The Broken Man

The Broken Man © Juke Box Productions AstroFacts Status: Active Base of Operations: Astro City Range of Operations: ? Personal Data Aliases: ? Height: x’x” Weight: xx lbs Hair: yellow InfoDump Appearances (in Publication Order): Astro City #1, 5 Event Timeline 2013/06     Current Broken Man Warns Us of the Oubor. 2013/06     Current Broken Man Confides Why He Can't Use Certain People to Unlock the Mystery behind the Doors. 2013/10     Current A Glimpse At The Broken Man's Wall. The Broken Man "The first questions will be: Why is he broken? And what -- or who -- broke him?" --- Kurt Busiek (interview with Mtv's Geek-News[1]) History Crazy or insane? Neither or both? There are hints of a past life, a possibly known identity for the Broken Man. However, pretty much everything here is speculative in nature. The Broken Man is in charge of the narrative, we are mere observers. The Broken Man warns that he is on a mission to save something (us, the world, mankind, the universe, we are not sure at this point) from the perceived threats of an entity know as the Oubor. He somehow broke the fourth wall itself to recruit readers' aid in his efforts. With our help, he was able to nudge Ben Pullam into becoming a guide to an Alien Ambassador named Telseth. Yet while all that's going down, he's also stuck in a psychiatric facility, spending his days in a pharmaceutical haze. ("Through Open Doors (Part One)") Some time later, he took the time to chat with us about the mission, but we got too distracted checking out the various knick-knacks in his collection, examining the history behind them. Somehow, when viewing certain objects, past history started to reveal itself Images and activities, presented in some kind of dream-like manner. To keep us from seeing events he deemed too risky, he gave us, as a sop, a story of Dame Progress and Mister Cakewalk from circa 1900. ("Thumbtacks & Yarn") Who knows for sure? We might be listening to the rantings of a crazed fool, or the last sane warnings of a man driven to his mental limits by the awareness of a sinister and very real threat. So, for all of us, keeping a low profile might indeed be a good idea. At least until we know more about both the Oubor and the skinny man with the purple skin. Powers He has broken the fourth wall. He can communicate with the reader. Observations He wears a white smock over a t-shirt depicting the famous Astro City Signal Rocket. The shirt is very popular with the tourists. Only the "Are You Jacked?" Jack-in-the-Box has higher sales. Kurt Busiek has commented that as the series of Astro City stories have so far circled around the Silver Agent as the overall background character, the next(current) cycle will belong to the Broken Man. Interesting... very interesting. Speculations, Theories We know that in the real world, the Broken Man's skin is yellow. So is the skin of the Bouncing Beatnik and the Halcyon Hippie, and Mister Cakewalk's yellow all over too, though in his case it might be clothes. Plus, all three of these men embodied cultural movements of their time. The Broken Man says he was once eternally young. So, even though they span different eras, could all four men be different versions of the same being? We can speculate even further on the narrative powers of the Broken Man. The objects that he hangs from yarn and thumb-tacks are important elements to his dramatic concerns about the threat of the Ourbor. They all purportedly have stories behind them. Yet to trigger their visual narrative requires a mechanism that is still mysterious and currently unexplainable. It's not time activated, we as viewers expended two panels of comic book page real estate focused on a magazine featuring the Iron Horse. Despite our intense and curious interests, nothing happened. Close proximity to a 45 RPM(revolutions per minute) vinyl record failed to illicit a day dream narration, even though the musical group had the intriguing name of The Vital Klew a play on the sound of the word 'clue.' Footnotes

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