This is the story of a boy called Joe who was totally obsessed with superheroes. Joe used to read superhero comics all day long and when he wasn’t reading about Superman and Batman and the Silver Surfer and Captain America and Wonder Woman and Catwoman and Invisible Woman and the Phantom Stranger and Mr Fantastic and Mooseboy and all the rest he was talking about them and fantasizing about them. As time went on Joe grew more and more obsessed with superheroes until it got to a point where he could talk about and think about nothing else. Then one day something happened to him – something that completely changed his life. No, he didn’t develop superpowers and become a superhero himself – he became mentally ill and was involuntarily admitted into a large psychiatric hospital somewhere near Staines, which is in Middlesex in England. There he proved to be resistant to drug therapy and before very long became totally obese, like a lot of the other younger patients in the psychiatric hospital. Joe stopped talking and thinking about superheroes all the time – but then again he wasn’t talking and thinking about very much else either.

So there was Joe, stuck in a psychiatric hospital in Staines, Middlesex, leading a perfectly meaningless life, until one day, after many months of this pointless existence, a kind of a miracle happened and he really did develop a type of a superpower. The superpower Joe developed was the superpower of being able to communicate telepathically with the beneficial bacteria living on his skin. These helpful bacteria told him that the psychiatrists keeping him in the hospital were being secretly controlled by the malignant bacteria on their skin, and so were as a result themselves effectively evil. They were in thrall to the secret malignancy that governs society. These doctors, the bacteria on Joe’s skin told him, claimed to be trying to help him but this was not at all true. The psychiatrists were only pretending that they cared about Joe – really they didn’t care about anyone and were trying to do him and all the rest of the patients great harm. This was all due to the influence of the cosmically malignant bacteria who were intent on enslaving the human race so that they could harvest their boredom, cynicism and negative emotions, which are food for them. The bacteria Joe was communicating with, on the other hand, were universally beneficial bacteria and they were going help him escape from the unit. They were also going to teach him how to fight back against the menace of the malignant bacteria who were secretly controlling the human race via bureaucracy, forcing them in this way to endure a life of utter abject humiliation and degradation in the name of civic duty, good manners and economic prosperity.

Now read on…