#139: Flashback to Microville

Editorial Note: We interrupt our regularly-scheduled first-person narrative by Clarissa James to bring you this third person (omniscient) flashback from the life of Trent Phloog. Enjoy! (Part 1 of 6)

The District Universe—May 1976

Golden afternoon sunshine spread across the verdant cornfields surrounding Microville Senior High School as their Bicentennial graduation ceremony came to a rousing conclusion. There was hardly a dry eye as the sixteen-piece Mudcat marching band offered a very out-of-tune rendition of “Pomp and Circumstance” while a score of administrators, faculty, and other dignitaries filed off the plywood platform set up in the Mudcat’s football field—actually, a pasture behind the school building surrounded by cornfields. These joined the crowd of a hundred or more family and friends who were still congratulating their twenty-three members of the Class of ’76, a bumper crop for the rural school district, arrayed in their navy-blue robes and mortarboards.

#21: Daddy Issues

It was the fourth week of September, with the semester well underway, that something miraculous happened: I found myself in the kitchen in the middle of the week having lunch with Trent, Stella, and baby Simon in his high chair. A meal with all three of them almost never happened, given our busy schedules, despite living in the same house. Pammy was absent—she was back in Ann Arbor but was busy lecturing and in the final stages of preparing her manuscript for publication, which was to be released the following spring.

The Secret Origin of Clarissa, In Color!

Here's the moment of truth from Bizarre Heroes #13 (Fiasco Comics Inc., September 1995), in which Clarissa James learns that she is the love-child of her African-American mom and Clyde Phloog, the Silver Age Megaton Man! (What can be said? Opposites attract!) In color for the first time.