Hyperion/Supreme Power Mega-Post Part 1

[proteus_lives]

Greetings True Believers! I have been inspired to do a series of posts about Mark Milton/Hyperion of Earth-31916 A.K.A the Supreme Power Universe. Hyperion is a Superman analog and the whole concept of the Squadron Supreme is a Marvel riff of the Justice League. What began as a shallow idea really took off. I really suggest the 1985-86 Squadron Supreme maxi-series by Mark Gruenwald. It's fantastic. In 2003 Marvel published a MAX reboot of the series called Supreme Power and it is also excellent.

This series has some simple but interesting themes. What if a Superman wasn't raised by kindly farming couple? What if it wasn't so easy to fit into the human race, even if you look like them? Would people, governments and others react to the sudden induction of superhumans to the equation? What effect would superhumans have on a realistic world?

This post is about Hyperion's arrival, childhood and the first stage of his super-hero career. Enjoy!



Suggested Tags: publisher: marvel comics, creator: gary frank, creator: j michael straczynski, char: hyperion, nsfw: sex, title: supreme power



The story begins like many others. A farming couple witness something fall from the sky into a cornfield.



The story starts to change here. They take the baby home but this event has not gone unnoticed....



The baby is taken into the custody of the American Government. I liked this because Hyperion came down during the seventies. There is no way in hell that the US government wouldn't see something like this coming down in their own backyard.

Carter cameo!



I liked this page too, it shows people grappling with what was just science fiction yesterday. They also recognize the power and danger of their situation.

Two government agents are brought into the project. This man and woman are going to be the alien's parents. It's a twenty year mission with them cutting off all contact with the outside world and devoting themselves completely to their mission.

They meet the baby.



I like the scope of the operation. Choosing the name and already they are attempting to shape the mind of Mark/Hyperion.

His parents give him a puppy for his birthday. In a survillerence room two operatives discuss how many breeds and names they went through until they settled on one that seemed to fit the subject psychologically. His name is spot, his comics career will be a short one.



More reality. Toddlers are too rough with dogs sometimes and sometimes dogs don't like that. Or is it because the dog can smell Mark's alieness? Either way, he got his powers a lot earlier then Clark did.

His parents are freaking.



I understand their reaction. They are monitored at all times but how would you react to living with a child that could kill you whenever he wanted?

Mark starts to grow up, being home-schooled by his parents and "teachers" in a very special curriculum. And like all American children, he grows up in front of the TV.



I also like the progression of real-world events.

Mark is entering his teenage years and he's lonely. He's also starting to question why his parents don't let him outside the fence and the guarded area.



This converstion with his father with effect Mark's entire life.



I can barely express how much I love this page. The father's whispered, "god" while Mark hovers in front of the sun, layers of meaning and foreshadowing. And both them are so scared. The father, "Is this when he starts killing us or not following instructions? Mark: "Please don't say no, don't make me do something. Please don't reject me."

Later destroys a book with his flash-vision while his teacher is holding it. She is unharmed. He has another conversation with his father.



The project leaders decide it's too dangerous to send Mark to a real school, Project: Hyperion would be too exposed. So they create a school manned by project officials and populated by children of the project members.




Mark is taken to school in an APC and it goes down hill from there. None of the other students will speak or sit with him. They're scared.

Mark uses his x-ray vision to follow an overheard conversation in the girl's restroom.



Ouch, social rejection to the max.

Mark tells his parents he doesn't want to back to the school. Life returns to normal for a few years until it's time for the first Gulf War and Hyperion's first operation.



President Bush asks Mark to assist in the ousting of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Mark destroys Iraqi tanks and planes.



This pattern continues for a few years. Mark does secret missions for government but a being like Hyperion can't be kept under wraps forever. One journalist is on the trail and putting it together over the years piece by piece. He meets with a government contact who tells him the basic truth under pain of death if his name is mentioned. The reporter's reaction.



How would you react to such forbidden knowledge?

It's not just him. Word and rumors are slowly leaking out. The new Clinton administration decides to head them off and control Hyperion's exposure to the world.

The same reporter receives a phone call in the middle of the night asking him to step out to his balcony.



That's another page I loved. I love the change from the previous page and I adore that costume. It's functional and stormtrooperish. It's very dark and cool.

Of course the world flips out and the president holds a press conference Slick-Willie style.





And he introduces....



And "The greatest weapon in the United States strategic arsenal becomes the world's first super-hero."

Mark visits the reporter again.



So Hyperion does the hero thing for a while and the Project decides it's time for the parents to exit stage-left. They fake a plane emergency to ensure that Mark doesn't discover the meeting.





Mark is supposed to go on a fishing trip with his folks but they give him a bogus mission to distract him. (What they think is a bogus mission.)

They send him after the "Atlanta Blur" an urban legend that might be another superhuman. The emergence of other superhumans will factor in enormously on Mark's life.

I like what he does to track the Blur.





Creepy huh? But smart use of super-hearing.

Mark catches up to the Blur but the speedster doesn't want to talk. He does a left at super-speed and Mark can't make a course correction in time.

Mark is excited about discovering another superhuman, "I'm not alone!" Then some army guys arrive and tell him there's been an accident. Mark zips off to the accident and admits to find his parents.





I love the dead ocean life. It's realistic, he used his flash-vision under water and it was deadly.

The government puts Mark up in a new apartment in a major city. He has a request.





Isn't that fucking sad? Mark is still isolated and alone. All his life he's been lied to and manipulated. In part two, the US government and the world will learn the consequences of that. Mark will also encounter other superhumans and begin to discover the wider aspects and results of his fall to earth. I hope you enjoyed!

Comments

[halialkers]

Damn, this is good. And I like how it approaches the different US Presidents. Though one could argue that in this particular Timeline Jimmy Carter did everything to fuck up this particular USA by giving it a ticking time bomb.

[thokstar]

Though one could argue that in this particular Timeline Jimmy Carter did everything to fuck up this particular USA by giving it a ticking time bomb.

That's not really any different than the real Jimmy Carter, who had good intentions but not the will or ability to carry them out properly.

[halialkers]

Creating Al-Qaeda unintentionally is one thing. Creating a PMD who is going to be extremely pissed off at an entire country is quite a bit more of a Dethroning Moment of Suck.

[thokstar]

I wasn't particularly thinking of any specific incident; the main difference between this scenario and real life Jimmy Carter is the absence of a baby from space.

[geoffsebesta]

Explain.

[halialkers]

He pretty much gave them a Superman-analogue, and a realistic Superman is a self-contained 21st Century military more or less, who is going to discover "Wait a minute, everything I was told was a lie? FTS!" and then the USA is boned. Especially since Hyperion looks strong enough to shove off everything short of a nuclear weapon or a MOAB. And there's even the possibility that if he considers the USA to be judged by the fruits it's shown him (lies and treachery) he might defect to China or alternately join the Taliban-analogues. In which case the USA goes from being boned to being utterly fucked.

[geoffsebesta]

And what should he have done instead?

[halialkers]

Given the guy a chance for a happy life with parents who might have not screwed him up quite as badly? I mean, shit, what the actual events were implied already that Hyperion was screwed up this way. The parents that were going to raise him would have at least had a choice in the matter.

[geoffsebesta]

So they were going to take the superpowered indestructible alien life form and...release it into the wild?

Wouldn't that be insanely irresponsible?

Or should they have chosen better parents? If so, how?

[halialkers]

Well, I'd hardly call planet Earth the wild these days. It's not like he'd be living with Ug the Caveman. As far as can be seen he'd be just another human.

Well, a start would have been to simply use the ones that found him in the first place and not actors paid by the government.

[geoffsebesta]

You are seriously expecting the American government to take an extraterrestrial life form with god-knows-what space diseases and put them into a foster home.

Leaving aside this is the 70s, the era of the Andromeda Strain, but even if nothing went horribly skin-meltingly wrong, if time had gone on and he hit puberty and I don't know, torn some high school kid in half by accident, or flash-fried an EMT or who knows what, it would have come out that the government had him and let him go. And you thought Willie Horton made a stink...

I freaking demand that any aliens that crash-land on earth are kept in quarantine until we are sure they will not accidentally do to us what the Europeans accidentally did to the Native Americans, and vice versa.

[halialkers]

Leaving aside that something from another planet evolved under such entirely different circumstances that it is arguable that its diseases would no more affect humans than humans die from tree diseases that cross over to affect humans.....a single alien could not bring that kind of catastrophe. Unless said alien is a soldier from some society where each individual soldier is worth an entire human society's military, which is debatable unless we're talking one of those sci-fi societies that violate the laws of physics.

Space diseases are not likely through simple evolutionary physics. In comics Nightwing and Starfire can make babies. In the real world Starfire would resemble more Cthulhu and would hardly be capable of necessarily even breathing earth's atmosphere to start with due to said biochemical barriers.

[geoffsebesta]

Ha, I just walked outside and said to myself, "The next thing I'm gonna hear is the old Niven chestnut that Lois is more likely to be able to breed with an ear of corn than she is with Superman."

That is no excuse for irresponsibility. The fact is that this child looks like a human, even though it is not. There are many reasons why this could be and nearly all of them raise the possibility of non-earth-normal diseases. Although the odds seem very high against it, by allowing something like this child into the population you are taking a chance with the lives of every person on earth.

The American horror of disease has very real roots. Remember that smallpox is the main reason why you and I are not having this conversation in Cherokee.

This child proves by its very existence that these people do not know everything about genetics. He could be a chimera, a doppleganger, a clone, a mutant, he could be from the future or an alternate dimension, or he could be a tulpa, or any number of other things.

To expect the government to not study this, and very carefully, is not only unreasonable in the sense of expectation but unreasonable in the sense of survival.

[halialkers]

Actually, we'd be having this conversation most likely in one of the Iroquoian languages of the North, but I digress.

And it could be some form of convergent evolution or summat. Since disease spreads by things that are unlikely to spread from someone invulnerable.....

And in any case, a real alien is going to look more like

these than like these:

[geoffsebesta]

granted. So do you think Hyperion is not an alien?

And why does that make you think the government should abdicate all responsibility in his care and study?

[halialkers]

I think he's the result of poor imagination, frankly. One wonders how a god-fearing couple from Kansas would interpret Yog-Sothoth dropping in a spaceship in front of them, though.....

Because if he is a member of a hostile race which could potentially come back to get him and they discover how we treated a *young* member of their species we've just given a casus belli for an entire species of super-powered adults to go asskicking.

[geoffsebesta]

That said, I'm a bit annoyed that you take Carter to task as if he behaved monstrously when there isn't a single thing you could name that he could have done better.

[lamashtar]

I admit, I think killing the kid was safer. In the end, we discover that Mark was engineered to look like a human because he was a bioweapon designed to take over a primitive superstitious society.

Of course, if Carter had, probably the plot would've changed so that he was indeed a convergent evolution product, and simply lost by his species, or given to our planet as a test.

[blakeyrat]

Great thread, but we have no more reason to believe aliens *won't* look (vaguely at least) human than we do to believe aliens will look human.

Assuming they evolve on a planet similar to ours, well... even on our planet we have mammals that look nearly identical to fish, because they just happened to evolve into the same biological niche. If the ability to form a big self-aware brain is a specific niche, it's not unthinkable that any lifeform that evolves in that niche will look similar.

But really, I think until we meet an alien, it's a gigantic blank slate. We'll probably not have Starfire, and we'll probably not have bug-face up there either.

[halialkers]

Er...yeah, actually, the evidence for human aliens is pretty thin. The Burgess Shale Fossils are more alien than most sci-fi creatures except some of Lovecraft's. And in any case, presuming we meet a bipedal tetrapod, what happens if they look like Pan (aka like demons to the Fundies)?

[cmdr_zoom]

The thing is this... you can't just say "give him to the 'Kents', perfect people who will raise him to be a wholesome boy." Because they don't actually exist. Even if you could find a nice Midwestern farm couple (or whatever) who can be trusted with such awesome responsibility, we're talking about something like a sentient atomic bomb. Who, if it follows anything like a human pattern of development (which is by NO MEANS certain), will go through moods and periods of being unreasonable, selfish, and immensely dangerous. We see that here where baby Mark, without really meaning to, incinerates a dog. Because he was scared.

Have you ever seen "It's a Good Life", where a small town lives in terror of the omnipotent boy in their midst? Or read "Miracle Monday", the second Superman novel by one of his regular writers, Elliot S! Maggin, in which Jonathan Kent has a dream where Superboy does not have a code vs. killing? In the latter, Pa finally decides the only solution is to go dig up the kryptonite that they found after a meteor shower; but his shovel strikes the hard chest of Superboy, who has apparently been lying there waiting under the dirt, just to catch him in the act. Sure, it's dream logic, but it's also entirely in character for Silver Age Superdickery. Imagine that kind of power in the hands of an infant, or a child, or teenager with no regard for human life or property or privacy...

[proteus_lives]

Just wait till I get to the GWB pages.

I gotta say, I think Carter did the right thing. I read the talk thread and I don't it would be wise for a government to let such a being go uncontrolled.

[halialkers]

As opposed to giving it an example of regular humans as a bunch of lying thieving bastards who told it a whole bunch of untruths? Doctor Manhattan against the USA and not for it? Yeah....

[koschei]

What lies did they tell him, what did they steal? Sure they controlled the situation as best they could, but they raised him essentially the way you'd expect any other kid to be raised - respect the homeland, disdain its enemies.

[freezer]

but they raised him essentially the way you'd expect any other kid to be raised.

With handpicked "parents", no privacy, no chance ot interact with others in his age group who weren't already terrified of him? The kind of indoctrination that would get any real-world organization - federal, state, or local - sued out of existance?

In a nutshell: Justifiable =/= Right or good.