Author notes

Masque Magazine October 2007

Egg Comics

on Sept. 8, 2014

Merit… this is the superheroine that Pristine has "issues" with.
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Masque Magazine is the kind of magazine that I would have liked to have seen when I was younger.
Or made.
So I did.
Sorta.
I melded it into my own projects by way of it's creator/publisher, Damian Gray. A photographer and entrepreneur in Universe 84013-G who found that he had the ability to travel from parallel Earth to parallel Earth at will. He was fascinated by superpowers and superheroes, but, 
instead of becoming a superhero, or whatever, he learned to do what he loved. Photography, journalism and such and founded a magazine in each of the Earths he traveled to.
(Each one that had superheroes, anyway.)
Sadly, I seemed to have misplaced/erased most of the Masque covers I have made, but I am still looking.
For now, I will reload the ones I have.==================================================October of 2007's covergirl was the bombastic and very opinionated superheroine called Merit, out of Los Angeles, California.Merit, possibly the most outspoken detractor of the party girl superhero, Pristine, gave Masque Magazine an earful about superheroine body image issues, how The Patriarchy exploits not only female superheroes, but vilifies ANY woman with power, and, of course, she had MORE than a little to say about Pristine, herself, and how her every action sets back the feminist movement 20 years.========================================Merit
Charlotte Janice Randall
22
Coming from an affluent family, Charlotte Randall never wanted for anything. Young and idealistic at age 15, she, from her first boyfriend (a hippie throwback from Washington state, 4 years her senior, who had his name legally changed to "Silver Cloud Salmon") gleaned a rather skewed sense of moral responsibility for the fate of the planet. She also gained a skewed urge to rebel against authority and authority figures.
First, she defied her father, scientist and technologies magnate, Ralph Randall, by dating, then running away from home to live with, her boyfriend, Silver Cloud.
She joined his pseudo anarchist colony, aptly named "The Colony". She stayed with him for 3 years. In that time, she and his other followers freed animals from testing labs, dammed rivers above processing plants to keep them from dumping waste. (Though, the dammed river flooded a nearby town on the other side of the hill.) Protected protesters, both peaceful and riotous, by stink bombing arresting officers from nearby rooftops…
They protested everything they could get their righteous indignation on. The one thing that Silver Cloud Salmon hated more than anything were celebrities and their place in the Evil Machinations of Big Media.
One evening, The Colony raided one of Charlotte's father's own research labs and stole an invention that was said to have the possibility to increase small amounts of electrical power to insanely high degrees. The lab was attempting to work the bugs out of it, and reduce it's size to fit into everything from household devices to automobiles. Silver Cloud was secretly convinced that it could be used as a bomb. The Colony barely escaped the lab without getting caught and sped off in their van.
Charlotte wanted to know where they were going to take the device to dismantle it. Silver Cloud said he had a better idea. The Colony shot across town to Ocean City, and crashed the gates of Church Entertainment Studios, where the Chauncey Keeble Show* was filmed. Silver Cloud had, unbeknownst to many of his followers, an extensive backround in engineering and electronics. He'd been a child prodigy, accepted to MIT at age 12. He'd also been expelled at age 14 for malicious mischief. 
He understood a few of the basic principles of this strange device, but not quite enough to weild it properly, or rewire it properly, so he'd decided to loop it into a portable generator, overload it, and cause an explosion. He laughed at the thought of the death of a studio full of people, and figured by taking out one of America's favorite TV hosts, he'd be striking a blow against Big Media. Once she'd been told his true plan, Charlotte had second thoughts at the last minute and tried to stop him, raising a commotion. Security arrived, and Charlotte told them everything. Furious at her betrayal, Silver Cloud stabbed her with his pocketknife and ran.
As fate would have it, Pamela Cross, aka Pristine, was one of Chauncey's guests, she flew after the fleeing members of the Colony, while Charlotte limped, bleeding, over to the device, and, knowing nothing about it, tried to deactivate it to no avail.
The studio guards were useless. Someone had the presence of mind to call the authorities. Silver Cloud doubled back and returned to the scene of his crime and was even more furious. Screaming incoherently (save for punctuating whatever he was screaming with the word "bitch"), he reached into his jacket and produced a well-worn 9mm handgun. He shot twice. Just before his first pull of the trigger, Pristine came literally bursting into the backstage area through the soundstage wall. The first bullet got past her and grazed (albeit deeply) the back of Charlotte's head. The second one, Pristine literally slapped away the way a normal person would deflect a spitball. it flew back and made a ruin of Silver Cloud's own head. Charlotte had witnessed all this and, hurt and bleeding, flew into hysterics. The man she loved had just tried to kill hundreds of people, and now he was dead. Killed by a superhero. A superhero who was now gathering her up into her arms like so much laundry. She was too out of it from the loss of blood to notice that the machine that she was trying to stop from overloading was doing just that. It buzzed, sparked and vibrated. Pristine grabbed the girl and, concentrating, threw up her electromagnetic shield. The machine detonated and seemed to have an odd energy-altering effect on the forcefield. Pristine howled in agony, as did Charlotte, who was somehow infused with Pristine's own energies via the machine's explosion, Pristines's field, and the metal knife still sticking from her profusely bleeding side.
Silver Cloud Salmon was dead. Pristine moved on like nothing happened. Beaming with pride in the papers and on television in the follwing days that she put down a 'terrorist' and saved hundreds of lives by shielding everyone from an explosion by blocking it with her own body and forcefield.
Weeks later, in her bed back home with her parents, Charlotte Randall discovered that the machine did something to her.
She was now able to make an electromagnetic forcefield, just like her "savior", Pristine. She could also move and manipulate objects made of metal. She no longer needed to sleep, and she could levitate herself. Almost as if the earth itself were repelling her.
She had superpowers. As if by fate, another commercial teaser for Planet Entertainment* played on her big screen TV. Pristine was in the news again. This time not for "saving lives", but for getting intoxicated at a posh club opening, jumping up on a table and showing her naked vagina to all and sundry and screaming obscenities at Ben Affleck. Interviews with aghast celebrities and civilian housewives concerned about the type of role model Pristine presented for young girls spurred Charlotte to make her next move.
After she was up and around again, she spent 7 weeks of self-training in the use of her new powers, self-defense classes twice a week, and countless hours designing and sewing a costume. She read literature on the inner workings of various aspects of society at large from the Communist Manifesto to Precepts fo Buddhism, to Feminism, to Mein Kampf and beyond.
Her trauma gave birth to a new type of superhero.
Calling herself "Merit", Charlotte set off to find and confront Pristine on her recklessness. She never did, though.
On her first ' patrol', she ran across a gaggle of policemen attempting to subdue a suspect with excessive force. Enraged, and a little insane from where the bullet grazed her skull plus the total lack of sleep made Merit defend the suspect with a little excessive force of her own. Then came fires, robberies, protests, drug deals, attempted rapes. Obsessed with eradictating crime and injustice wherever she found it, Merit never even got close to finding Pristine, so she decided to bide her time. With said time, she went about making 'statements' and performing random acts of activism whenever possible. She even shaved her head to show solidarity to a group of chemotherapy patients she'd befriended while "petitioning" the 'Governator's' office for better healthcare for the state. For the first time, she wasn't self-conscious about the unsightly scar in the back of her head.
Soon, she gained quite a degree of fame in her own right. Deeply conflicted about the attention she used to get her message heard, and self-loathing due to slowly turning into the very thing she hated most: a celeb, Merit slips slowly into psychosis and schizophrenia. As bad as it seems for her, this was only the beginning, as, eventually, she WILL cross paths with Pristine.
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Editor's Note:
In my superhero fiction, in the Pime Reality (Earth 99101 - X) Chaucey Keeble is a very popular former standup comedian-turned-sitcom actor-turned Talk show Host. His show is the second most popular in the country overall and is king of his late night timeslot.
AND…
Planet Entertainment is an hourlong international arts and entertainment show based out of Vancouver, Canada. It started out in 1986 as a serious look at celebrity, but has slid a bit into sensationalism over the years.