Introducing...

As per Michael Kelly, I thought I’d dig up an early attempt at fiction of my own. When I was a boy, I invented a superhero named, if I recall correctly, Powerman. Now, Powerman was somewhat unremarkable as a superhero, save his extraordinary origins, which I wrote in complete sincerity.
You see, his story begins in the future, when a man and a robot were walking along the beach together. Suddenly, they were attacked by a lion! Terrified, they fled into the ocean, only to be followed by the persistent beast. Then, (oh no!) they were attacked by a shark! So now, the man, the robot, the lion and the shark are all locked in a life or death struggle when (oh no!) they are attacked by an eagle! You’d think that would be as bad as things could get but then, the whole party is struck by lightning! The lightning strike fuses all five creatures/machines into one extraordinary person: Powerman! With the strength of a lion, swimming skills (?) of a shark, flight of an eagle and super-tough skin of a robot, he is set to… I don’t know, fight crime, presumably.
Now, seen through the lens of maturity, I will concede that there are some troubling elements in this scenario.

1)What exactly is the relationship of the man and the robot? Did the man build the robot? That would be kind of poignant; he built himself a companion. Are they just friends? What a marvelous future, where you can meet robots socially and invite them for a walk on the beach!

2)The robot. Now, at the end of the story, Powerman is blessed with armor-like skin, thanks to the robot. We can infer from this that the robot himself was super-tough. Yet, when confronted with a lion, the nigh-invulnerable robots first reaction is: "Christ! Let’s run for it!" You’d think he could deal with a lion relatively easily… Also, as a robot would his first instinct be to run into the ocean? You don’t generally think of robots as being creatures of the sea.

3)The lion. Okay, this is a future where robots are readily available, but apparently they have not found a way to stop lions from attacking you at the beach? I don’t think lions are really much of a hazard today, so I’d like to think that in the future we could have the lion-attack problem pretty much licked. Maybe, between now in the future there will be some sort of lion baby boom and our beaches will be lousy with them. That being said, wouldn’t you avoid the beach in that case? Maybe the man thought he was safe because he was with a robot, and didn’t realize that his robot was such a sniveling coward.

4)The ocean. Presumably, the man and the robot did not go deep enough to avoid the lion, which was probably not a terrific swimmer. However, they were out deep enough that a shark could swim up and join the fun. Maybe it was an unusually aquatic lion, or a very small shark.

5)The eagle. Now I don’t know a lot about eagles, but I don’t think they routinely zero in on robot/man/lion/shark melees as the ideal prey. Maybe this was a really gung-ho, balls-out kind of eagle, who just liked to fuck shit up. In that case he would prove an excellent addition to the Powerman menagerie

6)The lightning. This is just stupid.

7)The powers. Well, for one thing, I’m not sure lions are really that strong. I mean, I’m sure they are stronger than humans, but probably not by much. So Powerman is only relatively strong than other people. The contribution of the shark is also troubling, as being able to swim is also not a terrifically effective crime fighting ability. Then there is the eagle. While I never had a really clear image of what Powerman looked like, I know he was never meant to have wings. Somehow, the eagle would pass along the ability to fly sans wings; an ability the eagle itself had failed to master.

So, yes, I’ll agree there are some kinks I need to work out. This I promise you, though, in 2007 you will be lining up to see Powerman: the Movie. Hear me and obey!