Free Sidekicked by John David Anderson

Saving Captain Marvelous from the hands of the Nullifier, he kick-started a career that would rocket through the next ten years.
    The Titan wasn’t your typical Super, though. He was a recluse. He didn’t stick around after a battle for a photo op, and he often phoned in anonymously to the police, who would drive to some intersection to find a couple of thugs with a lamppost wrapped around them. He never took on a sponsor or shilled for soft drinks or milk. He declined all the awards people tried to give him. Mayors mailed him keys to the city, which supposedly sat in their peanut-filled boxes in a storage closet. It is said that anyone who ever got close to him had the snot knocked out of them. Still, he was good at his job, and with the retirement of Captain Marvelous, the Titan found himself leading the new Legion of Justice, perhaps the greatest group of crime fighters the world over. Venus. Kid Caliber. Mantis. Corefire. You could find a poster of them lining the wall of every eight-year-old boy’s room from here to Seattle. But even in a crowd like that, the Titan stood out. For a while he and his team cleaned up crime, not just in Justicia, but all over the world, putting away the likes of Dr. Terminus, the Gemini Squad, the Nullifier (again), and a host of other scoundrels still banging on the walls of prisons across the globe.
    And then came the Dealer—a particularly nasty villain who dogged the Legion for over a year. The Titan made it his personal mission to stop this man and his gang—a group of equally vicious thugs known only as the Suits. In the end, the forces of goodness and light were triumphant. The Dealer was gone. His henchmen dead or captured. His crime spree ended. It was the pinnacle of the Titan’s career. His crowning achievement.
    And the beginning of the end.
    Something happened after the Titan’s battle with the Dealer. He lost his edge. The bad guys started slipping through his fingers. The Titan stopped showing up for work. The OCs started to lose faith. Not long after, he stepped down as leader of the Legion of Justice, promising that he would still be an integral part of the superhero community. That he would continue to make the world a safer place.
    And then he all but disappeared. Nobody knew where the Titan was. Nobody saw him around. He was a legend, but he wasn’t super anymore.
    What none of them will tell you, none of the papers or talk shows or cereal-box biographies, is that about a year ago, George Raymond Washington Weiss waited in the shadows outside Bob’s Bowlarama for a then-twelve-year-old boy to appear.
    That boy was me, less than a year into my training as a sidekick. Time spent honing my powers and biding my time, reciting the Code that would govern how I would behave. The Code that told me that my Super was more than just my role model—he was my partner in the quest for truth and justice, freedom and happiness, goodness and light, and all the things at the end of the rainbow.
    George Weiss showed up with a bottle of whiskey in his hand and another on his breath.
    â€œAndrew Bean?”
    He stood in the shadows. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew who he was just by his size. I knew who he was because I had been thinking about him all week. I knew him before, of course—I had the poster, the button, the commemorative stamp—but I had spent the time since finding out I was going to be his sidekick intensely studying him. Staring at his picture. Watching old news footage of him online. I had been preparing for this moment, the moment when I would meet him and shake the mighty hand that brought down the Dealer.
    â€œI’m Drew,” I said.
    He stepped out into the faint glow of the setting sun so I could see his pale skin and stubbly cheeks. He didn’t look much like the pictures. He had shaved his head but not his jaw. His stomach spread out over the top of his pants. He was massive, though everything was a