Joe Magarac

Joe Magarac is a Solimond.

Overview

Big industry needs big heroes, and Joe Magarac - Pittsburgh's own "man of steel" - fits the bill perfectly. He burst onto the scene sometime during the first half of the 20th century, tossing 850 pound iron bars around Hunkietown like feathers and stirring molten metal with his bare hands. When he won a bride in a contest of strength, he promptly gave her to the runner-up, claiming that a wife would only get in the way of his work down at the mill. That combination of brawn and brainlessness endeared him to the boys at Furnace No. Seven. After all, when you've got a legendary strongman working on your team, production quotas aren't an issue anymore.

Motivating all of that muscle was Joe's giant heart. If a fellow worker was killed on the job, he picked up the slack, giving his overtime pay to the man's family. Insults about his surname (it means "jackass" in Hungarian) were met with a smile and the explanation that, since he worked like a donkey, he didn't see any shame in being named after one. In the end, he died to save his friends from unemployment, melting himself down to provide the steel their mill needed to say in business.

That last act wasn't as selfless as the tall tale claims: Joe was a solimond, and the Bessemer converter he jumped into was his Anchor. A strange combination of immigrant dreams and working class fantasies, Joe returned years later to help another blue collar community fight its battles. Pittsburgh's commoner community was days away from total defeat in the Accordance War when joe last woke up; the molten man-mountain's skill in battle quickly convinced the Sidhe to sue for peace. Unfortunately, the glory Joe gained from that fight didn't last long: As the American steel industry sank into ruin, he found it more and more difficult to stay alive, let alone awake. His red-hot skin began to cool and dim, and his joints seized up with rust. The say the mill containing his Anchor closed its doors for good was the last time anyone, mortal or fae, cast eyes upon Joe. No one knows whether he's just deep in Slumber or lost forever to Banality.

References

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