HCC: HCC 36-1/2: One Minute Origin

[Tom Russell]

I seem to have a knack for picking unappealing challenges (or perhaps to pick said challenges at times when real life-- with all its pleasure and misery-- intrudes). Part of it I think is I come up with concepts that are perhaps too precisely defined, that aren't open enough. As the guy who started the HCC, I'm not entirely comfortable with being the guy who killed it. So I thought I'd call a "mulligan" on my previous challenge and throw out one that might be a bit less limiting so that there's a chance there'll be a number thirty-seven. :-)

Before every superhero got their own Year One miniseries, before they wrote for the trade, before even the fifteen-page epic that was Amazing Fantasy # 15's lead story... there was the two-page origin stories for Superman and Batman. Brief, primal, distilled, yet oddly powerful and resonant in ways that the long-form origin story, for all their merits, could not match.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a brief and distilled origin story for a hero. I won't put a cap on the word-count, or limit what constitutes a "hero". It can be a new hero or an old one. It can be whatever the words "one minute origin story" move you to write.