From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain

You can wrap a steel I-beam around your neck with your bare hands and
wear it like a tie. You can swim so quickly that you can go back in time to
offer Columbus correct directions to India. You can climb the outside of a
building, regurgitate the ton of paper you've eaten and weave a beautiful
multilevel hive while not paying a cent in downtown rent.

But are you happy?

There was an innocent time not so long ago when most people assumed
that the flamboyant adventurers whose stories emblazoned the front pages
of our newspapers and whose exploits ricocheted across the six o'clock
news must really have had it all: fame, good looks, public adulation, and
seemingly godlike powers.

But as our society has matured, many of the greatest heroes of our time
have come to the numbing epiphany that invincibility and immortality
simply aren't enough. The war of Götterdammerung was finally concluded
in victory, the worst ultra-menaces were locked inside the
maximum-security force fields of Asteroid Zed, and the rest of the
misguided offenders are being cared for by the finest psychiatric facilities
for the atomically insane.

But while super-lawbreakers are being profiled in movies of the week, fêted
for their (sometimes literally) ghost-written autobiographies, and cared
for to the price of millions of tax dollars, who will care for you?

Who will care for you, the brave men and women who put the menacing
malefactors away? Who will care for you, the courageous crusaders who
risked your headquarters, your magic bracelets and diadems, your
proprietary technology, your connection with your sub-dimensional
xeno-souls and even your lives? Who will care for you, who jeopardised
every relationship you were forced to put on hold or which you allowed to
wither while you were fighting to preserve our freedom?

Far too often, the sad answer has been no one.

You men and women who kept our world safe from the likes of the Infinity
Farmer and his Time Tractor, from X-Stacy and the Ravers, or from the
technopurges of Robot-Stalin, have too often defined yourselves solely by
the existence of your foes. But what are you supposed to do now that those
foes are gone, and the ungrateful world no longer applauds from the safety
of its decorative balconies?

What are you supposed to do now that you're trapped in a safe world of
your own making, a world which offers you no challenge, no rôle, no
identity, no external enemies?

Yes, the supervillains of old are gone. But there's a new group of them
around today. And they're psychic. No, not psychic like Sarah Bellum,
Menton the Destroyer or the specially-relative Einstein Baboons.

Nor are the poisons of these villains green glowing crystals hidden inside
lead strong boxes, or poisonous prions murdering you one DNA-helix at a
time. Instead these poisons are locked inside your head and your heart,
revealing themselves as depression, paranoia, rage, guilt, performance
anxiety, psionic decay, dimension-shifting, impotence, im-omnipotence, or
any number of other impairments of the soul.

Perhaps now you're forced to recognise that hyperhominidism is equal part
curse to the blessing of your glory days.
But if you've been suffering due to HH, the time to suffer without help is no
more.

MEET YOUR MENTOR

My name is Dr. Eva Brain-Silverman, but to thousands of super-powered
individuals like you I'm simply known as Doctor Brain. For twenty years at
my Hyper-Potentiality Clinic in the refurbished Mount Palomax
Observatory in sunny Los Ditkos, I've been helping the
extraordinarily-abled to adjust to a life beyond heroics, and to feel alive
again even when there are no more neutron bombs to defuse inside the UN
building.

The book you're holding in your hands is the summation of two decades of
advice I've dispensed as balm to heroes across North America at lectures,
seminars and clinical sessions.

But it's more than that. It's also the case study of the most spectacular
group session of my career, whose destructive dysfunction culminated in
the diabolical July 16th Attacks which are even now reshaping our world.

When first contacted by the Board of Directors of the Fantastic Order Of
Justice to assist its six most contentious and confused members in
conquering their intercommunal conflicts, I leapt at the opportunity to
assist. Which heroes among Earth's foremost fighting force for freedom, I
wondered, were so bent on antagonising each other and destroying
themselves that their own leadership was threatening to terminate them
unless they solved their problems in group therapy?

To my astonishment, my line-up was a list of legends among legends:

Omnipotent Man, AKA Wally Watchtower, seventy-one year old refugee
from the destroyed planet Argon, and Earth's mightiest man,

The Flying Squirrel, AKA Festus Piltdown III, seventy year old of
billionaire industrialist and scourge of the criminal underworld,

Iron Lass, AKA Hnossi Icegaard, the immortal Norse warrior-goddess and
the planet's leading martial strategist,

The Brotherfly, AKA André "P-Fly" Parker, twenty-six year old
wall-crawling, wise-cracking, blue-bottled ladies-man,

Power Grrrl, AKA Syndi Tycho, the nineteen year old dynamic diva and
pop music sensation, and

The X-Man, AKA Philip Kareem Edgerton, the thirty-four year old detective
supreme and militant rabble-rouser from the ghettoes of Los Ditkos.

While numbering only six, these individuals had afflictions galore: SID
(Secret Identity Diffusion), narcissisism, Saviour Complex, ODI-CFFB
(Obsessive Defensive-Ideation and Compulsive Fight-or-Flight Behaviour),
Icon Trap, Mortiquaeroticism (death-seeking urges), and RNPN (Racialised
Narcissistic Projection Neurosis), among others. Added into this miasma of
mental maladies were group dysfunctions: Rudolfism and the Uranus
Complex. And pervading all their disturbances, the leading malaise of our
times among hyper-hominids: MILD (Mission-Identity Loss Disturbance),
also known as PHSD (Post-Heroic Stress Disorder).

MY MISSION... AND YOURS

By examining the three-week travail-to-triumph odyssey of the most
extraordinary assembly of patients--or as I prefer to say, "sanity
supplicants"--I have ever treated, you will put yourself on a trajectory out
of the magma-pits of mediocrity and into the metropolis of mental health.
Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can't Save You From Yourself will
give you back the ultravision you once had--but stronger, so that you can
perceive not only threats like MicroCrip and his Nanogangstas, but the
ennui that destabilises the super-ego ions of your self-respect.

Reading this book is the first step in re-arming yourself with the
ultrapower necessary to rescue the only innocent person you've so far
failed to save: yourself.