The Unfortunate Fate of Citizen Angst

Brent and I had six issues of The Successors planned, each starring a different superhero from our blossoming universe. Unfortunately, since we'd been developing these ideas and characters for so long, we were over it by issue #3 and decided to move on to something new and different. I had scripted and Brent had drawn a significant amount of the third issue already, so we decided to condense the work into a zero issue ashcan -- despite our frustration with the Successors, we had to get this character to print somehow. So, albeit abbreviated, Citizen Angst was born.

Writers often recommend soundtracks to their comics, and if I had to do that I'd suggest Tear for Fear's "Songs from the Big Chair" for the Optimist's tale, Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill" for Psycho Chick, and anything by ZZ Top for Citizen Angst -- specifically, the song "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide." Inspired by that tune from Brent's playlist, and a guy we often saw at Starbucks wearing full army fatigues and rolling his own cigarettes, Citizen Angst is the blue collar Captain America, plain and simple. He works the slow day shift at a neighborhood bar by day, and he patrols suburbia in his Chevy pick-up by night, thwarting domestic crimes with his newfound super-strength. The name Citizen Angst says it all -- the every man's hero.

In The Successors #3, ol' C.A., a.k.a. Marcos Peluso, fought the politically charged criticism of Flash Limburg and Republicans Against Superheroes (R.A.S.H.), the super diversity of super-team Affirmative Action, and his biggest fan and wanna-be sidekick Whipper Snapper. In this zero issue, Marco merely muses over the lifestyle of a superhero, unaware that he was about to become one via the cosmic tragedy happening right outside his bar. Brent reformatted some choice images from his finished pencils and inks, and we aligned them with allegorical dialogue to produce this little glimpse into the Successors universe. I've posted the pages for your enjoyment here; remember, these are scans of Xerox copies of printed pages, so the quality doesn't do Brent's art justice -- but that's the thing about Citizen Angst. He gets the job done, whether justice is involved or not! Angst . . . assemble!