Enarr

Absolute Comics - Season Two: The Monster Within

I'm gonna touch the butt

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

"Wow, you look great tonight."

"Oh, you're too much. Besides, you don't look so bad yourself."

"Man, it's so nice that these last few years have been building up to the satisfying emotional climax that tonight presents."

"I know. There's nothing worse in this world than being alone," Nic said to himself in the mirror. With his black sport coat on over his red t-shirt, it occurred to him that he looked like he'd stepped out of a nineties rom-com. He wished he had. "It's high time for my meet-cute. I wonder what everybody's up to."

It had been an unusually lonely couple weeks. Not anyone else's fault. His solitude was basically entirely self imposed. It's just hard to imagine that he's out here with all these parahumans. His dad would have had a heyday. Out of habit, his first inclination was to study everybody but, although it felt right, it felt very wrong. So he mostly walked around, smiling almost ditsily, avoiding eye contact. Even the act of getting to know people, the act of making friends, out of earnest curiosity, felt like a personal betrayal.

He'd literally spent the last forty-five minutes looking at himself in the mirror, thinking. Thinking far too clearly for his own liking. His muscles were wound far too tight. His mind even tighter. Everything felt so crisp. So dry. He felt kinda thirsty. Nope. That's not happening. Not dumping the last 593 days of progress down the drain or, perhaps more accurately, down his throat.

"Y'know what? Fuck it. Tonight I'm gonna dance with somebody and we're gonna fall in love. And they're gonna know all about me implicitly, inferring things. Making unreasonable jumps in logic. And understand and respect me for who I am... Like that means anything. The fuck do I expect? No!" His fists clap down against his bathroom sink. "I just gotta get out of this bedroom before I go stir crazy."

And so, after standing in front of a mirror for almost an hour, he still hadn't done his hair. But he took a few brave steps out into the common area, seeing almost no one dancing, unless their eyes darting back and forth with obvious intent counts as a dance.

And so he did a dance of his own. He did the wallflower, walking in a tight little circle every time the song changed. He saw a girl he wanted to talk to. She looked at him. He thought she wanted to talk. He smiled at her. She smiled at him. Reasoning it would be better not to talk without any idea of what to talk about, he stepped out of the room for a moment. But then he kept going, thinking he'd probably have a better idea by the time he came back if he walked further away.

Soon enough, he found himself stumbling out into the nearby woods. It was dark. Too dark to see. And that was just how he liked it. He couldn't see anything. Not with his eyes nor anyone else's.

But he could hear a helluva lotta noise nearby. So he mosied on over, making his way into a forest party. So he put on a smile and prepared for combat conversation.

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas Adair

NICHOLAS ADAIR

_______________________________________________ Nicholas Sylvester Adair _______________________________________________ December 31 | 17 | Caucasian _______________________________________________ Bachelor | ♂ | Heterosexual _______________________________________________ Junior | Student _______________________________________________ Physical Profile ___________________________________ [+] //Basics: • Height | 5'8" • Weight | 150 • Build | Taut • Hair Colour | Brunette • Eye Colour | Brown Miscellaneous Items ___________________________________ [+] //Every Day Carry: • Steelbook Sketchpad | 180 pieces of 3.5" x 5" 50 lb paper, very smooth and pleasant to touch. Sturdy enough to sketch on, though not quite ideal for markers or runnier sorts of pens. The pages are sealed within airtight steel lips, which can only be bypassed by dialing the correct combination or, y'know, breaking it. The exterior has a smooth matte black finish with the image of an all-seeing-eye pressed into its' face.

A p p e a r a n c e D e t a i l s When he's with other people, nine times out of ten, Nicholas is smiling. Like, the sort of smile that makes you wanna smile. He has perfect posture and is usually standing in a way that emphasizes his musculature, though he is by no means a body builder. He is very neat and presentable, always ready to be examined. Otherwise, he tends to be wearing unicolor t-shirts beneath a jacket reminiscent of the one he wore around his old militia compound, modeled after the US Army BDU but unicolor. For his legs, he usually wears denim jeans, though he occasionally makes the choice of wearing yoga pants, which people tend to make fun of him for. As far as footwear goes, he tends to wear running shoes, but has been known to switch to oxfords if there is some sort of special occasion. If he's lounging, he may even make the choice to wear a sport coat. He tends to have a black rolex on his left wrist, though.

_{P e r s o n a l i t y}

Nicholas essentially rotates between behaving extremely skittishly and affirmatively. He is a deeply conflicted young man on account of the ways his abilities have been exploited in order to facilitate the harm of his fellow parahumans. For that reason, he has recently been attempting to avoid giving in to even the most remotely hostile inclination he has. On the other hand, he also feels that he has allowed his self-restraint to prevent him from reaching his full potential, causing him to allow others to come to harm in some of the more recent events. It all makes him want to reach for his signature crutch, alcohol, but he is generally abstaining in order to fall into his old habits of binge drinking. He wants to make the world a better place but isn't confident in his own judgment.

He feels guilty for all the people that he has hurt, acknowledging that he is a prime example of why parahumans are prevented from being a part of law enforcement or the military. He wants to make the world a better place but he also feels like that, to a certain extent, simply means withdrawing from it. Mathematically it seems that many people's lives had been ruined and would, in fact, have been better off without him in it. But, having debated on following that line of reasoning to its natural conclusion, he decided that there is a balance he can strike. Maybe it involves using his powers minimally. Maybe it means not at all. He's working on it.

At this phase, he is most likely to attempt to settle disputes peacefully and is quick to volunteer himself as a mediator. He hasn't thrown a punch in the last year. He tells himself he's a pacifist. That's what he tells everyone else, too. But he knows better deep down. But thanks to the rubber hand effect, in spite of the fact that he's never killed anyone, he loses a lot of sleep over feeling like he had and, maybe one day, could again.

He tends to keep to himself. Sometimes he spends the entire day journaling. Other times it feels more appropriate to clear his mind with intense exercise until he's so tired he can't help but fall asleep. The world feels safer with his eyes shut. But when he can find it within himself to go outside, or when he has to, he smiles and attempts to make everyone else's day better than the last. It can come across as clingy, maybe creepy, even. But he'd do anything to avoid repeating his own history.

_{C h a r a c t e r S y n o p s i s}

When US Army Sergeant Nathan Adair was thirty-three years old, he and his wife, Avery, had a son named Nicholas. It was around this time, due to the perspective and pride accumulated over his career, he grew resentful toward the parahumans of the United States because they did not serve in the military. Retiring at the age of thirty-eight, he took his family and moved into a quiet corner of Nebraska in which he formed his own militia, with expectations of privacy so stringent that it bordered on cultism. The objective was to keep an eye on parahumans, even more meticulously than the federal and state programs. As for whether that was actually the result was inconclusive and complicated, to say the least.

When Nathan became aware of Nicholas' parahuman status, he bribed the relevant physicians to falsify his documentation so that he was legally considered well within the spectrum of biological normalcy. At that, they ran some tests and discovered that his eight year old son was biologically predisposed to become the ultimate surveillance asset, thanks to his inherent ability to piggyback the eyeballs of other people. Nic was then trained as the first junior private in Nathan's militia, being run through the equivalent of basic training and then some, all before he ever hit his double digits.

In spite of the pedigree for action, he was mostly deployed on missions to somewhat-literally "get eyes on" various parahumans in the area without the targets even becoming aware. Nicholas complied and always succeeded. No one ever demonstrated an understanding of his true function and seemingly few ever seemed to have noticed his antennae. Periodically Nathan and his fourteen man platoon would assassinate a parahuman they suspected of being disrupted or being particularly menacing. Nicholas watched all of it, participating and broadcasting the shared eyesight to the entire militia at times. He occasionally saw parahumans beaten down as though he were doing it with his own hands. Around the time that he was twelve, Nicholas had become complicit in several parahuman abductions, the victims of which were housed and restrained in the militia's recently annexed holding facility.

Around this time, Nicholas grew to understand and became somewhat calloused before his nightmares began. In order to cope, he began binge drinking. This illuminated his special relationship with alcohol: It totally decimated the tissue that allowed him to transmit and receive visuals. This proved, obviously, problematic due to its neutering of the essential function of his father's unit as a whole. Therefore, he was severely reprimanded every time alcohol was found in his possession.

Though it had been legitimately clandestine and, most succinctly, extremely effective in its operations, the militia met its end around the time Nicholas had become fifteen years old. There was a raid on the compound and the majority of the militia was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism, presumably dropped in Guantanamo Bay or a similar facility. They had mercy on Nicholas, however, due to his young age and fragile state. He was entered into constant therapy, and occasionally dosed with alcohol to prevent him from redeveloping his abilities. After threatening to sue his caretakers when he came of age, his treatment was stopped.

Nicholas Adair has recently turned seventeen years old and has been sober for 593 days. His antennae are three inches long, less than half of what they were before he initially turned to alcohol at his peak, when he was thirteen, and he has been deposited onto The Promise in an effort to further his rehabilitation and enable him to be a contributing member of society.

_{A b i l i t i e s & S k i l l s}

_//Abilities:

Superhuman Ability | Eyejacking

Nicholas is anatomically distinct from other humans on account of the retractable antenna that have grown in his brain and protrude through his skull. The base of his antennae are located in his occipital lobe and penetrate through a pair of parallel foramen, each being about two centimeters thick, along his lambdoid suture. That is to say that his antennae can pop out of the back of his skull above his neck, both telescoping and by pumping large quantities of blood into them, in the visual processing part of the brain. The antennae can nest all of the way inside his skull, or alternatively they can be extended to a maximum length of three inches at present, though they had used to be longer.

His antennae are extremely dense with nerve endings and are sensitive, much like whiskers, and can detect a sudden change in the wind, for example, but are more generally outstanding because they primarily function as receptors for a specific sort of electromagnetic wave. The other main function of his antennae is that they can release an invisible cloud of parasitic cells that can, if ingested by another human, take root within the brain and begin constructing an organ dedicated to transmitting and receiving the visual output of the host along the frequency that Nicholas' antennae are attuned to.

What this means in practice is that Nicholas' can see through the eyes of the people he's infected as long as they are in range of his antennae. He also has the option to allow them to see through his eyes or through the eyes of anyone else within range of his local infected network. Though it straddles the line between skill and superpower, he can use the input to create a very rough facsimile of a live overhead video feed, assuming he has some kind of an idea about the relative position all of his input is coming from.

Limitation(s) | First and foremost, he does not have telepathy. He can only transmit live visual input, though he is vulnerable to being affected by optical illusions seen by one of his transmitters by merit of piggybacking off of their perception.

If the person ingesting the virus has a particularly strong immune system, the virus may be deterred entirely. Though on average, it takes about twelve hours, four if asleep, for a person in average health to begin manufacturing the transmission organ, assuming that they are not actively starving to death. For those with a particularly healthy diet and plenty of nutrients to spare, particularly if they eat "brain foods", then they will likely have a functioning organ in as little as six hours, two if they happen to be asleep.

The range of effectiveness on a fledgling transmitter is largely limited by how long they have been infected. One thing to note is that his reception is crippled if there are concrete walls, or anything similarly dense, separating him from a transmitter. For a transmitting organ to fully mature, it typically takes two weeks, at which point it can transmit to Nicholas while he is actively receiving at a maximum of 1,000 feet within line of sight. Beyond that, signal decay is rapid and largely becomes unreliable. From the moment that an organ is initially operational, he has a working range of about 100 feet.

In addition to juggling his own sight, he can reliably keep track of about six other people's transmissions comfortably, simultaneously, though by his estimate he'll be capable of actively networking with as many as twenty people at once in a years time. If he's not paying attention to a transmission, he's still technically sensing it though he wouldn't really be perceiving it, most of the time. It's very easy for him to lose track and become distracted amidst all of the simultaneous input however and, for that reason, he is especially prone to jumpscares.

Weakness(es) | His kryptonite is alcohol. Alcohol disintegrates his transmission organ and causes rapid shrinkage and deterioration. That is to say, if he were to drink an entire fifth of vodka in a single night, he would have reset his entire development back to ground zero. While that is unlikely to happen, it's more of a problem because the people he infects with his virus can be "cured" by drinking or otherwise ingesting alcohol. Due to the fact that their transmission organs aren't nearly so integral to their being and usually haven't existed very long, it is extremely likely that they will be periodically diminished if the subject has a casual drink.

Otherwise, his antennae are extremely sensitive and have an extreme concentration of nerve endings. If they were struck while they were extended from his head, the pain would be debilitating and any impact on his occipital lobe would be even more likely to render him unconscious than it would any other person.

_//Skills:

Combat Training | Thanks to his time in his father's militia, he has been thoroughly prepared for hand to hand combat against both armed and unarmed opponents of biological normalcy.

Firearm Training | Nicholas is an abnormally precise shot with guns, obviously owing to the usual availability of enhanced perspective. He prefers rifles but will essentially work with anything he has.

Spatial Awareness | His access to multiple perspectives at once has generally heightened his spatial awareness and coordination, essentially training him to be extremely precise when performing tasks such as balancing or drawing.

_{O T H E R}

Though he has not been diagnosed, he exhibits many symptoms of PTSD.

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas Adair

NICHOLAS ADAIR

_______________________________________________ Nicholas Sylvester Adair _______________________________________________ December 31 | 17 | Caucasian _______________________________________________ Bachelor | ♂ | Heterosexual _______________________________________________ Junior | Student _______________________________________________ Physical Profile ___________________________________ [+] //Basics: • Height | 5'8" • Weight | 150 • Build | Taut • Hair Colour | Brunette • Eye Colour | Brown Miscellaneous Items ___________________________________ [+] //Every Day Carry: • Steelbook Sketchpad | 180 pieces of 3.5" x 5" 50 lb paper, very smooth and pleasant to touch. Sturdy enough to sketch on, though not quite ideal for markers or runnier sorts of pens. The pages are sealed within airtight steel lips, which can only be bypassed by dialing the correct combination or, y'know, breaking it. The exterior has a smooth matte black finish with the image of an all-seeing-eye pressed into its' face.

A p p e a r a n c e D e t a i l s When he's with other people, nine times out of ten, Nicholas is smiling. Like, the sort of smile that makes you wanna smile. He has perfect posture and is usually standing in a way that emphasizes his musculature, though he is by no means a body builder. He is very neat and presentable, always ready to be examined. Otherwise, he tends to be wearing unicolor t-shirts beneath a jacket reminiscent of the one he wore around his old militia compound, modeled after the US Army BDU but unicolor. For his legs, he usually wears denim jeans, though he occasionally makes the choice of wearing yoga pants, which people tend to make fun of him for. As far as footwear goes, he tends to wear running shoes, but has been known to switch to oxfords if there is some sort of special occasion. If he's lounging, he may even make the choice to wear a sport coat. He tends to have a black rolex on his left wrist, though.

_{P e r s o n a l i t y}

Nicholas essentially rotates between behaving extremely skittishly and affirmatively. He is a deeply conflicted young man on account of the ways his abilities have been exploited in order to facilitate the harm of his fellow parahumans. For that reason, he has recently been attempting to avoid giving in to even the most remotely hostile inclination he has. On the other hand, he also feels that he has allowed his self-restraint to prevent him from reaching his full potential, causing him to allow others to come to harm in some of the more recent events. It all makes him want to reach for his signature crutch, alcohol, but he is generally abstaining in order to fall into his old habits of binge drinking. He wants to make the world a better place but isn't confident in his own judgment.

He feels guilty for all the people that he has hurt, acknowledging that he is a prime example of why parahumans are prevented from being a part of law enforcement or the military. He wants to make the world a better place but he also feels like that, to a certain extent, simply means withdrawing from it. Mathematically it seems that many people's lives had been ruined and would, in fact, have been better off without him in it. But, having debated on following that line of reasoning to its natural conclusion, he decided that there is a balance he can strike. Maybe it involves using his powers minimally. Maybe it means not at all. He's working on it.

At this phase, he is most likely to attempt to settle disputes peacefully and is quick to volunteer himself as a mediator. He hasn't thrown a punch in the last year. He tells himself he's a pacifist. That's what he tells everyone else, too. But he knows better deep down. But thanks to the rubber hand effect, in spite of the fact that he's never killed anyone, he loses a lot of sleep over feeling like he had and, maybe one day, could again.

He tends to keep to himself. Sometimes he spends the entire day journaling. Other times it feels more appropriate to clear his mind with intense exercise until he's so tired he can't help but fall asleep. The world feels safer with his eyes shut. But when he can find it within himself to go outside, or when he has to, he smiles and attempts to make everyone else's day better than the last. It can come across as clingy, maybe creepy, even. But he'd do anything to avoid repeating his own history.

_{C h a r a c t e r S y n o p s i s}

When US Army Sergeant Nathan Adair was thirty-three years old, he and his wife, Avery, had a son named Nicholas. It was around this time, due to the perspective and pride accumulated over his career, he grew resentful toward the parahumans of the United States because they did not serve in the military. Retiring at the age of thirty-eight, he took his family and moved into a quiet corner of Nebraska in which he formed his own militia, with expectations of privacy so stringent that it bordered on cultism. The objective was to keep an eye on parahumans, even more meticulously than the federal and state programs. As for whether that was actually the result was inconclusive and complicated, to say the least.

When Nathan became aware of Nicholas' parahuman status, he bribed the relevant physicians to falsify his documentation so that he was legally considered well within the spectrum of biological normalcy. At that, they ran some tests and discovered that his eight year old son was biologically predisposed to become the ultimate surveillance asset, thanks to his inherent ability to piggyback the eyeballs of other people. Nic was then trained as the first junior private in Nathan's militia, being run through the equivalent of basic training and then some, all before he ever hit his double digits.

In spite of the pedigree for action, he was mostly deployed on missions to somewhat-literally "get eyes on" various parahumans in the area without the targets even becoming aware. Nicholas complied and always succeeded. No one ever demonstrated an understanding of his true function and seemingly few ever seemed to have noticed his antennae. Periodically Nathan and his fourteen man platoon would assassinate a parahuman they suspected of being disrupted or being particularly menacing. Nicholas watched all of it, participating and broadcasting the shared eyesight to the entire militia at times. He occasionally saw parahumans beaten down as though he were doing it with his own hands. Around the time that he was twelve, Nicholas had become complicit in several parahuman abductions, the victims of which were housed and restrained in the militia's recently annexed holding facility.

Around this time, Nicholas grew to understand and became somewhat calloused before his nightmares began. In order to cope, he began binge drinking. This illuminated his special relationship with alcohol: It totally decimated the tissue that allowed him to transmit and receive visuals. This proved, obviously, problematic due to its neutering of the essential function of his father's unit as a whole. Therefore, he was severely reprimanded every time alcohol was found in his possession.

Though it had been legitimately clandestine and, most succinctly, extremely effective in its operations, the militia met its end around the time Nicholas had become fifteen years old. There was a raid on the compound and the majority of the militia was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism, presumably dropped in Guantanamo Bay or a similar facility. They had mercy on Nicholas, however, due to his young age and fragile state. He was entered into constant therapy, and occasionally dosed with alcohol to prevent him from redeveloping his abilities. After threatening to sue his caretakers when he came of age, his treatment was stopped.

Nicholas Adair has recently turned seventeen years old and has been sober for 593 days. His antennae are three inches long, less than half of what they were before he initially turned to alcohol at his peak, when he was thirteen, and he has been deposited onto The Promise in an effort to further his rehabilitation and enable him to be a contributing member of society.

_{A b i l i t i e s & S k i l l s}

_//Abilities:

Superhuman Ability | Eyejacking

Nicholas is anatomically distinct from other humans on account of the retractable antenna that have grown in his brain and protrude through his skull. The base of his antennae are located in his occipital lobe and penetrate through a pair of parallel foramen, each being about two centimeters thick, along his lambdoid suture. That is to say that his antennae can pop out of the back of his skull above his neck, both telescoping and by pumping large quantities of blood into them, in the visual processing part of the brain. The antennae can nest all of the way inside his skull, or alternatively they can be extended to a maximum length of three inches at present, though they had used to be longer.

His antennae are extremely dense with nerve endings and are sensitive, much like whiskers, and can detect a sudden change in the wind, for example, but are more generally outstanding because they primarily function as receptors for a specific sort of electromagnetic wave. The other main function of his antennae is that they can release an invisible cloud of parasitic cells that can, if ingested by another human, take root within the brain and begin constructing an organ dedicated to transmitting and receiving the visual output of the host along the frequency that Nicholas' antennae are attuned to.

What this means in practice is that Nicholas' can see through the eyes of the people he's infected as long as they are in range of his antennae. He also has the option to allow them to see through his eyes or through the eyes of anyone else within range of his local infected network. Though it straddles the line between skill and superpower, he can use the input to create a very rough facsimile of a live overhead video feed, assuming he has some kind of an idea about the relative position all of his input is coming from.

Limitation(s) | First and foremost, he does not have telepathy. He can only transmit live visual input, though he is vulnerable to being affected by optical illusions seen by one of his transmitters by merit of piggybacking off of their perception.

If the person ingesting the virus has a particularly strong immune system, the virus may be deterred entirely. Though on average, it takes about twelve hours, four if asleep, for a person in average health to begin manufacturing the transmission organ, assuming that they are not actively starving to death. For those with a particularly healthy diet and plenty of nutrients to spare, particularly if they eat "brain foods", then they will likely have a functioning organ in as little as six hours, two if they happen to be asleep.

The range of effectiveness on a fledgling transmitter is largely limited by how long they have been infected. One thing to note is that his reception is crippled if there are concrete walls, or anything similarly dense, separating him from a transmitter. For a transmitting organ to fully mature, it typically takes two weeks, at which point it can transmit to Nicholas while he is actively receiving at a maximum of 1,000 feet within line of sight. Beyond that, signal decay is rapid and largely becomes unreliable. From the moment that an organ is initially operational, he has a working range of about 100 feet.

In addition to juggling his own sight, he can reliably keep track of about six other people's transmissions comfortably, simultaneously, though by his estimate he'll be capable of actively networking with as many as twenty people at once in a years time. If he's not paying attention to a transmission, he's still technically sensing it though he wouldn't really be perceiving it, most of the time. It's very easy for him to lose track and become distracted amidst all of the simultaneous input however and, for that reason, he is especially prone to jumpscares.

Weakness(es) | His kryptonite is alcohol. Alcohol disintegrates his transmission organ and causes rapid shrinkage and deterioration. That is to say, if he were to drink an entire fifth of vodka in a single night, he would have reset his entire development back to ground zero. While that is unlikely to happen, it's more of a problem because the people he infects with his virus can be "cured" by drinking or otherwise ingesting alcohol. Due to the fact that their transmission organs aren't nearly so integral to their being and usually haven't existed very long, it is extremely likely that they will be periodically diminished if the subject has a casual drink.

Otherwise, his antennae are extremely sensitive and have an extreme concentration of nerve endings. If they were struck while they were extended from his head, the pain would be debilitating and any impact on his occipital lobe would be even more likely to render him unconscious than it would any other person.

_//Skills:

Combat Training | Thanks to his time in his father's militia, he has been thoroughly prepared for hand to hand combat against both armed and unarmed opponents of biological normalcy.

Firearm Training | Nicholas is an abnormally precise shot with guns, obviously owing to the usual availability of enhanced perspective. He prefers rifles but will essentially work with anything he has.

Spatial Awareness | His access to multiple perspectives at once has generally heightened his spatial awareness and coordination, essentially training him to be extremely precise when performing tasks such as balancing or drawing.

_{O T H E R}

Though he has not been diagnosed, he exhibits many symptoms of PTSD.

Absolute Comics - Season Two: The Monster Within

I withdraw. Love you all.

NR: IWCBADALWOCBTWWTAUA for Short or NI for Shorter

This is the cover of Kingdom Come's first issue, entitled "Strange Visitor". I love it. It doesn't look like a comic book. Sure it has grown men with weird outfits, but this looks like a representation of history meant to be put up in government building. This looks like the way that George Washington and his posse were portrayed by Emanuel Leutze when they were #CrossingTheDeleware. But instead of carrying the American flag, they're just standing there, menacing you, as The Spectre (God's Spirit of Vengeance) stands among them. But The Spectre isn't staring you down. He's just keeping his head down. Is there a metaphor there? Probably.

When Kingdom Come came out, it was the summer of 1996. Mark Waid had spent a great deal of the decade writing stories like The Legion of Super-Heroes, The Flash and Justice League. He'd only recently gotten knee deep writing X-Men, Onslaught and Deadpool before he began production on this story. Basically the premise of the story is that the old superheroes were pushed out of the limelight by younger, edgier heroes who stand in stark contrast to the previous generation with their characteristic lack of mercy and hyperviolent ways. My personal theory is that this is less of a commentary on other comic writers output and more of a meditation on his own bibliography. To back this up, you even see a cameo from The Legion of Super-Heroes amongst the old heroes, even though that would make absolutely no sense from an in-universe chronological perspective.

You could argue that this story isn't even about superheroes, though. The character that we start the narrative by focusing on is a preacher who is reading from the book of Revelation. Wanna guess who he's reading to? Too bad. He's spending time with the geriatric Wesley Dodds, once a wiry and spry superhero, now reduced to an unraveling knot of bed-ridden organ failure. He used to be The Sandman. He used to be a superhero. One page-turn later and he's just dead. So the preacher dude goes out into the world and checks out a restaurant where everyone is dressed up as a classic superhero, mostly Justice Leaguers. One of the waiters is dressed up as Hal Jordan, but he literally doesn't even know whose costume he's wearing. It really hammers in the theme of the previous generation being deemed more and more irrelevant and, even worse, forgotten.

It reminds me of Grant Morrison's New X-Men, where Professor Xavier tells Magneto "The only thing you have that they want is your face on a t-shirt". Don't get me wrong. I hate Hal Jordan, but I also refuse to wear clothing with symbols or logos on them that I haven't thought about intensively because I refuse to allow people I dislike to use me as a billboard. So it's against my personal philosophies and probably isn't a universal takeaway.

He ends up stewing on how the new heroes battle each other just for the thrill of it and how the old are fading fast. Then he starts receiving intrusive visions of the future that unsettle him. It gets to him so bad that he ends up preaching doom and gloom in a sermon to his congregation before cutting himself off, apologizing and dismissing his audience. Shortly afterward, he's met by The Spectre, who explains that he is assigned to punish the wicked and deliver vengeance, but he literally cannot because his faculties are not what they once were and that he needs to a host to accomplish his plan. He wanted Wesley because he had been having visions of the future, but Wesley's dead. So this dude winds up with the Spectre by process of elimination.

They go on a little spirit walk where they see Wonder Woman check up on a gray-tinged Superman in the fortress of solitude where he's living out a fantasy of being a simple farmer. She tells him that they need him in order to stand up to the new generation of super heroes because everyone follows his lead. Even the old timers who didn't entirely give up still were changed remarkably. The Green Lantern created an Emerald City that looked upon the Earth from below, an idea that I love, btw. The Flash runs through Central City and literally never stops, correcting everything with a faux omnipresence that only the fastest man alive could muster. Hawkman is acting as a protector of the remaining natural environment, which has become very minute after the new generation of superheroes attacked The Parasite viciously and literally relentlessly before The Parasite cracked Captain Atom open in an attempt to end his suffering, destroying the midwestern United States, and therefore causing an ecological/economic disaster.

Superman has been living in a self imposed exile for the better part of the past ten years when he was essentially outshined by Magog, one of the antiheroes we keep mentioning, and the public refused to heed his warnings that this style of heroism would destroy the world. Diana attempts to snap him out of his complacency by insisting that they need him to take the lead, not because of his might but because he is Superman, the epitome of heroism. If he doesn't stand up then neither would the rest. Superman declines, dismissing Wonder Woman.

That's where the vision ends. That preacher dude is, like, super let down by Superman's bogus response, and asserts that The Spectre was supposed to have provided hope. The Spectre quips that he, in fact, did not ever promise hope. Hold that in mind for a second. Then they take a peek at a fight between superheroes and villains. You literally can't tell who is who on account of the massive amounts of damage that is being done. Preacher-dude screams "We need Hope" and guess what. All of the guns are crushed by hands more powerful than a locomotive. In a whirlwind, a dangling cablecar is deposited safely and Superman has brought the battle to a close.

Which is one of the best executed superhero interventions ever because it's strongly implied that Superman had truly retired. Unfortunately, the world rejects him once more. The final page displays him being overtaken by a redness that I presume to be either radiation or magic. The point of origin isn't given away in this particular issue. A real cliffhanger. Having never read it, I imagine it might be this Magog that keeps coming up. But yeah. For a second it looked like everything was gonna be okay. Though the spectre of God's vengeance had been insufficient, Superman had not forsaken the world.

Anyhow, I'm off to bed. If anybody has any interpretations of this that they wanna bounce off of me, I am, like, all ears. Or at least, like, 87 percent ears. I assume I probably have some blood and serotonin left in me given that I feel an overwhelming need to slump off to sleep.

Ciao.

Absolute Comics - Season Two: The Monster Within

When I was a kid, the first Blue Beetle that I knew was Jaime Reyes. I liked him a lot because he had a really neat gimmick with the whole Scarab thing going on. But I had no idea about Ted Kord, who I now adore thoroughly. Jaime is a cool kid. But Ted was a real hero, complete with a completely self sacrificing loyalty to his friends and allies. He was uncompromising on his principles and was willing to do what was necessary to save the day even though he deserved better personally. Reading his death was the first time that a comic book made me cry. I was, like, fifteen. Man, that was a great story. Great character.

Keep on keepin' on, @Hound55.

NR: IWCBADALWOCBTWWTAUA for Short or NI for Shorter

Nightly Ramblings

^{In Which Comic Books Are Dignified As Literature
Worthy Of Consideration Beyond That With Which
They Are Usually Ascribed}

Or NR IWCBADALWOCBTWWTAUA for short and if that acronym seems insufficient, I recommend NI for shorter. Anyhow, I like comic books. I like 'em a lot. I always have. In fact, in my youth I developed a literal code of chivalry that I had sworn to, upheld through my middle teenage years and have since forgotten the actual terms of, based upon the behaviour and tenets of superheroes (one of which was Always Get Back Up).

I got into comic books because I was fixated on The Batman when I was a lad, and, not counting the Bionicle comics which confounded me at the time, my first actual comic book that I personally owned was Scott Snyder's Batman Annual #1, from back when the New 52 first launched. I loved it. The first series I would actually read all the way through was the first run on Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man, trailed by Watchmen, Geoff Johns Green Lantern (My copy of Green Lantern: Secret Origin got stolen out of my locker when I was in middle school. I would've reaped my revenge had I known who it was. I hadn't finished reading it), and Vince Vaughan's The Runaways.

It wasn't the presence of violence, bright colors or the scantily clad women. I felt like comic books were the perfect storytelling medium. With opportunity for text and illustration, sometimes acting as one, usually working in concert that allowed me to get totally immersed. I didn't hate TV, but I'd usually rather have been reading a comic book. I found it much harder to think actively while watching TV. I didn't like my attention being steered at someone elses pace. I loved the intimacy of leaning over a page and ignoring everything else. I was a pretty solitary type for a litany of reasons.

You can't really share a comic book like you can an episode of a television show or an audiobook. It makes for an awkward experience. But I think that the fact that it's something you kinda have to do alone, makes it feel all the more communal when you'd get together with whatever buds you had that actually engaged with it on the same level, with similar immersion and neurotic single-minded fixation on the pages.

I guess NI is supposed to be that. I want to update this every Saturday, which means I'm already late, but hey, better late than never (sometimes). So the idea is that every week we're going to discuss a single issue of a comic book. From now until August 31st, we're gonna be focusing on Mark Waid's seminal Kingdom Come #1, at which point we'll get to talking about #2, until we're done and pick a new series/arc/run. Thanks for joining. I gotta fly to get to work, but I already read the first issue and I'll post my thoughts later.

Absolute Comics - Season Two: The Monster Within

<Snipped quote by Lord Wraith>

@Hound55

I don't understand what I did? Outside of my post-high casual writing style.

Absolute Comics - Season Two: The Monster Within

For We Are Many

C H A R A C T E R C O N C E P T P R O P O S A L

M O O N K N I G H T

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^{_{M A R C S P E C T O R ♦ E X - M E R C E N A R Y ♦ Q U E E N S / T H E B R O N X ♦ K H O N S H U}}

C H A R A C T E R C O N C E P T:

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^{"Careful there, you almost broke your arm."}

As a child, Marc Spector discovered that his father's best friend was a neo-nazi serial killer that preyed upon Jews, such as his father Elias and himself. After anxiously telling his father about his outlandish discovery and speculating upon it, he was admitted into a psychiatric institution and treated as though he were suffering from dissociative episodes. While he was receiving treatment, it was discovered that his father had been murdered, the grief causing him to slip into the patterns of unwellness expected of him before he was discharged and returned to his family life.

After graduating from MIT with a Bachelor's Degree of Science in Engineering, he applied for a position with SHIELD, where he found work as a Counterintelligence Threat Analyst, assigned to monitor the unrest in Kahndaq that characterized the Muhunnad regime during the Arab Spring. He ultimately gained his accolades for his neurotic levels of dedication and willingness to pull all nighters in the name of research, which paid off when he discovered that the Kahndaqi ambassador was conspiring with US intelligence operatives to plan a siege on Bialya's nuclear arsenal.

Following a routine psych evaluation, Spector was honorably discharged and given a generous severance. It was never fully explained to him who had decided that he had suddenly become a liability, but adapting to civilian life was a challenging transition. Ultimately, he decided that his skillset was still of value, so he moved to Kahndaq, where he found work as a soldier of fortune, leveraging his history with SHIELD. He found a kindred spirit in Jean-Paul "Frenchie" Duchamp, a skilled helicopter pilot and mechanic who proved invaluable doubling as Mission Control.

Marc Spector became a soldier of fortune, but occasionally indulged in fugues as the playboy philanthropist Steven Grant. Rinsing out his wallet on cars, public outreach programs and expensive women, he began a juggling act that was so involved, he escaped from his vacation by adopting the persona of Jake Lockley, an alcoholic cab driver constantly scrubbing the Earth for fast cash and a dust up. While acting as a mercenary, he found work under the accomplished guerrilla fighter Raoul Bushman, who was hired to raid an Egyptian digsite and retrieve the unusual gem stones that were found there.

It was here that they met Peter and Marlene Alraune, a father and daughter archaeologist team. Peter was killed by Bushman after being provoked, though Spector had attempted to dissuade him. His daughter, Marlene, attempted an escape, where Spector attempted intervention again. This time, Bushman was tired of dealing with Spector and stabbed him, inflicting what had been presumed to be a killing blow, leaving him to bleed out by an ancient statue where he would wake up hours later.

He had a dream, or some sort of vision, where he was met by Khonshu. He was presented with a deal, life in service to the moon god, acting as the his Knight of Vengeance, who would reap the blood of the wicked and protect those who travel under the moon's watchful eye. Rising under the wickedly smiling razor thin lips of a crescent moon, Spector wrapped himself in fresh sheets that shimmered a molten white under the luminescence of night. He reaped much blood that night, leaving a crimson oasis in his wake as he eliminated all of Bushman's underlings, though he underestimated the threat presented by Bushman himself. He succeeded in rescuing Marlene and then arranged for her to stay in Steven Grant's estate in Staten Island, not entirely selflessly.

Upon arriving back in America, Marc Spector laid himself to rest, in a manner of speaking, preferring instead to reserve violence for his newest persona "The Moon Knight". Taking cues from some of the more grounded stories of the Batman of yesteryear, he invested in designing a suit of highly flexible body armor complete with a cape capable of allowing him to glide off of rooftops "safely".

Thanks to his experience in reconnaissance, he has been able to loosely track Bushman's activities, discovering that the diamonds, sometimes referred to collectively as The Heart of Darkness, are something of a recurring motif and he has therefore concluded that if he can acquire enough of them, he can lure Bushman into a trap, where he can claim vengeance. In the meantime, he continues refining his approach with Frenchie at his side.

C H A R A C T E R M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S:

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I felt it was high time I reintegrate with my coven of internet nerds. After attempting a Legion of Superheroes sheet that was swatted down because the idea of characters traveling between the present and the future of a different world seemed too convoluted and the lack of a singular protagonist in my Green Lantern sheet was evidently not sufficiently compelling, I decided that I'd revise my approach for the time being. I just want to come home.

Now, as for why I chose Moon Knight specifically: I wanted to revisit a slightly more grounded world of non-superpowered or minimally superpowered vigilantism. To that end, I considered who else was being played. I considered attempting a Pied Piper, where I could collaborate with Hillan, but figured that there were other options that offered both superior creative freedom and entanglement. I considered doing a version of Wilcat where Ted would mentor his son Tom, but that's extremely reminiscent of Wraith's very own Batman Beyond approach. In the end, I figured that Moon Knight's background involving government agencies, far out earthbound exploration and intimate cast of characters would be really easy to integrate into this game's mainstream.

This isn't quite a Moon Knight year one, but he's not quite the expy of Denny O'Neil's Batman that appeared in Marc Spector - Moon Knight, but he wants to be. He's on track to be as involved with the supernatural as he was in his earliest appearances or, if you haven't read those, his fixation on slightly monstrous villains will be reminiscent of Batman's earliest encounters with chemically enabled villains such as Doctor Death or Hugo Strange.

Basically, Marc is a man who has created a routine that involves adopting new selves so thoroughly that it isn't simply lying anymore, it even goes beyond character acting to the point that he could probably fool a psychic. As Marc Spector, he is dedicated to being Moon Knight, to developing his equipment, his technique, learning new things all the time and implementing new strategies, growing as aggressively as he can in order to redeem himself and in order to take vengeance for the sake of 'goodness' in general, in Khonshu's name. His behavior as Jake Lockley and Steven Grant allow him an escape, though they sometimes seem to work as a team, or perhaps, more aptly, as a family.

The end of Season Two's first act, for Marc, as I envision is, will see him baiting Raoul Bushman into a fight to the death where Marc will acquire much of the Heart of Darkness, a diamond containing Eclipso's being, which will allow Eclipso to speak to Spector, much as Khonshu does, and will result in him journeying to Kahndaq to retrieve the final pieces of the Heart of Darkness, which basically will put a nail in the second act. As for the third act, Marc will need help to confront Eclipso, probably with help from other superheroes.

I really want to be an active participant, so I thought of some things that other players could do if they wanted to affect Moon Knight's story in the IC. So if you want your character's story to perk Moon Knight's ears up, just do anything in Kahndaq or come into possession of a fragment of the Heart of Darkness.

C H A R A C T E R N O T E S:

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Cast & Crew

Marc Spector

Marc Spector / Moon Knight: 26 year old former SHIELD agent, former mercenary, present superhero / Avatar of Khonshu. The basic superhero package.

Jake Lockley: 34 year old alcoholic cab driver. Killed a man when he was younger and scared himself because he liked it so much. Driver's license expired two years ago and he doesn't carry insurance.

Steven Grant: 36 year old wealthy philanthropist who owns a bona fide mansion by the Southeastern coast of Staten Island. Is presently dating and living with Marlene Alraune who assumes that this is the true self of her rescuer. Is undergoing something of a mid-life crisis.

Khonshu: Obscure ancient Egyptian god of the moon and patron deity of those who travel by night. Continues to bless Spector with life. Demands tribute in the form of blood.

Allies

Marlene Alraune: Steven Grant's live in girlfriend. Enjoys engaging with the academics of archaeology. Endorses Steven's other activities but doesn't appreciate the full extent of the violence that he metes out.

Jean-Paul "Frenchie" Duchamp: Often found on the other end of an encrypted comm link, cross referencing police databases and various other depositories for information regarding the people and places that Moon Knight comes across. Is secretly in love with Spector.

Antagonists

Morpheus: An insomniac unable to dispell his rotting dream energy through the regular means.

Raoul Bushman: Merciless mercenary collecting the pieces of the Heart of Darkness, armed with steel fangs, distinguished by a bleached white skull shape on his face.

Eclipso: God's Wrath incarnate whose consciousness has been trapped inside a shattered diamond known as the Heart of Darkness (horcruxes) that will claim the body of a human host upon enough of them being gathered up.

S A M P L E P O S T:

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Manhattan, New York City

"... received reports of a lethal stabbing at 210 West 46th Street, the Marquis Theater. Suspect is still at large." The news crinkled in The Moon Knight's ear as Frenchie patched in a feed from the police scanners.

His new cowl had the comm link built in to circumvent the hassles of a handheld walkie talkie. Spector had been rather insistent that, rather than simply defaulting to commonplace systems with government strength encryption, they manufacture their own quantum entangled intermediaries that would ensure that their transmissions would be both instantaneous and impossible to intercept without destroying. It took several months to arrange for the facilities to manufacture them quietly, but they had made it happen. After all, an unknowable amount of revolutions had failed in the past because they failed to prioritize communications over firepower.

"Well, Mark, it looks like The Marquis was debuting a musical adaptation of the classic slasher film Dreadcastle. Never did like the original much myself. Terribly pulpy," Frenchie drabbled. "But according to this charming little film on Instagram, the killer was wearing a mask that looks roughly like a caricature of a human face if it were crossed with a tax-evading Muppet. I wish I could demonstrate the true extent of how terrible the look of it is using words, my friend."

"Until we determine how to effectively convey the impression of visual stimulus over a spoken medium, it's an evil we'll have to keep combating," Spector snarked, as his feet and palms made contact with the buildings roof. As much work as they had put into the armor, the idea of running fast was at odds with landing softly within the framework of their current design, thanks to the principle of shock absorption. So he figured his best move was to roll out of a glide. Not the best way to enter combat due to the disorienting nature of the maneuver, but as a mid range transportation solution, it served it's purpose for now.

Getting his bearings, he sized up the roof of The Marquis, with the full moon above him, unblinking like the eye of his ever vigilant God, patron deity of all who traveled by night. It'd been about ten minutes since the first report. The situation apparently wasn't dire enough for droves of police officers to lock down the place, yet. Though Spector could see that some had arrived and, judging by their vacant vehicle, had apparently beaten him inside.

"Frenchie, who is it that was stabbed?"

"That would be Fred Walker, the gentleman who had been hired to play the part of the near invincible serial killer. Ironically, it looks like he was a really nice kid, y'know his voice actually bears a striking resemblance to Dave Mitchell."

"I'm losing interest, Frenchie," Spector informed him as he broke into the maintenance stairs before making his way down into the menacing darkness of the vertical corridor, flicking on a flash light mounted beside his mask.

"My bad. Anyhow, the lad was apparently drug off without leaving a trace of blood behind. Which seems rather telling to me, how about you?"

"I've been told that revenge is best served cold. I think it's gonna be hot and sticky and scarlet tonight," he smiled egregiously, dribbling his eyebrows.

As he neared the bottom of the staircase, he heard the faintest clink of a small piece of metal stroking the doorknob over and over, the sort of sounds that you can only ever hear when your heart is still and no one is talking. So he scurried to the door and, using his left hand, opened it and with his right, seized the throat of the man attempting to sneak in.

"Come on in, buddy," he said as he yanked the masked man into the darkness, thumb clogging the scream in his throat while he reeled him in. "Y'know, I'd be more than happy to take you to the jail on the moon. Only one little problem," he said as he slammed the door shut on the fiend's shoulder, eliciting a desperate wheeze from the man. "The moon is all full."

Frenchie started laughing far longer than most would deem reasonable, but it didn't matter. Marc joined in, easing the pressure off of the man's throat after firmly shutting the door for a bit of privacy. As the beam from Moon Knight's cowl washed over him, he could see that the stabber was now covered in blood.

"It was a PR stunt, wasn't it? You probably made him think it was all his idea to have the old slasher pretend to kill him so that you could lure him away and actually do it. Because you're not a random superfan, you're the original film's killer."

The bastard went for his knife, covered in blood, drawing it up, preparing to clamp down on the white garbed vigilante like a cobra prepares to clamp down on a rat. The difference is that a rat can't grab onto a cobra's fang and guide it into it's own flesh.

"Take it easy, buddy. So you missed the mark on this particular murder. You may not be a criminal mastermind, but that's no reason to stab yourself." Cruelly, Spector teased the man whose hand lay on the handle of a blade that had freshly been driven into his own thigh with all the might he could muster and then some. "Alright you knucklehead. Here's what's gonna happen: If you pull that blade out, you're gonna bleed to death faster than you can say I was framed. But if you play it smart and walk over to the cops who are desperately trying to minimize the paperwork they have to file tonight so that they can go home at a reasonable hour, you might get to live out the the next twenty to twenty-five years in a cell receiving free meals and state issued housing."

The magnificent Moon Knight gave him a solid punch to the gut and another to grow on before throwing the door open and waving for him to approach the policemen. "Go on now, boy-o. You've got your whole life ahead of you."

P O S T C A T A L O G:

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A list linking to your IC posts as they're created. This can be used for a reference guide to your character or to summarize completed arcs and stories.