Disclaimer: Just out of curiosity, would I still have to write these if I owned stock in Walt Disney Productions? I mean, then I would at least partially own The Incredibles, which is more than I can say right now.

Radiant's Death Demonstrates Incredible Family Bonds
By Pat Aveling, Metroville Times Staff Columnist

"She wasn't fast enough."

For a few minutes, that's all Accelerator seems able to say. Under ordinary circumstances, as all our regular readers know, the Human Bullet Train is rarely at a loss for words, but the death of his older sister seems to have reduced his vocabulary to that one sentence.

"She wasn't fast enough."

At first, he seems to almost be condemning his sister. Certainly, if Radiant had produced one of her trademark force fields even a second earlier, the machine-gun fire that erupted in the alleyway where she was serving as a social worker wouldn't have penetrated her body, and the twenty-five-year-old super would not now be lying in state in the U. S. Capitol, but to mention the fact seems perilously close to de mortuis praeter quam bonum.

But after the fifth or sixth repetition, you realize that Accelerator isn't thinking about his sister's powers at all, but about his own; that he's wishing that he could have given her his super-speed at the critical moment; that he feels, in some illogical way, responsible for his sister's death.

After a while, Accelerator's visible grief subsides and he becomes more coherent, but those first few minutes hang over the rest of the interview, as a symbol of just how close the bonds are among the group of five red-clad supers that we call the Incredible Family. It makes one wonder whether he's ever fully grasped the meaning of that name; ever stopped to realize that the Incredible Family is not merely incredible, but a family.

"Sister" to us all

Of course, one doesn't have to be related to Radiant to participate in the national outpouring of grief at her death. Probably no superhero's demise has ever gripped the public fancy quite like this one; even the 1971 revelation that over five dozen supers had been massacred by the Omnidroid-9000 was swallowed up in the excitement of seeing a handful of surviving supers (including the Incredible Family themselves) coming out of the woodwork and taking up their old duties once again.

Indeed, the Omnidroid itself has played its part in making Radiant's death so poignant. Not only are individual superheroes much less dispensable when there are no longer hordes of them in existence, but the image of the Incredible Family standing together, proudly erect, after battling Syndrome's monstrous machine is now an inextricable part of our national collective consciousness (to the point where the NAACP has felt the need to repeatedly remind America that Frozone also participated in the Omnidroid's destruction). Under those circumstances, the sight of "Miss Incredible" stretched out on a bier, her slender body riddled with bullet holes, cannot help but shake us to our core.

Thus, the one-minute dimming of Metroville's lights last Saturday; thus, the heaps of flowers and hand-written remembrances left outside the NSB office in Washington; thus, President Reagan's eloquent speech from the Oval Office ("She was often invisible to the eyes, but we could always see what she stood for"). A part of ourselves has been lost, and we have responded.

A deeper kinship

And yet… when all is said and done, we were not the ones who brought the baby Radiant home from the hospital. We were not the ones who saw her across the dinner table every night, who joked with her in the heat of battle, who could see themselves in the color of her eyes or the shape of her jaw. She was a "part" of us only metaphorically; to the other Incredibles, she was a piece of themselves in sober truth.

And they, too, responded. We have all seen the images: Mr. Incredible holding her body across his arms, wailing helplessly at the stars; Elastigirl lying beneath the lamp-post in a limp heap, as though the bones had all been sucked from her body; Proteus literally dissolving in tears as Bishop Golden read the elegy.

For this columnist, though, the Incredible Family's reaction to its loss will always be represented by Accelerator's shell-shocked repetition in the foyer of the Times building.

"She wasn't fast enough."

Perhaps she wasn't. But, all the same, Accelerator has no reason to lament the deficiencies of his sister's power.

If the past few days are any indication, she is by no means weak even now.