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Kickin' Around In Limbo, Part One: For all five of you out there who actually wondered what had happened to CrazySugarFreakBoy! when Mefrothto banished him from Hell in the Hooded Hood's astonishing epic, here at last is the entirely unnecessary, untold background story ... Saturday, 05-Jun-1999 07:49:39
"Okay, Astro Boy, since I finally have the opportunity to pose this question to a costumed crimefighter in real life, perhaps you'll do me the courtesy of explaining a point of logic which I've always wondered about, namely, how exactly does a regular human being go about becoming a genuine, bonafide superhero in the first place? Seriously, does the hypothetical guy or gal simply wake up and resolve over his or her bowl of Corn Flakes, 'Hey, guess what? For no apparent reason, I've decided to dedicate my existence to selflessly defending the innocent and fiercely fighting against the forces of injustice!' before he or she dons a ridiculous set of pajamas and leaps out a second story window, hoping the morning breeze will carry him aloft, or what? Alright, I suppose my phrasing was a bit unfair, but still, how do you manage to successfully emulate an improbable lifestyle which doesn't seem to be even remotely workable for anyone but the characters in your comic books, who by their very nature are literally defined as two-dimensional? I mean, hey, if you've somehow figured out the secret to inhabiting your impractical fantasies without abandoning your sanity, by all means, please let me know." The fourteen-year-old girl's aggressively confrontational attitude and intimidatingly articulate arguments felt so eerily familiar to the twenty-one-year-old man whom she had directed them towards, that the older-than-he-appeared young adult couldn't help looking at his teenaged companion askance, and wondering if perhaps he hadn't met this sky blue-eyed, strawberry blonde-haired teenager with the taunting tongue and the catseye-lensed, horn-rimmed glasses someplace elsewhere ... or elsewhen. But then again, the day-glo yellow skinned kid with the fluorescent orange hair and neon green eyes, who had been born Dreamcatcher Foxglove and later gained fame and become known (to an admittedly apprehensive world that remained, to this day, rather reluctant to make his unusual acquaintance) as their friendly neighborhood CrazySugarFreakBoy!, had been forced to take a lot of jaw-dropping revelations on board within a relatively short space of time - which he managed to cope with only through the sheer strength of his own idiotic inability to comprehend the true scope of any affairs that transpired outside of the imaginary universe he'd constructed inside of his own mind - and coupled with his pre-existing tendency to quickly dismiss what he deemed minor details at whim, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the sense of déjà vu which the unnamed lass had activated in his memory cells was soon forgotten. You see, CrazySugarFreakBoy! had just recently been engaged in mortal combat (NOT the incorrectly spelt video game version with the superior soundtrack) with an insanely powerful adversary calling himself the Hooded Hood (whose distinctive nickname lost a considerable degree of its potential terror impact on the impressionably cheerful Dreamcather, reminding him as it did of either the whimsical Woody Woodpecker cartoons he'd watched after school as an elementary grade child or the brand of ice cream his mom had bought for his first birthday after they'd moved to New England), and to abbreviate an already overlong prologue, an unlikely series of events culminated in his greeting the Demon Lord Mefrothto within the purview of his typically and inimitably irreverent fashion, and subsequently pissing off the aforementioned Prince of Fibs so severely with his chaotically caffeine-enhanced effusiveness that CrazySugarFreakBoy! actually accomplished the previously impossible feat of being so annoying that he got his ass BANISHED FROM HELL. And THAT'S when matters got really weird, as CrazySugarFreakBoy! awoke to discover he'd been flung headlong into the farthest reaches of an incalculably distant future; or, at the very least, dipped his toe in the shallow end of the possible-tomorrow, near-now kiddie wading pool of temporal travel, since the technology was terrifically improved, but the sorry state of affairs regarding humanity had stayed essentially the same, which Dream had deduced from the unfortunate fact that the lemming-headed speculators' corner of the four-color funnybook collecting market continued to shell out hard-earned cash to perpetuate the cancerous careers of twin pseudo-talents Rob Liefeld and John Byrne, now publishing jointly under their self-started "EGO Comics" label, their motto: ALL variants, ALL number ones, EVERY damn issue! It didn't take long for the middle-aged man adorned in full Native American tribal shaman garb - at least forty-some-odd years old by the crinkling of the crows' feet below his lids and the deep ravines of the laugh lines which accentuated his stubble-coated grin, with feathers woven into his graying, muted auburn hair and paint smeared on his furrowed brow and chapped cheekbones to frame his tired, faded jade eyes - to locate the dazed and haphazardly wandering CrazySugarFreakBoy! in the midst of his meanderings, and with this newly introduced individual, too, Dreamcatcher's initial reaction was to remark upon how much he believed he knew the palefaced man, whose age and care-worn and -hardened features harkened back to Foxglove's own father, despite this stranger's light skin tone and obviously caucasian ethnic extraction. To this curious comment, the traveling man in the mystic outfit replied cryptically that most souls don't possess the insight required to recognize their elder selves, and before this significant non-sequitur could spark any further distracting inquiries, he offered up his title in this time as simply being The Dreamcatcher, and nothing more, explaining his adopted moniker as a tribute to his predecessor, for his apparent role in this era involved serving as a spiritually-oriented successor of sorts to the looney-tunes legacy of the original Dream's own soon-to-be written history of heroism as the one and only CrazySugarFreakBoy! Furthermore, thanks to the retroactive revisions that the Hooded Hood had implemented within the current continuity - as CSFB! learned with next to no warning from the stubby, stocky, immensely overweight, green-skinned, three-eyed, alien guide whom had suddenly appeared out of nowhere to squat beside The Dreamcatcher – nearly all of the most popular and reader-requested “What If … ?” Elseworld versions of himself that he’d caught sight of in the course of his initial sparring session with the Yurt had somehow now been incorporated into the branch of Hypertime which he’d happened to call home first, well before any of his displaced dopplegangers from different eras had come in from the cold. In simpler terms, Dream had fallen victim to the retcon style responsible for screwing Jay Garrick and Alan Scott by shunting the aforementioned Golden Age Flash and Green Lantern onto the same track of the space-time continuum as their Silver Age counterparts, Barry Allen (however briefly it might have been, until Wally West assumed the mantle shortly thereafter) and Hal Jordan (even if he’d temporarily ceded his reign over the ring to such unworthy punk-asses as John Stewart and Guy Gardner), when the Anti-Monitor had merged Earth-1 and Earth-2 during DC Comics’ trend-setting 12-issue maxi-series, Crisis On Infinite Earths, which meant that, even though Foxglove had still retained credit for coming up with the CrazySugarFreakBoy! concept entirely on his own, he was now but one in a long and vaunted line of Gyro Gearloose goofballs who’d had the idea to gussy themselves up as equally disturbed and glucose-dependent avengers of injustice, villainy, general wrong-doing, and all-around mischievous scheming. In other words, Dreamcatcher Foxglove was now a Post-CrisisCrazySugarFreakBoy! And while Dream had pulled off a minor miracle by the mere act of managing to understand this updated state of affairs almost instantly, given his facility at processing all audio-visual input through the paradigms of comic book reality, the underlying principles of which he’d devoted himself to studying with more heartfelt commitment than he could even conceive of summoning up over any boring old religion, the fat, short extraterrestrial wearing the atomic-age protective poncho and the cool-looking black wraparound vision ring – an interplanetary visitor who finally chose to give his name as Doctor Emmett C. Phobia was apparently, shall we say, LESS than patient with his would-be pupil’s lengthy exposition on the subject, even though Foxglove’s enthusiastic narrative caption boxes were offset and even foreshortened somewhat by his lightning-fast calculations and deductive reasoning (which remarkably, for once in his life, were remotely accurate, but only because he was dealing with his extremely specialized field of expertise), Emmett C. instead simply opted for the quick and easy expedient of injecting the information directly into CrazySugarFreakBoy’s! unprepared brain, via an abrupt and jarring psychic uplink, which set CSFB's! nerves on end worse than all the aluminum foil being crunched and munched between all the metal filling-laden teeth in all the whole, wide multiverse. All those incalculably innumerable parallel universes, alternate earths, divergent timelines, and multiple streams of reality branching off from our own, and his consciousness was flooded with sensory input from each and every one of them, to the point that his perspective was as fragmented as a kaleidoscope lens, as CrazySugarFreakBoy! was forced to violently absorb the unbelievable bulk load of raw data being downloaded into his already overtaxed cranial capacity, just in order to help him keep the already considerably limited degree of sanity to which he could continue to lay claim … Circa late 1930s to early 1940s, an adventurous, globe-trotting explorer donning the ancient helmet, jet pack and discus shield set of the CrazySugarRocketLad! and drawing upon his well-researched knowledge of hidden mystic lore in order to decipher the purpose, potential and meaning of his recently unearthed archaeological discoveries, to fight against dark Nazi sorcerers during the patriotic skirmishes of World War II; circa late 1950s to early 1960s, an inventive, ground-breaking scientist harnessing the fundamental forces of the universe and containing them in a comically Jack O’Lantern-shaped, trick-or-treat candy barrel-modeled battery construct to join a sci-fi squadron supreme corps as the CrazySugarSpaceGuardian! and applying his scientific skill and engineering expertise in order to employ their futuristic vessels of the power cosmic, to carry on star-spanning crusades of epic scope against evil alien races at the height of the Cold War’s Atomic Age; circa late 1970s to early 1980s, a tough-as-nails, grim-and-gritty former police officer zipping up the menacing leather mask and strapping on the high-caliber, highly illegal, and admittedly unlikely weapons arsenal of the InsaneCaffeineRevengeSoldier! and utilizing his exhaustive law enforcement training and combat-tested military tactical strategies in order to control his top-secret government experiment-granted genetically enhanced physical and mental abilities, to wage deadly warfare against inner city crime and corruption in the midst of the Vietnam Era’s wake and the dawning of the Reagan Eighties; and even glimmering glimpses of a teenaged, female, energy-humming HyperActiveKineticLunatic! training herself under the affectionately parental care and even-tempered tutelage of The Dreamcatcher himself, to step into her virtually predestined role in the pantheon’s eclectic echelons and take over as the next-generation descendant of the improbably iconic and time-honored heritage of one dim-witted, silly-hearted, insignificant and incurably immature child who was honestly never meant to amount to anything to begin with. And this wasn’t even venturing into the hotly contested issue of how much truth was contained within the oft-whispered legends that this lineage’s ancestry stretched back to the beginnings of humanity itself, if not beyond, providing plenty of opportunity for debate about whether or not a CrazySugarQuickDrawKid! had actually earned his reckless rogue reputation as a top-notch gun-slinger in the “steampunk” frontier badlands of the Old "Wild Wild" West, or if in fact a CrazySugarShiningKnightOfNie! had indeed ever inflicted “only flesh wounds" upon the hallowed, Holy Grail-questing grounds of various and assorted Python-esque, Hieronymous Bosch-influenced battle fields during the Dark Medieval, Pre-Renaissance Period. And once CrazySugarFreakBoy’s! complex neural network had been reduced to the mushy sludge consistency of a cherry-flavored Slurpee, available in the standard Big Gulp size at any area 7-Eleven store, just from the raw effort required to process this updated FAQ sheet for superhero antics dating back roughly the last three quarter-centuries, Doctor Phobia up and ditched this hipster scene, departing the settings just as inexplicably as he’d entered into the action, leaving behind The Dreamcatcher to confide in his junior namesake that, while the mental transfer may have inflicted excruciating discomfort upon Dream's senses for a scant few seconds, it had been vital that Foxglove be fully armed with an intimate and unabridged knowledge of his previously barely hinted-at past, so that he might yet face his utterly unsuspected future ... and still survive. As for his perplexing present, or as he thought of it, where he was stuck in the middle of, CrazySugarFreakBoy! was reassured by The Dreamcatcher that yes, our central character could be returned to his own time zone, at the exact moment that he'd been exiled from his native era, but before that task could be performed, there remained a small errand that Foxglove would have to run ... namely, the fourteen-year-old, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, bespectacled girl, living in an upper-middle class New England neighborhood around about the mid-1970s, whom he'd just recently encountered in her bedroom after midnight, apparently on the evening that she'd planned upon running away from home and her parents. In classic Quantuum Leap style, all he had to do, in order to get back in the nick of time to assist in saving his friends on the Lair Legion lienup from Mefrothto, as well as the Hooded Hood when he eventually got that far down the road, was figure out the nature of this troubled teen's problems, and try to fix them up as best he could. Unfortunately, at this interval, even someone as socially inept as CrazySugarFreakBoy! was aware enough of his surroundings to realize that he'd scored a considerable victory simply by persuading the lovely lass not to scream her pretty head off at the mere presence of such an oddball intruder having broken into her house, but as her initially tolerant disposition grew increasingly and inexplicably more sour within just the first hour of their introduction, even the ever-optimistic Dream wondered how he was going to win this contest of wills. It was going to be longer than any all-nighter study session he'd clocked in college, that was for DAMN sure. :) TO BE CONTINUED ... CrazySugarFreakBoy! |
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