309. Stupendous Girl is Not Cleared for Landing
Amy settles down, legs crossed, and opens the comic book in her lap. She's quickly drawn into the bright colors and life-like drawings; she almost feels like she's there!
An opening narration box gives a precis of Stupendous Girl's origin. “Once an ordinary small-town cheerleader, one night Claire Kant was out stargazing when she saw a meteor land in a field on her family's farm. Rushing to see what it was, she discovered a metal space capsule at the bottom of the crater. The capsule opened and inside she found her Stupendous Suit, which when worn grants her powers far beyond those of mortal women! Now she fights the forces of evil in Megalopolis as Stupendous Girl!”
The scene on the first page shows Stupendous Girl soaring through the sky above the city, scanning for trouble with her Stupendous Vision.
“Help! Help!” Stupendous Girl instantly recognizes the voice of her boyfriend, Larry Long, peril-prone ace reporter for the Megalopolis Daily Star. Accelerating to super-speed, she flies toward the source of his voice.
Amy looks at the next panel, depicting a point-of-view shot of Stupendous Girl's perspective as she flies to her boyfriend. Larry is tied to a pole, an exaggerated look of panic on his face. He sits in sharp focus at the center of the panel, which rapidly blurs as it goes outward, illustrating the super-luminal speed at which Stupendous Girl is traveling to reach him. Amy feels slightly dizzy looking at the panel, and feels a rush of wind as though she herself were moving at stupendous speeds.
“What an artist!” she thinks, “I'll have to see what else he's done when I get back home!”
“Stupendous Girl! Thank god you're here!” Amy is surprised to hear a voice. She turns to look at it and sees Larry Long, large as life, but colorful as a comic book character, tied to a pole.
Amy looks around, confused. She seems to be in some kind of mad scientist’s lair. A giant ray gun, two stories tall, is pointed through a hole in the roof straight at the sun.
“Ah, I'm glad you could join us!” cackles a voice from above. Amy looks up and sees a not-unattractive bald woman in a white lab coat. “You're just in time to see my sinister plan take form! I have observed, in our previous encounters, the curious protectiveness you exhibit toward that meddling reporter. It was only a matter of time until he stuck his nose in my affairs once again, and I was given the bait I needed to lure you into my trap! You see, that pole he is tied to is no ordinary pole; it is a giant electrode! When activated, current will begin flowing through it and in less than a minutes your little friend will be fried to a crisp!”
“You'll never get away with this!” Amy shouts, supplying the line she's certain a character of her type would say. The villain's monologue provides a momentary break in the action, which Amy uses to give herself a quick once-over. She's wearing a skin-tight short-sleeved red dress with a yellow circle on the chest. Inside the circle is a stylized blue letter S, accentuated by her abundant bosom. The skirt of the dress is loose and blue and extends not much beyond her pleasingly tight derriere. She wears a blue cape on her back that goes down to her knees. Her long, lean legs terminate in a pair of blue high-heeled knee-high boots. She notes that her hair is now mid-back length, straight and blonde.
“But that's not all!” the villainess crows, “You have no doubt noticed my Solar Field Gun. I have noted in analysis of our previous encounters that certain wavelengths given off by the sun are absorbed by your suit. I can only assume that your suit is powered by the rays of our yellow sun. My Solar Field Gun, once activated, creates a curved field between the Earth and the Sun that screens out the wavelengths powering your suit. Without your Stupendous Suit's stupendous powers, you'll be nothing but a Stupendous Bimbo!” She takes a moment to have a good nefarious laugh while Amy figures out how a super hero of her apparent abilities would get out of this situation.
“At last, the world will know the genius of Lexie Lothar, and my mind will have definitively triumphed over your brawn! Now I throw the master switch, activating the diode and the Solar Field Gun! Choose, Stupendous Girl! Choose between your friend's life and your stupendous powers!” With a flourish, she pulls a great lever, causing a crackling sound to emerge from the diode while a low hum comes from the Solar Field Gun.
“If I know my comics,” thinks Amy, “this is a false choice. The writer sets up a seemingly-interesting conflict of values for the superhero. She has to choose between her own powers and the life of her friend, between the life of someone she knows and the lives of all the people she might rescue in her future career as a superhero. In the end, though, rather than forcing the decision the writer finds a cop-out ending that lets the hero off the hook. Either the hero finds a way to defeat both mechanisms, or, in modern comics, the choice is taken out of the hero's hands by outside circumstances. In the end, maybe the hero loses her powers and has to learn to live like a normal person (only to regain those powers a few issues later, because nobody wants to read about some ordinary schlub), or the hero's love interest is killed, allowing the writer to explore the depths of the hero's angsty emotions as she comes to grips with her failure (then the author brings the love interest back to life five years later after a fan letter-writing campaign about how terrible it is that the status quo of the comic was changed.)”
“Stupendous Girl! DO something!” Amy is woken from her reverie by Larry's cry; his hair is starting to stand on end as the charge in the electrode builds.
Amy gets an idea. Willing herself to fly, she finds herself blasting through the air toward the Solar Field Gun. Meanwhile, she turns her head back to the diode, focusing on it with what she hopes is heat vision.
“OUCH!” shouts Larry, burned by the pole.
Satisfied, Amy begins absent-mindedly pounding at the Solar Field Gun and tearing out parts, while simultaneously puckering her lips to send a concentrated blast of cold air at the diode.
“BRRRRR!” Larry is freezing, confirming that her plan will work.
Amy begins heating and freezing the diode faster than the human eye can see, alternating a hundred times per second. As she does, big cracks begin to appear in the metal. Finally, Amy takes a deep breath and blows at the diode.
CRACK! CRUNCH! TINK, TINK, TINK, TINK!
The rapidly-alternating hot and cold has turned the pole brittle, and her final breath shatters it into a million pieces, freeing Larry. Amy turns her attention back to the Solar Field Gun. She is pleasantly surprised to discover that her half-assed rain of blows has already reduced it to a pile of electronic rubble.
“My brilliant plan! Foiled!” laments Lothar, who has fallen to her knees and is clutching her cue-ball head.
Larry runs over to Amy. “Oh, Stupendous Girl, you saved me again!” He pecks her on the cheek. “Now, how about an interview?”
Amy gleans from this that Larry doesn't know her secret identity. She decides not to break the comic's status quo and gives Larry a wink. “Maybe someday, Larry, maybe someday.”
Amy raises an arm in the air and rockets out of the building, soaring once again over the Megalopolis sky. She now has a moment to herself to consider her situation.
“It looks like I'm trapped in the comic book I was reading,” she decides, “Not the absolute worst place to be, all things considered...” She admires her idealized form and superhuman powers. Then she snaps back to reality. “But I have to get out of here to save Shannon. Now, I'll bet that I have to finish the story if I want to get out of here, because once the story's done the world should cease to exist. I just finished one adventure, but there are probably more to come. After all, I was reading a collected edition, so if it's of decent length there should be another five stories to come. Still, I'm pretty much invincible and all-powerful, so what could possibly go wrong?”
The world supplies an answer to Amy's question immediately. Unaccustomed to flying and lost in thought, Amy doesn't notice a flagpole atop a tall building. As she flies by the pole the end of her cape gets snagged. The pole bends and her cape stretches behind her, slowing her movement to a crawl. Startled, she looks back and realizes her situation. She then reacts in exactly the wrong way: She mentally ceases her forward movement.
SPROING! FWOOSH!
Without anything pulling it down, the flagpole snaps back into place, sending Amy rocketing backwards like a stone launched from a slingshot. The cape remains snagged and pulls up over her head as she passes back by the flagpole. When her cape is fully extended, the cape pulls pole-ward on her shoulders as Amy continues flying backwards. Both of her arms remain positioned above her head and thus provide no resistance as Amy's body flies straight out of her dress.
In the space of half a second, Amy goes from all-powerful super hero, flying through the sky and surveying the city that is her domain, to nearly-naked, utterly powerless blonde girl screaming as she is catapulted through the air. Back at the pole, her now-empty Stupendous Suit, still attached at the cape, wafts in the breeze like a flag.
Amy, meanwhile, is flailing her limbs as she arcs through the sky. Tumbling end-over-end, she sees an oncoming skyscraper and then-
SPLAT'!
Miraculously, the impact does not kill her. Less miraculously, she finds herself looking through the glass into the Megalopolis Daily Star's bustling newsroom. Everyone looks up at her, seeing the strangest sight any of these hardened reporters have ever seen: Stupendous Girl, blue eyes crossed and wearing a look of dazed confusion, pressed spread-eagle against the glass that separates the newsroom from the rooftop terrace, clad only in a pink g-string with sparkly silver Stupendous Girl logo on the crotch and her trademark high-heeled knee-high blue boots, her Stupendous Tits squashed flat against the glass, making each one look about the size of a waiter's serving tray.
The no-longer-empowered Amy is left to peel herself off of the glass and run down the stairs and through the city streets back to Claire Kant's modest apartment, all the while hugging her chest in a futile attempt to preserve what little remains of her modesty.
That tiny bit of modesty is blasted into its component atoms when the Daily Star comes out the next day, featuring full-color front-page photos of her surprise appearance at the paper's offices, accompanied by the headline “STUPENDOUS SLUT IN A STUPOR!”
Amy winces as she reads the article; her secret identity is revealed, as it isn't particularly difficult for the reporters to note the similarities between the disgraced heroine and their own bumbling co-worker when her body is laid totally bare like that.
Amy is interrupted by a knock at her door. She opens it to find Lexie Lothar's grinning, bald face.”
“Hello, Stupendous Girl!” she sneers.
With a blast of pink light from the ray gun that Amy only know notices Lexie was wielding, Amy is zapped out of existence, along with her bathrobe and slippers. All that remains behind is a little pink g-string with a sparkly silver S in a circle. It hovers in the air for a moment, maintaining the contours of its former owner's crotch and butt, before giving up the battle against gravity and lazily drifting to the ground.
Amy is in no state to continue her adventure or her life.