HEROISM IN THE GUTTER – a retrospective by Calvin Jordan, Doctorate of Sociology

I look at the newspaper, the television, even outside my office window, and I see men streaking across the sky, blazes of plasma fire burning from the husks of Girandi wardroids, and the wreckage of ruined luxury cars littering the ground of the dealership across the street.

Two decades ago, things were different; we had real heroes back then. Not self-absorbed rock stars who create far more property damage feuding over merchandizing sales than they ever manage to prevent when posing as serious crimefighters. For those were different days, peopled by individuals of conviction and virtue. Towering men and women, people who embodied the hope for a brighter tomorrow. And the greatest of them were the Advance.

Seven men and women, devoted to the highest ideals of the human condition. They weren’t the most powerful heroes, not all of them. But they didn’t need to be. They had something else, something more that made them special. And together, those seven were truly one of a kind; nothing could stop them from holding the line against violence and despair. Until they weren’t seven any more.

Doctor Sondra Hastings was a woman of infinite compassion and patience, who never found a need to take up a masked identity in order to help the innocent. She possessed no impressive gifts for destruction, being rather a healer of bodies and spirits. She provided the Advance with their moral center, the essential spark that separated them from the contemporary groups so misplaced in comparison to those true heroes. And, lacking her teammates' capacity for physical spectacle, it was sadly inevitable that she would be the first to fall in battle.

Her death was not only a blow to the Advance, but to all humankind, in that without her stabilizing influence the rest of the Advance had lost their sense of connection to the masses of everyday humanity they had pledged to serve. Although they made a valiant effort, none of the surviving members of the Advance had the saintly reserves of temperance necessary to hold six such bombastic personalities together to present a united front in pursuing their dreams. And so, with startling rapidity, they drifted apart and faded from the world’s greatest spotlight.

A few former members of the Advance (most notably Starcarver and the Wraith) continued to operate on their own for a few years after the group’s breakup, but as new teams of increasingly aggressive powered crimefighters emerged into the public consciousness these relics of a fading golden age inevitably withdrew completely into their private lives.

Of the surviving members, only Starcarver’s real identity is known to the general public: Jack Braithwaite, the only son of Michael Braithwaite (of Los Angeles’ prestigious corporate law firm Cooper, Simons, Braithwaite, and Davenport), and grandson of Hollywood legend Veronica Duchene-Braithwaite. Having given up crimefighting (if not his youthful looks and vitality) more than a decade ago, Braithwaite is rarely available for interviews, but on one such rare occasion three years ago, Braithwaite did have comments regarding the dissolution of the Advance.

“A lot of people, old fans I guess; they ask me the same question. Why did [the Advance] break up? And why didn’t we ever come back together? And after all these years, the answer is painful in its simplicity; almost as painful as the irony in me of all people being the only one left to answer the question. Everything dies; even the dreams of heroes.”

So where does that leave us; in a world whose brightest hopes are gun-toting killers splattered with the blood of innocent bystanders?

No, because there is another truism to consider: that fashion is cyclical, with a half-life of twenty years. It has been a long, cold winter, but spring is coming. And some day soon, the people will look up from their televisions and newspapers and burning wreckage, and they will see our heroes again. Real heroes.

the consequences of watching Marla Singer die

WARNING: This post contains massive spoilers for the huge plot twist at the core of the film "Fight Club", and I can not stress enough how little understanding you'll have of this post if you've never seen that most exceptional film. And now, on with the show.
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Wow. I had never noticed that before. In the kitchen after learning that Marla spent the night screwing Tyler, Jack's voiceover says "if only I had wasted a couple of minutes and gone to watch Marla Singer die, none of this would have happened". But he's not saying that to himself there in the kitchen. It's part of the larger voiceover, which results from the entire story being told in flashback, as he's sitting in the room where Tyler had stuck a gun in his mouth.

So, when he says "none of this", he doesn't mean Marla being there in his home, screwing his best friend, and intruding on his life like she'd intruded on his support groups. He's referring back to the pre-flashback line "and suddenly, I realize that all of this: the gun, the bombs, the revolution... has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer".

If only Jack had wasted a couple of minutes and gone to watch Marla Singer die, he wouldn't have found himself without his pants, sitting in a chair on the top floor of an empty skyscraper, while his best friend shoves a gun into his mouth and counts down the timer on the explosives in the basement...

Wow.

a quick laugh

Anyone who knows me will be fully aware that I've almost always got stories of superheroes and villains (most frequently of either Dennis O'Neil or Warren Ellis's writing) in my head. And most recently, I've been thinking up a scenario featuring the Joker.

He breaks out of Arkham, only to find that Batman is off with the Justice League somewhere, and not available to play their special game. So, in search of the Batman's attention, the Joker takes a road trip. He finds some third-string city with a team of third-string heroes, breaks every single one of their third-string villains out of jail, organizes them into a villainous team against the heroes they've each already fought solo, and sets up a big confrontation between the two teams. Then, at the pinnacle of the action, he rains Joker-venom gas down on them all.

Because if a gaggle of third-string heroes and villains all dead and grinning together in the bottom of a pit won't earn him Batman's undivided attention, nothing will.