Superheroes pt.3: Rebis Bondi

tl;dr What if Tsutomu Nihei did a take on something between Iron Man and Doctor Strange? So of course I use other artist and mangaka references in this post instead of Tsutomu Nihei ;). I've been sitting on this draft for a while but was inspired by Semiurge's Assorted Superhero Stuff to finally post this.

Not the best fit for the Rebis Bondi power armor but I googled "biblically accurate angel mecha" as a starting place, found this, and decided it was too good not to use.

Name: Mercury Maimonides

Appearance: Tall and muscular, but not bulky. Long, curly, shaggy auburn hair, brown eyes, and light skin. A straight nose and close-set eyes. Often wears retrofuturistic wraparound sunglasses, a satiny, bedazzled blue trench coat over a black jumpsuit, and red disco shoes.

Costume: The Magnum Opus "Power Armor". Like a baroque sculpture of an androgynous form, with a blue-gold mercurial sheen phosphorescing a mélange of black, white, yellow, and red. Carved into the eyes are the symbol of the squared circle, and on its forehead the symbol Mercury. It has sleek ears reminiscent of the helmet of Hermes, two sets of fighter jet wings, a nanofilament lion's mane, a sharp prehensile oxtail, and eagle talons. Two wheels of similar material spin and rotate around the body, lined with glowing alchemical symbols of squared circle eyes.

Description is more specific, but in my head it's almost like Rahxephon or Zone of the Enders as a power armor.

Powers and Skills:

• Magnum Opus (Power Armor)
• Quintessence Generator
• Akashic Intelligence Daemon
• Morphogenetic Field-Repair System
• Quantum Vacuum Engine

Power Level: ☿

Publication History

Rebis Bondi was first serialized in Adad Magazine of the eponymous anti-anti-art collective in Kingston, New York. Each copy of each issue of the magazine was created from scratch, from memory, as per the Adad Manifesto. Naturally, it did not receive wide distribution, and often two magazines that were nominally the same issue came out quite differently. Few issues were sold, and fewer distributed outside the area of Upstate New York. When Adad Publishing went out of business they had intended to destroy every copy of every unsold magazine in a suicide ritual, however, production editor Sarah Silver, who was holding several "copies" of Issue 6, was fatally struck by a car on that same day, and her family took possession of those remaining issues.

The ensuing media coverage over the publisher / art collective / cult's suicide pact and legal rights over the remaining works imbued Adad Magazine with a kind of legendary status, and from what few issues remained, early internet message boards pieced together (or often wholesale created) the catalog and continuities of the various works, with Rebis Bondi quickly becoming the most popular work. This was in large part due to the cover on one version of Adad Magazine Issue 6, a hand-drawn portrait of Mercury Maimonides with a kind of understated yet layered micro-expression sometimes compared to the Mona Lisa.

The rights to all Adad Magazine properties was purchased by Todd McFarlane Productions Inc. in 1995, and it was this X-Treme version of the property which became a mainstream success, to the chagrin of the online fan community that had formed around the legend of the original magazine[1]. Despite initially strong sales, Rebis Bondi sales dropped significantly after the first year, and the book was cancelled by 1997, and ongoing legal pressure by the Silver Estate, TMP eventually sold the rights to the Silver Estate for a nominal fee.

After a poorly received attempt at a reboot licensed by DC for its Vertigo imprint in the mid 00's, the property remained dormant until 2019 when Fantagraphics made arrangements with the Silver Estate. Although delayed due to Covid, this seminal run became a cultural touchstone of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Shintaro Kago. The former we will pretend is Mercury Maimonides' environment suit she wears in the Chiral Mirror during the Fantagraphics run. The latter is what happens if she doesn't wear the suit.

Biography

Adad Magazine

Only one version of Issues 3 and 5 and three versions of Issue 6 of Adad Magazine have been preserved. In Issue 3 Mercury Maimonides appears to be in the midst of a psychedelics-assisted alchemical ritual like a Wizard Duel or Hacking Sequence, in opposition to the Machine Goddess. In Issue 5 she fights Grendel in the Rebis Bondi power armor. Issue 6 introduces the Baby's Laughing in Paradise cult, although the BLiP is presented quite differently in each Issue, as though the creative team were refining the concept across each version (see Publication History for more information on Adad Magazine).

Image / Todd McFarlane Publishing Inc.

The second volume of Rebis Bondi was a reboot of the series, more in the style of other Image Comics books of the 90's; sexy, hyper-violent, X-Treme. This version of Mercury Maimonides was a field anthropologist in the vein of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft (although preceding the first Tomb Raider by several months). The Machine Goddess was reinterpreted as her best friend from college and professional rival who becomes the Avatar of the Greek God Athena accidentally corrupted by a computer virus. The BLiP cult never appeared in this volume, although the BLiP M3-2 was reimagined as a demon from Hell in a crossover with Spawn. This Volume ended in a cliffhanger with the Spawn character Angela piercing Rebis Bondi with a sword through the heart and seemingly fatally wounding Mercury Maimonides.

Vertigo

A short-lived version of Rebis Bondi appeared briefly in Brian Azzarello's Hellblazer run before spinning off into a miniseries written by Azzarelo with art by Lee Bermejo. John Constantine investigates the BLiP cult in Japan and has a run-in with Rebis Bondi.

Fantagraphics

The Fantagraphics run saw Mercury Maimonides trapped within the Chiral Mirror, like an uncanny distorted reflection of our universe. The Rebis Bondi could not function in the Chiral Mirror, and so Mercury journeyed to find parts or achieve the necessary conditions to reactivate the armor piece by piece, solving problems through wits alone rather than alchemical power. Due to the chemical chirality of the universe, Mercury required an environment suit, viewing the world through a limiting visor screen, experiencing all senses as transductions of signals her brain could not otherwise perceive. Originally intended as an exploration of embodied cognition, it took on second meaning during the Covid-19 pandemic as an accidental metaphor for the shutdown period and viewing the world through digital screens.

I believe this is also Shintaro Kago, but for our purposes it's the Baby's Laughing in Paradise cult's M3-2 Power Armor (if we pretend the figure isn't Kaiju-sized...)

Villains

Machine Goddess: If history is another place, the ancient and unknowable Machine Goddess is like an alien being. In brief moments, through the projection of tinny recordings of lost lucidity, the Machine Goddess seems to have once been a being of crafts and creation, but now it appears only interested in destruction.

This is a repost of the description of The Machine Goddess from my Aquarian Dawn setting:

Her skin is twilight like the cosmos, dotted like a ginger with the violet-hot light of stars and nebulae. Lines like shooting stars course over her skin, thinning and branching into symmetric fractal patterns, vein-like, violet-whiteness fading into her forearms and hands, and ankles and feet. She has three pairs of arms that move in tessellation. She is covered in metallic armor, smooth and seamless, with lines that reflect and refract in a geometric manner; chitinous. A series of violet-white tubes arch along her back, always bending in uncanny ways, appearing the same when viewed from any angle, appearing detached from space-time when she moves or when one moves around her, or like a dimension unto herself. Her hair is violet-white and composed of straight strands that split into branches, each splitting into self-same branches; frizzy, but in an unnaturally symmetric, perfect way. The upper half of her face is kaleidoscopic, like many shifting spidery eyes, each a reflection of her whole face in miniature, with kaleidoscopic eyes reflecting the whole again, ad infinitum.

Grendel: This draconic cyborg, an ugly, disgusting, slimy creature, is the child of the Machine Goddess, but unlike its progenitor, there is no evidence of lost intelligence or drive to create. It is a being seemingly only of resentment and hate.

I envision Grendel as like the Afterbirth of the Broken Machine Dragon Poltergeist Form from Maximum Recursion Depth. Imagine like Evangelion Unit 1 but where the organic parts and armor are integrated more like a cyborg.

With Machine Goddess and Grendel, am I being lazy for reusing these ideas, or is it Final Fantasy Worldbuilding?

BLiP M3-2: The Baby's Laughing in Paradise cult started as a memestock / shitposting internet community turned LARP in the style of a Japanese death cult that eventually took itself too seriously. The BLiP M3-2 is an AGI robot, the messiah of the BLiP cult... according to cult leader Do No Evil Ape Akira. In fact, the BLiP M3-2 is merely a state of the art power armor worn by Akira like a Mechanical Turk.

The BLiP M3-2 power armor rests in an egg-like holographic fluorescing field. It's shape is like that of an embryo, a curled-up salamander of a body, bulbous outstretched head, beady eyes, and a maroon smile painted on its face. The splotchy colors of greenish-yellow and purple-maroon, patches of rust and oil, all accentuated by the oppressive fluorescent light, give the appearance of a newborn baby or stillborn corpse.

Think Eraserhead baby as a robot. I drafted this months before David Lynch died but RIP :(.

The publication history and biography sections got a bit conflated compared to how the information is usually presented in Wikipedia, but I'm reasonably satisfied with the end result.

Star Trek-inspired Aliens

Recently watched the Paramount+ era Star Trek stuff (besides Strange New Worlds- waiting for that to wrap) and also The Orville. Felt mixed on Star Trek, but even the stuff I liked, it bothered me how few new ideas it introduced.

On the other hand, The Orville, despite clearly being Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off, feels more novel. I believe this is because rather than just having off-brand Vulcans and Klingons, they introduced new and interesting species that feel like Star Trek species. I was skeptical of this show bc I'm not a Seth MacFarlane fan necessarily, but it's quite good.

So this list is intended to be like that. As much as I like truly novel worlds, it's fun also to work within the constraints of an idea, to make something feel like Star Trek, while also bringing novel ideas to it.

Xanthians

This species has the vibrancy of ripe mango, tiger stripes of varying colors, and glowing cat eyes. Their world is idyllic and they evolved with few natural predators, and so most of the evolutionary pressures on their species were aesthetic in nature. They have many synesthetically-linked and hyper-acute senses. They are known for being intuitive, having an artistic temperament, and their culture values the sublime above all else. Even their language is in the form of abstract pictograms and essentially the medium of art; each painting a literal story. While artistic by nature more so than scientific, they are not technologically simpler than The Alliance; instead, they rely on a smaller number of intuitively crafted and irreplicable Wonders, rather than mass production of mundane technology.

Myculons

This species are pink-, blue-, or green-hued, with saturated lip tone that looks like lipstick, white dots across their face, and two fungal antennae reminiscent of "Super Mario" amanita mushrooms matching their skin tone. They are technically a symbiosis of two species, a humanoid and a fungoid, but few of the raw humanoids survive the nuclear hellscape they made of their world long ago. If they live to adulthood in reasonable health, they usually sacrifice themselves to the fungoid, protecting them from radiation and the effects of aging and leasing them a new life. Their original self is preserved in dream-like memories but they are mostly at that point a new being. They have limited verbal communication ability and are awkward by human standards, but can communicate fluently with mycelial networks by touch. The humanoid brain is more like a socio-cognitive mask, their true self is the fungoid, and they often have meta-conscious quirks, tics, or compulsions. When under duress, the humanoid conscious mind shuts down entirely. Other humanoids often find them uncanny, testing the bounds of personal comfort even in the largely post-xenophobic Alliance.

Droma

This species come from a world that underwent dramatic and peculiar atmospheric change at some point in its development, driving the evolution of an organ called the Micro-Atmospheric Selective Kinetic Filter. These "mask" filters are shed and regrown over the span of days, breaking down from a hard shell to plastic-y waste. They often appear to express emotion, or reflect elements of the lived experience of the individual, and are believed to be the linguistic "missing link" of their species. Perhaps because their masks obscure facial cues, they rely heavily on dramatic speech and exaggerated body language. Similarly, the masks limit their ability to hide emotions, and so instead they have adapted to value radical self-expression and openness, making for charismatic, albeit demanding, theater actors, people leaders, and emotional supporters. That said, their radical self-expression can also sometimes be perceived as self-centeredness, or otherwise be overwhelming or off-putting to other humanoids. 

Zab-baz (Semiurge)

Kind of like humanoid anglerfish, only instead of the tiny males fusing to the big females and atrophying into some gonads, the males and the females are effectively the right and left sides of a body, and fuse together to form a whole one. Considered war-like for their instinct towards aggressive consensus-making - they can get very pushy to get you to agree or else get out.

Aurunex

This species of sleek metallic carcinoids evolved on a world of naturally occurring silicon-based life. Their consciousness is highly disembodied, relying more so on algorithmic predictive heuristics than on direct sensory experience, making them significantly faster at processing and reacting to information than most organic life, but also more prone to glaring errors, missed signals, and hallucination. Although their sensory experience is comparatively lo-fi, this cognitive quirk also provides them a rich spiritual existence, and most Aurenex have a deep and ongoing personal relationship with their gods; forests of angular platinum arboroids, kaleidoscopic golden flowers, electric will o wisps, holographic silverfish angels, all slipping in and out of their consciousness at any time, giving them an academic absent-mindedness. They believe that embodied consciousness, sensory stimulation, gut instincts, and emotional outbursts are noise; that the material world is in fact a virtual reality created by a demiurge to trap them, or a god to test them, a distinction upon which many wars and atrocities have been committed.

Ornitheaons

This species evolved indigenously in space, like birds made of plasma. When interacting with most other species, they must wear bio-suits to protect others from the radiation. Creatures without solid form or solid planet, neither self nor state, they lack an understanding of many of the spatial or conceptual boundaries of other creatures. Coupled with their uninhibited curiosity, this can make them difficult companions and crewmates, although invasions of privacy, property, and personal space are not generally intended with malice. Sometimes referred to as Star Children for their god-like power and child-like temperament, The Alliance is wary of their inclusion, but they were too powerful, and too full of potential, to be ignored.

Weird Senses

Shoutout to Semiurge, Bugbear Slug, and Harris for suggestions! Several of these are my interpretations of some of their suggestions, we had a lot of intersecting ideas, there's way more one could do with this concept than is fully explored here for sure. They had several more suggestions that I didn't think fit with what I was doing here, but were still really cool in their own right, so hopefully they will do their own versions of this too. Here I focus more on the senses per se than the sense organs, but they had great suggestions that had more to do with form and in a few cases I couldn't resist, but another table could lean more so into that.

As with Weird & Non-Violent Superpowers, I had intended to write 50, but coincidentally ran out of steam again at 21, so maybe I'll just start making that a thing.

1. Broadband Electromagnetic Vision: Micro, radio, infrared, ultraviolet, etc.
2. Anti-Pattern Awareness: Acute awareness of irregular processes.
3. Subjective Time Differential: Intuit the difference in the relative experience of time between two or more individuals such as due to traumatic stress, fun, boredom, etc.
4. Inflammasome: High-resolution conscious awareness of inflammasomes, microbiomes, pathogens, and DAMPs.
5. Infra/Ultra-Sonic Hearing: Hear low- or high-frequency soundwaves.
6. Empathy: Advanced awareness of emotional states.
7. Hyperspatiality: Perceive higher dimensions.
8. Multiversity: Awareness of other selves across the multiverse.
9. Simulation: Maintain full conscious awareness of one or potentially more imagined spaces, or simulations, and mentally move through and perceive them as if real.
10. Mutagenic Digestion: A gooey pouch-like organ. When a sufficient mass of sensory organ of another species is placed inside and digested, it temporarily takes on that organ's form and function.
11. Will: Awareness of the will to live of those in the vicinity.
12. Reflection Tracing: Perceive the source of a reflected signal like light or sound, or anything along its path.
13. Smooth Time: Experience the flow of time not as single moments, but as the rolling average of ~6s of normal time, like lotion moisturizing consciousness indulgently.
14. Infomatica: Perception of the coalescence or collapse of information i.e. enthalpy and entropy, in all its forms.
15. Beyond the Cave Awareness: Awareness of the Platonic Form, Prototype, or most Exemplar of any thing.
16. Genopathic Chemoception: Chemocept the genetic or evolutionary history of organisms via something like taste.
17. Cherubic Pressure: Sense love density as a kind of pressure. Passion and lust acute like pain, attachment and contentment firm yet dull, like a squeeze on the shoulder.
18. Econometric Temperature: Sense the exchange of money and goods or services like wispy phosphenes in the periphery and broad market trends like storms and bolts of lightning.
19. Super-self Awareness: Recognition of the self as part of one or more super organisms, the ability to mentally graph the network like a map, and sense one's place in the map, like if a cell in your body could in part commune with you.
20. Morpho-Lucidity: Perceive nearby dreams as if they were real (be careful not to lose track of what's real and what's a dream...).
21. Anthropocene: Awareness of social constructs, legalism, taboos, and other epiphenomena of human civilization; like seeing the source code of the matrix or the fine print of a contract or the view from a CEO's corner office on the top floor of a skyscraper.