CHAPTER EIGHT

EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES

         I come home to Galatea’s suite and find a jumpsuit laid out on my bed, its colors the Champions’ yellow and orange. That’s how they tell me I’m a Champion. A New Champion, to be exact.

I sit down, hard. I’m a little stunned. No, a lot stunned. I close my eyes for a little bit. I guess something at the back of my mind expected my stint as a superhero to end pretty soon, one way or the other. Not this. This wasn’t in the script.

I sit for a while first just holding it, letting the high-tech cloth slide and pool in my hands. It’s stiff in places, suggesting embedded circuitry; the stitching is perfect.

I start to change into it but then stop halfway. Looking at myself naked in the mirror is like an aching feeling. You can see every place the damage happened. And you can see all the enhancements, hinted at when I’m wearing clothes, the complete design where woman’s flesh melds with plastic and metal. Appreciate the technological sea change that turned crippling injury into something else. What’s gone came back in silver and chrome, titanium and silicon, a map of catastrophe.

I try it on, gingerly. The costume is a one-off, cut to work around and complement my cybernetic elements, even the ports on my right thigh. In fact, it shows off the best of my bodywork. I’ve never been especially slender—even before the changes I was probably no Damsel—but when I try it on it fits me sheer and perfect, the way I’d always imagined. At the window, I take a moment to luxuriate, Manhattan spread out below me. It barely seems real.

This isn’t my usual sweatpants and tank top ensemble; it’s a real superhero costume, like Damsel wears. It’s unnervingly like being naked, but at least no one will mistake me for a robot.

I stop and look at myself in the full-length mirror, a machine-woman hybrid in a leotard. Female cyborgs are supposed to be wasp-waisted pleasure machines, but the fact is, it takes a lot of structural metal to carry a miniature reactor and this much hardware. I’m six four, taller than most men, with long thighs and broad shoulders. Even with my silver hair down, the impression is a bit more fearsome than traditionally beautiful.

The uniform isn’t especially modest, baring more skin than I’m used to around the shoulders and above the knees. But the patterning complements the silver and peach of my skin tone, and the effect is not unpleasant. You could even call it flattering.

I run a hand down my flank, feeling the cool metal and then the real flesh, thinking of how long it’s been. Not since the accident, and how long before that? I don’t even know. I only know I’m not a virgin. That’s all.

I look again, to see Fatale of the Champions. It’s hard not to feel a little proud of myself. I flip the hair back and do a Fatale pose for an imaginary photo shoot.

         

I hear scattered applause as I come into the kitchen. Someone whistles. There’s a cake with my name on it, and Lily’s as well. She joins in with a bemused expression. Everyone shakes my hand. Blackwolf explains: Apparently, the founding members met without us and put it to a vote, and that was it. I’ve got a new security clearance and an official ID.

“Is the costume all right? Damsel designed it.” Blackwolf plays host, passing out plastic cups of champagne.

“It’s perfect.” It is. And I’m kind of touched, thinking of Damsel spending so much time on her own, thinking of me.

“They say I have a knack for it. Look. You did good back there in the bar. I hope you’ll stay on with us.”

“I’d…yeah, I’d really like that.” Suddenly, I would. I empty my glass. Damsel did a lot for me when she asked me to join. Suddenly, I feel bad for disliking her.

“Look, I know we kind of come from, uh, different worlds.”

“I was raised normal, if you didn’t know. I didn’t get my powers until I was sixteen. Until then, I was the amazing little girl who couldn’t.”

“But…genetically, I thought…”

“I’ll tell you all about it sometime. The costume’s okay?”

“I didn’t realize it would be so tight.”

“You get used to it. I did.”

Everybody’s changed their look over the years, at least a little. Elphin still wears her suspiciously Pre-Raphaelite “traditional” costume; she’s added an armband to signify her Champions affiliation; Blackwolf hasn’t changed, but then he relates to his wolf getup in some way that I’m afraid to ask about. Damsel’s looks like a cross between her father’s and mine.

We’re a team, at least in the clothes department. Officially, it’s a response to the CoreFire situation and Doctor Impossible’s escape. Damsel herself makes the announcement that evening at a press conference, with the six of us standing behind her. Re-forming the team means notifying the city, the State Department, and the UN. The logo that had been dark for almost ten years glows from the Champions Building overlooking the city. We’re an item in late-night talk-show monologues. Calls and congratulations come in from other major superteams.

Tomorrow, we’re all going to Doctor Impossible’s island, ten hours in Blackwolf’s Wolfship, to fight a bona fide major villain. If they’re right, he’ll be there waiting for us, with God knows what wacky inventions at the ready. We don’t even have a scientist with us. Or CoreFire.

When the party breaks up, everyone goes their separate ways, to the rooftops or the gym. My eyes follow Blackwolf out; Lily notices and carefully cocks a silvery eyebrow, which I studiously ignore.

I linger for a while looking out at the city. I could rest up for tomorrow, but there’s something else I’ve been meaning to do.

Upstairs in the computer room, they have a modest library, including films. I meander upstairs, and, a little furtively, slip the DVD of Titan Six from its shelf. It’s still in the shrink wrap; I’m probably making a newbie mistake by even watching it.

The documentary came out the year after the team broke up, five hours of patchwork archival video, found footage, and FOIA-obtained government video. No one on the team agreed to be interviewed, but it purports to tell the true story of the world’s greatest superteam. It’s not quite that, but it’s something.

I don’t know what I’m looking for. To get to know CoreFire, I guess. They’ve all met him, and I’ve just seen a few speeches on TV. I wanted to be a detective, but I’m the only one here without a clue about the missing person.

         

I put the disk in the player, settle on the couch. A solemn voice-over introduces the three original members, young superheroes at the start of their careers.

Behind the opening credits, archival film from the early eighties shows Damsel’s first press conference when she was only sixteen and her powers manifested, her father and the rest of the Super Squadron beaming behind her, and then she’s zooming around at her eighteenth birthday party in a white jumpsuit. Then an early shot of her and her mother before she left Earth. The film has a yellow-tinted home-movie quality. There’s a gawky adolescent Blackwolf sweeping the opposition at the U.S. gymnastics finals, not out yet as anything but a precocious Rhodes scholar. And CoreFire in his ROTC uniform, clowning with his dorm mates only a few days before his accident.

After the obligatory origin stories, the talking heads kick in with the much-retold story of their first meeting. All three had, coincidentally, been in pursuit of a particularly nasty drug ring, which had gone to ground in the sewage system, and the heroes followed the same police tip underground on the same night. It must have been a strange encounter in the watery undercity, two men and a woman, all in masks, none over the age of twenty-four. Damsel, crown princess of the superhero world, her force field glowing green with power, casting deep shadows along the waterway. CoreFire had torn aside the gratings of another drain, lazily triggering half a dozen alarms. Blackwolf crouched concealed in a storm drain, night-vision goggles buckled on across the mask.

         

We’ll never know exactly how the conversation went, or how long it took. I don’t even know if they exchanged secret identities then, or later.

A man named Frederick Allen was deputy director for Metahuman Affairs at the time, and he gave the team sponsorship. He was hoping for a group of attractive, marketable young heroes who would prove both popular and pliable to U.S. policy recommendations. Everyone agrees the name was his idea.

Hence the Champions; when the team roster finalized, their ages ranged from twenty years (Blackwolf ) to over a thousand (if you believe Elphin). They were very young and a little dazzled by the attention. They accepted his offer and became an official government team.

Why? Damsel, perhaps because of her father; Blackwolf because he needed legitimacy, and maybe (although he’d never admitted it) superpowers on his side. CoreFire is harder to pin down. Because he’d wanted to be in the Super Squadron but it fell apart before he was ready? He had everything else, the perfect superhero life—the mighty powers, the fiendish nemesis, everything down to the writer girlfriend who always needed rescuing. He always fulfilled expectations, as if he’d never had to make a decision at all.

         

It’s nearly ten when Lily drifts in to watch for a while. She hovers a few feet behind me, holding a bag of potato chips. I can see her without turning around—I have attachments for that.

“I brought snacks. Can I watch?”

“Have a seat.” She didn’t get a costume, I notice, so I ask.

“I don’t wear clothes. We worked out some decals, like on a car window.”

“Well, congratulations anyway.”

“Thanks. You, too.” We shake hands awkwardly. On-screen, the heroes are thrashing their first bank robbery together; CoreFire turns over their getaway car, bullets pinging off of him.

“I like your moves.”

“Beating up Psychic Prime isn’t much of a move.”

“Meant against Elphin. It’s hard to land a shot on her. Trust me, I know.”

“It must be weird being on the team. After all that, well, other stuff.”

“All that villainy, you mean? It’s okay. Everyone wants to be the bad girl. Just for a while.”

         

A superteam needs certain things, the right mix of personalities, an unpredictable battlefield alchemy, a thing no one can predict, or duplicate. Two of them could fly and stop bullets; the third was the best detective and the best athlete in the world. But they needed to shore up the team.

Allen reached out to the superhero world. The most likely candidates lived under secret identities; some were off-world, or in the hospital. It took months to bring them all in.

The recruitment meeting happens in a meeting room in an anonymous office building in Washington, D.C. The filmmakers pulled original tapes and footage of the meeting. Allen has an overhead projector and he ticks through a list of points, crime statistics and potential off-planet threats, making his case. In front of him are eleven young superheroes, top talent, fully costumed and cocky.

The camera does a slow pan, and Lily leans forward to catch all the faces.

“Look at that crowd. They asked Leapfrog, can you believe that? And Anne de Siècle. What a bunch of also-rans! I should have gotten in while I could. God, we both should have.”

“Thanks, but I was six. And I didn’t have any of this stuff yet.”

She takes in the skeletal metal of my calves, upper arms. “That must have been some accident.”

“It was.”

Galatea is there, still an unknown—they don’t even realize she’s a robot. Blackwolf, cocky as ever, riding a wave of celebrity following a spectacular hostage rescue. Captain Kelvin is dripping water on the carpet, his cooling pipes rimed with frost. No Elphin yet, but Mister Mystic, glaring at the psychic Pontifex, later exposed as a fraud. Some of them I don’t know at all: a mustachioed man in chain mail with a sword at his side; a young man with a vampiric look who keeps well away from the windows; a woman in goggles, holding what looks like an Edwardian time machine.

Fred Allen cast his net wide, and the results look like a meeting of the board of directors in Candy Land. CoreFire floats at the back, obviously impatient with the selection process.

“We need to take on these unconventional threats in an organized way. In the face of people like Doctor Impossible, we can’t just guess and hope. We need our own operatives in the field.” Allen takes a deep breath.

“Under the circumstances, for purposes of public relations I think it best that Damsel be chosen to lead and operate as team spokesperson.” You can see from Damsel’s face that she doesn’t like the way he’s handling this.

A ripple runs through the crowd, glances exchanged. The vampire huffs a little.

“Shouldn’t we be making decisions like that for ourselves?” The red-and-white woman, who must have been cut pretty early in the process.

Damsel breaks through the noise. You can already hear the voice that would give Damsel’s famous testimony before the Senate.

“I’m not going to order people around. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Yes, but surely you see how it’s going to be interpreted,” says Allen, temporizing, giving the camera a nervous look, as if he already knows he’s playing to history.

“With my military background—” Blackwolf begins.

“Which is, you understand, off the record. You’re just going to be Blackwolf on this team.”

“Wait…what else is he?” Damsel shoots him a look. An odd look, and a familiar one; rewinding, I could swear they’ve known each other from somewhere, longer than the others. There’s another story here.

“You don’t need to know that.”

“What else don’t I need to know? It’s supposed to be my team, damn it.”

“Look. The purpose of this is to have a superteam with institutional legitimacy again. A team people can trust. Not a bunch of costumed weirdos.” The camera cuts from Allen to stock footage of Elphin at a press conference. She’s examining a stapler, fascinated.

“There are going to be changes. You’ve all done most of your work solo up to this point. I’m offering you government sponsorship and all the resources that go with it. Security clearances within reason, transport, and state-of-the-art facilities. Legitimacy. A chance to do a little good, and no more working in the shadows.”

“There are those of us who are more comfortable there, Mr. Allen.” Even on videotape, Mister Mystic’s voice carries its rich resonance. You wouldn’t know it, but two years earlier he’d been sleeping in a dumpster behind a Walgreens. A beat, then everyone starts talking at once.

“Does this mean we’re going to have to disclose our real names? Because I’m not prepared to…”

“Names are power, they say…” Mister Mystic begins some kind of point about wizarding law.

“I swore an oath to Queen Titania. I cannot break it. And technically I’m not an American citizen; I’m a fairy.”

“I don’t have a driver’s license….”

“I don’t have a real name.”

Damsel stands. “Thank you, Deputy Director Allen. Now each of you, if you’ll follow me into the next chamber when I call your code name? This isn’t an audition, more like an informational interview.”

Even then she had good command of a room.

         

They chose carefully. Galatea’s abilities were impressive, and she gave the group a high-tech edge they’d lacked. Mister Mystic was the Earth’s foremost sorcerer, the master of mysteries that had been lost for generations. And Elphin…God knows where they unearthed her, the world’s only living fairy warrior.

An early press conference shows how easily they captured the public imagination. Blackwolf is absolutely magnetic, while CoreFire’s power is unearthly. Everyone stares as a scantily clad Galatea floats above the crowd, radiating golden energy. Mister Mystic glares with a mesmerist’s dark authority.

Magic and technology, superpowers and athleticism and indomitable will, and a myth brought into the present day. Once Elphin joined the group, they had a genuine fairy paladin! The energy of it was palpable. Here were the people who were going to save the world.

They gave press conferences and made public appearances and trained together as much as their disparate abilities would allow, Elphin sharing Celtic fighting secrets with Blackwolf, Blackwolf acquainting her with the bo stick and three-section staff. At the high end of the power scale, Damsel and CoreFire sparred with earth-shattering force above the Washington Mall.

But it was the big three, that unique mix of personalities and power, who held them together. Damsel’s discipline and readiness at command, her glamour and authority; CoreFire’s blond all-American image, his geniality, confidence, and all-conquering might, balanced by Blackwolf’s unpredictable intellect and dark charisma. They were unstoppable.

From their lavishly equipped headquarters in the center, they sallied forth to fight crimes and right the wrongs of the world. Their uniform was recognized everywhere. After a while, it was almost normal to see them flying back in early dawn after a hard night’s work, almost normal to see Damsel hauling a freighter off a coral reef, or Elphin calming a tornado above Oklahoma City.

Team portraits from the era show a happy young group of friends, a perfect ease. I wonder what happened to it all.

         

Maybe it was the Somali crisis—the Champions had always had government sponsorship, but some anonymous genius at the State Department decided it would be diplomatic and cost-effective to make them a shadow arm of the U.S. military.

The team smelled a rat. There was a team meeting, of which no record was kept, but which was perhaps the real founding moment of the Champions. There, they planned Blackwolf’s first infiltration of the Pentagon, skulking in full costume through the most secure facility in the world, while Galatea landed on a U.S. satellite and hacked the computer system from orbit. They brought back the full record of Fred Allen’s extended plan for the United States’ foremost superteam.

C-SPAN broadcast the hush and then the rising stir as Damsel walked fully costumed onto the Senate floor with the self-possession of the truly powerful. She deposited the full documentation of the episode onto the Vice President’s lap as the murmur rose to a roar of approval. Her speech and then the celebrated walkout made it official: They were a dedicated team, not a cat’s-paw for the executive branch. The United States quietly withdrew funding, and it was time to find a new patron, and a new paradigm for the superteam.

         

But that was only half the battle. They had always lived in the shadow of the Super Squadron, and maybe it was inevitable they would clash. There was always the sense that the heroes of this generation were just stand-ins. It’s a charge that dogged Damsel in particular. And it seemed like the Super Squadron would always be there above them. Some of them weren’t even aging.

That changed the day Paragon went bad. In his time, he had been a match for CoreFire, maybe more than a match, but the man who burned with a magical fire had finally lost control. We never found out where the Nightstar Sapphire came from—it was the kind of thing that might have been looted from any museum in Europe—but something in it had gone wrong.

He’d gone into semi-retirement a decade before, but there were disturbing rumors. His powers had changed, fermented within him, curdling in their long disuse. His force field used to be invisible, clean, but now it was visible as a blue flicker. When he struck, there was a blue flash and an ozone smell. He found a new costume, called himself Cerulean for a while, then Gaslight. But the change was ongoing.

He was older than he looked. The evil in the Nightstar was coming back to haunt him, change him. Whatever it was he found was so long ago, he could only barely remember it, a nineteen-year-old corporal called upon by the military to test something neither of them ever understood.

By the time the Champions arrived, it was too late for anything but a demolition job, but the Super Squadron wouldn’t stand for it. CoreFire sided with them and an all-out fight seemed inevitable, Stormcloud against Damsel, CoreFire against Blackwolf, Regina versus Mister Mystic. At the critical moment, Paragon escaped Mystic’s temporary bonds and attacked, leaving them no choice. It was a grim task, but it made the Champions era official—the Super Squadron’s aura of invincibility was gone, and the Champions reigned. But back at Champions HQ, I’m sure no one forgot that moment before Paragon burst in on them. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have come next.

         

On the screen, it’s the golden age. In a montage of headlines, supervillains fall like wheat before them. People like Slimelord and the Visage were taken off the streets for a long time.

“You worried about tomorrow?” Lily asks, munching popcorn. Mercifully, it goes transparent almost as soon as she bites down on it. Enzymes in her saliva?

“A little. I’m used to drug dealers. All this weird tech—”

“You’re kind of a weird tech person yourself. But I don’t think we’ll see any action.”

“Are you sure? Blackwolf thinks this is the one.”

“Trust me. This stuff looks different from the other side.”

Even Doctor Impossible lost to them, again and again. His face looms on the screen, imperious in his early-eighties high-crested helmet. Now we’re being treated to a montage of Impossible’s captures. The caped villain is throwing up his hands in surrender in a sequence of control rooms, cockpits, and city streets. I gather my nerve and ask what I actually want to know for a change.

“Lily? Were you really in love with him?”

She sighs. “It wasn’t like that. He’s smart, you know? And he made me laugh.”

         

We move on to the third DVD in the set. The fourth and fifth episodes focus on the mature years, when major crises tended to center around individual members. An interdimensional incursion from a demon overlord Mister Mystic had humbled one too many times. An ancient fairy curse. A crime lord from Blackwolf’s past, maybe connected to his siblings’ disappearance. An alien overlord sought out Damsel, taking revenge against her father for some off-world exploit. And, of course, CoreFire’s endless go-rounds against Doctor Impossible.

There must have been other moments, ones the cameras didn’t capture. I still feel as if I’m missing something, the real story: the first time they confessed their secret identities to one another; the moment they learned Galatea’s real nature, or CoreFire’s secret vulnerability. I try to watch with a detective’s eye, looking for what’s been buried.

When did Blackwolf and Damsel fall in love? Damsel and CoreFire were the obvious couple, matched in power and fame. Early on you see them together a lot, always soaring above the others, chatting, sparring. It’s hard not to wonder, especially after CoreFire’s girlfriend drops out of the picture. And then…am I wrong to detect a hint of unease between the two of them? Maybe it’s just the Paragon episode, the way the team split.

I stop and contemplate that famous face. Classically handsome, prominent chin, never a hair out of place. He could always say the right things, always knew what to do. For all that muscle, he was smart. He didn’t have Blackwolf’s sense of humor or his sense of mission, quite, but he never wavered, always did what was right. With all that power he could have been the worst villain of the age, but he always chose truth, and justice.

         

Damsel crosses through the computer room from the roof deck. “Are you really watching that thing? God, look at my eighties hair.” But she doesn’t hang around. I wouldn’t either, knowing what was coming.

I feel like skipping the wedding spectacle, but Lily makes us watch every treacly second of it. It was practically a national holiday at the time, but watching it now feels painful, the way the two of them glare at each other. CoreFire was the best man, Galatea the maid of honor.

At least we get to fast-forward through a compilation of painful Saturday Night Live appearances—there was no way to make Galatea funny. The best part was John Belushi in a red leotard and plastic cape, expectorating mashed potatoes all over a gamely smiling CoreFire. I think he was supposed to be Doctor Impossible.

It’s all good fun. But superteams are about personalities, and I can’t help noticing how over time the team starts to withdraw into its own little groups. Blackwolf and Damsel; Elphin and Mister Mystic. CoreFire and Galatea were more and more often alone.

         

Then the music darkens. They’re getting to the Titan incident, and even the voice-over finally shuts up. Lily may be the only person who didn’t grow up with this, but even so, she gets a little quiet.

Damsel ran the press conference at the UN. “This is real; it’s galactic. We need the full team here.” CoreFire was pulled in from Cabo; Mister Mystic from a shadowy intervention in Khartoum.

The galactic wars we used to hear about from the Super Squadron had come to find Earth. The Pangaeans and the Enderri together ruled about 15 percent of the Milky Way, but they were locked together in a slow, incomprehensible alien war. In the past, heroes from Earth had served on one side or the other, but never with Earth in the balance. Apparently, the Enderri had decided to take us out of the equation.

Damsel showed slides in the situation room, shots from the space probe that had caught a dark mass out by Saturn, where no such mass should be. Magnification and spectrum analysis gave out results too bizarre to believe at first. But confirmation came from off-planet sources, courtesy of old Super Squadron contacts.

By the time the Champions got there the Enderri fleet had been gathering for days, shadowed by the massive planet. They arrived under a diplomatic flag, and there was an audience with the Enderri overlord; the Champions were our planetary ambassadors. Damsel’s legendary self-possession held up well, perhaps one benefit of her off-planetary lineage. But it was Blackwolf who discovered and invoked an obscure section of their martial code, and demanded a trial by combat; he was probably the first to guess what it would mean. The six active Champions set down on Saturn’s largest moon to face the assembled Enderri ground force. They had a force field that ensured atmosphere and warmth as they stood to watch what had to be their final opponents assemble on the frozen plain.

No one can forget that moment as the five Enderri troop carriers disgorged their entire elite occupation force to face them. One of Blackwolf’s remote bugs recorded the event, sending a frame back once every second or two. In the first few images, the heroes can only watch as the alien horror encircles them. The camera pans across a single panoramic frame of Damsel, the powerhouse, squaring up against an army of ten thousand alien warfighters. She stands back-to-back with Blackwolf, who is grimly readying his Special Forces moves to haul the first miscreant out of the crowd. CoreFire’s smug air of invincibility is for once checked, those movie-star cheekbones tinted red in the light of the fleet’s fusion engines. Elphin, the consummate warrior, utterly unfazed, raises her spear against aliens in powered space armor. Mister Mystic is readying himself for the performance of a lifetime. Galatea’s face, unreadable, gives no hint of what is coming next.

The battle lasted only forty-one seconds, but the filmmaker plays the frames back one by one. The Enderri warriors were each eight feet high, seemingly part insect, part machine. There was no way to hold a perimeter against numbers like these. The group was swallowed up instantly, six fighting points in a sea of green and black. The footage shows Damsel and CoreFire sending the first wave flying back into the crowd, but it barely makes a dent. Blackwolf is a blur, kicking out at alien joints, cracking hard shells. Elphin and Mister Mystic have stuck together in the crowd. She’s aloft and wreaking havoc, spear point flashing; light blossoms from his hands, his mouth moving in some terrible invocation, already knowing he’ll never finish it. Behind him, the Enderri are pulling up heavier weapons.

Then Galatea rises into the air, and the last frame is solid white. Whoever built Galatea included an autodestruct mode, and she knew exactly how it worked and how far the blast would extend. She was gone, and the Enderri departed, beaten and cowed, never to return.

         

After Titan, the team fell apart into twos and threes. Cliques formed. Damsel and CoreFire worked together, usually with Elphin; but there were a lot of solo missions, too. The Champions Call, when sounded, would produce at best four rather testy heroes, who went about their business with a minimum of crosstalk and departed in different directions. Finally Damsel called a meeting, put it to a vote, and it was over.

The last time they were all in a room together was at the press conference where Damsel read a short statement announcing their dissolution as a team. A few weeks later, CoreFire appeared in his new costume, and the era was over. A few second-tier teams stepped up their operations to fill the void. The documentary spends a little time on the postteam careers, but there just isn’t much to say. Damsel left Earth for a while, reportedly in search of her mother, but came back months later empty-handed. She joined up for a while with the Reformers, while the rest went on to solo careers. Blackwolf went back to solo crime fighting, and Elphin enjoyed a brief vogue as the figurehead for a New Age movement.

The divorce was made public five months later, reaching the public as a kind of aftershock. A year later, Elphin, CoreFire, and Damsel reformed very briefly to take down Antitron IV, but there was never serious talk of a new team, not until now. Publishers rushed to offer them millions for the tell-all memoir, but none of them ever cashed in. CoreFire did a few fund-raisers with Damsel, but that was pretty much it.

Lily yawns. “Is it almost over? We have to keep looking for Dudley Do-Right tomorrow.”

“Isn’t that…do they really have those cartoons in your future?”

“Learned it in ancient civ class. I was a whiz.”

“You know we’re going to that island, right? Aren’t you nervous about meeting your old boyfriend?”

“He won’t be there. He’s too smart for that.”

“Blackwolf seemed pretty sure.”

“You never go right back to your fortress after jail. He’s hiding out somewhere else. Trust me.”

Lily heads off to bed, and I clean up the popcorn as the denouement rolls. No one on the team would even talk to the filmmakers, so Titan Six closes with a faux interview sequence, video clips rigged up to sound like they’re answering questions from the omnipresent voice-over.

Even considering the sound bites come from different decades and press conferences, the effect is jumbled. Elphin babbling about Oberon and the rest of her fairy friends, Damsel’s boilerplate truth-and-justice rhetoric, Mister Mystic’s portentous nonsense. Blackwolf comes off the scariest—they must have caught him right after the divorce. It makes you wonder how these people ever spent ten minutes together, let alone ten years. Or how they can ever hope to beat the smartest man in the world without CoreFire.

Afterward, I go back and watch a few sequences again, and this time the breakup seems to begin earlier. Well before Titan they had stopped grinning at one another the same giddy way; on second hearing, some of that banter looks awfully strained. I keep coming back to that handsome, enigmatic face. Smiling in team photographs, serious and statesmanlike in an address to the UN, grim and determined in battle, clobbering Doctor Impossible or whomever. That unshakable confidence that saved the team time and again. No one ever lost faith in him; the polls prove it. So whatever happened to the perfect superhero?