8FOLD: Victory #1

[Drew Perron]

On 4/7/2019 5:43 PM, Jeanne Morningstar wrote:
> LOOK OUT! HERE IT COMES! A STARTLING NEW ERA IN FOUR-COLOR EXCELLENCE!

HELL YEAH :D

> Once upon a time, there was a young woman who lived in Golden City, the youngest 
> of three daughters. Her name was Kate Aldrich. She had only admitted to herself 
> she was a woman about three years ago. She was short and scrawny and never had 
> much in the way of stamina. She had never felt like much of a man, and now she 
> didn't feel like much of a girl.

I IMMEDIATELY LOVE HER. Framing a trans woman as "the youngest of three 
daughters" brings such good fairytale energy into it.

> She lived in an apartment she could more or less afford, with a roommate named 
> Elinor who she was hopelessly in love with.

oh, they were *roommates*

> Kate worked in a 
> series of data-entry jobs here and there, none of which offered much hope of 
> long-term security and advancement.

Big mood

> She loved games like 
> Bayonetta where she could be a woman who was both powerful and desirable, even 
> though she didn't want men to desire her.

Mega relatable even tho I'm Super Pan

> She had a list of complicated and 
> cranky opinions about popular culture as long as your arm. She was autistic, and 
> her special interest was superheroes.

The MOST relatable!!

> Mr. Victory had been the defender of Golden City in years long gone. He flashed 
> across the sky like a comet in the 1940s. No one really knew where he had come 
> from. The story that was told was that his powers were magic--he was a mortal 
> transformed by a magic word written on a stone that had fallen from the heavens. 
> He could be anyone. That made people believe in him all the more--every child 
> hoped in their heart that one day they could become him.
> 
> And then, in the 1980s, it all ended. No one quite knew why. There was a great 
> battle between him and an enemy of titanic power, a man who might once have been 
> one of his sidekicks. The exposés came in and the world found that his origin 
> was all a lie, that he was created by a government experiment, and the stories 
> of wonder and strangeness that were told about him were nothing but cover for 
> more simple and sordid truths.

As Jeanne knows, I've been saying for years that someone needs to get around to 
subverting Miracleman, and I'm so glad they're doing it.

> But some people never stopped believing in him. Kate was one. Her high school 
> English teacher, one of the few people who'd ever supported her back then, had 
> told her about how Mr. Victory had talked her out of killing herself when Kate 
> had thought about doing the same.

awwwwwwwwww

> She knew that she was 
> unsafe in the night, that the city held many dangers, human and perhaps 
> otherwise, if the old stories were true. But she didn't really believe in them, 
> did she?

Spoilers: She did

> Then she saw another woman walking home alone by night, and three men following 
> her.

Ladies protecting ladies!

> For the soldiers of the Toad King had fought 
> Mr. Victory in the foxed and brittle pages of the old comics she'd read. They 
> were not real. Yet here they were.

MEGA fairytale.

> She wanted to run and hide; she hoped desperately to wake up. Yet she knew she 
> had suffered enough, had stood back and watched too often. Her heart clenched in 
> a hard certainty and she knew she could no longer stand by.

YEAH!!
> Kate put up her fists. She knew she couldn't win--she knew the death she'd felt 
> looming over her all her life ever since she'd realized what she was had come. 
> But she was going to meet it fighting.

Aaaaa bby ;-;v

> "Excuse me," said another voice in the night. "Haven't you something better to 
> do with your time?"
> 
> The voice belonged to a stuffed polar bear, six feet tall, in a blue suit. That 
> would be me. My name is Cornelius. I am a stuffed toy imbued with the spirit of 
> an elemental. My story is a long and complicated one, and now is not the time to 
> tell it.

Oh, hi narrator o3o A very unexpected frame shift - but pushing even more into 
the kids'-story playfulness

> Kate did not see the form I wore in that fight, only felt the cold wind blow 
> above her and heard their dying croaks. It was probably for the best.

Daaaaaaaaaamn that's such a cool statement

> She laughed. "Sure. Pull the other one. Are you taking me to the Starlit Temple?"
> 
> "As a matter of fact," I told her, "yes, I am." I took her hand in mine and led 
> her through the secret paths, through the foldings of time and space.

I'm imagining this as almost a dance, between the borders of different panels.

> And upon 
> a throne, just above that stone, sat Mr. Victory in the blue and gold caped 
> costume she knew so well. His unblinking deep blue eyes were staring off at a 
> far distance.
> 
> "Welcome," he said.

Siiiiiiiigh. <3

> "No," said Mr. Victory. "This is the Starlit Temple and I am Mr. Victory."
> 
> "Sure. That's exactly what a dream would say."

My dreams are not usually so forthcoming~

> "Hold on, I thought--that whole thing was just a government conspiracy. There is 
> no Star-Stone. There is no Starlit Temple."
> 
> "And yet here you are." Mr. Victory winked.  "That's just what they want you to 
> think."

There was definitely a government conspiracy~

> She read the Word written upon the stone and spoke it. (I'm not going to tell 
> you what it was, by the way. That would be irresponsible.)

I LOVE THAT SO MUCH. I'm reminded of the Oz book in which there's a word that 
can transform anything, and the writer spells it out but specifically doesn't 
tell you how to pronounce it. I bet there were a lot of kids who tried 
pronouncing it different ways like I did.

> CHAPTER 2: THE FIRST FLIGHT!

SO DRAMATIC

> It was just the same as it had always been--the comics and 
> books about programming scattered all over the room, the action figures of 
> heroes like the Green Knight lined up on her shelves.

Excellent callback

> But she was not the same.

eeeeeeeee <3

> She stared into the mirror, taking in the person she was now and trying to 
> comprehend the fact that this was her. She gripped her breasts. "Holy crap," she 
> said. "Now those are boobs. I never could have imagined in my wildest dreams I'd 
> ever get boobs like this."

That'd be my first action too o3ov

> She flexed her muscles in front of the mirror. 
> "Hel-LO gorgeous. Okay so... I'm a superhero now, I have a cape..." She picked 
> up her golden cape and trailed it through her hands. "...can I fly?"
> 
> She opened out the window and flung herself out and found the answer was, as of 
> yet, no.
> 
> "Nnn," she said, pulling herself out of the dumpster she'd fallen into.

heeheeheehee

> And then somewhere in the 
> distance, she heard a cry for help. One of the powers given by the Word was to 
> know when and where you are needed.

:D :D :D

> She raced off to answer it, and before she knew it, she was flying. It was an 
> astonishing feeling. She'd dreamed of it all her life, ever since she was a 
> girl, freedom from a life that did its best to weigh her down.

Siiiiiiiigh. <3 I'm reminded of the part in Dvandom Force's Born to Be Run arc 
where Kid Macro talks about being able to outrun anything.

> On the ground, people felt the rush of wind above their heads and turned up to 
> see. Taxi drivers and business people and street musicians and sex workers and 
> tourists all looked up as one. They couldn't be seeing what they thought they 
> were seeing, could they? There hadn't been a hero in Golden City since Mr. 
> Victory died. That streak of blue and gold in the air was nothing but a 
> half-believed story which older people told. They turned away and went on with 
> their lives, but they knew in their hearts those lives would never be the same.

HELL YEAH!

> She grabbed him and 
> hefted him in her arms.
> 
> It was then that she realized that, while she now knew how to fly, she didn't 
> exactly know how to stop.

Heeheeheehee X3 <3

> She dropped the man on the bridge, hoping it wouldn't hurt him too much, and 
> rocketed faster and faster, right into the lake where the river emptied. Hacking 
> up water, she floated back up to the top. For a while she stared up at the sky, 
> letting all the feelings from the last few minutes wash over her.

*cackles*

> Her mind drifted back to her childhood, to the first time she had ever swum. 
> She'd had a lot of trouble swimming at first, but her older sister had told her 
> to just let go of her fear and agitation, let it flow into the water and let it 
> bear her up. She did so and imagined herself floating not in the water but in 
> the air. And when she opened her eyes, she saw that she was.

ooooooh, excellent mental exercise.

> Even though she'd exerted herself far more than she 
> usually dared to do, she was surprisingly refreshed. It was as if transforming 
> had reset her spoons.

Ooooo, mega useful.

> And elsewhere in the city, another woman made her plans. For she had always 
> dreamed of being a villain, but never had a hero to fight. Until now...

oh, they were *rivals*

> There was always a lot of discourse 
> about the infamous boob window, so I decided to go from the angle of, what kind 
> of person would want to present that way? It immediately made sense for her to 
> be trans; the core note of her character is defiance so in that context the boob 
> window is partially "Fuck you, I'm a woman."

That is extremely Good.

> Amazingly, I had no idea I was trans at the time. I just... had an 
> extraordinarily vivid idea about what it would be like to be trans and want to 
> create an identity that's closer to your ideal self. I also really, really loved 
> Ranma 1/2 as a teenager. Anyway.

Yeeeeeep. X3 Big mood

> Most of the other ideas I dropped or folded into other things. This one, though, 
> stuck with me enough I decided to pull it out for an attempted Medley revival 
> which, sadly, everyone was too busy for.

Haha yeah @-@ God, I'm bad at being consistent. X3

> There's a Shazam movie out now, of 
> course. (which I am just about to see after I post this, since I always put off 
> everything to the absolute last minute...)

Heeheehee

  This made me a bit hesitant about
> posting the thing, but then I read through a bunch of Milestone comics and the 
> discussion from Worlds Collide about Superman and Icon and how the world needs 
> both stories inspired me to finally post it. "Each myth is incomplete without 
> the other," as Dwayne McDuffie wrote back in the day.

Yesssssss. :D

> I also folded in elements of a vague idea i had for a continuation of 
> Miracleman/Marvelman (like I said, I'm always coming up with useless revamp 
> ideas.) That's another side of the myth.

YES GOOD. Very useful revamp ideas more like

> There is a dense web of intertextuality 
> of superhero concepts, and now I'm going to extend that further, bringing in new 
> forms of experience and new sources of inspiration.

Fuck yeah!!

Drew "that's so important!" Perron