Supra-man’s aura weakens

As bits of paper fluttered back to the floor and computer screens flickered on and off, and as the newsroom door slammed shut behind the figure fleeing down the stairs, Jimmy Olsen shook his curly red hair.

Not again, he thought. This oke was always in some all-fired hurry to get somewhere. Too important to do his real job as a reporter on the Daily Planet.

Jimmy knew there weren’t that many real reporters around any more – and many of those who were being turned into boot-licking toadies by the evil Dr Scurvy from his multimedia empire on Sour Street in the heart of Metropolis.

And there was the fake news factory known as Twitter … Back in the old days, when newspapers left you only with grimy black residue – the sign of truth, one of the old editors called it – Jimmy would have been called a copy boy.

Now, there wasn’t any more paper copy to be hand-delivered to angry, fag-smoking subeditors. And if you called anyone boy, you’d be up before the Human Rights Commission faster than you could say “Vicki Momberg”.

So Jimmy was now, officially, an intern. But what the hell am I ever going to learn from Clark Kent, if he keeps flying out of the office? Sorry – I should call him by his liberation name, Dark Gent.

He had renamed himself some time ago and insisted everyone use the new moniker. Jimmy had a talent for investigative digging, though, and one day he followed Dark Gent. As Dark spun around, muttering “of course, there aren’t phone booths any more”, he saw an Uber waiting at the kerb.

He jumped in and, after a few seconds, emerged wearing a black, green and gold jump suit with a matching cape. On his chest was emblazoned a large letter S. Then he roared off into the sky, heading North West.

From more digging, Jimmy discovered that Dark had originally fallen to earth on a small farm just outside Mahikeng. He was just a baby then, but Koos and Lettie (his stief-ouers) raised him strong. So strong that he bliksemed those Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging clowns when they came to town to try to rescue Mangope back in ’94.

The people stood in the streets and gazed upwards in awe: “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Supra-man!”

But, sadly, he developed a taste for the rich life and his good deeds began to be done more for himself and his friends than for the poor people he used to help.

At the Daily Planet, he wrote stories about white monopoly capital, then catapulted into the heavens on his way to organise another government contract for his mates from Saharanpur, or cows for “Baba”.

Because his son did not inherit his talent for flying, he got Denel to arrange a bursary for him for pilot training.

When his enemies began closing in, peppering him with accusations of corruption, Supra-man deployed his amazing superpower: “It was not me. It was the director-general. It was the MEC. It was everyone else.”

Supra-man does not make such decisions. “It is all a political plot …”

Brendan Seery

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