If the F*O*O*J had been a vehicle for national and even global change, the F*L*A*C was the front axis of that vehicle’s wheels. So the candidate—or candidates—in our therapeutic sessions were in desperate need of a good greasing.
Back Issues: The Origins of the F*O*O*J
Forged during America’s now mythical Golden Age of Heroism to counter the threats of rum-running, communism, juvenile delinquency, and marijuana, the (then) Fraternal Order of Justice was Earth’s foremost and finest fighting force of fury. Delivering the decisive blow against the German war machine following the Soviet invasion of Berlin, the F*O*O*J became a planetary icon for justice and freedom. Its founding members’ names are synonymous with glory: Omnipotent Man, Iron Lass, Lady Liberty, Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid, Captain Manifest Destiny, and their brilliant, mysterious, mystical mentor, the incredible Hawk King.
Returning to America and the expansive East Coast metropolis of Seagull City, the F*O*O*J moved into its first legendary headquarters, the Mando Mansion, and began recruiting among the nation’s growing ranks of costumed avengers.
Thus began the F*O*O*J’s Silver Age, whose new stars would shine as brightly as the originals—Siren, the Evolutionist, Flying Squirrel, and Chip Monk—defending our country and our planet against some of the worst scourges imaginable: Nemesaur, the Leninoids, Codzilla, Black Mamba, Standing Buffalo, Cosmicus and the Hordes of Entropy…truly an unlimited series.
But in the goggled eyes of some, the atomic-powered America of the Silver Age was mutating into something unrecognizable. Gone were the neat pleats and fedoras of the founding era of the F*O*O*J. Now rock and roll, the Civil Rights and women’s movements, miniskirts, hippies, and drugs were bubbling out of the gutters and recoloring the splash pages of our country.
Like most institutions, the conservative F*O*O*J resisted any change until change was forced upon it, mandated not only by the pervasive influence of altered American mores, but by legal action. Gone was the adjective fraternal because of the Siren’s embittering lawsuit; the word was replaced by fantastic, so the F*O*O*J’s heralding acronym could be preserved.
Other changes—some with far more sweeping outcomes—were on the way. Warlock War II saw the magical relocation of Seagull City to the West Coast and its integration into the city of Los Ditkos. The war’s destruction of Mando Mansion led Festus Piltdown III to construct a replacement F*O*O*J headquarters, the glittering gold-silver Fortress of Freedom, which remains the leading tourist attraction of downtown Bird Island in Los Ditkos. Perhaps most contentiously, as a recipient of federal security contracts under President Nixon, the organization could not by the early 1970s continue to receive such funding if it remained all-white. Racial integration of the F*O*O*J introduced America to such now-classic crimefighters as the Spook and La Cucaracha.
Colossal figures were undergoing colossal change.
The Bitter Aftertaste in the Chalice of Victory
But there’s only so much change any organization can take before its primary-colored tunic begins washing out and splitting at the seams.
Integration, popular demands that the F*O*O*J apply itself to new threats such as environmental devastation and domestic abuse, and increasing public concern about due process and the legal loopholeism that allowed superheroes to operate meant that the legitimacy of the F*O*O*J’s mission—if not its very existence—was in question.
But no one, least of all the F*O*O*J’s founders, could have dreamed of the devastating impact that America’s and the world’s two major victories would have: the almost simultaneous collapse of communism and victory in the Götterdämmerung, the global war against supervillains.
Suddenly, for more than two hundred active F*O*O*Jsters, several hundred affiliates, and the public they were sworn to protect (and whose taxes funded them), the F*O*O*J no longer had any reason to exist.
Fortunately for the F*O*O*J, drugs continued to plague America’s cities, but the battle against this epidemic lacked sufficient drama to inspire a generation and the media, and it initiated as many awkward questions as it answered.
Inheriting a lugubriously legendary legacy impossible to leap above, but no longer possessing a substantial-enough organizing objective (or “mythic narrative”), the F*O*O*J’s workplace dysfunction soon became a matter of public record. Bickering among heroes transformed itself into publicized personal attacks and escalated into lawsuits, public brawling that shattered whole city blocks, and finally criminal charges against legendary heroes in front of a mortified America.
RELEASED: Jack Zenith’s sensational Two Masks of a “Hero,” the era-shattering tell-all and the very first investigative book on the F*O*O*J with a credible inside source—Clifford David Stinson, HKA the Blue Smasher.
REVEALED: Decades-old internal conflicts; lurid allegations of harassment, assault, and perversion; cases of heroes gambling on the outcomes of their own superbattles; countless tales of substance abuse, power-fixation and dimension-shifting; and most shocking of all, the outing of dozens of secret identities.
REDUCED: Dozens of heroes who had traipsed across our globe like gods above the Trojan War were revealed as the lawyers, scientists, industrial magnates, romance novelists, major imprint editors, husbands, wives, and robots they actually were.
For a world weary and wary of secrecy among the powerful, Two Masks of a “Hero” was an electromagnet for the alloy of public scrutiny and popular outrage. Demands exploded for the full disclosure of F*O*O*J mission records and especially its financial accounts. On the advice of managers, attorneys, and PR agents, some heroes preemptively revealed their own identities in order to shape perception about themselves and their careers and thereby limit the damage from ongoing and future investigations.
The shattering of the old paradigm was loud enough to cause permanent damage to the ears of some heroes, and just as the ear is the center of balance, the psychological disequilibrium that followed cast many costumed crusaders upon the grimy, vomit-streaked barroom floors of their careers and personal lives. Golden Age icons and F*O*O*J founders such as Gil Gamoid and his sidekick the N-Kid, implicated
