#agent summers

June Puckett's mask hides her eyes (so it would hide glowing)

She's working with sparks, but wearing short sleeves. Wouldn't that burn her arms? (Unless she has a spirit that protects her from burns, like Forge)

Max: And who was this mentor?

Boss Leader: Oh? ur mom lol

Max: Excuse me?????

Okay, I’ve had this theory rattling around in my head since the early days of Chapter 7, but today’s update just solidified it for me. I 100% believe that Agent Summers is/was Max’s mom.

First of all, we know that Spender was mentored by a pyrokinetic spectral - he says so outright during his fight with Forge (ch4 p127):

And we find out in today’s update that Agent Summers was “slinging fire” in combat (ch7 p51):

Agent Summers is clearly the figure in the background of this panel, as Spender, Mina, and Garcia are the kids, Walker is the large man behind them, and the newly-introduced Shrike is the one in the eyepatch, as referenced earlier in this page. They’ve got their hair half-shaved and are wielding a flaming torch of some sort. Compare that to Mom Puckett’s appearance (ch4 p111):

She’s rocking a punk vibe, with the piercings and tattoos, so I could totally imagine her having a more outlandish hairstyle in her younger years. And she’s got two different flaming/smoking instruments on her here, the welding torch and her cigarette. For the entirety of the small amount of screen-time she’s gotten, she’s been consistently associated with fire and metal.

In an in-character Q&A on Twitter, Zach revealed that Spender had a total of four mentors during his time at the Activity Consortium (from the Paranatural wiki):

One of them is obviously Walker, and Summers is also named as one of them (regardless of whether Summers is Max’s mom, of course). I believe that the other two are the Doctors Burger, as Gwen certainly shows familiarity towards Mina and Richard (ch7 p7):

And Gwen also lists Summers alongside herself and Walker and Boss Leader (ch7 p9):

I originally assumed that the fourth was the current Boss Leader’s predecessor, but there’s been no indication in canon to suggest that that was the case. Shrike seems to have specifically been a mentor for Garcia, and in today’s update, both of Ed’s parents are referenced alongside their other mentors. which leads me to believe that Ed’s father is the fourth.

...I suppose it could also be Francisco, but he isn’t affiliated with the Consortium. Anyways!

A couple of other minutiae to cover re: Agent Summers = Mom Puckett:

1. Summers would obviously be her maiden name - assuming that she did, in fact, take the name Puckett when she married. Since we’ve never heard Mom Puckett’s first or last name in canon, maybe she never changed it?

2. From what I can tell, the Barrier wasn’t put up until Spender, Mina, and Garcia were in their late teens. She easily could’ve just left Mayview with no issue.

3. Given that Spender’s only 13 years older than Max, Mom Puckett would need to be a few years older than him for that situation to not be awful. Which, of course, would be a not-unreasonable age to be mentoring new spectrals in the Consortium.

4. Spender’s reaction to Gwen mentioning Agent Summers’ name, coupled with what little information we know about Max’s mom’s death, (ch2 p9):

(that speech bubble has been theorized by others in the fandom to represent burn scars), and also coupled with this comment from Max, (ch5 p291):

really only feel like they point in one direction. Why bring up the idea that his mom was “normal, I guess” if she actually was?

Not the stuff you see fandom creators write. I’m talking in-universe, National City citizens writing Supergirl fanfics like their bloody lives depend on it. It’s an art form.

It starts with an elementary school writing contest one fall. Supergirl’s been out for maybe like six or seven weeks. Little girls everywhere are enamoured. Adults are hesitant. You know she didn’t make the biggest and cleanest saves at first.

But there’s a prompt “what would you say to your hero, and what would they say to you?” and this little eleven year old knocked it out of the park. It happened to be that eleven year old, Laura, who Kara rescued from bullying when she was dressed like Supergirl. Kara told her she looked cool and said she was friends with all the nice girls.

Laura wrote one heck of an essay. Her teacher submitted it to the contest run by the mayors office. And it won. And a couple newspapers published it. Suddenly everyone had read Laura’s essay about what she would say to Supergirl and what Supergirl would say to her.

And then someone from CatCo’s account (it wasn’t Winn, Winn insisted) “what would YOU say to Supergirl if you could?” And it was all downhill from there.

It begins with single tweets. “You’re doing great sweetie!” “Seriously, what’s your workout regimen??” “Can you take me flying, pretty please with a cherry on top?” Questions about Kryptonian physique and culture. Thanking her for being an inspiration to girls everywhere.

And then someone had a whole thread about it. They were a bit of a fan. They went a little overboard. All in the name of good fun! It was intentionally ridiculous. But they asked Supergirl hypothetically what she liked to do in her free time. It spiraled into “And that is how Supergirl became my girlfriend.”

It was pretty bad. People laughed. It became a meme. Whenever someone said something particularly outrageous, you could count on a teenager to reply with “Yeah, and that’s how Supergirl became my girlfriend”. It was great.

But then word started spiraling around that someone had written like, an actual Supergirl fanfiction. (“What do you mean actual?” Alex hissed, and Winn definitely did not consider jumping off CatCo’s roof.) and they had posted it online.

It was about becoming friends with Supergirl. People clicked on it hesitantly only to see that it was like, an actual comic. Short. Genuine. It truly captured her essence. It was very sweet and non-presumptuous and the writer, once tracked down, was offered a job by a prestigious comic company.

Well, the next person that wanted to write a story about Supergirl saving them wasn’t so platonic in their intentions. Nor could they draw. And then there was a page full of Supergirl fanfictions.

And then it grew.

A year after saving the plane, there were 1864 fanfictions and counting. They seemed to multiply every day. There was a special page dedicated to them, like AO3 but all for her.

Plenty were sweet and full of kid-obvious typos. Tons took a stab at what her day job would be and how she hid herself. Many guesses she just chilled at the Fortress of Solitude. There were hundreds of reveal fics, varying from “my best friend was secretly Supergirl the whole time” to “She took me to her house to interrogate me”. And those are just the ones on the safe for work page.

A DEO agent is tasked with reading them all before Winn writes an algorithm to make sure her identity is truly safe. This DEO agent oscillates between hating their job violently and cackling madly every time they see Supergirl do something that reminds them of a fic.