Fictional Character Biography
In the 10-page story "First Assignment: Break the Spy Ring" in Fighting American #1 (May 1954), Nelson Flagg was the unathletic younger brother of star athlete and war hero Johnny Flagg, and served as the writer for popular TV news commentator Johnny at station USA. When outspoken anti-Communist Johnny is killed by one of the many enemies his commentary has earned him, Nelson makes a deathbed promise to hunt down his brother's murderers. Recruited for the U.S. military's "Project Fighting American", Nelson has his mind and life force transferred to Johnny's "revitalized and strengthened" corpse. Assuming Johnny's identity, he adopts the costumed alter ego Fighting American to battle Communist threats. In the premiere issue's second story, the six-page "Second Assignment: Track Down the Baby Buzz Bombs", an unnamed, blond-haired teenager working as a page at Flagg's network assists the hero and is rewarded with own costume and the name Speedboy.
The two went on to battle an array of mostly Communists grotesqueries with physical deformities and colorful names, such as the two-headed criminal Doubleheader, the redheaded battleaxe Rhode Island Red, the Russian dwarf Sawdoff, the super-smelly Super-Khakhalovitch, the bouncing bank robber Round Robin, and Invisible Irving, the Great Nothing.
Read more about this topic: Fighting American
Famous quotes containing the words fictional, character and/or biography:
“One of the proud joys of the man of letters—if that man of letters is an artist—is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world’s memory.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“When much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom,—it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)