#162: What Cape Saw

Music blared in basement of the West Forest apartment of the James sisters, Clarissa and Avie, as they worked out on weight machines a couple of college girls should not have been able to afford. The Police, the B-52s, Was (Not Was), Prince and the Revolution, and Morris Day and The Time, carefully curated by Avie on high bias chrome type-II mixed cassette tape, streamed from a boom box, replete with Dolby noise reduction.

#122: Real Time

“Nuts!” I cried. “Clarissa Too’s the Civilian; she belongs in the Civilian Reality—not me!”
        I rose from my seat; it was no longer a leather-upholstered side chair I had sat down in. Now, it was just a battered, metal folding chair. Gone was the luxuriant Oriental carpet and oaken desk. It was still obviously the same space I had entered with Clarissa Too and Michele Selket, because I could see the distant horizon of Detroit through the windows, but they were no longer there. The top floor of the Wardell Building no longer housed Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute and its rare manuscripts and first editions in tall, elegant wooden bookcases. Instead, it was just a massive storage room, dusty and full of cobwebs, filled with utilitarian metal shelves stuffed with old cardboard boxes and rusty filing cabinets nobody ever visited.

#106: Drawing Board Booty Call

On my way out of Chas’s apartment building the next morning, who do I run into on the landing at the foot of the steps but Peggy, the rich white Grosse Pointe girl slumming in Detroit and studying literature at Warren Woodward University, returning from her escapades out on the town. The look on her face told me immediately she knew the kinds of sleazy things Chas and I had been up to the night before. “How is the undiscovered genius, anyway?” she asked dismissively. “Haven’t seen him crawl out from under his rock lately.”

#90: Profusion and Proliferation

Introduction to Volume IV: Civilian

I graduated from Arbor State University in the spring of 1984—a year late, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere and at the time was still trying to live down. Briefly, I attribute the delay in part to what I call my delayed freshman crisis. Being a studious student, it took me a couple years of college before I came out of my shell socially and sexually, aided by more extroverted friends and various psychoactive substances, not to mention a serendipitous, protracted hookup with Yarn Man.
        Another impediment was my discovery, in the summer of 1982, that I was a natural-born megahero, which earned me a costume and some quirky new colleagues. As Ms. Megaton Man, as I called myself, the few adventures I’d had, if you could call them that, were a distraction at best, only making my return to the dean’s list that much more challenging.

#87: Those Chosen Few

In the parking lot outside the Big Yard, I spotted my father, Clyde Phloog; although he was in his civilian form and not his default Silver Age Megaton Man stature, he still seemed a head taller than everyone in the crowd. He was dressed in a sharp business suit and was snapping away with a self-developing film camera as Stella and I approached, triumphant, in our caps and gowns, clutching the scrolled mock-sheepskins we’d received on the stage.

#85: Who Watches the Watchmen?

I’d been haranguing Avie for twenty minutes with my theory about the Multimensions, and my suspicions concerning Reverend Enoch, while she went through her workout in the basement of our apartment.

#84: Archangels and Other Responsible Grown-Ups

The weekend before finals week, all I could think about was the impromptu trip I had taken with Kozmik Kat to the Forbidden Future. Most people visit Europe after they graduate, as a present; I had accidentally visited 2184 before my graduation. It felt like I’d had desert before finishing my vegetables; graduation was going to be anticlimactic.

#81: Views from Olympus

“What up doe, Banky?” I said as I entered the Troy+Thems hall.
     Few people get my sense of humor to begin with, and my white colleagues weren’t sure they had permission to laugh at a black woman doing her impression of a racial stereotype. But Rubber Brother loved it.
     “Ha! Buckwheat from The Little Rascals,” he chortled. “Clarissa, that breaks me up every time you do it!”

#80: Escape-Ism From Flung-Into-Ness

At first, I wasn’t sure why I had been so rough on Trent over breakfast.
     True, I did have a lot on my mind, and men can have such rotten timing. And he was being awfully presumptuous, making plans without keeping me posted. I suppose he also thought he’d been loyal to me all this time, just to still be thinking of me, and then finally, after long indecision, acting upon it. Still, it wasn’t like he’d been trapped in another dimension all this time; he could have called, or borrowed a car to see me, or written me letters.

#77: Schroedinger’s Cat

The Wilbert Dunlevy Himmelfarb Presentation Festival of Undergraduate Research is held every year in mid-to late March, depending on when spring break ends and Easter occurrs, on the main campus of Arbor State University. This year, it landed on March 21 through 23, 1984. Sponsored by the Albert Kahn School of Arts and Sciences, the festival took over almost an entire floor of the Modern Language Building, with programming running concurrently in more than two dozen classrooms. Drawing from all the satellite campuses including my own extension in midtown Detroit, the programming featured mostly seniors giving brief synopses of the senior theses they had completed during the fall semester, but ambitious underclassmen could also enter to showcase their research projects.

#75: He, She, Him, Her

“Shouldn’t it be the Positive Woman?” asked Avie. “If the Negative Man stopped being a man, he might have stopped being made of anti-matter as well…”
     “No, he was still made of anti-matter,” I replied. “I mean she. He’s a she now. She just switched genders. Or sexes. Or whatever you want to call it. I mean, he switched…into a she.”
     We were all sitting around Wilton Ashe’s bookish apartment on Ferry Street at Cass Avenue—Avie, Wilton, Audrey, and I. It had a big bay window open to the south, and was crammed with all kinds of houseplants and bookshelves. It only had one bedroom but it had a nice-sized kitchen and living room. The walls were white and everything was open and bright. The sky was clear and blue and the steam heat cranking from the radiators almost gave the illusion of spring or summer, even though it was still winter.

#73: The Whistleroar of the Wondrous Warhound

Neither I nor Avie had bothered to do any cleaning in our apartment since we’d moved in before New Year’s, except for a quick tidying up before my birthday gathering. She had promised to dust and run the sweeper in the upstairs living room, and I agreed to handle the kitchen and bathroom, which was right next to it. We both managed to find ways to procrastinate—me with my homework and her with her working out in the basement. But by mid-February, the bathroom was starting to get funky, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. So there I was, scrubbing the tiles in our shower. I could hear Avie clacking away at the weight machine down in the basement, and was more than a bit perturbed at her. What if Clyde and Alice² were to drop by? Of course, this wasn’t likely—I hadn’t heard from them since they’d gone to New York.

#71: The Troy+Thems

It was the first of February, the day before my birthday, and I was walking home from my afternoon class at Old Main when I noticed a white van in the parking lot of the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City. This wasn’t just the usual white van belonging to the residents, my friends the Y+Thems, which was always there, but a second van parked alongside it. On the side of this van were the words Inter-faith Church Healing for Hopeless Liabilities, and there was a dumpster unceremoniously plopped down next to it that ICHHL workers were quickly filling with debris.
     “Oh, no,” I said to myself. “What now?”

#67: Knock Down, Drag Out

I shed my bookbag, winter coat, and civvies, stripping down to my Ms. Megaton Man leotard and panties. Koz took my bookbag before I could retrieve my yellow gloves and boots, let alone my red cape, brass buttons, or translucent-orange visor. “You won’t be needing that stuff,” he said, throwing me a pair of white silk boxing trunks instead. “Here, put these on,” he said as he grabbed a pair of red boxing gloves that hung on a peg on the wall.

     I noticed Alice², the Mod Puma, had shed her boots with their razor-like talons, so we were both barefoot. Presumably, she wasn’t wearing her taloned gloves, either, under her boxing mitts. She had slipped on a pair of black boxers nearly indistinguishable in color from her navy blue tights.

     All that was left after my gloves were tied was the padded head guard that boxers wear around their faces for protection during sparring matches, and a mouthpiece to protect the dentistry. “Is that really necessary?” I asked, as Koz proffered these.

     “Better safe than sorry,” said Koz.

#66: Plenty of Free Parking

I don’t know why I tell my sister Avril anything, because she always makes things more complicated.
     I mentioned to her that I desperately wanted to visit our Grandma while she was in Ann Arbor, and to visit my biological father, the Silver Age Megaton Man, and our alternate mama, the Mod Puma, at Megatonic University.
     “Great,” said Avie. “I’ll drive.”
     “No, I just want to fly in and out, real quick,” I said. By myself, was the implication.
     “Nonsense,” said Avie. “Seedy is my Grandma, too, and Alice² is our alternate mama.”
     “I’ll come along,” said Kozmik Kat. “I like the Mod Puma…I like any feline character of the female persuasion.”

#65: At No Fixed Address

“What possible justification could you have for evicting me, on the night before Christmas?” I said, my eyes narrowing at my landlord. “I pay my rent on time. I’m clean, I’m quiet…”
     “Up and down the stairs with your friends all the time,” he replied. “Men, women, all hours. You have some kind of twenty-four hour orgy going on in my attic!”
     The lady on the first floor who listened to fire-and-brimstone radio preachers all the time, I figured, had blown the whistle. I resisted the urge to break my landlord’s jaw in three places, something I was pretty sure I was angry enough to do—even without my megapowers. His words were so completely shocking, it took me a moment to realize his breath was rank with booze.

#63: The Snows of State Fair Avenue

“Wait a minute!” cried Yarn Man. “How do we know it’s really the Silver Age Megaton Man and the Mod Puma the Time Turntable has brought back from another dimension—and not just a couple o’ crummy imposters?”
     The Mod Puma turned and glared at him. “Bing, how would you like the polka dots on your boxers to migrate up to your eyeballs?” Feline-like, she lunged off the turntable and into the snow, executed a few practice karate kicks with her taloned feet, and held her clawed hands stiffly in front of her face, ready to chop.
     Yarn Man grimaced and covered his groin with his red mittens. “That’s the real Mod Puma, all right,” he conceded.
     The psychedelic cat relaxed her stance. “I thought so,” she said.

#62: This Fairground, This Battlefield

I wasn’t wearing my Ms. Megaton Man uniform under my clothes for extra insulation as I usually did this time of year, since I was wearing my nice dress again to visit Mama. So, I had to race back to where Avie had parked her Pacer. There, in the back seat among the groceries and gifts, I had stowed my book bag, just in case. I stripped right there, in the parking lot behind Mama’s apartment building, hoping none of her neighbors happened to be looking out their back windows at just that moment to see her daughter turn into a megahero.

#61: Cool Jazz Christmas in the Medieval Court Café

The Slick dashed into my john to take a leak; how romantic, I thought. In the front room of my studio garret apartment, I stripped off my civilian clothing and stood barefoot in my Ms. Megaton Man body suit, waiting. I wondered if he’d have the courtesy to put the toilet seat back down when he was through.

#60: Spotting a Roof-Runner

I was downtown doing some Christmas shopping—window shopping, really—for Mama and Avie, and wasn’t having much luck. I never knew what to get Daddy—Avie and I usually teamed up to get him a power tool from the hardware store at the last minute, so I was putting off any consideration of that gift entirely. My senior thesis was turned in, and except for a final exam tomorrow, my semester was in the bag. The following spring semester would be my last as a college undergrad. But instead of a sense of relief and anticipation, there was a knot in the pit of my stomach. I found myself worried about Dana, about what I may have done to screw things up and turn her into a megavillain. I dreaded when we’d meet again, when I would inevitably have to kick her ass.