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Ka-Sentinels at the Blue Pyramid never showed up to let her inside the retaining wall—”

“Ze Kingk never missed an appointment,” said Iron Lass. “Not in over fifty yearss, for any reason—”

“When there was still no response by ten A.M. today, Major Ursa and the Spectacle led a team back to Sunhawk Island. The gate was open, the Ka-Sentinels were in a state of stupefaction…The Pyramid portal was open…

“They found Hawk King lying on his back inside his Duat Chamber, gripping his crook and flail.”

They stood silently, but their eyes were screaming.

“The Spectacle’s preliminary call,” I concluded, “is natural causes.”

“ ‘Natural causes’?” spat the X-Man. “Closest thing to invincible, closest thing to omniscient, and suddenly, just like that, dead by ‘natural causes’?”

While the rest of us stood impotently, Kareem lowered himself back into his chair, his face ripped by rage, and then suddenly, horribly blank. And incongruously in that expressionless void, tears seeped from his eyes.

“No way. No way was this natural causes,” he muttered, staring at the seam where one wall crashed into the next. “Hawk King was murdered,” he said. “And if someone could kill him, that means all of us, and the world…are in for shit beyond anybody’s reckoning.”

Into Battle: But Where—and Who—Is the Foe?

Ironically, at the exact moment that global peace has triumphed, the gravest threat to superheroic mental health has become paranoia.

Although supercitizens now can bask in the summer sun of safety, the hypervigilance of their careers has cast them into a winter of ODI-CFFB: Obsessive/Defensive Ideation and Compulsive Fight-or-Flight Behavior, much in the way that a satyr or nymphomaniac, if placed in solitary confinement, may fall into chronic masturbation with attendant carpal tunnel syndrome.

The death of a loved one or a revered icon such as Hawk King is often a trigger for paranoia, but that paranoia speaks to a deeper drive than fear. Paranoia is a defiant charge to a cold, unfeeling cosmos: “Hear me! I exist! I’m important!” Because after all, if someone is actually orchestrating the chaos of the universe against you personally, then you do matter. When no one seems to care anymore, at least “enemies” give you the comforting illusion that you count.

As we’ll see throughout Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself, above all other psychic threats, paranoia holds more destructive potential than even Cosmicus, the Digester of Worlds. As the old saying goes, paranoia can indeed “destroy ya.”

CHAPTER TWO

Facing the Ultimate ArchEnemy

SATURDAY, JULY 1, 9:30 A.M.

Stages of Grief

Although as a hyperhominid you’ve spent your entire career risking your life, there’s only one task as difficult as facing the unresolved scandals and unsightly scars of your secret origin. And that is facing the deaths of others, especially that of a fellow hero.

After all, you’ve spent your professional career beating the odds, continually cheating the grim reaper at his own card table. But Death plays the ultimate trump card and is the only archenemy guaranteed to cash in everyone else’s chips.

The morning after such an epoch-shattering event as the death of Hawk King, it would have been predictable for my team of sanity-seekers to skip out on therapy at my Hyper-Potentiality Clinic. That’s because they, like everyone else, were falling up and down the escalator of the nine stages of the Brain-Silverman Grief Scale™ (Revised):

1. Confusion

2. Obsession

3. Lust for vengeance

4. Self-pity

5. Boundless contempt

6. Reckless adventurism

7. Depression

8. Paranoia and

9. Hollow acceptance

Regardless of each hero’s sadness, the F*L*A*C’s orders were emphatic: even at this moment of global mourning, any of my F*O*O*Jsters who failed to attend therapy and achieve measurable improvement would be summarily removed from the ranks of Earth’s most celebrated superteam.

And thus, in the bright sunlit Saturday morning of the Anger Room, my heroes sat in a circle of morbid moroseness.

In their fumbling individual attempts to bear the psychemotional weight of their legendary mentor’s death, each F*O*O*Jster shared something with the group to ease individual and collective sorrow, and offered a few halting remarks met by sodden silence. In doing so, each one evoked aspects of his or her personality which had until that point remained hidden—tenderness, nostalgia, melancholy, compassion, and more—a stunning departure from the factionalizing and fractious fracas factory of the previous day.

Wally W. Watchtower brought with him a pharaonic crown given to him by Hawk King, an interroyal gift from an ancient Egyptian king to the surviving prince of the doomed planet Argon; Wally explained how that gesture, in late 1944, had helped him rise from confusion as a wandering, superpowered Jehovah’s Witness farmboy from Kentucky to his grand destiny as Omnipotent Man. The Flying Squirrel distributed free advance copies of two books from PiltdownPerennial: a coffee-table book of the most famous photographs of the Egyptian deity, plus a small, black, clothbound volume of wisdom-quotations called The Utterances of Hawk King; even Festus Piltdown’s perpetual gadfly, the X-Man, seemed impressed and moved by the gift.

André supplied a sumptuous collection of delicate confections he’d baked personally, from flans to mille-feuille, and while serving them to everyone uttered not a single bzzzt!; Syndi distributed advance CD singles of the dancebeat eulogy she’d rushed into production the previous night called “Hawk On (Long Live the King).” And during a moment of intense quiet, Iron Lass produced a gleaming silver ram’s horn she’d brought from Aesgard more than a millennium before, from which she elicited a sound like Louis Armstrong on a muted trumpet, rendering in tear-trickling agony what she later informed me was Duke Ellington’s “Solitude.”

Only one of my sanity-supplicants came empty-handed: the X-Man. But even he would nonetheless later share something—a situationally inappropriate but entirely predictable paranoid rant.

Stages of Grief: Confusion

How do you all feel,” I said, looking for anything to get our discussion started at last, “about…oh, the media coverage of Hawk King’s passing?”

Getting no response, I held up a couple of newspapers. The Los Ditkos Sentinel-Spectator carried the headline NATION MOURNS FOUNDING F*O*O*JSTER. The Los Ditkos Sun announced HAWK KING: DEAD AT 7000+. USA Today blared