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to escape your Icon Traps. And doing so is as simple as proving to yourself that you need no more false idols in your life. Ultimately idols can only fall down and crush you. You need to start to take care of yourselves, and not be dependent on others or hold unrealistic opinions of your ‘elders.’ So go ahead. Smash your external icon. To do so isn’t blasphemy. It’s to be born again.”

All five F*O*O*Jsters stood motionless, confused if not still upset.

“Like, does this even apply to me?” asked Syndi. “I mean, like, I’m obviously not in this icon-thingy like them, right?”

All but Wally rolled their eyes. “No, Syndi, not exactly like the rest of them—”

“Good, cuz I wanna keep mine.”

“Wellsir, if she’s keepin hers, ma’am-doctor, c’n I keep mine?”

“It’s made of ice, you clod. You’re familiar with melting?”

“I c’n keep it frosted, Festy.”

“Bickering, my friends,” I said, “is a self-constructed off-ramp from the freeway to mental health.”

“Fine,” grunted the Flying Squirrel. “If the only way to escape the Sisyphean nightmare of this ‘therapy trap’ and Miss Brain’s meningococcal metaphors is to do as she said, let’s be done with this rubbish and get the Sam Hill out of here. I don’t have time for this hog-sputum—I’ve a eulogy to write for tomorrow.”

And with that, Mr. Piltdown ripped his bristol board Hawk King icon into two large pieces, then four medium ones, and then decreasingly into a flurry of Hawk confetti. “You see? Painless. Done. Because it’s meaningless anyway, Miss Brain.”

An earsplitting CRACK forced our gaze upon Iron Lass. Micro-Aesgard lay in rubble at her feet, her iron hand still in chop-pose before her and ringing-inging-ing like a temple gong.

“It is done, Frau Doktor. Unt now, O unexpected cosmic bounty, I’m breassing sanctified air viss ze clean lunks of a mentally liberated purson. Oh, I feel so much freer unt better unt more joyful. Vunderbar. You truly are a miracle vurker, ja. Now can I go?”

“Doc, if it’s all the same with you,” said Wally, “can I let mine melt? Don’t seem right to mush down m’daddy.”

“Wally, you won’t be ‘mushing down’ either your father or your love of him, because your father isn’t controlling your life. Only your idealization of him is.”

“So can I, then?”

“No, Wally.”

Hanging his head, his shoulders fallen, Wally looked like an intensely guilty gigantic child. He pulled up his dress shirt and lowered his trousers an inch, exposing his navel.

There was a blinding flash, and suddenly everyone’s hair was drooping from the steam saturating the room. Although visibility was nearly nil through the ice-fog, Wally’s icon-father was no more.

I found my next charge in the fog while Wally tucked in his shirt.

“Syndi?”

She pouted. She stamped.

When I insisted, she dropped her arms as if they weighed tons, then started ripping the materials off her mannequin.

I found Kareem in his misted workbay, his back turned to me.

“Khaibtu kher,” he whispered.

With a sound like sifting sand, the X-Man’s shining black idol fuzzed into black and silver smoke, faded to shadow, and was gone.

I touched Kareem’s arm. He jerked away, still averting his face. I softly asked him the meaning of his magic words.

“ ‘Shadows…shadows fall,’ ” he sniffed, before reaching a palm to his eye.

What will it mean for your life, and your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?

Omnipotent Man: “What’s the point anymore?”

Flying Squirrel: “The King would’ve wanted us to build a New Age.”

Iron Lass: “Götterdämmerung is the end of the gods, too. We’re there.”

How will you face knowing that you will never exceed, or even equal, the accomplishments of your predecessors?

X-Man: “We have no choice…but to become our own kings.”

Power Grrrl: “Who are they to be equal to?”

Icomposting: Enrich Your Mental Soil

Ironically, the very people who are icons to millions are often the most icon-worshiping of all. In many cases, such idolization was the impetus for young heroes to challenge death on a daily basis. For hyperhominids, idolization led to emulation, emulation to overidentification, and overidentification with an elder “superior,” paradoxically, to infantilization.

No matter your intentions, when you wrap your superego inside the tunic of your icon, you’re not wearing a cape. You’re wearing a diaper.

Believing in anyone more than you believe in yourself causes you to suspend your own judgment, which leads to counter-self-actualization, or self-deactivation. And while Power Grrrl’s exaltation of herself is certainly the cause (and effect) of many of her problems, that very exaltation frees her from the maleficent manhandling of the Icon Trap.

Most important, no one—and therefore no idol—is perfect. Inevitably you will discover your idol’s imperfections. And when your idol falls, its final act will be to crush you.

Iconsciousness: Time to Take Off Your Diaper

Adulthood means taking care of yourself, not psychic dependence on others or clutching on to unrealistic opinions of our elders. It’s time to unchain yourself from your mentor. And while you might think that your idol is made of gold, it’s really just made of garbage.

It’s time to toss your idol into the composter. It might stink for a while, but at least it’s transmuting into something useful…and fit to walk on.

But if you don’t dispense with your empty idol, in all likelihood you’ll be setting yourself up for the very chaos you are about to witness among the F*O*O*J.

CHAPTER FIVE

Limited Series

It’s Ironic That Funerals Are Sad

Funerals and superheroism are a natural combination. Each involves uniforms, oaths of allegiance, declarations of virtues, and connection to superhuman power under circumstances of high drama frequently performed to theme music.

But despite these abundant affiliations, hyperhominids are notoriously psychemotionally mismatched with the requirements of funereal deportment. Consider the following cases:

• The pustulent eruption of grief from Tempest and Pyromanny at the laying to rest of Lady Liberty was a popped pimple on the face of the 1945 funeral scene, resulting in no less than a flash flood and an instant inferno (which thankfully cancelled out each other without loss of life—but not before