100% of Your RDA of Ken

Flames engulf a building. Those trapped yell for help. Just when it seems hope is lost, in swoops … Bacon Boy!

The strip-shaped superhero, cape flying, knows catastrophe all too well. He’s endlessly at odds with his evil nemesis, Fry Guy, who always tries to burn him.

With such a creative story line, it’s no surprise that 10-year-old Austin Winters’ drawings and characters inspired artists from Tacoma’s Museum of Glass to turn Bacon Boy into a glass sculpture for its permanent collection; the piece also will travel with an exhibit, “Kids Design Glass,” expected to grace museum pedestals coast to coast.

Wearing a festive, horned Viking helmet, Austin slipped on safety glasses Wednesday and watched a team of museum sculptors craft his super-powered imaginings into glossy, three-dimensional art.

Perched on a stage outside Elements Glass Studio in Northwest Portland, the boy advised the artists on color and detail — “make the eyes bigger” — as they dipped steel rods into glass and poked them into red-hot furnaces.

When a sculptor rolled a big orange ball through shards of bacon-brown glass, a grin as broad as a breakfast buffet spread across Austin’s freckled cheeks.

Austin, who lives in Hermiston with his mother and father, Lisa and Jay, two brothers and a sister, was diagnosed in October 2007 with acute myelogenous leukemia. In a transplant at Portland’s Doernbecher Children’s Hospital this March, he received bone marrow from his brother, Chase.

While hospitalized, the fourth-grader took part in the Children’s Healing Art Project. The nonprofit has worked with about 10,000 pediatric patients through Portland hospitals, giving children opportunities to be recognized for their artistic talents, rather than being defined by their diseases or disabilities.

CHAP, as the project is known, encouraged Doernbecher patients to submit their designs to the glass museum’s contest, an event hooked to this week’s Glass Art Society’s conference in Portland.

Among the entries, Bacon Boy and Fry Guy sizzled.

For one thing, Bacon Boy’s superpowers, which he calls “Meat Vision,” include the ability to shoot bacon bits and grease from his arms, and sausage and corn dogs from his eyes. But Austin’s creativity goes deeper still: Bacon Boy and Fry Guy are born from such a longstanding feud that their grandfathers fight the same good versus evil battle in heaven.

“It’s the story — the challenge — that’s appealing to the museum’s Hot Shop guys,” said Liz Cepanec, a program manager for the Museum of Glass.

The Hot Shop team selected two of Austin’s drawings and worked Wednesday to meld them into one design. As they worked, sculptors frequently cried out, “Bacon’s cookin’!”

Austin will get one sculpture to take home; the other will join a collection of youth-inspired pieces created since 2004, when the museum introduced its Kids Design Glass program.

Austin got news of his artistic honor about the same time he learned that, despite 58 days of remission, his cancer has returned.

He can use all the help Bacon Boy can muster.