Real Name: Jen Armour
Ability: shape shifting
Alter-ego: Jason Ax
Current whereabouts: unconfirmed
Story: Falsely convicted of killing her husband, Masque was on death row, about to be executed, when her transformation occurred. An unknown person switched the lethal injection with a serum that gave her the power to change her shape (she later searched for her mysterious benefactor, to no avail). While the serum was altering her DNA she appeared to be dead and was taken to the prison mortuary. Upon waking, she took the form of a bird and flew to freedom. Her first act was to track down her husband’s real killer. With the help of her ability she was able to find out that her husband was killed by a gang for failing to pay protection money on his restaurant. Masque infiltrated the gang by impersonating one of their recruits and took them down from the inside. After the success of this first mission she became enamored of the idea of using her skills to rid
Jen, Jason, Jed? Wow, such shifting of identities.
ReplyDeleteDo you image that shape-shifting would make the shifter indifferent to socially constructed gender and sex roles, so that the hero might fall in love with a man from either a female or male identity?
I note that your hero story comes with its own ending... Can you imagine a future mission for Masque, departing from the final line above, or do you prefer to think of her/his adventures as coming to a definite end?
...she realized that her war on gangs was only treating a symptom, not the cause.
Rather like the final realization of Miller's Batman in TDKR?
It's an interesting point you bring up about a shape shifter being indifferent to socially constructed gender roles; I hadn't quite articulated it that way but I believe that's what I was going for with the shifts in gender. The way I see it s/he is the same person essentially, no matter what body s/he's in.
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question, I prefer to think that his/her superhero adventures do come to an end (at least in the form of busting gangs). One could argue that fighting to end poverty is rather heroic...
And yes I got the idea for her epiphany about symptoms vs. causes from an article we read about Batman, can't remember exactly which one...