On Post: Real World

Date: January 29, 2014

As I’ve noted several times over the course of four years doing The January Project, I try to avoid doing super hero content as much as possible. However, typically once a series I do let myself indulge in it. If ever there was a song that pulled for this kind of indulgence, it is this one.

For one thing, the song straight up says “super hero” and describes what is obviously Superman. In my story this description leads to the rather uncreatively named The Righteous.

The song also invokes the term “rainmaker” but doesn’t use it in the traditional sense (that is someone who seeds clouds to induce rainfall or someone who makes a business a lot of money quickly). Instead, it is a figure who literally makes and stocks rain in “boxes with little yellow tags.” That kind of behavior feels like the sort of thing a super villain might do and thus RainMaker.

The theme, of the transition of a villain from a small time gadget guy to a murderer, is provided by a trend observed in comics wherein villain moved from the goofy heists of the Silver Age to the grim n’ gritty 5 o’clock shadow wearing murdering (and sometimes raping) “serious” villains of the 90’s and early aughts.

The climax that sees The Righteous refuse to play and storming away instead while RainMaker weeps comes from the conclusion of the song that seemed, to me, like someone begging that super hero from the first verse to live up to expectations. The Righteous doesn’t break, per se, but he does change and thus denies RainMaker the “only thing that seems to work” in his rather strange world. Having almost killed him, the RainMaker realized their unique dynamic so Righteous tearing it down moments later hits even harder.