#30 – Bench Jockey (Alex Aronson)

| November 30, 2012 | 0 Comments

Most people don’t have to try to be a superhero. They just are. Alex Aronson tried really, really, REALLY hard to be one.

And he’s terrible at it.

In all honesty, “terrible” is an unfair descriptor. He’s not wholly incompetent at being a hero, it’s just that there are a lot of people much, much, much better at it than he is. Better organized. More skillfull. More capable of remembering if they parked their car in front of a fire hydrant. Alex was once described in a newspaper profile of superheroes as “meaning well”.

By all means, Alex isn’t a bad guy, and he’s kind of irrepressably positive about his position in life, even if he does find his never-ending string of robberies and crimes foiled by happenstance, accident or by someone else a bit frustrating. But when your only superpower is an advanced level of prestidigitation, there’s only so much you can do against a raging, 500-pound human behemoth.

Still, Alex is determined to be a hero, and rather than becoming a complete joke, he has gained a small retinue of dedicated fans, who see him as the everyman answer to the people streaking across the sky who don’t interact with day-to-day citizens anymore. He can’t jump over a building, has generally awful taste in almost everything, but he really does live the job, and believes a day spent working with children in need is just as good as stopping a robbery or a murder. He is a little deluded, sure, but he’s the kind of person who would show up to bail an acquaintance he’d just met once out of jail. He’s kind of embraced the nickname of “Bench Jockey”, given to him by a much bigger, stronger superhero. No, he’s never going to stop a plane from crashing, but he’s still important, in his own way.

Category: 2012, Humor, Superhero

About the Author ()

Amateur. Writer. Voice-actor. Always interested in learning for it's own sake.

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