (and mostly failing) to kick men with giant knives in the crotch with tiny fire-engine-red pixie boots.
Yeah, they got the kid about a year after that. He broke his leg or something and the cops nabbed him before the Vine could. Took a lot of therapy, a lot of work, but he’s the mayor now. Got some sweet biography deals out of it too. Good for him, good for anyone who’s managed to turn lemons that massive into lemonade. But there was another kid out there with the Vine inside the year, and another after that, and another…there must’ve been five or six of them. And by the third, we’d almost gotten used to it. Business as usual.
Besides the Vine finally leaking into the limelight, there were suddenly more than a dozen others. Oildozer, Lord Hippo, Deadbolt, Admiral Flag Patriotism, and Sheila the Sultry, off the top of my head. And they all attracted their own crowds of enemies. It got to the point where you couldn’t go downtown without being a bystander in some bunch of costumed nutso’s brawl. And the arms race didn’t slow down, it went up and up and up. Super-Maniac and the Vine teamed up to stop Alley Gator, so Mister Matchstick and Hugh Larious teamed up in self-defence. The Admiral starts a ‘Navy-SEAL-style combat response team,’ whatever that means since he’s as much a government man as I’m a hamster, and its members are six of the most high-powered bruisers on the planet. So in response to that, Doctor Doobie (an actual chemistry Phd.) takes over a nuclear sub and tries to nuke their headquarters. The thing gets ‘heroically diverted!’ into the ocean by Oildozer, the idiot, whose ‘noble sacrifice’ irradiates half of the richest fishing grounds this side of the Atlantic. Fucking Christ, how many years before you could guarantee you wouldn’t be eating two-headed salmon around here? Oh god, and the fishermen. I don’t even want to think about how many ended up in emerg thanks to that whacko.
They put up a statue to him in the park, you know? Thing got removed before you were born, but let me tell you this: they only took it down because there was no more room for graffiti on it.
Well, legislation takes time, and like I told you this all happened awfully fast. By the time the Supreme Court was weighing in, half the population of the country’s mental institutions was running around armed with explosive limbs and cybernetic bees and fuck knows what. So the ruling was about to go through (can barely remember the wording, it was so legalistic – but it basically boiled down to ‘being a loony in tights is now the biggest offense ever please turn yourselves in and maybe we can help you use those physically impossible abilities like a responsible adult rather than a playground thug’), when the Vine, the Admiral, and Super-Maniac storm the building and start yelling at the court and assembled press that they’re a bunch of appeasers and ungrateful know-nothings and they’ll all be stuck at the far end of the wedgie line when Bob the Blimp conquers the world unopposed and puts them to work slaving away in his helium mines. And then, of course, Hugh Larious saw that they were all in one place so he bombed the building. The court didn’t make it because they weren’t immune to explosions, the lunatics did because they were, and then they loudly denounced the outcome as the expected result of this sort of foolish fascist oppression. Regulation never quite got off the ground after that, especially after what happened two months later.
Two months later, the first world-wide catastrophe hit. Doctor Doobie kidnapped Mister Matchstick, replicated the formula that turned him from a pyromaniac to a pyrokinetic, and used it on a small army of Bob the Blimp’s Zeppelmen. Every first-world capital had twenty five-hundred-foot flaming blimp-people in its front yard, torching monuments. About a hundred thousand people died, millions were injured, the Eiffel tower got melted down, and during the final showdown at New York where Mister Matchstick exploded inside Bob the Blimp’s engine chambers, Super-Maniac impaled him on the Statue of Liberty and crushed that too. It took all of us years to recover from the damage economically, and I think the shock still lingers. But Super-Maniac? The Super-SEAL-Six? The Creeping Vine? They looked sad, they looked mournful. I took their pictures. But the very next month, they were back on schedule. Beating burglars to a bloody pulp, stringing suspected ‘EVIL-DOERS” from skyscrapers or dangling them a mile high in midair, and conducting their personal lives in a way that made B-list celebrities look like cloistered nuns. I think the sickest point had to have been when Sheila the Sultry got killed in action, so Lord Hippo cloned her and tried to pretend that effectively she was the same person and therefore they were still married. Can’t blame that girl for going crazy and trying to stab him to death; she had more reason than most.
Still got beaten to a pulp, though. And escaped. We did our best, but our jails can’t hold the damned loons, and every time we thought we found a way to remove their powers Hugh Larious would steal it and try to use it to murder Super-Maniac or something. And whenever it didn’t work, because they’d always take the half-functional prototypes, whatever vigilante they’d tried to use it on was sure to ‘accidentally’ destroy it while “FOILING THE VILLAIN.” Like clockwork, it was. I think the feds went through four rays five serums and a single full-scale power leeching facility. That last one got drained dry by the Human Brazilian Wandering Spider, after she learned how to suck out the innards of things made of metal, not just meat. What a nightmare. Went from being a serial killer to a global menace, and one that still liked to pick fights with the Creeping Vine. He always won them, but he liked to play rough with city infrastructure to do it rather than ask any of his five billion superpowered friends over to help out. Like that time he rigged the entire city’s power grid to run through a pair of mechanized gauntlets and punched her in the head. Christ, what was that, a four-week blackout? And that wasn’t even the end phase. By the time that fight was over he’d used hidden ballistic missiles to tear up half of downtown, and finishing her off had involved flooding half of city hall.
Anyways. That little episode with Bob the Blimp and Doctor Doobie was the first taste of what to come, but it was the smallest. Three years later, aliens – the Sleebos – drop out of the sky and start shooting up half of the USA looking for super-powers to drain. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you what THAT did to our infrastructure; how many years before you could take a bus coast-to-coast without seeing at least one stretch of plasma-melted highway? And then two years later, some shiny lightbulb that claims it’s a god promises the winner of an all-lunatic Fight Club tourney a free wish, and they all gather up in one spot and punch the shit out of each other for a good six months before any of those bright sparks goes ‘hey, what if that ‘god’ is just Mesmermastermorpho tricking us all into becoming weak and vulnerable before blowing us all up with an h-bomb?’ In all fairness, who could’ve guessed? It wasn’t as if he’d had conversations with his conspirators in front of active security cameras that the Creeping Vine could hack into. Oh wait, he did. God, they’re all as bad as each other.
And the year after that, one of those conspirators turned out to be a clone of Super-Maniac made from a tissue sample from Clonemaggedon. And there ended up being one thousand of them. God, that mess took all year to fix, and then the summer after that it turned out that Deadbolt was a secret agent of the USSR, except he wasn’t because only an idiot would blame him for that and it was just Lord Hippo framing him so nobody would notice that the CLONE EXPERT was probably behind the previous year’s ARMY OF CLONES. Jesus Christ, Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ on a Crutch With a Crouton Up His Crack.
Of course, the next year reality folded in on us during the big war with Stellaron the Living Supercluster. About half of the human race vanished or was merged with their counterparts from a parallel dimension, which lead to something like a 33% increase in superpowered whackjob populations, good and bad. I’m one of the five or six non-loonies who got to remember it happening, and I wish I didn’t. The oceans were vaporized, during the last battle Africa’s atmosphere was peeled off and left to boil away into space, and Stellaron disintegrated Antarctica to halt Doctor Doobie’s attempts at developing a toxic agent that could kill him. Unsuccessfully. In the end, he died and wham bam, back to normal. Except for the changes.
My fiancée vanished. Half the presidents of the last century are new to me. There’s a city that was called Tokyo that used to exist, and now there’s a country named Canada that didn’t. And you, I’m pretty sure, didn’t exist before then because I knew every person working at this paper damned well. Still do.
A few things’re still the same: the trend for the big, bad stuff is almost every summer now, and the body counts are going up and up. Even the powered nutjobs don’t always get out clean now – but there’s still hundreds of us poor commoners going down for each one of them, and they just don’t damned seem to die otherwise; Super-Maniac should be twice my age, but he looks thirty still, fuck knows how. Ten thousand Parisians die screaming as the seventh Eiffel tower explodes under one of Hugh Larious’s jackass whims, and the Creeping Vine sheds a single tear, business as usual. His latest semi-abused adolescent sidekick gets beaten up? He’s thunder and lightning and dramatic showdowns at midnight on skyscrapers. Skyscrapers, hah – we build them, and Super-Maniac punches people through them and flies away from the rubble. Fuck him, and fuck him sideways, and fuck that upside down on a trampoline.
It doesn’t matter. It’s not our world, not anymore. The big stuff is getting bigger and coming faster, and it’s caring less and less about us and more and more about them. We should’ve sided with the Sleebos. Better life as a slave than life as furniture.
Shit, I’m too drunk for this. Come back tomorrow, huh?
***
Timothy ‘Timmy’ O’Reily, Super-Maniac’s best friend, was found dead in his apartment yesterday, burned to a crisp. Mister Matchstick has claimed responsibility for the murder as a message to the super-hero of the seriousness of his intent. A tear-streaked, emotional Super-Maniac vowed that the villain had “GONE TOO FAR!” and that “THIS ENDS NOW.”
As Timmy would say, fresh from the rubble of a skyscraper or the waves of a Depth-Master invasion: “business as usual.”