Missed Landing: The Bionic Man #11 Review
When I was six or seven years old, I had a Power Records LP…
(Note to Generation Y: “LP” stands for “long playing record.” It was a big piece of vinyl that sounds were recorded on. Think a CD, only bigger and with shittier sound, no matter what line of horseshit Jack White tries to sell you about vinyl sounding “warmer.” Crackles and skips are not features, they are bugs,)
(Note to Millennials: “CD” stands for “compact disc.” It was a small piece of plastic that sounds were recorded on. Think an MP3, only one you had to spend all your beer money on in college back in 1991 if you wanted to own any music. Now all of you: get the fuck off my lawn.)
Sorry about that. Anyhoo, I had the Power Records LP of The Six Million Dollar Man, which included a retelling of Steve Austin’s origin, according to the television series. Which is a story that anyone old enough to associate the “bah-nah-nah-nah-nah” bionic sound effect with something other than Chevy Chase doing putts in Caddyshack knows: Steve Austin is a test pilot in a plane crash, and Oscar Goldman and Rudy Wells…
(Note to Gen X’ers and drunken comics Website editors: There is a thing on the Internet called YouTube where everything you ever loved as a child has been collected, for free. And it allows you to embed those things in your own Website! So quit chasing those little bastards off your lawn and, you know, do that,)
Okay, so now that we’re all on the same page, the thing that I never understood about this story when I read it as a boy, or even when I read Cyborg, the novel by Martin Caidin upon which The Six Million Dollar Man was based (and which I re-read on the plane to SDCC this year. Toldja I was a Six Million Dollar Man fan), was why Austin was initially so angry about being kept alive with the bionics. The man went to sleep in an airplane and woke up with fucking superpowers; when I fall asleep on an airplane, I wake up with a runner of drool connecting the corner of my mouth and the shoulder of the poor bastard sitting next to me, and maybe with a nicotine fit.
It wasn’t until I was older that I could get my head around the idea that having most of yourself replaced – even if the replacements were better, stronger and faster – might take away your image of yourself, and that transition might take some time, if not forever, to come to terms with. But that coming to terms is a huge part of Steve Austin’s story. Even though I didn’t fully understand that as a child, I grasped it instinctually; to this day, even before I found that YouTube video, I remembered the poor bastard whose resume reads, “Voice double for Lee Majors on childrens’ record” saying, “I’m not a man anymore… I’m a freak,” including that wretched music cut cue that would make the worst twelve-year-old Skrillex wanna-be hang his head in audio editing shame.
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