Broken Frontier

Described as "The Incredibles meets The Sopranos meets Michael Chabon"G. Xavier Robillard's comedy superhero novel Captain Freedom - A Superhero's Quest for Truth, Justice and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves ( ISBN: 9780061650680; ISBN10: 0061650684 ) goes on sale this week, published by HarperCollins and priced $13.99. Broken Frontier is privileged to present some words of wisdom from the good Captain himself and for three lucky BF readers there's also the opportunity to receive your own free copy of the novel. See below for details...

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Though not a direct excerpt from Captain Freedom – A Superhero's Quest for Truth, Justice and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves, the following will shed light on Our Hero's personality and philosophy. Freedom's powers include strength, flight, lightning-fast reflexes and acute weather prediction.

One of the first tasks handed down to a new Hero is the construction of an alter ego. If you already have an Also Known As before you become super, and you’re satisfied with the alias of a mild-mannered junior high school biology teacher with a bad mustache (Mr. Wasner, I’m thinking of you), by all means go with that.

But some of us super-powered types were super BEFORE we had to think of a secret identity. We grew up super and kept our secret safe, revealing it only to our three best friends, parents, clergymen, random people we recognized from locking carts in the produce aisle, the old lady behind the counter at the drug store who glared at us because we used our powers to steal cigarettes, and every single girl we tried to get to second base with. But society forces us to claim an alter ego. The telephone bills have to go somewhere.

My identity was not the product of a long soul search: I became what everyone else says they’re going to be after college: a screenwriter. The beauty of screen writing as a secret identity is that nobody expects you to succeed, your name will not likely get top (or any) credit, and it’s the perfect job that allows you to hang around the house all the time.

There is one part of this fake job that is strenuous: you must come up with plausible movie plots for when your civilian friends ask what you're working on. The trick is that your story can't sound so good that it'd be a movie someone would want to see, forcing you to actually produce a screenplay, or so bad that a studio exec would immediately greenlight it, forcing the same result. Stick with period pieces about the affairs of seventeenth century French postal workers.

Screenwriting might not be the right secret profession for you. Maybe you are missing a finger, rendering it impossible to credibly hit the "tab" key that all screenwriters depend on to get their character’s names in the center of the page, or perhaps you’re allergic to popcorn. There are other career options for you.

Be a Billionaire Playboy Inventor

This is a fabulous option for those Bruce Wayne/Tony Stark types. Billionaires don’t take shit from anyone and radiate the aloof demeanor that casts off all suspicion and drives the ladies mad. It's best if your inventions have some kind of crimefighting angle – you could invent a new garage door opener but it won't do much for the utility belt. The only problem with this career is that it requires one billion dollars, and if you spend all your time attempting to accrue that kind of scratch you really won’t have any time left for crimefighting. Oh and it also calls for debonair looks.

Journalism

Pretending to be a journalist seemed to work for the Clark Kents and Peter Parkers of the world (go ahead – flame me about whether Parker's a journalist or just a photog – I’m in my asbestos cape!) but what you have to know about true journalists is that they are drunk all the time. While this might work for someone battling for truth, it's not optimal when you’re expected to fly in a straight line several times a day.

Using Your Hobbies

You can also choose a hobby you’ve always been interested in developing but couldn’t find the time to do. I’ve considered gardening, art history and orienteering as possible fake career options for my secret identity. Note: just because everyone does it, collecting news clippings and photos of your exploits for the scrapbook is not a legitimate hobby.

A Final Thought

There is one occupation which looks like a real up and coming option for the superhero's fake career. It requires no special abilities, nor will anyone be particularly interested when you mention this as your job, in fact, most hardworking folks will excuse themselves politely and get as far away from you as quickly as possible, as if you've just announced that you work as a physical therapist at a leper colony. It requires only that you have a computer and a steady internet connection.

This is the job of blogger, the perfect cover for any new Hero. You ever wonder why there's been such an explosion in blogging over the past few years? Might it coincide with the recent release of gamma rays, radioactive spiders and mutations cannonballing into the gene pool?Look around you. The person next to you at the cafe with the dirty baseball hat pulled low over his eyes, writing feverishly on his laptop about competitive knitting using Nerf needles and wearing a tee-shirt that states "I Brake 4 Mutants." Keep watching. You never know.

G. Xavier Robillard is a humorist, hacker, and wait for it, blogger, whose work has appeared in McSweeney's, NPR and Comedy Central's Indecision. Captain Freedom is his first novel. He will be signing books at NY ComicCon on Friday February 6th.

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For your chance to receive a FREE copy of the Captain Freedom novel, courtesy of HarperCollins and Broken Frontier, send us an e-mail here. Please put "Captain Freedom Giveaway" in your e-mail subject line. Offer only open to U.S. residents. Three lucky recipients will be chosen at random and be notified by e-mail at a later date.