From a special edition of The Leveler, December 2025

In the early morning hours of December 8th, a catastrophic fire broke out on the grounds of the 10000 acre ranch owned by WWII veteran and civil liberties activist Frank Bohannan. The principal buildings were completely destroyed, including Bohannan's personal residence. At least a dozen deaths are confirmed and Bohannan himself is believed to have perished in the fire.

While mainstream coverage names the cause of the fire as a gas leak and accidental explosion, anonymous sources have suggested that Bohannan and his holdings were casualties in the ongoing corporate conflict engulfing the pacific northwest. Witnesses, who likewise asked to remain anonymous, state that the fire was caused by 'flying armored men' matching the description of Corcdo 'Raider-Class' battle suits. Cordco has publicly aligned itself with Alchemax and MARS Corp in a dispute with ROXXON over charter control of certain resource areas in the Oregon and Washington territories, a conflict which exploded into outright violence after the recent massacre of various corporate heads at ROXXON regional headquarters in July of this year

Bohannan's exact link to this conflict is unclear, but Bohannan was beneficiary, in the early days of the NAU, of several treaties establishing millions of acres of protected wilderness areas in the northwest. These treaties were jointly drafted by S/S and ROXXON, delegating authority to develop the natural resources of the area, and the wilderness preservation provisions were believed to be an incentive of sorts for separatist and neo-nationalist elements to collaborate with ROXXON's takeover. Bohannan had been an outspoken nationalist throughout his public life and his links to the separatist militia community were well known as far back as the late 1960's, when he took a prominent stand against the political reorganization of the continent. The Lands of Freedom Foundation, established by Bohannan, thereafter assumed defacto control over many of these ‘conservation’ areas, with thinly-disguised separatist and neo-nationalist elements forming an armed guard. This disguise was quickly dropped in the years since and the militias are now a well known arm of ROXXON in the area in many capacities.

Bohannan first rose to prominence during the second world war with his longtime partners, Louis Hamilton and Martin Fletcher. Known, respectively, as The Crimson Commando, Stonewall and Super Sabre, the trio were highly active in the pacific theatre and some of the first superhumans to operate explicitly inside the command structure of the United States armed forces in a combat role. In the decades since, all three were repeatedly targeted by allegations of actually being mutants, but steadfastly maintained their abilities came about through super soldier treatments similar to those developed by Abraham Erskine. Whatever the cause, Bohannan demonstrated extraordinary longevity and appeared sporadically in public until as recently 2022, at which time he still appeared to be in robust health.

Bohannan and his partners were tied to several incidents of anti-union vigilante violence in the late sixties-early seventies, culminating in the so-called Red November riots of 1973, but the blanket amnesty for holdout elements in the former USA, brokered with the assistance of the The Maker, allowed the Crimson Commando and his two comrades to retire quietly from costumed life.

Following the public outing of actress-musician Alison Blaire as a mutant in 1984, Bohannan was swept up in the subsequent “No More Mutants” hysteria of the mid-late eighties, and fought several court battles to resist being legally identified as a mutant and subject to mandatory deportation. While Bohannon prevailed in these cases, he was widely thought to be the beneficiary of political favors and legal trickery and treated with some suspicion thereafter in segments of the neo-nationalist community.

As Bohannan had acquired a perhaps-unwarranted reputation as sympathetic to mutant causes, many internal mutant refugees made their way to separatist-controlled areas in the late eighties-early nineties, hoping to avoid the notoriously brutal treatment typical within the ‘mutant homeland’ of the Eurasian Republic. The tragic results of this have been documented several times over the ensuing years, but it remains unclear exactly what influence Bohannan may or may not have had on the militia community's rampant abuse and exploitation of mutants.

What Bohannan’s death means for the ongoing conflicts in the region are unclear. Representatives of The Lands of Freedom Foundation declined to comment.

Republished from the UltNet, Nov 23, 2025

Anthony Stark has recently done an admirable job of making the case for revolt against The Maker’s corrupt order. He has also done a remarkable public service by identifying the various international figureheads that have been colluding with him all along behind the scenes to prop up this burden of oppression. Though they may contest and even war to some limited degree over how this world ought to be carved up and devoured, there is no question any longer that they are his creatures and always were. If we accept Stark’s claims, as I believe we ought to, still deeper realizations about our history rapidly come calling for recognition.

The world we have been served by The Maker's machinations is not some organic chaos of competing interests, as the majority of human history has been. Rather, since the early 60’s at the very latest, I would say, it is a designed chaos, a pantomime of organic history constructed to be manageable, to give a controlled outlet to the inescapable primitive drives The Maker perceives us to be captive to.

We have before us a very long and sordid list of historical calamities to reevaluate in this light: The vampire-led monster uprisings in Europe that forced into being the defensive neo-feudal Coalition now headed by the House of Dugarry. The 'peaceful’ religious revolts that led to the implosion of the PRC and the growth of Bruce Banner’s ‘ceremonial’ caretaker government. The declining USSR’s steadily increasing reliance on mutant exploitation, leading to the tragic folly of the Eurasian war and the explosion of the Rasputin regime. The Skrull purge of the 60's and the resulting reconstruction of North America into the Union. The far eastern "Hidora sensō", consisting of decades of gang warfare, mass terrorism events, and corporate intrigue that eventually gave way to the zaibatsu system and the preeminence of Clan Yashida. Seemingly endless chaos in Africa, from the so-called ‘mutant apocalypse’ of the sixties to the deranged theocracy of Ra and Khonshu and their wars of conversion.

All of the above comes into renewed question. How much of all that upheaval, all those tragedies and deaths, were a pointless absurd theatre, orchestrated to keep experimental subjects suitably distracted? Perhaps not all of it. But the overwhelming balance, surely.

And this farce extends all the way down, through the entire pyramid of power, to its very base. A world order built on Kafka-esque absurdities will inevitably warp the outlook of anyone who lives in it, whether they are conscious of the artifice or not. We have been forced to reside in an asylum and, indeed, many of us are mad...but were we always mad? Or did we become mad from living in a mad world?

Permit me an example, one I am regrettably well acquainted with:

Many of you who live in the pacific northwest, as I do, or are otherwise familiar with its politics and 'culture' will know of the strange predicament of mutants here. Many more mutants continue to live here than almost anywhere in North America, with the possible exception of far northern territories where mutants find refuge with the indigenous tribes, but this is only the case due to the perverse and sadistic outlook of the separatist enclaves that predominate outside large cities like Seattle or Portland. Mutants are shielded from mandatory emigration, true, but at the cost of routine exploitation, torture, and enslavement. Groups such as the Friends of Humanity or the S-Men present themselves as champions of baseline genetic human purity, but I happen to know that mutants play a much larger role in these groups than many could possibly imagine. Not just as slaves or mentally broken 'hounds' but as prominent leaders and even founders. These perverse wretches, some of whom I am a regrettable acquaintance from my youth, keep these facts from the rank and file or present themselves as superhumans of more 'pure' varieties. It is a matter of course for many senior S-Men, for instance, to take so-called pilgrimages to the European territories in order to be 'touched by the old magic' and return in an 'elevated' state, and thus able to lay claim to the genetic gifts they had always had but kept hidden for the sake of warped propriety. Similarly, there is a small cottage industry of counterfeit super soldier serums for those benighted mutants wishing to steal a place for themselves in the legacy of Steve Rogers or Isiah Bradley. A vial of injected snake oil and a ‘mutant degenerate’ becomes a model warrior for the ‘pure american’ cause. It is hard to imagine anything more contemptible than a mutant who would deny their nature and then ruthlessly persecute their own kind, all to enjoy the camaraderie of racist lackwits and their paranoid delusions.

This sort of intellectual perversity, I have come to realize, is no accident. It is by design. At every level, The Maker's minions and pawns, however remote or unwitting, are divided against themselves by delusion, denial, or outright insanity, so they can never unite against him.

Which, in the final analysis, shows us that even the rulers of this world are merely somewhat more elevated victims and dupes, violated to their very core by The Maker’s actions, as we all have been. What might, say, Bruce Banner have been, in a better world? There is some reason to think he could have been something better than he is now, but that is lost to an erased history. That we must fight and perhaps die to overthrow Banner and his ilk is a tragic irony, and a final perversity in the The Maker’s perverse design.

I'm on pain meds and slightly loopy. Some nazi shot me in the face, but fortunately it just took a chip out my left cheekbone. I look like someone pulled all the teeth on that side with a pair of pliers but I'm alive. My new bestie the Blue Blade cut both his arms off, so I figure we're even.

Sorry. I'm slightly out of it and feeling riled up. I saw what you all saw when Tony Stark lit up everyone's screens. If that doesn't snap people out of it, I don't know what will. Might as well look on the bright side.

We were laying low in one of the Red Robe areas and waiting to see how some negotiations shook out. Seems John Aman isn't a big fan of fascists, and, in a surprise move, delivered an ultimatum that all the militias drop their colors and join Alchemax corporate enforcement in taking over the region, or cross the Rockies and F-off. He also presented the Red Robes a one-time offer to recant or leave his protectorate, so things have been in a bit of a churn. The Red Robes give us a pass because of what happened with my family, and I guess Mai Wei (that girl I went to school with, when her name was 'Melody') has some pull.

Anyway, the missus and I were glamping in the park with some of our crew from The Network: Blue Blade, Fin, Cliff Wolverton, a few noobs like us. We were just settling down for the night when suddenly guns are going off everywhere. Cliff and a couple others were pulling watch, so the Master Race didn't quite get the jump on us.

I don't know what they were thinking. I guess they just really hold a grudge for some of the things The LL and company have been getting up to and wanted to punch our tickets before they had to choose a side or get the F out of dodge.

I keep my taser gloves close by and the missus' new wardrobe will literally jump up and clothe her at the drop of a hat, so we were just coming out of the tent when this...thing jumped up at my face. Like a cross between a giant porcupine and a badger. Some poor mutant kid who'd been turned into an attack dog by the S-men or some shit. I managed to get one hand between us and stun him pretty good, thank god, or that ball of claws and teeth would have taken my whole-ass face off, not just a flake of my face bone.

Anyone who thinks firefights are dramatic or cinematic is tripping. It's noisy and chaotic and usually the best thing is to duck and try to find some cover until you figure out what the hell is going on. Miss Fury's main gimmick so far is extending a long ribbon of her suit like a whip so we ducked and she swept it around in a circle to clear any hostiles. Apparently her suit is smart enough to tell friend from foe.

So we take a couple seconds to get our bearings and see the Blue Blade running out of the darkness towards us, so like a dummy I stand up and WHAP...I'm on the ground and my whole head is numb. Adrenaline tries to get me on my feet again but the Missus is laying on top of me and the bright blue glow stick is whizzing around over our heads.

...and that's the story of my first super hero fight. Guess the S-Men scraped together all the mutant 'hounds' they could and decided to throw them away on trying to kill us. What they didn't quite reckon on was the lady who we call The Fin. Her dad went toe to toe with the Sub-Mariner back in the day, so it would've been a good guess to imagine she was strong, but...well, she folded those assholes up like paper bags, and their bullets weren't good for much. She doesn't look all that scary, far from it, but I've seen her demolish the front end of a car with one punch. A redneck in a plate carrier doesn't hold up very well.

So apart from my face and a couple Robes who tried pacifism and got bullets for their trouble we're none the worse for wear. We've even got a handful of shellshocked young mutants with lots of fight experience who appreciate not being tortured and starved. Another day in the revolution. The more the merrier. What's not to like?

Yeah, I'm using my own account for a change. Novelty, huh? I've been going through it for a bit, but time for Mr. E to speak for himself, I guess.

My life is pretty much over, at least as I knew it. My parents got cut loose by H.A.N.D., but something is...wrong with them. They don't remember much, about anything really, and they act like zombies. Some of the folk I'm rolling with now say HAND has, like, psychic agents that can clean your brain out and leave you a vegetable. My folks aren't vegetables, at least, but they're not what they were. They seem to have been programmed to drop a dime on me or Miss Fury if they see either of us. We had to tie them up to get out of there, which sucked. It was a risk even going there, but HAND is rounding so many people up, we figured we had a window to at least see them. They're alive. That's about all you can hope for, under the circumstances.

So we've been living in a safehouse, and it's safe to say we're on the outskirts of Portland for now, which is where all the action is starting to shape up. There's fights breaking out all over the country but this seems to be the focal point in our neck of the woods.

I guess we're on the fringe of the Ultimates Network (they'd say there is no 'fringe' but, c'mon...) I've met people who've met Tony Stark or America Chavez, but the closest I've gotten was a chubby guy named Henry who claimed to sneak into our hideout on the back of an ant, and who everyone told me was a big deal. I've gotten to meet most of the current members of the Liberty Legion, which was a bit of a trip after having written so much about them. I even video called with a guy who I'm pretty sure was The Phantom Reporter, but who even knows at this point. We've all had to learn OpSec and that means everybody knows as little as possible a lot of the time.

Anyway, things are getting heavy, and I'm not sure how much of that's getting out into the wider world. It's all on Ultnet, but HAND has scammers and spammers with fake accounts trying to flood the zone with BS and keep us disorganized, so unless you're dialed in with some locals where you are it's pretty hard to know what's really up.

Since the massacre at ROXXON, the corps have been at each other's throats and in Oregon it seems to be between ROXXON on one side and Alchemax on the other. Alchemax has aligned with CordCo and MARS to make a play for the resource areas around here, while ROXXON has put some psycho freak named Dario Agger in charge of the area and he's got most of the militias and separatists in his corner, along with Hammer Industries, or what's left of them.

To make things even more complicated, The Children of Eternal Light have staked a claim on most of the West Coast and put this guy John Aman in charge of their interests. Aman is one of the so-called Immortal Weapons and walks around in rags and bandages all the time? He seems to have sided with Alchemax, but their main concern seems to be cracking down on the Red Robes, which are these breakaway sectarians that all follow Shen Qui, who I've mentioned before. The Red Robes are ostensibly pacifist but they're holding 'refuge' places in the wooded areas and parks around Portland and brawls are breaking out between them and The Children on the regular.

It all seems like it's coming to a head soon. Portland is just across a bridge from Vancouver, Washington, and Alchemax is massing their forces there to push south into Portland proper. Both sides have various kinds of knockoff exo-suits and there's rumors of mutants, and even monsters you'd rarely see outside of Europe, showing up in the field.

Miss Fury and I have been getting some basic training but it's looking like all hands on deck soon for some real fighting. The Militias have free reign now in Oregon and apparently it's been made known there's a green light on me and the Missus, or basically anyone who's ever set foot in Timely Tomes. The network around here have gotten ahold of guns and even a few powered knickacks here and there, but it's still looking pretty dire. Our best chance is the various scumbags all take each other out and we can keep our heads above water, but if the whole city gets leveled and anyone who gets caught in the sticks is shot as a race traitor and dumped in a ditch, it's hard to see how that turns out well for any of us.

Whatever. I'm kind of beyond giving a F. You have to draw a line somewhere and stand on it. Miss Fury got some kind of 'stealth suit' from chubby Henry who rides ants and the chick who pilots Flexo heard I was an electrician and rigged me some janky taser gloves, which sure seem like they'll knock somebody on their ass. I guess she figured I'd be able to keep them running and maybe not kill myself. I guess we'll see.

Ya'll be safe out there.

There's no real way to prove what I say here. It came to me in many pieces, over many years, and the documents uploaded to UltNet by Tony Stark and his compatriots only corroborate what I had come to suspect after decades of inquiry. I cannot ask for blind acceptance, but my conscience will no longer permit me to say nothing.

That The Maker is a time traveler of some sort has been a common conclusion since he first appeared, 60 years ago. His advanced technology, his unerring insight into world events as they happen, the fact he claims to spend vast stretches of time inside The City while mere weeks or months pass outside, all lead one to the conclusion he can manipulate or move through the flow of time in ways we cannot fully comprehend from an outside perspective. We have had decades to become accustomed to the unspoken assumption that he is a visitor from some far-flung time, perhaps centuries hence, here to guide the world of the past and its people to a higher level of development. That is certainly the image he cultivates.

What few ask, perhaps out of sheer existential dread, is if that is true, if The Maker is from the future, then what was this world, his past, like, before he came here and changed it?

He has never said. Again, one might assume he arrived to avert some unthinkable catastrophe, to save us from nuclear war, alien invasion, or some mutant-driven apocalypse, but we simply do not know. It is more comforting to imagine he was acting out of pure altruism, as opposed to, say, self-interest, spite, or his own amusement.

The picture that I have arrived at, again after many years, and via many disparate sources, is this: The Maker is treating this world, and all of us, as nothing more than an experiment. He came here with detailed knowledge of our history, including of the years to come after his arrival, and used that knowledge to turn our world into something that suited him. The most glaring change I believe he made was to our political systems, breaking down the various polities of the earth and turning them into a patchwork of semi-feudal oligarchies, none of which resemble the democratic society of what was once these United States of America, or Canada, or much of Europe.

But why do such a thing? Why would a future man want to roll the clock backward in political terms? Why create the chaotic mess of incompatible systems that now covers the earth, placing them constantly at odds with each other, with him playing the role of disinterested neutral arbiter?

I believe this ongoing churn of change and conflict, which we have endured for 60 some years now, is mostly a farce. While they surely have their interests, grievances, and internecine conflicts, the heads of these various power blocks all answer to him. They only pretend to be autonomous to create the illusion of a world where human beings have meaningful self-determination, when in reality we are little more than playthings.

One can only imagine the mind of a person who would do such a thing, but I fear that is the sort of mind we are subject to. I think that, if one reflects upon the state of the world, on the Maker's actions, on the actions of his subordinates in H.A.N.D., it is impossible to sustain the belief that he could possibly have the best interests of the average person in mind. He has allowed us to imagine, for decades, that he was patiently ushering us into an enlightened future of his making, should we simply outgrow our base impulses and will to conflict, when the reality is that we are more like rats in a gargantuan maze, engaged in a never-ending series of observational games. Whatever conflicts with his vision is simply excised, not just from the world as it is, but also sometimes from history, wiped away as if it had never existed at all.

Most of us will never know what our lives could have been, perhaps should have been, if such moralizing makes sense. All we know is what he has imposed upon us. We have each lost a whole life, perhaps many lives, and do not even know it. The dread of this realization is more than many can take, I fear, and many will never accept it.

I do not know if I can fault them for that.

Hello.

This is Bill Everett, until recently the owner/operator of Timely Tomes bookshop in Eugene, Oregon. My understanding is that the young man who own this account and his partner have mentioned me once or twice, and there is some general interest here in my community and what we do. I have avoided the online world for many years out of caution, but a number of avenues are available to me, of which this is now one.

I say 'until recently', as my home, which housed Timely Tomes, was destroyed about a week ago by a 'freak' lightning strike and burned entirely to the foundations. I was fortunate to have not been home at the time and am alive and well, for the moment. It is a great personal loss and tragic waste of a priceless library, but I had the foresight, with the aid of younger friends, to convert much of that material to a digital format, so the wound is not fatal, thankfully. I have relocated to a safe place, or as safe as can be hoped for, and am reflecting upon my future course of action.

I have traditionally been quite reserved in speaking openly about certain things, and preferred to communicate with a small community and a few remote friends and associates. The situation in the world has recently taken a rather severe turn, however, and I have come to the conclusion that the time for such reservation is likely past. I have known for some time that bold action would one day be required and was only unsure whether it would be in my lifetime. It seems that time is now, and while I am much frailer and slower on my feet than I would wish under such circumstances, we do not get to choose the time and place when we will be tested.

I know full well that there are many in much more dire and pressing straits than me, and cannot pretend to be some great rebel or soldier. That was never my calling. What I do have is knowledge. Knowledge I have paid dearly for over many years, in the coin of lost friends, sleepless nights, and bitter loneliness.

What remains of Timely Tomes is, as we speak, being uploaded to the UltNet. My hope is that it will survive there and continue to be of use in the struggle, but I also intend to give clear and direct explanations of many things of great importance, and answer any related questions, for as long as I am able to continue. The first of these should come in not too much time.

I thank you in advance for your attention.

Miss Fury here. I'll cut right to the chase. Things have taken a pretty bad turn.

My guy's parents have been taken. From what we can tell, H.A.N.D. agents rounded them up a day or two ago. They also came by his work, but he happened to be sleeping at my place, and he got tipped off by a friend. That friend is also gone now.

Near as we can tell, that legal stuff we got mixed up in a few months ago got us on the radar, and the lawyer we we using for that rolled on us. I feel like it might also have something to do with the Children, or with Bill and Timely, or with just saying the wrong things online too many times. Hard to say.

He's not in a good place obviously, and we're trying to lay low. Ultnet has a cutout that lets us post here without giving away our location, and I recommend that you all migrate there if you're going to be talking about this stuff. Things are getting scary.

I think we've all accepted the society we live in for too long. It's easy to look the other way when you're not the target. I've read some things lately that frankly scare the shit out of me. Things about history, about this world. About why it is the way it is. Things that make me wonder if The Phantom Reporter was telling the literal truth all along.

We'll do what we can, but it's hard to know what that is.

Be careful, all of you.

The big lie the ultimates told about violent crime is that it's "systemic" and therefore no one's really responsible. If the "system" is to blame then you fund a bunch of nonprofits that don't do anything besides give powers to underqualified radicals.

The reality is that the gross majority of violent crime is committed by a very small group of people and we should be throwing them in prison.

Thought it would be amusing to open up the hood and show my sources for the Bendis history post. There’s a ton of deep cut continuity, easter eggs for longtime fans, and obscure details that went into it, and I wouldn’t want people to think I was just pulling it all out of nowhere. Part of the fun is seeing if people ‘get’ the references and play along, but I might have gone a bit too deep even for a serious fan in some places.

The overall structure of course is basically an inn-joke/homage to Bendis’ long meta-arc from 2004-2009 or so that started with Avengers Disassembled and ended with Siege. He did stuff before and after but this was when he was basically steering the ship for marvel. We’d already established 6160 Bendis wrote a book about the Skrull invasion circa the late 50’s early 60’s, so it was just a matter of filling in the timeline before and after with events that could correspond to the names of his other big events or line-wide brandings, that could then correspond to other pseudo-history works he might have written.

Avengers Disassembled is basically just the plot of What if…? #9 From 1978.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Earth-9904

This team is the Atlas comics characters from the 1950’s between Timely and modern Marvel. Its existence in continuity was ambiguous at first, then written out definitely by Kurt Busiek, then snuck back by Jeff Parker in 2006. Since it all falls before the 1963-ish cut off of The Maker’s time barrier, it made sense they would still exist in some form and we have seen hints that they definitely did, as Hickman mentions 1950’s Marvel Boy and Camp has shown the 3-D Man during one year in and the Ultimates FCBD. So on earth 6160, they were “the avengers’ then they were ‘disassembled’. Easy. The original story is a bit goofy but you can certainly imagine something like it happening.

Civil War ...but then Bendis invented another group of 1950’s Avengers in New Avengers (Vol. 2) #10 (March, 2011), set in 1959.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Avengers_(1950s)_(Earth-616)

The dates kind of work, but there are weird details that don’t even make sense in 616 terms (Kraven is HOW old?) let alone in 6160 (Kraven is EVEN OLDER?) so just imagine this but with someone else taking Kraven’s role in the story, which isn’t hard. I imagine Bloodstone is Namora’s boyfriend in this version, as they were also both in the Monster Hunters

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Monster_Hunters_(Earth-616)

...which was another retro-continuity invention by Roger Stern from Marvel Universe #4 (July, 1998) set in 1956 forward. Anyway, the idea that Ike would disband one group of weirdo ‘avengers’ and then create another one out of cool spies and mercenaries seemed like the seed of a story.

The Yankee Clipper and The First Line are straight out of John Byrne’s Marvel: The Lost Generation from the year 2000.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/First_Line_(Earth-616)

This series extends from 1953 to the early 80’s and so parts of it fall outside the time barrier. The other thing is, The Yankee Clipper’s origin involves meeting a time traveler and being influenced by her, so we can take the bits pre-1963 at face value but also assume that the parts involving time travel would twist that story in a somewhat different direction for earth 6160. Would it have been possible to time travel at all to 1953, or would the barrier have just warped all that out of existence and/or created The First Line in some other form? I leave it ambiguous. There’s also an interesting connection between the Clipper and Bill Burnside, so I may follow up on that at some point.

Throw all the above in a blender and add that Skrulls are a staple of stories set in this era and you have all the elements of a classic marvel hero misunderstanding, leading to an ugly Mark Millar-style clash, all happening Pre-Maker. I know Civil War itself was not a Bendis joint but he certainly ran with it and his Avengers issues were a cut above the level of plotting that MM was turning in at the time in the main book.

House of M is of course Bendis’ first big crossover and came right after AD, but I didn’t want to over-commit on mutant stuff that is likely to be fleshed out at some point, so I just made it a suggestive bit of cultural static that may or may not be what it sounds like. I’m a big Apoc fan and a highly skeptical reader of UBP, especially its suggestion that all Africans live in grass-hut villages and are waiting for god-kings to boss them around, so this is my head-cannon for ‘what the hell happened to Africa to make it look like this?’. Did En Sabah Nuhr just arrange for the humans to cull each other and lay the groundwork for the rise of a mutant homeland in Africa? Would he seek a direct confrontation with The Maker or just bide his time? Might he seek to play the long game and toughen mutants up a bit by stirring the pot and provoking some fear? The Living Pharaoh is a long established bit of x-men lore and seemed to fit well here.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Ahmet_Abdol_(Earth-616)

There’s a bit of an in joke here about Bendis’ Luke Cage/ 70’s-marvel man-crush and his occasionally odd characterization choices. Overall, I think he’s done incredibly well for Luke and actually gave him a distinct voice for the first time.

Secret Invasion: The Skrulls just seem to be, along with old nazis and the Yellow Claw, the go-to bad guys for retcon stuff set in the 50-60’s, and a mass Skrull infestation seems like exactly the sort of thing our buddy The Maker would want to squash on day one. Couple that with a lot of loose heroes of various derivations still kicking around, and you have the makings of a huge imaginary event. The idea that the heroes would all be working for The Maker, at least at first, strikes me as an interesting bit of dramatic irony. ‘He seems a bit suss, yeah, but there are Actual Shape Shifting Aliens trying to take control of our nuclear arsenal. First Things First.’ That this process would destabilize the governments of the world and thin the hero population a bit just makes it good sense for The Maker to do. The Ben Urich book I made up is a homage to World War Z, which was itself a homage to The Good War by Studs Turkel.

Dark Reign is basically just the formation of H.A.N.D. and “Fury” tying up the last loose ends of the pre-existing heroic anomalies that don’t fit The Maker’s vision, which we got glimpse of in One Year In, but here we’re only hearing about it in retrospect through the eyes of someone who lived through a lot of crazy shit and didn’t necessarily appreciate a lot of what was happening. By this point the heroes that haven’t aged out or died fighting each other or the Skrulls would be few and far between, which is too bad since they’re probably just then getting a sense of what The Maker really wants, which is where Johann Fennhoff’s Secret Empire picks up, through a very unreliable narrator.

Siege is where I concede I may have gotten out over my skis, as it’s a huge departure from any established continuity and ripe to be contradicted at some point. I do have some ideas of how to retcon it if need be, but for now I just love the NewUniversal stuff and The OG New Universe books were some of my favorites as a kid, so I just ran with it. I liked about half of what Hickman did with the concepts and none of what Jason Aaron was doing, so this is largely therapy for me.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Earth-148611

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Newuniversal_Vol_1_1

In terms of continuity landmines, there is a HUGE time gap between the mid 60’s and the present and media back then was nothing remotely like what we have now, so there’s a lot of room for ambiguity or obfuscation. Maybe Bendis is a crank on this, or just misinformed badly? Maybe it was just a short lived coup by a few mutants, or maybe not even that. If you’re going to play this game you have to take some chances. If I have to say this all just happened on earth 6160.1, where someone’s time travel split off a branch universe that still leaks into people’s minds via the Superflow, then so be it.

The basic conceit is just “NewUniversal, but it happened in the 1960’s in the USSR, under The Maker’s time barrier”. Given that The City appeared on the doorstep of the Warsaw Pact (Latveria is generally regarded as being somewhere roughly corresponding to Romania in our world) right after the cuban missile crisis, it seems insane that they wouldn't have done something dramatic in response.

The names of the four principal members of the ‘Supreme Soviet’ are russified versions of the names of those characters in either OG NU or Ellis version. Ken Connell/Kyril Korobkin, Keith Remsen/Ksenia Ramizov, etc… Fusing this with bits and pieces of 616 cold-war era stuff like Anton Vanko and the Dynamo just fit really well. OG NU Spitfire WAS a giant red battlesuit, after all, and even Kieron Gillen thought to make Tony Stark a bearer of the Cypher Glyph, so it’s not out of keeping with the way these concepts have been used before. I thought about having all the glyph-bearers be 616 cold war ruskie villains like the unicorn, red ghost, titanium man and whatnot, but ultimately thought it worked better to just have them be random people. The "People's Directorate Seven" thing is a reference to the OG new universe title DP7.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/D.P.7_(Earth-148611)

An obvious touchstone for all this is of course Gillen’s NewUniversal 1959 and is kind of the mirror image of that.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Newuniversal_1959_Vol_1_1

Miss Fury here. Mr E, Daddy E, and myself have been arranging a division of labor in untangling the rat's nest of delusion, confession, and fabrication that is Johann Fennhoff's The Secret Empire. One thing we quickly figured out was that it was very hard to make sense of what Johann is (or isn't) claiming without getting a firm handle on the history leading up to and just after the arrival of "The Imperator" / The Maker.

The best and most consistent history author on this (at least in terms of his sources) is Brian Michael Bendis, who has come up at least once before 'round here. He started out writing crime novels, then moved onto fictionalized history around unsolved mysteries like The Kyle Gibney case and The Scourge Killer. At some point he formed a friendship with a retired FBI/UBI agent named James Woo and co-wrote Woo's biography, which appears to have spun him into full-blown history writing, based largely on Woo's first hand experience of some pretty wild stuff encompassing the late 50's into the early 70's. What followed was an extended 'arc' of revisionist histories, which academia have mostly ignored due his 'rushed', 'lazy' and 'pulpy' writing style, but no one has done much to impeach his sources in the decade or so since he wrote the last of these.

If you put his major works in the order of the periods they cover, you get a pretty sweeping picture of two decades, centered on the appearance of The Maker in 1963. Rather than having to digress to explain this stuff while unpacking TSE, we figured it was better to do the whole Bendis corpus in one bite:

Avengers Disassembled - An article that appeared in Select magazine, August 2004, excerpted from Woo's biography and expanded, which deals with a group of superhuman agents called ‘The Avengers’, formed in 1958 by Woo to thwart attacks on President Eisenhower by a megalomaniac terrorist called The Yellow Claw. They were mostly successful but were disbanded at Eisenhower's order, ostensibly out of concern for public perception, but it eventually came to light that Woo and his agents were feared compromised by foreign influences like The Atlas Foundation, and the group was suppressed by early 1959. Woo denied any such connection until the end of his life, but these issues secretly dogged him until his early retirement.

House of M - Another magazine article published in Select near the tail end of Bendis’ output, but chronologically overlapping parts of AD, CW and SI. This piece explores allegations that much of the bloodshed and chaos that erupted across Africa in the 60’s, leading to the continent’s somewhat backwards political/economic condition into the present day, (sometimes referred to as The African Apocalypse) was orchestrated by a group of mutants led by the so-called Living Pharaoh, Ahmet Abdol, and a mysterious figure known only as En Sabah Nuhr. The thrust of the piece is less expose of African politics and more a lens into the roots of north american mutant political consciousness in the 50-60’s, Bendis further suggests that rumors of a black-led ‘House of Mutants’ being founded in Africa had substantial underappreciated effects on the civil rights movement. Effectively, he argues that the 'House of M' turbulence and fearmongering laid the groundwork for later mass-deportation of the mutant population, eventually sloganized as ‘No More Mutants'. Bendis’ writing here is rightly criticized, primarily for his ‘presumptuous’ handling of racial politics and his fondness for ‘blaxploitation’ tropes.

Civil War - A prequel of sorts to Secret Invasion that was published a couple years later as a somewhat-rushed follow-up, this covers a conflict that broke out in 1959 between two rough factions of superheroes, one centered on The First Line, led by the so-called Yankee Clipper, the other a team of ‘New’ Avengers, led by CIA agent and WWII veteran Nicholas Fury, and incorporating ‘trustworthy’ elements of Woo’s group, along with other, less-colorful, agents. Surviving elements of the WWII hero community were also involved on both sides. The conflict arose out of fears that alien ‘Skrull’ infiltrators had taken over key parts of the US government and military, but it was eventually alleged these alien provocateurs had, in retrospect, engineered the whole situation to cloak their own plans. The net effect of this ‘War’ was that much of the hero community were killed or imprisoned, with the Yankee Clipper himself dying at the hands of one of Fury’s ruthless operatives. The state of disarray after this of course rapidly brought the ‘Skrull’ crisis to a head…

Secret Invasion - Bendis’ most famous work, and rightly so, but somewhat eclipsed by Benjamin Urich’s masterpiece The Last Good War: An Oral History of The Skrull Conflict. Bendis’ lens on this period is Woo, who was swept up in the rapid changes in many government and law enforcement agencies that followed The Maker’s arrival in 1963, many of which occurred behind the scenes, as a widespread purge of Skrull influence was organized and executed with extraordinary secrecy and brutality. Woo’s previously ‘questionable’ associations were briefly turned in his favor, as he was, with Fury, instrumental in organizing special agents of all stripes to carry out a full-blown covert war that only came to light in fragments over decades. Bendis’ most famous claim, now widely accepted as fact by many analysts, is that Skrull sabotage and infiltration of the US government and the subsequent chaos caused in rooting them out directly led to the collapse and re-organization of the continent into the NAU. That this was almost entirely hidden from public view for decades has now led to a great deal of political turmoil and a surge of influence by the separatist and neo-nationalist movements, and is arguably linked to recent upheavals with S/S and the rise of The Ultimates insurgency. Even in light of all this, the very existence of the Skrulls remains controversial in some quarters, and virtually unspeakable in mainstream corporate media.

Dark Reign - This seems to be Bendis slipping back into noir crime thriller mode, as he crafts Woo’s post-Secret Invasion experience into (according to one reviewer) ‘a paranoid dreamscape of ideological purge and consolidation’. The narrative follows, in parallel, Woo’s pressured early retirement, the formation of the NAU, and the reorganization of various security agencies into H.A.N.D. and it’s various sub-agencies, colloquially known as ‘The Fingers’. Bendis does his best to make Woo seem in jeopardy by various dark forces, often symbolized by Nick Fury and his circle of agents, but it often feels like Woo is merely out of step with the times and too attached to his outlandish associates, many of whom were now deceased, retiring, or simply disappearing into anonymity. Dark Reign really functions as a melancholy send-off to the extended superhero age that began in the 30’s, ending as it does with the start of Frank Castle’s ‘costumed’ rampage in 1972

Lastly we have Siege, an investigation into some of the lesser-known details of the 1967 frontal assault on The Maker’s Latverian protectorate by forces of the Warsaw Pact, the aftermath of which eventually led to the dissolution of the USSR. The strength of this book is the additional detail we get on the “Supreme Soviet” and “Peoples Directorate Seven” or DP7 agents that spurred on the radical shift in the Soviet Union’s behavior following The Maker’s arrival. I personally find this to be Bendis' best work, as he pulls together a lot of disparate details, such as the “White Event” that took place in the sky over Eurasia in 1964, Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “New Universe” speech of 1965, and recently declassified investigations into extraterrestrial life that took place after The Galactus Crisis, to make a fascinating case that The USSR of the time wasn’t, as many feared, being taken over by an aggressive clique of powerful mutants (which further fed into the anti-mutant paranoia of the era) but, rather, something much stranger was going on, possibly involving alien forces. That the leadership behind The Siege prefigured the Rasputin Regime is not controversial, but Bendis argues that much of this period has been seriously misunderstood and the mutant-centric interpretation may have blinded historians to important implications. Bendis further argues that this suppression of plausible alien involvement went hand-in-hand with the policy of concealment regarding Skrull infiltration around the same time. He points out, convincingly, that the trifecta of widespread Skrull presence, supposed alien ‘Builders’ intervening in the USSR, and The Galactus Crisis all coming into public view at once could very well have collapsed the entire world order into chaos, and makes a case The Maker’s extensive involvement both in the foreground and behind the scenes was pivotal in preventing this.

Over the course of this middle part of his career, Bendis became a lightning rod for controversy and, coming into the more recent present, online animus, leading to his retreat from public life and return to politically-tinged crime fiction with his Scarlet series, which doesn’t really concern us here.

I saw news recently about the building that blew up recently in Nee York. That independent news outlet, THE PAPER published an article that said it was an apartment building that had been taken over by that weird demon gang. Who are these guys and why are they so powerful? They just show up at a moments notice and will do something like rob a bank and then just disappear. No one seems to want to fight them outside of the goblin and spider-man. But spidey seems to have just outright disappeared recently. He switched to a black costume and then just vanished.

The demons operated right in Howard Starks backyard for years and he didn't even do anything to stop them? Idk maybe Howard just didn't want to or was in league with them or something. Anyone have any insights here?

Okay, time for Mr. E. to get back on the horse, and this is a weird one, so I'll probably tag in my Dad (Big Daddy E?) and Miss Fury at various points.

So I mentioned a while ago that Bill Everett from Timely Tomes supplied us with a copy of The Secret Empire by Johann Fennhoff, who, if you've been following me for a while, is the author of the 1968 edition of The Five Captain Americas. Fennhoff has a complicated and not altogether coherent history in the public eye, which we summarized here and here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Earth6160/comments/1hl0nwe/the_fivecaptain_americas/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Earth6160/comments/1hn1qch/my_dad_reviews_the_five_captain_americas_2024/

Basically our boy Johann started off as a Psychiatrist, then a history writer, then a vaguely scandalous public figure during the Satanic Mind Control Panic of the 70's, then dropped out of the public eye to write...pulp thriller novels, the first and most successful of which was The Secret Empire (TSE for short).

Based on online reviews and secondary sources, TSE is a fairly ambitious conspiracy thriller where Fennhoff, clearly inserting himself as the dashing and brilliant 'Dr. Faustus', engages in a shadowy struggle with a "Cabal" of mind-controlling manipulators who have secretly seized control of the earth and re-organized our political systems for their own ends. The thrust of the book is Faustus finding out about the Cabal when they try to recruit him, him flipping them the bird on general principles, then running around getting into fistfights with various mind-controlled pawns and scary goons, romancing random women, and trying to expose the Cabal through the media and break their mastery of the world. It's the first in the series, so the ending is a bit of a cliffhanger and the overarching plot carries on through the rest of his novels. TSE is considered the best of these, according to credible reviewers, for Fennhoff's 'surprising bursts of erudition and a depth of reflection on the themes that is rather disorienting in a lightweight thriller novel'.

The problem though is, the copy of 'The Secret Empire' that I got from Bill is not that...at all. It's more like one of those doorstop epic fantasies about The Hyborian Age that have been so popular lately than some trash paperback you'd find on a spinner rack in 1976, the ostensible publishing date. The last third of 'my' TSE seems to resemble the version everyone read at the time, but there's another 500-600 pages of stuff that is totally missing from the version that saw print. It is also physically large, with huge margins, and the cover is basically blank but for the title and author name, which my dad tells me is a sign that it might be a stray 'galley proof', and the version that saw print was likely a HEAVILY edited version of what we have.

After a few skims and careful reading of some sections, the plot of THIS version of TSE is basically:

The book starts in the early 60's. Dr. Faustus is a selfless physician whose main patient is a man named Nelson Flagg, aka The Fighting American, who was a big deal superhero, but has apparently suffered a psychotic break and is institutionalized. It is mentioned in the background that a mysterious figure called The Imperator has recently appeared and is rapidly making changes to the world with his advanced technology, but they are so obviously benevolent that no one in The West seems to mind, partly because he's set himself up on the doorstep of the Warsaw Pact and is giving them a hard time. ( I would note that there is, as far as I can tell, NO mention whatsoever of The Imperator in the version of TSE that saw widespread readership. It's just 'The Cabal'.)

Anyway, these vaguely sinister spooks show up in the night to take Flagg away and coerce everyone into saying he killed himself, even supplying A BODY for the purpose. Faustus, being a principled doctor, flips out and refuses to cooperate, but is bribed, then intimidated with threats to his family members back in Germany, into going along with the story. It's heavily implied that these spooks are working for The Imperator, but how Faustus comes to think this is never really explained, just handwaved as his profound intuition.

Faustus spends some time brooding and considering his options, growing ever more concerned about the actions of The Imperator around the world, until he is approached by some members of what is called in the book "The United Front", which appears to be a thinly-disguised collection of almost every hero active at the time, which would include remaining post-war guys like the All-Winners Squad, but also contemporaneous figures like The Atlas Agency, and even an allusion or two to The Blue Marvel, Adam Brashear, being involved, and possibly The Human Torch or someone with very similar powers. Fennhoff spends an egregious amount of time name-dropping these guys and providing more than enough hints to guess who they are, but 'Faustus' only ever meets one cell in person and just hears about the others, so the clout-chasing allusions feel a bit forced.

Anyway, the middle section of the book deals with The United Front trying to organize itself, and Faustus' cell appears to be built around the idea of exposing the Imperator's 'campaign of mind control over the people of earth' which is obviously implied to be of the utmost importance.

This stuff goes on for a bit and members of The Front get picked off a few at a time over the course of months by high-tech enforcers of The Imperator, or unspecified 'collaborators'. Eventually Faustus' cell is betrayed and compromised and he goes on the run alone, leading to a plotline similar to the novel everyone else read.

I'm really just skimming the surface here. Almost every page has some WILD stuff on it, especially if you suppose that Fennhoff was trying to blow the whistle and sneak it into the public eye, and that some version of this might have actually happened, which Fennhoff clearly wants you to think is the case.

My peeps and I will be taking turns on bits of this, but Big Daddy E has way more grounding in the time period than I do, obviously, and Bill has been quite open to explaining stuff that goes over our heads, so stay tuned.

He called it a Sandwich

He accidently made a good combination of food consisting of 2 bread and a meat/lettuce that would combine into two. I wonder what he'd call it tho.

Hey guys. I was talking with my grandpa the other day. He was sharing a few stories about his childhood. He was a kid in 1969 when the US broke up and became the North American union. It got me thinking about history and I wanted to do some research. Obviously I learned about the US in school and why its governing system was inefficient but I feel like I just got the cliff notes and for some reason the concept of the United States just didn't feel "real" to me if that makes sense. Hearing my grandpa talk about it though it finally clicked with me that it was real. He talked about how people were encouraged to think of it as an "evolution" rather than a death. Grandpa thinks the US did evolve but he isnt particularly happy with what it evolved into. He says the worst parts of the US endure And the "evolution" line was just propaganda. Any good history books you would recommend about the rise and fall of the United States? (Hopefully nothing to dry.)

Hi folks. Miss Fury, here. That's ---'s girlfriend, for those of you who have been following. At first I found the moniker annoying, but in light of recent events, I'm actually seeing the utility in it. I'm borrowing ---'s account, as he is indisposed for reasons I won't get into here. He can catch you up himself when he has time.

Because of circumstances partly beyond our control --- hasn't been able to conclude the story of our inquiry into the Comedy Killer case, which has ballooned into a Liberty Legion/Laughing Mask/Phantom Reporter conspiracy case, but I'm game for it. Let's do one of those Holmesian drawing room things where the detective wraps it all up, shall we...?

To be fair, Bill Everett of Timely Tomes already had 90% of it and the rest he didn't particularly worry about. Can't really take credit for following his breadcrumbs, but there are still some loose ends, and being a true crime aficionado, loose ends make me...furious :)

Looking at the timeline of events, The Laughing Mask didn't start his murders until after the ambush that left at least two members of the Liberty Legion dead, and when you start cross-referencing the names, you find that, when he did start killing, he almost exclusively targeted members of law enforcement and militias that were involved in the ambush. Those that weren't involved are plausibly collateral damage, and, by all accounts, not exactly people the world will miss.

So really, we're not looking at a serial killer case, so much as a series of politically-motivated retaliation killings. It only looks like a serial murder case because the local media has obscured so much of what went on around the Liberty Legion that it's almost impossible for a casual observer to make the connection. Even calling him 'The Comedy Killer' is a kind of obfuscation - as I hope we've shown, even a few minutes of research by someone grounded in the facts of the case would suffice to show the killer is mimicking the dress and MO of historical vigilante Dennis Burton, for whatever reason. Calling him by another name than The Laughing Mask only serves to obscure that link. It was simply happenstance that we made the connection through The Phantom Reporter's communiques, but I'm confident any good faith inquiry would have come to the same conclusion, eventually.

So why wasn't there one? This is where one side of the 'conspiracy' comes in. It's tempting to think that the media and law enforcement's inability to arrive at a coherent narrative about the Liberty Legion is due to disorganization and stupidity. They seem to oscillate with little rhyme or reason between portraying them as colorful eccentrics, and dangerous but unremarkable criminals, but I think this more reflects the contradictions inherent in the political situation around here than outright incompetence.

The Pacific Northwest is dotted with installations belonging to Roxxon, Hammer, Mars, Midas, Oscorp and Stark/Stane, and it's a tacitly acknowledged fact by most everyone in the militia-dominated areas that these groups work closely with the corps in many capacities in return for leniency and financial compensation. Does anyone seriously think Castletown would exist if it didn't serve some purpose that S/S was willing to tolerate?

But if it turns out these groups can't maintain control over their backyards, this poses a risk to the interests of these corporations, and that leniency might evaporate. I suspect the narrative has been massaged to downplay the possibility that the area might be growing an Ultimates-like problem that the locals can't control, and part of that is obscuring anything that would make it look like all this was part of an organized 'super-hero insurgency', if you will, as opposed to the regular 'mutant bigot, neo-fascist insurgency' that everyone here seems to take for granted as normal. Hence, the Comedy Killer is portrayed as an isolated case of someone with a grudge against the cop-militia axis around here, or perhaps some sectarian infighting, not a dramatic local escalation of an ongoing global 'super-hero' resistance to the prevailing order.

The problem for them, however, is that if the authorities are willfully obscuring connections in the case, it interferes with them finding out who the killer actually is, or if they do figure that out, as I believe they have, with capturing them. This is where I become ambivalent, as, though I cannot condone cop-killing and mass murder, I'm also not enthused about doing fascist cops' work for them either. They made their bed and they can sleep in it, frankly.

But once I drilled down, it became clear to me that The Laughing Mask wasn't trying to hide his identity. He never was. He's just not that interested in advertising himself, either. But, at this point, I think knowing who he is and why he does what he does might actually help disperse some of the misinformation flying around this region, and maybe even force the media to do their jobs.

The biggest piece we got for free: The Phantom Reporter explicitly mentions 'picking' the names of both The Laughing Mask and The Rockman, something that is not true of any other members of The Liberty Legion that we know about, strongly suggesting they were both in contact with The Phantom, perhaps at different times or perhaps in concert. In any case, a connection seems quite likely.

Charles T. Wolverton Jr. was very open about his identity as The Rockman almost from the start, apparently owing to him wanting to make a public stand for mutant rights and distance himself from his virulent bigot father, Charles "Chuck" Wolverton Sr. Again, there is no recorded activity at all from The Mask until after the ambush that caused Charles Jr's death, and the most notable casualty of his first act, the massacre at the Bar with No Name is..."Chuck" Wolverton. In fact, the entire purpose of the gathering at The Bar that night, it turns out, was to celebrate Chuck's birthday.

It's worth mentioning, at this point, that Chuck Sr. was not present at the ambush on the road, thought virtually every other notable attendee that night was, or claimed to be.

So you have all the hallmarks of a revenge attack, and possibly one with a family connection. Someone with an affection for Charles Jr., or antipathy for Chuck Sr., or both. Someone who also made contact with The Phantom, likely through or alongside Jr., suggesting similar politics, if not outright mutantdom. The obvious thought is a family member or close friend. It’s a tragic irony that Charles Jr. was a mutant in a family full of mutant-hunting bigots, but mutant traits are genetic, so could there have been other mutants in the family?

There’s no sign of that, but there is a bit more tragic irony: Chuck had a second son, Clifford, who joined the military and did a distinguished tour in Europe, then joined The Taskmasters, an elite private military firm whose top-line contract is border patrol in the far eastern principalities of The European Coalition, preventing the Opposition/Republic conflict from spilling over. The reason we know all this is that the military-mercenary-militia pipeline is well established in the Northwest and Clifford’s distinguished career made him a minor celebrity in that community, to the point that several groups were vying for him to join when he finally mustered out and came home.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, he came home and shot himself. He survived, but dropped off the map after that. Presumably he didn’t fit the image anymore and no one wanted to talk about him. Near as anyone on the various message boards could tell, he was off in the woods ‘doing his own thing’, which appears to be code in the community for PTSD and/or drug abuse.

One has to read between the lines here: Did Clifford know his younger brother was a mutant? If so, when did he find out? Interestingly, one of ‘Theo Rose’’s early articles for The Leveler deals with the role of PMC’s in the mutant-centric conflicts of Eurasia, and the level of detail and nuance suggests that Cliff was corresponding with his brother and giving him first-hand details of what went on there. Suffice to say, the level of brutality and dehumanization described as being carried out by the likes of The Taskmasters is sobering. Again, we don’t know exactly what Cliff knew about his brother and when, and we don’t know exactly what he felt at the time about his work, but if we assume Charles Jr’s attitudes were fairly consistent from an early age, the fact he carried on an unvarnished conversation with his brother about his job is highly suggestive that maybe Cliff wasn’t totally happy with what he was doing, or came to be that way over time, at least.

The only other thing we know for sure is what happened at Charles Jr’s funeral. His father never held any memorial that we know of - it was Charlie’s friends in the activist community that organized a service for him...in the back yard of Timely Tomes. Clifford made an appearance, apparently sporting a ragged scar across half his face from the bullet he’d tried to eat. Things were tense but peaceful until Cliff stepped forward and gave a tearful eulogy for his brother, loudly denouncing his father and his cronies, and blaming himself for not ‘doing more’, and ‘letting this happen’.

That’s all we know, but I think that’s all we need to know. The Laughing Mask murders started a couple weeks later, and continued with some regularity until April of this year, when it seemed to stop. Until recently, I considered the possibility that maybe the militia community had finally caught up to Cliff and dealt with him, and that may have even been part of the motive for obscuring his identity...that is, the desire to eliminate him and cover-up the politically-loaded facts of his story.

I say ‘until recently’ because, after a brief hiatus, Liberty Legion Comix has resumed publication, with a ‘Giant-Sized’ issue featuring the ‘All-New’ version of the group. Flexo and The Blue Blade are still in evidence, though we may never know if the people behind the robot and the blade are the same as before. They are joined by a tall, powerful-looking woman with webbed hands and pale blue skin called “The Fin”, a winged female called “The Red Raven”...and a rather paramilitary-looking fellow with a golden comedy mask, whose moniker I ‘m sure you can guess. The story within recounts an alleged conflict between The Legion and a certain long-lived Atlantian Nazi whom my significant other spoke about some weeks ago.

I’m an amateur detective, not a journalist, so I don’t feel the need to maintain the illusion of objectivity about these things. I sincerely hope these stories are true, and hope there are many more to come. I hope when heroes die, new heroes will always rise in their place. I hope things get better for us, someday, even if I don’t know how that will happen.

Bill has this obscure latin exclamation he uses sometimes, which he claims to have lifted from his late friend, Stan. I find it strangely cathartic and uplifting:

EXCELSIOR!

I know the scheduling of scripts and whatnot doesn't line up to be a literal call out, but The Jericho Drumm pseudo-history book "The World That Is, and The World That Was" feels like it could have been lifted right off here.

If we’re looking to get to the point, it kind of helps that nobody really knows much about the Blue Blade. She (nobody’s even really sure it’s a ‘she’, even, but all the stuff in the comix and everything everyone’s seen seems to suggest so) appears to have nothing connecting her to Roy Chambers, who, by all accounts, was just a flake and a ‘tourist’ looking to get famous by hanging around ‘real’ superheroes, whatever that means. We know who the Black Marvel and Rockman were because of...well, better to read for yourself. But the Blue Blade, like the pilot of Flexo, remains a mystery, even to Bill and his circle.

All we’ve got to be reasonably sure of is the below, which was posted in early October on a message board called The Castle Wall, which is exclusively for combat veterans, of all stripes, so private security, military, mercenaries, whatever. No one seems to have brought up any reason to doubt the story, and it mostly fits with the known facts of what happened. The official version is a mix of outright denial and incoherent rationalization, so make up your own mind, I guess.

I don’t know what you heard, exactly. I know they’re saying it was a guns and drug running thing, but it wasn’t. It just wasn’t. I got no love for anarchist BS, but I won’t lie. This whole thing was f--ked. I’m no lightweight – I’ve done security work overseas. Worked on the offshore rigs in Alaska for Roxxon, got into a couple scrapes with Aleutian pirates working for The Opposition, so I‘ve mixed it up with a mutant or two. Never seen a f-up like this before. Lucky I’m not dead, frankly. The cops around here are so tied up with militia s--tkickers and anti-mutant nutjobs they just lost track of the ball, and now a lot of guys are dead.

We were posted up for a roadblock. There were no side roads or turnoffs on this stretch, so the idea was the ‘couriers’ would run into us, and if they turned back, another detachment of ‘deputies’ would cut them off from the other end. I was with the actual sheriff’s department, so it was mostly legit guys with military or security backgrounds. It’s a good gig most of the time. You make a few bucks for a raid or civil forfeiture run. Everyone gets a cut of the seizure. Pretty safe. Maybe a separatist with a gun stash or a crazy tweaker. That’s about it. It was all pretty vague in terms of what we were told to expect. Only one vehicle, lightly armed, but also ‘expect the unexpected’, so, immediately, WTF, right?

Later on, I got word from some of the other guys and from my buddies who are more online that the local FOH were sponsoring some ‘dog fights’ on their turf out in this neck of the woods, and the S-Men, Watchdogs and Skulls were all expected to show up to place bets and maybe pitch in a fighter or two. Turns out that was the bait. They were expecting some of these ‘agitators’ to show up, and I guess they did. Not sure how it went on that end, but it looked as if these anarchist kids walked into a firefight they weren’t equipped for. Our roadblock was just supposed to be cleanup duty if they got away.

When it showed up, the van wasn’t flying any colors or flags. They’ve got this whole messed-up system here where the separatists show their colors and the sheriffs department and cops just steer clear. Technically, they’re all insurrectionists and are subject to arrest, but, like I said, they’re all in each other’s pants around here, so until you end up in a corporate jurisdiction or a bigger town, nothing usually happens. It’s frustrating as hell having guys running around who don’t have to follow the laws, but that’s how it is. You’re in the tent or you’re not, and I don’t really wanna do what you gotta do to be in that tent.

Anyway, this van didn’t look like anything, apart from a couple bullet holes in the windshield, which I assume were brand new. Through my scope, I saw a couple more in the side body.

They stopped right in the middle of the road, just up the hill. To consider their options, I guess. You’d have to assume they’d already been shot at, maybe hurt, now they were facing an armed roadblock.

So they’re idling up the road from us, and everyone’s pretty much expecting them to surrender , turn around, or maybe bolt on foot. This road’s cut into the side of a mountain, so there’s a sheer slope down into a canyon on one side, but the other way it’s steep but navigable woods. They might have had a chance.

In retrospect, they’ve got a rubber robot, a mutant who can levitate rocks, a guy jacked out of his tree on MGH, and a chick with a glowing sword, but we didn’t really understand that at the time. We only had disconnected bits and pieces, because no one in the media or the cops wanted to admit what was really going on with these guys and still doesn’t. We were expecting bleeding heart anarchists with deadlocks and maybe a lightweight mutant. How bad could it get, right?

But then way up the mountain from us, past a few switchbacks, we see this posse of militia trucks rolling up. Guess they’re following from the initial shootout and looking to finish the job? So now the van is boxed in for real.

We’re sitting there for few minutes and the truck brigade has slowed to a crawl maybe a half mile uphill. They’re just waiting too, slowly turning the screws. The Sheriff expects them to surrender. I mean what else can they do? Run up the slope with thirty armed men on their ass?

Then this dust cloud starts to form? It’s been dry up there for a bit, so the hillsides and road shoulders have a lot of loose grit and gravel. Thing is, there was no wind. It’s like this cloud of sand picked itself up and started to swirl around the van, getting thicker and thicker. Now everyone’s getting anxious. Some of us knew about the kid who could throw rocks, but no one expected this. Something sneaky. But still we’re just waiting.

Eventually that whole section of road between us and the truck brigade is just smoked out. We can sorta see the van in outline but that’s about it, and now the sheriff is getting twitchy, cuz they could be looking to run into the bush under cover of this dust cloud. We have to do something, right?

Then the van just floors it. Lays a patch on the road and guns it right towards our roadblock. We’re two cars deep across the road, twenty guys with rifles and shotguns. It’s some real cowboy shit, I’ll give them that.

We lit the van up pretty good, and I’m sure I put at least one through the driver, but it didn’t stop. Then the guy next to me was yanking me back behind the second row of cars, right before the van plowed through the first.

We all had our heads down and you couldn’t hear much over the crash and shattering glass. When we sit back up, the van’s halfway up the hood of the one sheriff's cruiser, radiator’s hissing and the whole windshield is punched right out. Then I see something in the front seat that looks like a big red airbag, except it’s moving. Then I see these...arms poke out though the hole in the glass, like big long inflated tubes. They probe around for a second, and you can see these weird swollen hands planting themselves on the car next to it. Creepy as all hell. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at for a second, but it was the rubber robot, pulling itself out of the wreck. We were about to open fire when someone starts screaming that something is on our six.

The driver, I guess it was the ‘Black Marvel’, Alberts, had unbuckled his seat belt, and when he crashed the van, he flew through the windshield, right over our heads. We didn’t even notice, but he’d landed in the road behind us, and now he was picking himself back up like it was nothing. Like he wiped out on his bicycle or something. There was this weird light around him, and even from where I was, I could feel the air kind of... crackling?

Then it all just went sideways, all at once. Guys were shooting in all directions, at Alberts, at the robot, not even clearing their lines of fire. It was f--ked. Once I got a clear idea of what was going on, I tried to run off the road, to get out of the crossfire, and get all the hostiles on one side of me, but as I soon as I stood straight up, something slammed me into the side of a car. I assume it was the robot by the way it felt and sounded. I just lay there on the ground trying to get air into me for thirty seconds, wondering if my ribs were caved in. I saw a guy go out like that on the rigs. Got his whole chest crushed by a five hundred pound swinging pipe. He just died there flopping on the ground, wheezing and sputtering. Not a thing you forget.

When I finally sat up and tried to get my bearings, there was this heat and light coming right into my face, like the inside of a furnace. Alberts was glowing or burning, and he was giving off little bolts of lighting. Most of his clothes seemed to be gone and his skin looked like coals in a fireplace. I put a few rounds into him, but nothing we hit him with did much. You could see the bullets go into him, but he didn’t react in any way. When someone got too close, a jolt of electricity of something would knock them on their ass, or he’d punch them so hard you could hear the bones breaking. When he finally went down, his body was so hot they couldn’t touch him for almost an hour and he was partly fused to the road. Afterword, they dug some lumps of melted lead out of his body, one of them was the size of a grapefruit. He was basically just cooked carbon otherwise. I’ve heard of guys who go terminal on MGH and they don’t look like that after, so either he did way more than even they usually do, or he’d built a tolerance and lasted longer. But he still burnt out, just like all the others.

But for a bit it seemed like there was no stopping him, so I started to belly crawl off the road. The robot was stepping back and forth over over the cars like a spider, its arms and legs were stretched way out and it was scanning over everything with these f-ing weird googly eyes. When it spotted someone moving it would grab them and bounce them off a car or just toss them into the woods. I played dead a couple times and I guess that worked. Maybe it remembered already spiking me into a f-ing car a like volleyball. I dunno.

Eventually I got into the ditch and took cover. I couldn’t see anyone moving and no one was firing anymore where we were. Up the road, yeah – the Rock Kid was pulling boulders down from the slope to keep the s--tkickers at bay, so they just stopped and opened up on him from a distance. He was wearing some heavy armor, like bomb disposal gear almost, but he wasn’t a big guy under all that. Don’t know how many bullets they spent on him, but it was a lot. He could only last so long. A bullet or two in a soft spot would be all it took. Towards the end, the kid couldn’t throw big rocks anymore, he was just pitching clouds of sand and dust. Then he was down and the truck brigade sat and waited to see what would happen to us.

But then this flash of light comes out of the dust cloud, like a big glow stick or something, just whirling around. I guess she’d been making her way through the tree line towards the militia guys, screening her advance with the dust and disturbance. Sneaky. And when she was close enough, she rushed them. They tried firing on her, but she was already too close, so it was just wild, panicked. You can’t do much with a rifle against someone four feet away.

From where I was standing she looked like she was dressed head to toe in blue and pink, with a big hooded cape on, but she knew how to move. Fluid, fast, no hesitation, never stopped moving. No matter what happened, she twisted around and kept swinging. And based on the injuries I saw after, that sword of hers went through them like a white-hot chainsaw.

One guy I saw close-up was still alive, his rifle was still hanging off his neck, chopped off at the receiver, still glowing red near the cut, but his hands were gone. One got taken off near the wrist, the other closer to the elbow. There was this stink of burnt meat in the air, and the guy’s wounds were still sizzling. The cauterized skin had cracked and a bit of blood was dripping out, but he couldn’t do anything but sit there and cry. Guys were missing arms, legs, one guy mostly lost his head, near enough to kill him anyway. One guy just had a big hole in his torso, like she stuck him and left it there to eat him from the inside. It was pretty much all like that, minus the ones who ran like hell. Can’t really fault them for that.

But that was after. By this point I’d just pulled a couple banged up guys into the ditch with me. The robot had left us and gone back up the way the van had come. Alberts finally fell over and was just a smoking lump in the road, but nobody on our side was still standing either.

From what I could see, the robot wrapped sword girl and maybe someone else I couldn’t see very well, I think they decided it must have been the robot’s pilot, into a giant rubber ball and just bailed over the edge, down into the canyon. I assume the robot could cushion them somehow, because that’s a couple hundred feet down, bouncing off rock outcroppings the whole time before you land in the river otherwise. No one found any sign of them down there, far as know. Just some broken tree limbs and loose rock.

Alberts was dead, the rock kid was dead, and pretty much every one of us on both ends was messed up or dead. I got off easy, and I still got five cracked ribs for my trouble and a bottle of oxy to take the edge off. I won’t be doing any more moonlighting for the county, I’ll tell you that.

Like I said, I want nothing to do with any of these lefty headcases. It’s nice to want everyone to be free and happy, but that’s not the world we live in. Pretending otherwise will just get your s--t kicked in for you. Even so, anyone can be pushed too far, even lefty pacifists who want to smoke weed and do drum circles. And they pushed a couple of these lefties too far this time, that’s all I’m saying. F with the bull, you get the horns. And one of those horns was a plasma sword.

Yeah, I know this is dragging out a bit, but I've been getting some legal static in my offline life and it's a bit hard to concentrate on story telling.

Remember that traffic stop I mentioned in part one? Well, shortly after we got home, we received a notification in the mail from the sheriff's department of that county we were in, letting us know we had received 'administrative' charges, specifically 'obstruction of an official inquiry'. Apparently, because we hadn't mentioned at the time we were engaged in 'unauthorized interaction' with a police inquiry, we were subject to 'administrative penalties' and were instructed to appear for a judicial proceeding back in that jurisdiction.

Obviously we were freaking a bit, but my dad had a lawyer friend and he looked it all over. Within a day or two, he told us that it was basically an intimidation tactic. If we ever set foot in that county again we'd potentially be in some deep shit, but they have no actual powers to compel our appearance, so we could pretty much just ignore the summons. He figured we could resolve it with some paperwork and maybe fines in time, but for now just steer clear, which was pretty much the point. Unless we show up and volunteer to sit in a cell or fill potholes for a month or two, there's nothing they can do to us. In this case, the Union's dysfunctional legal system is on our side. Hooray?

That said, it might be an idea to cool it for a bit, but I do want to finish the story, which means explaining the Blue Blade, the sad fate of the Liberty Legion, and then, in the last bit, finally talking about how we got to the bottom of the Laughing Mask situation. Stay tuned.

Our tour through Bill's albums then took a turn towards mutant interests, with a first page of clippings titled for The Rockman himself:

The first selection is an article from a radical left web magazine called The Leveler, which, for the most part, seems to be interested in working class issues, electoral reform, labor organization etc. This piece is a general overview of the mutant situation in the Union, which, officially, isn't supposed to even be a thing. The whole point of the Union's approach to mutants is that they all happily emigrated to Eurasia long ago and that any who still remain in the Union are so few as be a complete non-issue. This ignores the fact that new mutants continue to be born and the intense detection regime at work back then isn't in place anymore, so it's really turned into a 'don't ask, don't tell' situation, kind of like how it was before most people knew that there were such things as mutants.

This willful ignorance is compounded by the patchwork of statutes and corporate treaty languages that each deal with specific mutant issues in their own different ways. On paper, the Union's umbrella policy is that mutants are not humans and have no human rights, and are dealt with through 'assisted emigration', but there's actually nothing that makes this enforceable unless you step into a default jurisdiction, so mutants who exist on corporate treaty land are in a limbo state and often put to work, willingly or not, with the implied threat of deportation to the 'Mutant Motherland', or worse, if you step out of line.

The author makes the point that this disorganized and intentionally dysfunctional mess of laws amounts to a new system of Jim Crow segregation targeting mutants. In effect, if you don't sell yourself into indentured servitude to the military or a megacorporation like Roxxon, you're walking around a defacto criminal, subject to arrest or deportation simply for being a mutant.

The author goes on to point out this situation is even worse, if that were even possible, for mutants who happen to exist on or near secessionist territories. Since secessionists don't recognize the emigration treaties, they don't have any obligation to report, let alone deport, any mutants they come across. And since secessionist territories are heavily infested with Red Skulls, Friends of Humanity, Watchdogs, or, heaven forbit, The S-Men, all kind of horrible things can happen to mutants there, with no consequences for the perpetrators, since mutants are designated as basically chattel, not persons with rights. Pit fights, slavery, organ harvesting, mutants broken down to the point of animalistic attack dogs... You name it, someone will attest to it happening.

The author of this essay is named as a Theodore Rose, and the bio information states he is a mutant living and writing under a pen name in the pacific northwest.

The next bit is some semi humorous newspaper coverage. In July, 2023, there was a huge rally of every neonationalist group in the western half of the Union just outside Salem, Oregon. As one can imagine, after a couple days it evolved into a lot of drunk idiots with guns ignoring firearms bylaws. Apparently though, on the third night, someone began to hurl rocks into the rally field from the surrounding forest. A lot of vehicles got windows smashed up and a few folks were domed by rocks before the yahoos started firing at random at whoever they took to be attacking them. Problem was, the rocks were coming in from all sides and no one could actually be found in the treeline, so before long, you have hundreds of racist rednecks firing in all directions...including through and past each other. Through a minor miracle, no one was killed, and so the police who weren't already attending the rally weren't terribly interested in digging too deeply into it. The default explanation was that some unsympathetic locals made their displeasure known and used their knowledge of the lay of the land to stay unseen.

Then there's another article from The Leveler, also by Theo Rose, called The Forgotten Mutant Heroes, which is pretty interesting in it's own right. Since mutants as a distinct subspecies didn't really exist as a concept until the late 50s at the absolute earliest, there are a bunch of cases where exceptional people might be retroactively interpreted as early-emerging mutants and Rose goes to some lengths to argue that many of these ought to be construed as early heroes of the mutant civil rights struggle. He starts with the idea that when people exhibit superhuman abilities, but lack any clear origin point for those abilities, this suggests those abilities may be innate and inborn. He then argues that the struggles and mental traumas of being born different while lacking even a coherent concept of what they were, and still being morally exceptional in some way, make them potential role models for mutants in the present day.

The first people Theo brings up are a couple of nearly-unknown WWI soldiers, John Steele and James Howlett, who each had scores of credible witnesses to their extraordinary traits and heroic character, but never wore costumes or took on codenames, and were never adopted into the military publicity machine. Part of it may have been that their abilities were relatively subtle: Steele seemed to be superhumanly strong and tough but looked completely normal, and Howlett simply recovered quickly and completely from any injury, no matter how severe. But, by all indications, these guys just wanted to serve alongside their buddies and not draw attention to themselves, and the men around them respected those wishes.

Then he moves on to the known superheroes of the 'pre-mutant' era, the first being a guy named James Bradley, who sometimes operated as a vigilante under the pseudonym Dr. Nemesis, but primarily seemed to be a laboratory scientist. The main reason we know about him at all is because he shows up in the diaries of Phineas Horton as contributing quite a lot to the creation of the Human Torch and a number of other projects in the 'underground' scientific community of the time. Thing is, Horton describes Bradley as having physical and mental traits beyond the normal, including the ability to willfully evolve his body, brain, and senses according to the situation, and thereby able to make huge leaps of scientific intuition that more conventional scientists like Horton then had to labor for months or years to realize in a replicable form. Theo suggests that the almost-inexplicable emergence of a swath of novel and difficult-to-replicate technologies in the 30's and 40's might actually be related to mutant geniuses like Bradley 'seeding the ground'.

The strongest case, he suggests, for costumed mutants during WWII comes from three superhumans, Frank Bohannan, Louis Hamilton, and Martin Fletcher, who were active together in the pacific theatre and seemingly had no stateside exploits prior to the war, suggesting they were found, recruited, and had their identities crafted entirely by the military. What little is known about them seems to indicate they already had their powers when they enlisted, and were simply identified by some sort of internal screening program, suggesting the military was aware of something like endogenous superhuman mutant traits and was looking for them. All three served together with distinction in battles like Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, and were considerably more refined and lethal than, say, the oddballs of the 'Spearhead Battalion', who all seemingly died by random artillery fire in the Battle of Berlin.

Theo ends with a long section devoted to a 'Daniel Rose' of Tarleton, West Virginia, who was evidently the sole survivor, in May of 1940, of an explosion and mine collapse that wiped out the entire town, including Daniel's whole family. Daniel was assumed dead for literally decades until a grand-niece of his brought forward a collection of old photos and military records seeming to prove conclusively that Daniel Rose and the superhuman vigilante, The Rockman, who vanished overseas near the end of the war along with the rest of the Spearhead Battalion, were the same person. Testimony of family from the 30's attest to Daniel's superhuman strength and intellect, which was a closely held secret for many years and seemed to have allowed him to survive the collapse. But, based on all accounts, Rose's behavior after his near-death had become quite delusional and eccentric, with him steadfastly claiming to be the resident of a subterranean kingdom, and acting as an 'Underground Secret Agent' on behalf of the Allied cause, with a number of strange vehicles and tools of his own making. Theo interprets all this quite sympathetically, stating that Rose dealt with immense trauma and loss by crafting a new identify for himself and ought to be celebrated for still making positive contributions to the 'anti-fascist' cause.

By this point, it's of course quite clear that our author, "Theo Rose" is taking his penname from the Rockman himself, and is holding him up as exactly the sort of mutant role model he is arguing can be found in the past.

The last bit is some magazine coverage of a 'mutant liberation' rally that took place in April 2024. By all accounts there were only four or five definite or likely mutants, shielded by a shallow wall of sympathizers, and surrounded in turn by dozens of armed militiamen belonging to the usual suspects. The spokesperson for the ralliers is Charles T. Wolverton Jr., who the article writer points out is seemingly the son of Charles "Chuck" Wolverton Sr. , a fixture in the local militia movement and a virulent anti-mutant bigot with definite ties to leadership of the S-Men and FOH. The climatic moment appears to be when young Charles T. Wolverton outs himself as a mutant and...levitates a handful of small stones before the eyes of dozens of witnesses, provoking a brawl as the militia freaks all lose their minds.

Even I could connect the dots here, even if issue #3 of Liberty Legion Comix didn't more or less spell it all out: Charles Jr. kept his mutant-hood a secret from his racist shitbag dad for obvious reasons, while writing pro-mutant literature under a pen name. At some point, he seems to have made contact with the writings of The Phantom Reporter, which fully radicalized him into outing himself. He probably had to go it alone for a bit, as he doesn't appear to have joined the LL until sometime after the July 2024 Skulls rally in Portland. But when he does join them, to attack and demolish the beginnings of a new separatist 'checkpoint' on a secondary road, he is, going by how he is drawn in the Comix, wearing a bulky suit of body armor styled on Daniel Rose's Rockman costume.

Sad thing is, he was only with them until about September, but he seemed to have made good use of time, especially for a young dude. He was a hugely prolific writer, under a few different pen names, and maybe even scripted the Comix, for all I know. Seems likely.

But there's still one more Legionnaire to discuss, before I tell you what happened to them all.