My biological father—Clyde Phloog, the Silver Age Megaton Man, only now dressed as Lt. Colonel Clyde Pflug, USAF—smiled broadly. “I’ve got those capsules Dr. Joe gave me,” he said, patting his medal-encrusted breast pocket. “After the blue one I took wears off, I’ll be able to fly back as the Silver Age Megaton Man. And if it doesn’t wear off, I can take a red one to speed up the conversion.” He looked dimly at Kozmik Kat, who shared the back seat with him. “I only wish I had a lint roller for all this cat hair.”
“Sorry,” said Koz. “I shed whenever I’m around radiation.”
I asked my father, “What about where I punched you? Are your going to be all right?”
“I’ll manage,” he said, wincing only because I’d reminded him of where I cracked his ribs in the boxing ring of Megatonic University. He smiled and winked at me, as if injuring him had somehow made more completely me his daughter. “You’re a chip off the ol’ block, Clarissa.”
We pulled into the parking lot adjacent to the apartment building. Clyde leaned over the backseat, kissed me on the cheek, grabbed the duffel containing his megahero uniform, and hopped out, doffing his officer’s cap. We watched him, in full military regalia, approach the front door of our mama’s apartment. It was starting to snow, and the flakes were sticking to the navy blue wool of his dress uniform. We had no idea what Mama would make of him in this, his civilian—that is to say, non-megaheroic—form.
The idea that Clyde would be able to change back and forth between a more-or-less ordinary civilian physique and the over-muscled proportions of the Silver Age Megaton Man sounded pretty speculative, since Dr. Joe had only sprung the capsules on Clyde an hour earlier, without making any trial runs. Assuming it worked, I wondered whether Clyde’s cousin Trent Phloog—who had once been the Bronze Age Megaton Man but lost his powers when he swallowed the Cosmic Cue-Ball—would opt to become the Man of Molecules again, if such a simple medicinal transition existed.
“My, he’s a handsome man,” said Avie, as we watched Clyde get buzzed into the building and wave goodbye to us before going inside. “Even without all those muscles, he’s still got muscles.”
I just hoped Daddy wasn’t around to complicate Clyde’s visit with my mama. But there didn’t seem much chance of that. Daddy’s pickup truck was nowhere in sight, and Avie explained to us as we drove down Woodward Avenue that while our estranged parents had been cordial in one another’s company over the holidays—no doubt because my grandma was present—it was going to be a long, rocky road for them to get back together. Daddy’s torrid affair with Pammy Jointly wasn’t going to be erased so easily.
By the time we pulled into the alley behind our new off-campus apartment near Warren Woodward University, the light snow had become a storm and the storm a blizzard. If that weren’t enough, both parking spaces for our apartment were occupied.
“It’s Daddy’s pickup,” said Avie. “What’s he doing here?”
“And that white van,” said Koz. “The one that says Interior Conversions & Habitable Habitation Lifestyles on the side. That can only belong to the one spy organization we all know and love.”
We entered the backdoor of our apartment that led into the kitchen, and heard the workmen downstairs in the basement. Sure enough, Daddy was leading a couple of ICHHL technicians in a complete facelift of our dusty, brick-walled basement. They must have arrived shortly after we left for Ann Arbor that morning, and since we’d been gone all day, they were nearly done. Not only had the brick walls been sand-blasted clean and coated with waterproofing, but new flooring, ceiling tile, a washer and dryer, and several pieces of fitness equipment for Avie’s benefit had been installed, along with a sofa and easy chair and a large, flat kitty basked with pillows for Koz. Walls had been erected to divide the space into laundry room, powder room, weight room, and den.
“The basement’s now nicer than our upstairs apartment,” said Avie, who hugged and kissed Daddy hello. “I’ll be able to work out and get fit for my new role as the Wondrous Warhound, so I can have a body to go with the costume Grandma Seedy made for me.”
Koz plunked himself down in his cushioned basket and Avie adjusted the weight stack on the pulling machine.
I said to Daddy, “You must have been at this all day, while we were in Ann Arbor. Did you get a day off from the auto plant?”
“Your grandma Mercedith’s got me working for ICHHL full time now,” said Daddy. “Although I refuse to wear the jumpsuit. This job was easy compared to some of them we’ve done; it’s practically above ground. Everything else is in a tunnel.”
I took this to mean that Daddy was working on the rehabilitation of the underground labs of Megatonic University in Ann Arbor. “Just watch out for Doctor Software and his nephew, Grady,” I warned him. “They’re a couple of evil geniuses, and their hobby is killer robots.”
“I survived raising Ms. Megaton Man,” he said. “And I was married to woman who became the Mod Puma in another dimension.” We watched Avie doing some relatively light lat pulldowns. “Now I’m the father of the Wonderful What’s-her-name.”
Daddy and his crew finished sweeping up and went upstairs. I followed him up to see him out. “You’re not on your way to visit Mama by any chance, are you?” I asked.
“No, I’m pretty tired,” said Daddy. “Just heading home to Boswick-Addison to shower and hit the sack We’ve got a big day on another job tomorrow. Why?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said. I made up a lie about wanting him to give her a message, but that I would tell her myself later. I kissed him goodbye and watched the vehicles leave the alley.
Avie, all sweaty, and Koz came up from the basement and sat at the kitchen table. Avie got out some orange juice and poured glasses for us. “Isn’t it great,” she said. “Our grandma not only turns out to be alive and well but runs a secret government spy agency—and now Daddy works for her. This is going to make going to college even more fun.”
I wasn’t quite as certain. The perks of a new basement rec room was fine and all, but I was beginning to miss the privacy of my old attic garret apartment.
I started down the steps to the basement.
“Where are you going?” asked Avie. “We remembered to turn off the lights.”
“I’m just going to take a quick peek behind the washer and dryer,” I said. “I want to make sure Daddy didn’t install a secret tunnel to Ann Arbor.”
I guess Clyde’s visit with my mama, to settle accounts after his mysterious disappearance before I was born, went well. If there was any negative fallout, I didn’t hear of it. I didn’t have much time to think much about that situation, let alone our daytrip to Ann Arbor and boxing encounter with the Mod Puma or the Contraptoid or Dr. Joe, or to ponder whether my Grandma Seedy’s hunch to keep Doctor Software and Grady Grinnell on staff at Megatonic University to work on killer Bots was a wise move. I hardly had any time to think of my own career as Ms. Megaton Man of anything megaheroic, or indeed much outside of school, since my last undergraduate semester of college was already in full swing.
The next morning, bright and early, Avie and I trudged through the sixteen inches of snow that had fallen overnight—not all of it had yet been shoveled or plowed away—to get to our first class, an Introduction to Art History course we were taking together. Actually, only I was enrolled in the class; Avie was just tagging along because this week we would be meeting in the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts, right across from the Arbor State University Extension, a place Avie and I knew quite well from our own excursions.
At the early hour we arrived, the museum wasn’t open yet to the public, but our class was given special clearance to tour the galleries early. My classmates assembled inside the Farnsworth entrance lobby, among them my friends Nancy, Hadleigh, Audrey, and Chas, all of whom had signed up for art history, too. They were all already there, and with the exception of Chas, all of them lived only a couple blocks from the museum. They weren’t nearly has out of breath as we were, having trudged a greater distance through the snow.
We had all taken off our coats and had turned them over to the coat check, along with our book bags. Chas had his sketchbook and the others had notebooks, and we all had a fistful of sharpened pencils, the only writing or drawing implements allowed in the museum. “Their policy makes no sense,” Chas the artist complained. “You could do just as much damage with a sharp pencil as you could spilling ink or whatever, maybe more.”
“You’re not planning on attacking any masterpieces, are you, André Breton?” asked Audrey.
“If he does, the Wondrous Warhound will have to deck him,” said Avie. Chas got a kick out of that, since he had devised Avie’s megaheroic identity.
In addition to us, there were maybe ten other students taking the class, and we were all huddled near the admissions desk at the appointed time. For me and Avie, visiting the museum was nothing new, but it was a big deal for our class, most of whom had never set foot in an art museum even though it was free with our Warren Woodward IDs. Class had only met so far in a nondescript room in a campus building where we viewed slides and read through our textbooks with the teaching assistant—actually, a teaching fellow because she already had earned her master’s degree. This was our first collective visit to the gallery to view actual art.
More importantly, this would be the first time we’d be meeting our mysterious professor who still hadn’t returned from traveling abroad over the holiday.
“Do you see our teacher yet?” asked Hadleigh.
“Does anyone even know what he looks like?” asked Chas.
“I hear he sleeps with his teaching assistant,” said Audrey.
“You think everyone does that,” said Avie. “Just because you and Wilton…”
We all looked around for an adult who looked like a college professor, but saw no one who looked the part. There was no one but us students and the guards, and someone behind the admissions desk, and our teaching fellow.
The teaching fellow was a beautiful young woman named Michele Selket. With her dark hair and bangs, she looked like a vaguely exotic yet more restrained Bettie Page. She wore slacks and loafers and a frouzy pullover over a dress shirt, and carried a clipboard with our attendance sheet. Chas had already sketched her several times in the black of the classroom, fitting her out in an Egyptian princess costume for his comic book adventures. He was busy sketching her now.
“All right, everyone,” Michele announced. “We’re going into the galleries. Professor bar-Joseph has already gone ahead to prepare a place for us; we’ll be meeting him inside. Follow me, please.”
“Already gone to prepare a place for us?” whispered Nancy. “Who is this guy? Jesus Christ?”
“Blasphemy!” hissed Hadleigh.
“Wilton once took a class with him,” said Audrey. “He’s an internationally-recognized authority on antiquities. Some say he speaks from first-hand knowledge—rumor has it he’s immortal. Who knows? If he isn’t Jesus Christ, maybe he knew him.”
“Blasphemy!” repeated Hadleigh.
Based on this build-up, I supposed our teaching fellow Michele would lead us straight to the art of the ancient world—Egypt or Mesopotamia, or at least Greece and Rome. After all, the museum did have one ceramic lion made of bricks from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. But no, Avie and I knew the way to that part of the museum, and we were heading in another direction—to the spacious, modern galleries. There, huge canvases hung floor to ceiling streaked with dye-like drips of paint; minimalist sculptures of pure geometry protruded from the walls like steps. A giant electric plug, fabricated from furniture-grade wood, hung several feet off the floor. And Detroit had its requisite stack of wooden facsimiles of scouring pad cartons.
Amid all of this modernity, a man sat cross-legged on a medium-sized Turkish carpet rolled out in the middle of the polished marble floor. His back was to us as we approached him; his long black hair flecked with grey hung over a black sweater. He wore faded, frayed jeans. By his bare feet sat a small brass dish with some aromatic incense burning.
“Does he have permission to do that?” asked Avie. “That would seem to be a violation of the fire marshal.”
“Shh,” whispered Michele.
The man stirred at the sound Michele made. “Is that you, Michele? Are all of our flock in attendance?”
“Every last sheep, present and accounted for, Doctor Messiah,” said Michele.
The man rose from the lotus position with a limber, flowing, effortless movement. Standing fully erect, there was nothing of the stiffness I, for example, would have felt, sitting on a hard floor for any period of time. “Thank you, Michele,” he said. “There is a place for you in the afterlife.”
Professor Joshua bar-Joseph turned around and studied us. He seemed ageless, or at least it was hard to pinpoint his age. Clearly mature, his came up under his medium-length beard. He had a long, aquiline nose and arched eyebrows. His eyes were piercing, intense. He looked like one of those far eastern depictions of a Semitic or Caucasian swami. He wore a large black and white yin-yang symbol of some kind of shiny material, perhaps ceramic or stone, rimmed with gold, that hung from a large gold chain. The symbol seemed to revolve slowly, yet remain stationary, exerting almost an hypnotic effect.
He studied each of us intently in absolute silence for several minutes. Finally, he spoke.
“I regret not being here for your first few weeks of classes,” he apologized, “although I trust Ms. Selket acquitted herself admirably. You’ve all have learned some basic art historical vocabulary, I understand.”
Everyone murmured affirmation.
The professor turned and looked around the room slowly, no longer at us but at the works of art that surrounded us. He spent several more minutes of intense silence, doing a complete, slow one-eighty, before turning his attention back to us.
“Does anyone find it remarkable that I asked you here, to this room?” asked the professor.
Chas raised his hand. “I was kind of wondering why we’re starting in the present and not in the past,” he said.
“Why would we do that?” asked the professor.
“Maybe your point is that history doesn’t have a beginning, or an end,” said another student, a girl. “Maybe it’s all cyclical.”
“Exactly!” cried the professor. “Now, what do you think of these works?” he asked.
“I think every age has its own art, its own style,” ventured another girl. “I suppose every period gets the art they deserve.”
“It sure takes up a lot of space,” said Chas. “I’d rather see some Old Masters than all this stuff.”
“You don’t like modernism?” asked the professor.
“Well, I think it’s all right,” said Chas. “I mean, I suppose it’s okay…”
After some hesitation, another girl raised her hand. “I think it’s all a matter of how you see the world.” Another offered that everything in the room was a valid study of form, of non-objective depiction of the self, and other modernist gobbledy gook. Another student, a boy, said that these works were expressions of the times we live in.
“What if I told you every work of art in this room was bullshit?!” said the professor, ending the sentence in a shout. “That everything in this entire museum was bullshit? That all art everywhere is bullshit! That everything we treasure, that everything we hold dear, is a complete waste of time?”
He paused to gauge his effect on us. Not surprisingly, most of my classmates were speechless.
“This work says nothing about the world we live in,” said the professor. “How on earth could it? It has passed directly from an artist’s studio directly into a curator’s collection, without society ever having passed judgment on it. Do you call that democratic? Yet it is offered to the public as art history—as a fait accompli—and goes straight into your textbooks without so much as a murmur. And somnambulist public accepts this as culture. Can you think of anything more ludicrous?” He paused and glowered at us. “It’s an inside con job!!”
By this point, all of us were too petrified to speak. I wondered for a moment whether our teacher was going to lead us on a rampage, tearing art from the walls and hurling it to the ground, casting it down as Jesus did with the tables of the money changers in the Temple of Jerusalem, or like iconoclasts destroying depictions of saints and angels during the Reformation. I worried that guards might come pouring out of the woodwork at any moment to tackle us all and remove this wild man bodily from the museum.
“Art history is bunk,” said the professor. “It jumped the rails sometime shortly after the invention of photography—that horrid technology, now amplified cinematically and electronically—that does all our seeing for us. Hegel announced that art history came to an end nearly two centuries ago—who are we to question him? This class is not about the artistic wasteland of the present—for there can be no art in the present. It’s an oxymoron. This class isn’t about the past, either, for how can we discuss the history of something if we don’t know what it is that we are searching for? It’s about learning to see, to think for oneself. It’s about the future. Above all, it’s about time itself.”
He looked sternly around the room at us students again.
“We are going to take a trip through time, to learn how we got here, and perhaps to learn where we are going.” The professor paused. “Have any of you ever traveled through time?”
Avie looked at me; the professor, perhaps following her eyes, turned to me as well. Suddenly, all the class was looking at me as his eyes locked onto mine; he took a few steps toward me.
“You,” he said to me. “You have traveled through time; I can sense it.”
My eyes widened. “Uh, no sir,” I said. ‘But I know a few people that have.”
Some of the students laughed. The professor smiled.
“My mistake,” he said. “And yet there’s something about you…” He looked me up and down. “You will do a great deal of traveling through time and space, young lady. In a sense, you already have.”
At this point, I was hoping for a bell to ring to bring the class to an end, but it did not.
Someone dropped a pencil instead. Its echoes reverberated in the vast gallery.
Professor bar-Joseph gave a nod to Michele. “That’s enough for today,” he said to her. “Next week, let’s meet in the Asian galleries.” He turned and stepped onto the Turkish carpet, and in a fluid motion, sat down again, assuming the lotus position.
Michele looked at her watch. “Okay, listen up,” she said to us. “The museum’s now open to the public. Your assignment is to look through at least five galleries over the next half hour, select a work of art, and write a two-page reflection exercise, due at the beginning of our next class. Be sure to analyze the medium and subject matter, and note the date, country and name of the artist, if any. Also, topics for you research papers are due in two weeks, so if anybody would like to discuss ideas, now would be a good time to talk to me.”
The professor was already in a deep trance as the class broke up. A few students clustered around Michele, who wandered into the next gallery. The rest of us broke off for parts unknown within the museum.
My group wandered toward the nineteenth-century galleries.
“So, what do you make of our professor?” asked Audrey.
“He’s an anti-modernist, for sure,” said Nancy. “I’m not sure I like his teaching style at all.”
“I don’t know,” said Avie. “He just wants to encourage us to look at the world through fresh eyes.”
“What did the TF call him?” asked Chas. “Doctor Methuselah?”
“Doctor Messiah,” I said.
“Blasphemy,” said Hadleigh.
Next: The Once and Future Crime Busters
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Archival Images:
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| The Asp and Doctor Messiah, 1995. See chapter #69, chapter #70, and chapter #78. |
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| Doctor Messiah and Michele Selket in Megaton Man #0 [Bizarre Heroes #17] (Fiasco Comics Inc., July 1996). |
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| Scene from an upcoming Maxi-Series episode. |
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