Michael Bounauro’s “Marvelous Bob”
Recently I’ve been thinking about a super hero type story I read online over a decade ago. I couldn’t remember much about it, except that I loved the style how it was told, that it was on a black and red website, and that I linked to it from the 8-Bit Theater website. I also vaguely remembered how part of the story went. After posting on the forums associated with 8-Bit Theater site, I found my answer. The story is called UnknownHero, a.k.a. Michael Bounauro’s “Marvelous Bob”. The story was originally hosted at UnknownHero.com, but has been down for some time. Fortunately I was able to find it again using the Wayback Machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20040824074752/http://unknownhero.com/.
The story itself is a first person narrative about Marvelous Bob, an everyday sort of guy who works hard to keep his city safe. Michael never reveals all of Bob’s powers, or delves too much into the story. Instead he focuses on the character as a normal guy dealing with every day problems like paying the rent and maintaining relationships. In fact, Bob is pretty messed up. But he tries, and does the best that he can. Bob is the character we can all sympathize with.
It really saddens me to say, Michael committed suicide after finishing his first Unknown Hero story. His parents have since started a foundation in his memory to help prevent suicide, and to education others about it. More about the Michael Bounauro Foundation can be found here.
From information found at the foundation site, it looks like his parents are working toward getting the Marevelous Bob story printed as a graphic novel. It’s one I look forward to reading.
