Astonishing Adventures Profiles: The Mechanist

A long time ago, I was working at Verizon Wireless doing data entry and couldn't help but wonder what it would be like if superheroes had somewhat ordinary nine-to-five jobs? Not alter egos, but they show up to work at 8 every morning in mask and cape, sit down in their cubical and do paperwork for five hours. Sure, then there is an emergency and a bunch of them run out and solve it, but then they have to go back to work and (like a police officer) fill out more paper work.

Interesting ideas came from this like different sized urinals for giant and tiny people and most of the employees being victims of villainy or super-phenomena (i.e. dino-men, time travelers, parallel universe duplicates, etc). I called it The Union: half-Justice League, half-The Office.

One of the characters I developed for this was a Superman analogue named The Mechanist who had all the powers of Superman, but basically he was the company's warehouse and fix-it guy who I just imagined hanging out in his own area moving several tons of machinery from one place to another. A sagely blue collar sort.

For his origin, well... one part of Superman's origin always bugged me and that is, aside from his powers, he is absolutely identical to a human being. So I decided he was an alien/human hybrid from a UFO abduction. (There was something very sardonic about having your pure, ideal superhero being the product of an alien rape.) And since I have no sympathy for middle America or Smalltown, America, I decided that he was born in one of those backwards-as-fuck Evangelical towns where his mom had a well-earned reputation as being crazy and a not-so-well-earned reputation of being a slut. Meanwhile, the young boy was picked on by the other kids as a weirdo, but he possesses a budding brilliance as his head is filled with ideas from his advanced culture written into his genes (i.e. at three years old, he was doodling with crayons and ended up drawing a design for a microchip).

In large part, I've retained most of the ideas for this concept. Now, however, the Mechanist was born at the turn of the century and, naturally, in order to fit the less fantastic power levels, I've made him merely a brilliant inventor and super-athlete. I've also switch the main source of his inspiration from Superman to Doc Savage (right).

Who is Doc Savage? Just because you probably haven't heard of him doesn't mean the character hasn't effected you. He was the direct inspiration for Superman, Batman, Indiana Jones, Jonas Venture Sr., Buckaroo Bonzai, and Tom Strong (above). Superman's arctic Fortress of Solitude was, in fact, directly stolen from Doc Savage's arctic Fortress of Solitude. Like Batman, Doc Savage was in peak physical and mental condition from a life time of training. Like Jonas Venture Sr. and Buckaroo Bonzai, he went on bizarre scientific adventures with a strange band of adventurers.

In short, my idea is of an exceptional, good-natured person who travels the world endlessly searching for somewhere that he fits in. After his mother's death, he travels to the big city and gets a job working at a factory. His boss finds out he has a talent for fixing things which is where he gets his nickname. He soon finds he also has a habit of getting into trouble and gets propelled on a life of constant adventure and intellectual pursuits.

When the story begins, the Mechanist is living in his custom-made, spacious, and ornate airship. Accompanied by an unusual cast of friends and comrades (I'm imagining a 1938 equivalent to the entourage of Hansel in Zoolander), including a Tibetan holy man, Clea the Clockwork Girl, and a hyper-intelligent gorilla named Padre whose hobbies are reading and piloting. Padre is his best friend and former science experiment. Clea is his artificial Girl Friday with his custom-made "electronic brain." And the as-yet-unnamed Tibetan holy man is his mentor and spiritual guide.

As for his look, that first image (top) is pretty close, particularly with the goggles and leather gloves. His casual clothes would be period adventure style with cargo pants and a white shirt unbuttoned enough to feature in a romance novel. He wears a red leather, button-up jacket in that old fashion V-button style (right). I was going to go with jet black hair, but the more I think about it, the more I think he should be a brunette with a lock of white hair on his widow's peak a la one of my favorite upstanding childhood heroes, Quantum Leap's Sam Beckett (below). (Interestingly, as I looked for this picture, I found on wikipedia that says that Sam was inspired in part by Doc Savage. It makes sense. He's a scientific genius in multiple disciplines as well as an accomplished martial artist.)

The Mechanist's arch-nemesis is his childhood mentor Dr. Josef Mueller, a quiet and timid scientist who goes mad when he essentially downloads the knowledge of Atlantis into his brain (which parallels the Mechanist's own unnatural alien intellect). For some reason, there are a lot of father-type villains in this story. I'll try not to psychoanalyze that too much. Dr. Mueller's daughter, Milla, was the Mechanist's first love. (She is easy to describe. Dress Marilyn Monroe as a Nazi and put an eyepatch on her. Voila!) She is probably just me vicariously living out a fantasy reality where I can caricaturize my ex-girlfriends as Nazis, but who can't identify with that? The Mechanist and his airship have also faced the deadly Tokyo Rose, captain of the Japanese sky pirates in service to the Empire of Japan.

So far, I have one very important rule for the Mechanist: every entrance has to be not only big, but huge... and he has to take it completely casually. I have an image of him riding a giant sandworm through the city and dismounting it like the cowboy who just rode into town.