Authors: From the Notebooks of Dr Brain (v4.0) (html)
Minister Faust
CONTENTS
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
PREFACE
Hey! You in the Cape! Why Are You Reading This Book?
PART ONE
VERY BAD CONDITION
CHAPTER ONE
Operation: Cooperation!
CHAPTER TWO
Facing the Ultimate Archenemy
CHAPTER THREE
Clash of the Icons
CHAPTER FOUR
Iconoclastic Means “I Can!”
PART TWO
MISSING NUMBER ONE
CHAPTER FIVE
Limited Series
CHAPTER SIX
Up Is Down: The Path Inside Is Outside
CHAPTER SEVEN
Who Are You, Really? Secret Origins and Secret Shames
CHAPTER EIGHT
Unrequited Hate
PART THREE
APPEALING TO A HIGHER POWER
CHAPTER NINE
Paranoia: It
Can
Destroy Ya
CHAPTER TEN
The Battle of All Mothers, the Mother of All Battles
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Self-Distraction Is Self-Destruction
CHAPTER TWELVE
Superheroes Need Superegos
EPILOGUE
Be a Phoenix, Not a Dodo
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE REAL AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BY MINISTER FAUST
BY DOCTOR BRAIN
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR UNMASKED!
PREVIEW OF UNMASKED
PRAISE FOR MINISTER FAUST
COPYRIGHT
For my very own Mary-Jane Watson,
my beloved wife, Michelle
PREFACE
HEY! YOU IN THE CAPE!
Why Are You Reading This Book?
Y
ou can wrap a steel I beam around your neck with
your bare hands and wear it like a tie. You can swim so quickly that you can go back in time to offer Columbus correct directions to India. You can climb the outside of a building, regurgitate the ton of paper you’ve eaten, and weave a beautiful multilevel hive while not paying a cent in downtown rent.
But are you happy?
There was an innocent time not so long ago when most people assumed that the flamboyant adventurers whose stories emblazoned the front pages of our newspapers and whose exploits ricocheted across the six o’clock news must really have had it all: fame, good looks, public adulation, and seemingly godlike powers.
But as our society has matured, many of the greatest heroes of our time have come to the numbing epiphany that invincibility and immortality simply aren’t enough. The war of Götterdämmerung was finally concluded in victory, the worst ultra-menaces were locked inside the maximum-security force fields of Asteroid Zed, and the rest of the misguided offenders are being cared for by the finest psychiatric facilities for the atomically insane.
But while superlawbreakers are being profiled in movies of the week, fêted for their (sometimes literally) ghost-written autobiographies, and cared for to the price of millions of tax dollars, who will care for
you
?
Who will care for you, the brave men and women who put the menacing malefactors away? Who will care for you, the courageous crusaders who risked your headquarters, your magic bracelets and diadems, your proprietary technology, your connection with your subdimensional xeno-souls and even your lives? Who will care for you, who jeopardized every relationship you were forced to put on hold or which you allowed to wither while you were fighting to preserve our freedom?
Far too often, the sad answer has been
no one.
You men and women who kept our world safe from the likes of the Infinity Farmer and his Time Tractor, from X-Stacy and the Ravers, or from the technopurges of Robot-Stalin, have too often defined yourselves solely by the existence of your foes. But what are you supposed to do now that those foes are gone and the ungrateful world no longer applauds from the safety of its decorative balconies?
What are you supposed to do now that you’re trapped in a safe world of your own making, a world that offers you no challenge, no role, no identity, no external enemies?
Yes, the supervillains of old are gone. But there’s a new group of them around today. And they’re
psychic.
No, not psychic like Sarah Bellum, Menton the Destroyer, or the Specially Relative Einstein Baboons.
Nor are the poisons of these villains green glowing crystals hidden inside lead strongboxes or poisonous prions murdering you one DNA helix at a time. Instead these poisons are locked inside your head and your heart, revealing themselves as depression, paranoia, rage, guilt, performance anxiety, psionic decay, dimension-shifting, impotence, imomnipotence, or any number of other impairments of the soul.
Perhaps now you’re forced to recognize that
hyperhominidism
is equal part curse to the blessing of your glory days.
But if you’ve been suffering due to HH, the time to suffer without help is no more.
M
y name is Dr. Eva Brain-Silverman, but to thousands of superpowered individuals like you I’m simply known as Doctor Brain. For twenty years at my Hyper-Potentiality Clinic in the refurbished Mount Palomax Observatory in sunny Los Ditkos, I’ve been helping the extraordinarily abled to adjust to a life beyond heroics, and to feel alive again even when there are no more neutron bombs to defuse inside the UN building and no more Treemasons to burn out of our forests, banks, and government offices.
The book you’re holding in your hands is the summation of two decades of advice I’ve dispensed as balm to heroes across North America at lectures, seminars, and clinical sessions.
But it’s more than that. It’s also the case study of the most spectacular group session of my career, whose destructive dysfunction culminated in the diabolical July 16 Attacks, which are even now reshaping our world.
When first contacted by the board of directors of the Fantastic Order of Justice to assist its six most contentious and confused members in conquering their intercommunal conflicts, I leapt at the opportunity to assist. Which heroes among Earth’s foremost fighting force for freedom, I wondered, were so bent on antagonizing one another and destroying themselves that their own leadership was threatening to terminate them unless they solved their problems in group therapy?
To my astonishment, my lineup was a list of legends
among
legends:
•
Omnipotent Man,
AKA Wally W. Watchtower, seventy-one-year-old refugee from the destroyed planet Argon, and Earth’s mightiest man,•
Flying Squirrel,
AKA Festus Piltdown III, seventy-year-old billionaire industrialist and scourge of the criminal underworld,•
Iron Lass,
AKA Hnossi Icegaard, the immortal Norse warrior-goddess and the planet’s leading martial strategist,•
Brotherfly,
AKA André “P-Fly” Parker, twenty-six-year-old wall-crawling, wisecracking, bluebottled ladies’ man,•
Power Grrrl,
AKA Syndi Tycho, the nineteen-year-old dynamic diva and pop music sensation, and•
X-Man,
AKA Philip Kareem Edgerton, the thirty-four-year-old detective supreme and militant rabble-rouser from the ghettos of Los Ditkos.
While numbering only six, these individuals had afflictions galore: SID (Secret Identity Diffusion), narcissisism, Savior Complex, ODI-CFFB (Obsessive/Defensive Ideation and Compulsive Fight-or-Flight Behavior), Icon Trap, Mortiquaeroticism (death-seeking urges), and RNPN (Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis), among others. Added into this miasma of mental maladies were group dysfunctions: Rudolphism and the Uranus Complex. And pervading all their disturbances, the leading malaise of our times among hyperhominids: MILD (Mission-Identity Loss Disturbance), also known as PPSD (Post-Power Stress Disorder).
My Mission…and Yours
B
y examining the three-week travail-to-triumph odyssey of the most extraordinary assembly of patients—or as I prefer to say, “sanity supplicants”—I have ever treated, you will put yourself on a trajectory out of the magma pits of mediocrity and into the metropolis of mental health.
Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself
will give you back the ultravision you once had—but stronger, so that you can perceive not only threats like MicroCrip and his Nanogangstas, but also the ennui that destabilizes the superego ions of your self-respect.
Reading this book is the first step in rearming yourself with the ultrapower necessary to rescue the only innocent person you’ve so far failed to save:
yourself.
