So, um... Yeah. Head baby? Maybe?

[IamLEAM1983]

What started out as me wondering what the surviving superheroes from the twenties and thirties might have to say about the current era took a turn for the weird.

Toons à la Roger Rabbit don't exist in Hope's universe. Cartoons are just that. Cartoons. Things that are watched but that can't be interacted with. However, magic tends to bond with the oddest materials - especially those you didn't think about. I figured a fairly toon-esque antihero might have had a pretty unusual origin story.

So it's around 1927 in Hope and some animation-related branch of MGM, Disney or Warner Brothers is established in town, to cut back on costs. One of the hired animators has family ties with the local mob, at a point in the Irish diaspora's history where Chicago's influence is making it harder for Jimmy to keep all of his lieutenants on the nice, congenial, straight and narrow. It's decades before Weasel's birth, of course, so the Commission isn't a glimmer in anyone's eye. There's feuds, the occasional murder - the usual Gangland stuff. A woman from the Cels department is a bit of a mage, though, and she's studied the process behind the creation of Clanks, golems and dryads without really knowing where she's going. It's more of a hobby for her than anything else, and she really isn't doing anything that's particularly harmful.

The years pass, and the outsourcing gig really doesn't pay off. Things seem to be better off when centralized in California. Lack of motivation, family tensions and mob problems are pushing our friend the animator into a bit of a perennially grouchy mood, and the bottle is sort of compounding that. There's not a lot of supernatural problems in town, but crime is fairly unchecked. Being related to some itchy trigger fingers is fast becoming unhealthy for our friend the animator.

Eventually, dissatisfaction and whiskey push enough buttons that he blabs about something one of Winters' dimmer lightbulbs asked him to keep quiet. Said goon isn't exactly the brightest tool in the shed, so he waits until the guy's on overtime, slips into the studio and pretty much forces the guy to guzzle down some paint thinner. The idiot figures death by paint thinner in an animation studio makes sense because of the fumes, or something. Animator Person dies a fairly horrible death.

A few years pass, the guy's succession goes nowhere and Winters is having a hard time dealing with some rogue elements that are clearly taking cues from the Sicilians in New York and Chicago. The mage lady's moved on to doing color work for an ad agency, but she hasn't dropped out of her studies. She manages to pick up some of Animator Guy's unfinished cels and movement studies for an unnamed character; some kind of typical Silver Age Pac Man-eyed and glove-wearing canine with a cocked derby. Being enough of a Sensitive, she realizes that there's a lot of supernatural frustration and anger that's clinging to the drawings.

Using some scissors, some glue, some chalk and a disassembled Etheric Transference Unit she purchased on the cheap from Masterson, she conjures Animator Guy's spirit forth. At first, she only figures she'll use that to question him and find out if she can bring him closure by giving extra info to the cops. The first few times work mostly as planned, but the cops are stumped. The more she tries, the more frustrated the ghost gets and the more he makes it clear he's working on something.

Eventually, the guy is sick of seeing that both the cops and the mob can't solve his case. He pulls off something that's excessively rare and manages to transsubstantiate the cels and motion studies into a kind of homunculi - the character's design made flesh. Using his new body, Animator Dude leads the cops on the weirdest cases of Assault and Battery they'd have ever seen. He clearly has enough sense to avoid killing the men behind his murder, but he also clearly doesn't mind leaving them fairly scarred, psychologically.

Fast-forward to today and Hope has spent several generations being saddled with the grumpiest antihero ever - a guy who kind of managed to find his lot in with the rest of the Silver Age's heroes, before Seraph's time, but who was already woefully out of touch by the fifties. Now he's mostly an ageless and borderline physically indestructible old coot who looks and acts like an antisocial Steamboat Willie reject. He almost never does anything that's specifically cartoony - except maybe drive around at normal speeds in an undersized car, since he's barely three feet tall - but it's still technically possible to piss him off enough to earn the sight of his oversized gun. Or, God forbid, of his mallet.

The nineties' superheroes already used to compare him to Rocket Raccoon, since the guy has a... few anger management issues. He's versatile enough, he just has a chronic lack of credibility that's kept him out of virtually all of the city's serious scrapes and burns. He figures he hasn't clawed his way out of the Shadowlands just to spend a few mortal generations collecting Social Welfare checks, smoking bad cigars and guzzling beer. He wants some form of validation, but nobody's really bothered to give him a chance - except the woman who resurrected him. Obviously, she died of old age long ago.