Gritty_Superhero

(It's recommended you read with a classical music playlist in the background)

(If You Like stories like Watchmen or the boys , or any form of superhero media, THIS IS FOR YOU!)



Marvelo-Man: Book One – The Golden Age Ends
In Depression-era New York, abused runaway Maxwell Marvelo rises from circus strongman to wartime superhero. Transformed by a secret government experiment, he becomes Marvelo-Man, America’s mythic savior. But war, monsters, and betrayal twist his journey. Haunted by guilt and hunted by his darker counterpart, Black Zero, Maxwell fights to stay human in a world that only sees him as a weapon. As the Cold War dawns and his story becomes sanitized fiction, the real Marvelo-Man disappears—watching, waiting, while the world forgets who he really was.

Marvelo-Man: Book One – The Golden Age

The war pressed on. The faces changed, the dead never stopped arriving, and the headlines from home grew stranger by the week. Maxwell fought through the rubble of Marseille by day and paced in silence by night, those clippings tucked into a worn leather satchel he kept by his side like scripture.

The soldiers had begun calling the vigilante "The Red Thread." Rumors said he never left a scene without a single red thread tied around something — a lamp post, a body, a church bell. It became a calling card. A warning. A myth.

A high-ranking OSS officer debriefed Maxwell in a musty tent lined with maps and cigarette smoke. He was blunt.

"There's been chatter out of New York. Someone's cleaning house in ways we can't publicly condone. And they're doing it with powers we haven't seen outside of you."

Maxwell's jaw tightened. "Do you know who it is?"

"No official name. But the street knows him as 'Black Zero.' Some of your old colleagues call him Patient Zero."

The officer nodded. "If he ever was Elijah Gray, he's buried that name. We've pieced together fragments—teleportation, inhuman agility, brute strength. Always wears black. Purple trunks. Red side-hung cape. Never speaks. Never smiles."

He handed Maxwell a photo. The image was clear now. No grain. No blur.

Elijah Gray. Hardened. Lean. Unforgiving. Wearing the black mask with white eyelids. The half-seen jaw. The rage behind the eyes.

"And angry," the officer said. "He's not your friend anymore."

Maxwell sat with a wounded infantryman who had lost both legs. They talked for hours. Not about war. Not about loss. But about books. About what the man wanted to write if he survived. A western.

"You think people'll want stories when this is all over?" the man asked.

"I think stories are all we'll have left," Maxwell replied.

"Don't let Black Zero make people think power has to come from fear."

That night, Maxwell walked alone through the rain-soaked ruins. He took out the photo of Elijah—of Black Zero. Held it to his chest. And for the first time in years, he prayed.

If Elijah had become the shadow, then maybe it was time for him to step fully into the light.

Red Threads