Silver Age Design Journal #4 - The Silver Age of Freedom

By Steve Kenson

One of the unusual "meta-textual" elements of writing about the Freedom City setting for Mutants & Masterminds is that it often involves creating a fictional history of a fictional setting that never really existed. That is, I always wanted Freedom City to read like it could be based on a long-standing comic book universe, not unlike those of the major comic book publishers. So the trick is to create the impression of a vast body of material, going back decades, a level of depth to the characters and the world far greater than even a few hundred pages can encapsulate.

The funny part is, then you find yourself going back later to actually fill-in parts of that backstory. We did it in Golden Age and in Iron Age, talking about different eras of Freedom City in more detail. Along the way you turn up some inconsistencies that you try and address (I like to think that makes Freedom City even more like the comics) and you find opportunities, chances to add to the broad fabric of the World of Freedom.

Silver Age is the last great era of Freedom City's history waiting to be filled in. We touched upon a lot of minor eras in Worlds of Freedom, and covered the other major ones in the aforementioned Golden Age and Iron Age books. Once again, Christopher McGlothlin has stepped up and provided us with a wonderful survey of the period and the genre. The Freedom City chapter just had to rise to meet it, while also matching up with the existing material we had already published.

One of the tricks was to make Freedom City's Silver Age seem both similar to the "neo-Silver Age" influenced material in the main Freedom City book while also being different and original in some ways. Fortunately, I already had a decent amount of raw material to work with. Previous Freedom City products were littered with references to the Silver Age era and its characters. So a good part of my job was to gather all of the references and start answering questions, like who was this Hepcat character who was around in the 1950s and what about Mary Minstrel, the ill-fated Freedom League member Daedalus used as the basis for his android Chorale?

Along the way, things began to take shape. Turns out the Silver Age Freedom League was a lot more like the Avengers than the Justice League on many levels, with their urban headquarters and team composition including the lovely android, the wealthy philanthropist with a double-life, and the fierce sea-king, and the slumming deity, to name a few. I imagine the late-Silver Age Daedalus having a bit of a Hank Pym complex following a number of ill-fated inventions and experiments. Could be he left Earth in a fit of depression or guilt.

I also got to detail the Silver Age Atom Family, much more of a "Kirby Quartet" than the Atom-kids of modern-day Freedom City. (Speaking of which, if time moves in Freedom at the same rate as in our world, Chase Atom should be graduating from college sometime this year!) You've got the fatherly scientist (Dr. Atom), the guy's-guy brawler (Jack Wolfe), his foil the hotshot with a brittle sense of humor (Mentac) and, of course, the girl (Andrea Atom) who, in a bit of retroactive continuity, is quite the scientist and adventurer in her own right.

One "missing" element from Freedom's Silver Age was the "youth" group representing some of the hippie culture and youth-power movement of the time. I'd come up with the Newcomers early on in developing Freedom City's history, but didn't get around to fleshing them out until this book. What could be more Silver Age than a rock'n'roll band of young aliens who travel the country in a souped-up RV fighting the forces of evil (oh, yeah, and the Man). You just know the Newcomers went up against the Tick-Tock Doc and his Counter-Clock Culture at some point, as well as having the compulsory "war" with the Freedom League when the ol' "squares" tried to muscle in on some situation the kids had well in hand.

Don't think we forgot the villains, either! One bonus of Freedom's Most Wanted (only 7 of those left in stock, by the way. - Ed.) was that it included a lot of Silver Age characters, or "legacy" characters based on their Silver Age predecessors. That allowed us to save some space by referencing those write-ups, the same with existing ones in Freedom City -- plenty of bad-guys like Malador, Una, and Omega are ageless and were around in the Silver Age days, too. Along with them you get August Roman when he was at the top of his game as Centurion's arch-nemesis, the sinister Set (Horus' rogue uncle), and Queen Khana, the future mother of one of the interstellar bad-guys from Freedom City. Speaking of interstellar, did I mention the Space Ranger?

Yeah, there's a fair amount of stuff in the "Silver Age of Freedom" chapter of Silver Age. Whether you run a full-fledged Silver Age series, a time-travel adventure or two, or even just spend some time reading about those wonder-filled days of yesteryear, I hope you have fun in the Silver Age. I certainly did bringing it to you!

Look for the PDF of Silver Age coming very, very soon!