I spent an hour or so chipping ice off of a sidewalk yesterday, and as a consequence my fingers aren't working quite as well as they usually do. Also, the rest of my arms. Here, instead, is my one-panel picture quiz, featuring Superboy's robot pal Percy from Superboy No 9:
As for the quiz part: just who does that robot eerily resemble?
Last chance to enter the Micro Contest! Next week: the winners!
Well, it's Sunday morning. Once more I have proved myself very bad at preparing something in advance of a busy day. Ah well. We're dipping into the Sack of Silver Age Strangeness today and hauling out Superboy No. 126, because I know that you all want to learn about Krypto the Super-dog's family tree and because stuff this dumb practically writes about itself.
Under the flimsy pretense of trying to figure out why Krypto is frightened of a tiny bug, Superboy uses some of his amazing technology to look into his pet's earliest memories and ends up listening to his father Jor-El give a mini-lecture about the new puppy's family tree. A really detailed lecture, actually, given that up to the age of five or six Kal-El was basically about as smart as Bizarro on nitrous oxide.
Jor-El starts off by telling the tale of Krypto's father, who lived with a little girl in Zaro city and was named, well, Zypto.
Now, obviously the people of Zaro City are insane. I have a theory that it served as some sort of massive asylum for the people of Krypton ("Granpapa just wouldn't stop watering the cat, kids, so we had to send him to Zaro City"). I mean, here's a city on a planet that was dedicated to science, right? They were ruled by a Science Council, for Rao's sake. And yet their first response to their dogs getting sick after bing struck by lightning isn't quarantine or a search for a cure, it's DOG EXTERMINATION SQUADS. Join the Dog Extermination Squad, for a satisfying, meaningful career.
Valla's father, who as far as I can tell is named Dik-Ki, demonstrates that maybe Jor-El wasn't such a revolutionary problem-solver as we had thought. Or perhaps Kryptonians had some sort of built-in impulse in times of stress to put something in a vehicle and get it as far away as possible, fast! I mean, think about how many times Superman has flung something into space or tossed it in the ocean and then considered the problem solved. I'll bet that the Kryptonian wheel was invented by a man who lived at the top of a hill and had a stressful family life.
Of course, Kryptonians also seem to have uncannily good aim, as demonstrated by Zypto's surprise appearance at the Zak-Zil Aviary ("Zak-Zil Aviary: we cram birds into the smallest cages we can! Come see the parrots cry!") Professor -Zil seems to bear out my theory about the inhabitants of Zaro City: he's spent years and years and who knows how much money and how many birds making a serum that should give him wings, but hasn't even thought to test it in any way other than by slugging it back himself.
Ugh. Ag. "Distillation from the glands of a thousand birds," skeezes me out. It's very similar to the origin of Man-Bat and half a dozen other Silver Age animal-based superfolks and it conjures terrible images into my head, either of a thousand birds (or bats, or ocelots) having lots of problems in life because someone has removed their adenoids or similar. Of course, the alternative is to picture Zak-Zil maniacally feeding a thousand birds into some sort of giant juicing machine, so having a them sadly lining up across my mind's eye, waiting for their thyroid medication and gently coughing, is maybe preferable.
So Zypto was now a winged dog. He went back home and it turns out that the people making up the Dog Extermination Squad were dumb enough to believe that he was some type of dog-like bird. Which makes sense, really. I mean, think of your relatives: which one is most likely to end up in a Dog Extermination Squad?
You picked the dumbest one, didn't you? Just goes to show.
So Zypto has wings for a while and then he loses them when he fans some radioactive gas away from his owners.Everything's neat and tidy.
Now Zypto's father, Nypto, he was Dik-Ki's dog when he was a boy:
Dik-Ki had trained Nypto as a meteorite-hunting dog, which must be pretty tricky outside of an asteroid belt. Also, I have to assume that he dyed that poor beast. That's the sort of thing that kids get up to, right? you've got a meteor retriever, so he'd better look the part, all blue with crazy spots?
Sent after a fireball in the sky one night he finds not a chunk of space-rock but a pair of green and hunched aliens who have a truly diabolical scheme:
They're going to steal a couple of fish! Truely, these intergalactic tyrants put Mongul and Darkseid to shame with their awful schemes. Give an alien a giant fish, as they say, and he'll... eat that fish and be happy. Damn his blue and terrible bones!
I don't know if I can take any alien seriously when he's holding a fish bowl liike that. Do Skrulls keep pet fish? Is that why I could never quite take them seriously, or is it the chin corrugations? Actually, the most menacing alien that I've encountered recently in a comic book is Starro the Conquorer, which I call ironic. In any case, they want to eat dogs, so I guess they must be evil, despite their piscophilic tendencies.
Really, though, from what I hear, dog is a horrible thing to eat. Maybe these guys could go legit with their meat-wrangling business, taking things like skunk and hagfish and such off the hands of butchers across the galaxy. Or processed ham, that's pretty unbearable.
The dog-chase rages on, with Nypto desperately fleeing for his very steaks, until he gets a great idea:
Pork! No alien can resist pork!
Also, every planet in the universe has the same basic life-forms? Are there pigs on Mars, except that they're red and can levitate? Fire-breathing pigs on the moons of Alpha Centauri IV? A race of amorphous pigoids living under the frozen ammonia sheets of Strompar Maximus? Do I like a universe with infinite variations on the porcine form more or less than one without? A man could go mad envisioning the many variations on the gentle pork chop alone.
Philosophical musings on the nature of intergalactic ham aside, the story ended in a fairly standard manner, as Nypto lured the aliens close enough to a magnetic mountain to wreck their ship and send them fleeing in their two-man-no-dogs escape craft. Their evil scheme foiled, the aliens returned to their world to watch their people starve to death.
Finally, we have Vypto, Krypto's great-grandfather, and his super-boring story. See, Vypto was a normal dog, except for the fact that he could apparantly dive one mile underwater. Now, it's possible that the Kryptonian mile was actually about six metres or something but any way you slice it I'd call that extraordinary. Vypto spots some treasure on the sea floor and then gets mixed up with some crooks that are searching for it and fools their telepathic hounds by scaring them with a picture of a scary bug that his owner drew.
The important part of this whole stoy? Jor-El took the time to track down the picture of tthe scary bug and show it to Kal-El and Krypto, and that's the origin of why Superman's dog is scared of a bug. Damn you, Silver Age. And damn you for your dog-naming conventions, too. I love you, but it's going to take me a little time to get over this.
One final note: this wan't a last-minute, the-story-that-the-regular-guy-handed-in-has-Superboy-eating-kittens-oh-god-get-the-mail-boy-to-write-something kind of thing.
Yep, they planned this debacle. Uh, enjoy the hobby shop comic that I forgot to edit out.
Happy Sunday, folks.
It's a lazy Saturday here at the John pad, so I'm going to engage in some thought-exercise. Specifically, I'm going to try to figure out just what kind of chance the members of the 1960s version of the Doom Patrol would have had if they'd applied for membership in the Legion of Super-Heroes.
I've changed things up a bit since the last time I did this: instead of arbitrarily deciding whether someone gets in or not I'm going to give everyone a hundred points, then subtract a varying amount based on any ways in which they don't qualify for Legion membership (being 25 might lose you 5 points, while being as old as time itself would bump it up to 20) However many points are left at the end of my brutal evaluation process will be the likelihood of their admittance into the LSH, percentage-style. And then, being a well-rounded nerd, I'm going to roll 2d10 to see if they get in.
Today we'll be doing things in reverse alphabetical order!
Robotman
Cliff Steele, former racecar driver, had his brain placed in a powerful robotic shell following a terrible accident. He's been the Martian Manhunter of the Doom Patrol, having been a member of every incarnation so far. And noone has yet stabbed him fatally with a fire spear!
Penalties
Over 18: -5 points
No powers/duplicate powers/device-based powers: -15 points (no matter how he swings it he's going to get dinged here. He's either an ordinary guy, a guy whose power is being made of metal [which is Ferro Lad's schtick] or is reliant on a robot body. No way someone isn't going to bring that up).
Likely to mouth off during the interview: -10 points
Not too bad, actually. The simplicity of Cliff's position is his strength here - he's a brain in a jar in a robot. If he applied post Sun Eater then there could hardly be any arguments against the usefulness of having a metal guy around. Plus, Robotman's cavalier attitude toward his body comes in handy with surprising frequency. I've seen him rip off his limbs to use as missiles or hurl himself into machinery to gum up the works with surprising frequency - he'd be worth having around for the novelty factor of seeing Mordru get a robo-leg upside the head during one of his soliloquies, if nothing else. And Brainiac 5 would have the fun of replacing his various parts. Try to tell me that he wouldn't enjoy that.
The only real problem is that Mr Steele here is a bit of a big mouth, with a penchant for insulting people at the slightest provocation. I reckon that there's a pretty good chance of him calling someone "something-puss" or "something-snoot" during the interview, with the "something" being replaced by physical idiosyncrasy. Chameleon Boy, for example, would be "pumpkin-snoot".
Still, he stands at an astonishing 70%. Let's get out the old dice and see... hooray! He's in!
Negative Man
Larry Trainor was a test pilot who flew too high one day and was filled with radiation. Now he himself is radioactive, necessitating that he wear specially-treated bandages in order to keep the people around him safe. On the plus side, he can release the super-fast energy being Negative Man from his body in order to do his bidding. On the minus: if Negative Man is away for more than sixty seconds, Larry will die.
Penalties
Over 18: -5 points
Drawback ("If your bandages were to slip off during a mission, you could irradiate and kill your teammates!"): -10 points
Another drawback ("What if Negative Man were away too long and you died? We'd never finish a mission that way."): -10 points
Very likely to mouth off during the interview: -20 points
Larry's got more bankable powers than Robotman but on the other hand has a heck of a lot more negative (ha!) traits. Barring the super-generalists like Superboy and Ultra Boy, the Legion is traditionally low on speddy types, so he's doing all right there, as well as with the radio energy that he is usually described as crackling with. A little fancy talk to downplay the inherent downsides to the Negative Man condition, maybe a bit of a mention of the whole pilot thing along with a hint that he'd only be too happy to fly the Legion Cruiser on missions (I'm sure that they need more pilots - half the damn team flies outside of the spaceship) and he's in.
Problem is, Larry's got a bigger mouth than Robotman. He starts more of their many fights and definitely starts the name-calling more than his share of the time. There's no way he gets through the judging process without calling someone a "tin-plated gavel jockey" or something equally nonsensical. There might even be a fist-fight.
It's an even fifty-fifty chance for Larry Trainor, folks. And... he doesn't get in! Larry ends up joining the Legion of Substitute Heroes for about two weeks before he punches out Stone Boy during an argument over a sandwich and is asked to leave.
Mento
Steve Dayton! Billionaire industrialist, philanthropist, inventor, super-hero! Steve Dayton, AKA Mento! Not really a member of the Doom Patrol, but associated heavily-enough with them that I include him here.
Penalties
Over 18: -5 points
Uses a device (the 'Mento helmet') to achieve his powers: -15 points (I knocked off 5 points because there's some indication that the helmet just amplifies some powers that he already possesses)
Somewhat likely to mouth off during the interview: -10 points
More than a little creepy: -10 points
Possible criminal record: -20 points
Mento is an interesting character but only occasionally a likeable one. Yes, he has telekinetic powers in addition to being in top athletic condition, but he's also a bit of an arrogant dick. Since he only really associated with the Doom Patrol in order to get into Elasti-Girl's pants I have to assume that that would be his motivation for applying for Legion Membership as well. The only question would be: who is he stalking? Shrinking Violet? Triplicate Girl? Princess Projectra? Whoever it was, it'd likely come up at the interview. Steve is a little more cool-headed than Larry or Robotman but is more than ready to rise to any baiting that he might encounter. Throw in the fact that he uses a device to gain his powers and the fact that he might have a record either for insider trading or for this sort of thing:
and his score is down to a measly 40 percent. Did he get in? Nope! Bitter, Steve takes to the drink, slowly losing his holdings to RJ Brande's corporate takeovers and racking up an impressive number of restraning orders from female super-heroes.
Elasti-Girl
Rita Farr was a movie star and (I think) an Olympic swimmer before she was exposed to strange gases and gained the power to grow or shrink at will. Later, she refined the ability so that she could grow only a part of herself at a time.
Penalties
Over 18: -5 points
Duplicate powers (Shrinking Violet, Colossal Boy): -20 points
Bit of a pushover: -5 points
Now Rita, she's a good fit for the Legion. She's got a fairly straightforward power, no major personality flaws and is quite good at the actual mechanics of super-heroing. As noted above, though, she can be pretty passive at times - two to four men at a time were usually squabbling over her in the old Doom Patrol comics and she was not terrific at doing much more than going with the flow. I reckon that if Superboy or someone started claiming that "If you suddenly expanded while we were all in an elevator or something then you could seriously harm all of us. Except me. Unless you're magic." then she might not do more than agree with him and slink out of the room. Or maybe not - she did show some spine from time to time.
Okay, assuming that she emphasized the usefulness of being able to grow parts of herself instead of the part where she has powers that are already represented on the Legion... 75 percent chance. Go, Elasti-Girl! And...aw. She didn't make it. Reverting to her sex-object roots, Rita went on to date Sun Boy, Matter-Eater Lad and Chemical King in quick succession before settling down with Kid Psycho in a little split-level Moon Dome.
The Chief
Niles Caulder is the genius behind the Doom Patrol: the man who placed Cliff Steele's brain into the Robotman body, who coordinates the Patrol's activities and who creates all of the scientific devices that they require to fight monsters and other weirdies.
Penalties
Over 50: -10 points
Duplicate powers (Brainiac 5, Rond Vidar): -15 points
Drawback ("Dude, you're an old man in a wheelchair."): -20 points
Aloof: -5 points
The Chief is going to have a hard time winning over the Legion. Put aside the fact that he's older than most of their parents or that he's used to being in charge of a team and is likely to put people off with his attitude - the guy's in a wheelchair due to supervillain misadventure. It's highly likely that Wildfire is going to walk over and tip him onto the floor as an illustration of why they're going to reject him. Of course, Niles Caulder doesn't roll around in just any old wheelchair, and is likely to pull what I like to call a Val Armorr Manouvre: beating up a Legionnaire to prove that you can cut it in the Legion. In Niles' case, there's a giant mechanical arm in the back of the thing for smacking people around, plus a machine gun in the arm.
Of course, the Legion already has a couple of guys whose claims to fame are their big brains. Do they want someone who specializes in Sixties-style mad science cluttering up their lab? Let's see: another no. Well, don't worry about old Niles. He gathers together a rag-tag team of heroes like The Mess and Arm Fall-Off Boy and sets out to prove that they're more than their freakish deformities. Then, years later, Grant Morrison writes their adventures. The Mess becomes a hermaphroditic comet with some pretty interesting theories about popular radio!
Beast Boy
Look everyone, it's Garfield "Gar" Logan! Given an experimental serum when dying of a rare illness, he turned green and gained the ability to turn into various animals! If you grew up during the Eighties or Nineties, you might know him better as Changeling!
Penalties
Kind of likely to mouth off during interview: -15 points
Power duplication (Chameleon Boy): -10 points
Same name as a dead guy: -5 points
Bonus
Great hair: +5 points
Beast Boy is a bit of a troubled lad as a result of being orphaned at a young age and then entrusted to a scheming uncle who was interested in his inheritance and nothing else, but the structure of a group like the Legion might be just what he needs. It has to be better than him hanging around with the Doom Patrol, for heavens' sake - two grown men yelling at him and calling him names in Sixties lingo can't help his self-esteem. As long as he doesn't antagonize the Legion members like he did the original Teen Titans, he'll be fine. His powers are only kind of like Chameleon Boy's, after all (especially if Reep can grow an imagination) and I'm sure that Brainiac 5 would like to see another green face around the Clubhouse. After all, it's not like he's a token or anything - surely the Legion can have more than one guy of a certain colour at a time. Right?
Beast Boy has the same name as the deceased semi-villainous former member of the Heroes of Lallor, but the creepiness of that is offset by his great hair, and by the fact that he retained that hair, well...
... that's right. He kept his wicked mop-top while he was in animal form. How could the Legion resist that? 75 percent chance of getting in and... he gets in!
Robotman and Beast Boy are our newest members of Johnathan's Possible Legion of Maybe Super-Heroes, who need a better name! Feel free to suggest one!
Until next time, mes amis.
Ha ha! I have returned, overcoming a month's worth of illness, romance and computer failure to bring you the tale of a plucky little guy by the name of Molecular Master! Here, look at him sitting around in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes No. 201:
Such a good-looking era in Legion art - check out the lovely Infectious Lass and the homely-as-sin Porcupine Pete, as well as those way-cool chairs! I want those chairs, but maybe not in orange.
Molecular master gets to try out third, after Infectious Lass has made Star Boy barf and Porcupine Pete has studded the whole damn place with quills - note their abundant presence above. Which, actually, is kind of gross. I know a few people who would have to leave that room pretty quick-like after they realized that it would be like being in a big pile of toenail clippings or used hair or whatnot.
I don't know how I feel about the Molecular master's power:
That's a pretty old conception of what an atom looks like, MM. I do like the Kirby dots, though.
Also, i think that that might be a carbon atom, which is kind of boring. I just don't know...why does making an atom really big make it all crackly and energy-tastic? are all of my atoms doing that right now? And what does he do with the really big atom, anyway? Split it?
And just why the hell isn't he called the Atom Master, anyway? Gosh darn it, I want scientific accuracy fro my minor Seventies Legion characters! Isn't this the magazine that brought us the Chlorophyll Kid, causing literally dozens of youngsters to know that chlorophyll has something to do with plants? Oh, the shame.
So anyway, Molecular Master makes it through the first portion of the Legion application without anyone bellowing "REJECTED!" at him. Meanwhile, ERG-1 (you know, Wildfire) is roaming the Legion clubhouse in my favourite form, that of a blobby little pink cloud of antimatter. This is his second appearance after seemingly killing himself while saving Colossal Boy a year earlier and he's trying to get back to his uniform so that he can have some limbs again. Sadly, all of the Legion's technology seems designed to make life difficult for blobby pink guys and so:
He tries to possess the one person on the premises who isn't covered in Legion tech. But what horrible secret does the Molecular Master conceal?
By the way, I love the Molecular Master's costume. It's A-1.
No mind! But why?
Dang. That is one creepy android. I appreciate all the work that went into making all of those robotic facial features (check out the massive power supply going into that eyebrow! I'll bet he could make Mr. Spock run and cry with one hydraulically-augmented raising of that little number) but hawk-nosed tube-men with wildly staring eyes might just be a new phobia of mine.
Robot nose! Robot cheeks! Robot Adam's apple! Oh my god, terrifying robot ears!
ERG-1/Wildfire is upset about the other aspect of the Molecular Master's power: the highly poisonous breath. I like that at this point there no longer seems to be the need for someone to shout "There must be kryptonite in the gas!", though I would think that any gas potent enough to have an effect on Superboy might not require such a roundabout method of delivery. Just heave it through the front door in grenade form and he'd kill himself by sucking it up for easy disposal. Super-villains, huh? Always over-thinking.
So: evil android filled with poison gas and after the Legion's very own deus ex machina. Can he be stopped in time?
Oops - guess not.
Ah, the Miracle Machine, as recently featured in Final Crisis (and eventually featured in Matter-Eater Lad's bowel). The Legion really shouldn't be surprised that folks try to kill them for this thing. Perhaps they should at least hide it behind something opaque - you know, give the homicidal maniacs a bit of a challenge.
Don't worry, though. ERGfire has used the Machine to restore himself to his suit (and certainly not to fashion himself as new human body, no sir), thus sparing the Molecular Master the embarrassment of standing there dramatically while that big atom completely failed to do anything to the inertron. Psh. Big atoms...
Undaunted, the Molecular Master tries again! He makes the biggest damn atom ever!
ERG-1 eats the super-atom! The Molecular Master's super-power officially sucks. ERG, on the other hand...
... has the Antimatter Kick! I don't even care that Wildfire never really did any kicking in later years - blasting this one android in the face with his foot makes him just incredibly great.
That's not quite the end of the future's best-dressed android, though. A few years later, in Legion of Super-Heroes No. 281, a bunch of Legionnaires are trapped in the past and run into the little scamp. It's a weird issue: Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz team up to produce a weird script, while Steve Ditko and Bruce Patterson compliment it with some weird art.
That costume still looks good, though. Note that in this second appearance everyone thinks that his name is Molecule Master, which is lame. I won't be a party to such a renaming, damn it.
In this issue, the Molecular Master no longer has the awesome power of the Big Atom. Instead, he can sort of generically control molecules, causing things to fly around and warp out of shape and so forth. I think at one point that he turns some air into rocks. Surprisingly, this is not an improvement. The absence of the big atoms has made me miss them.
Superboy, by the way, thinks that he's Ultra Boy, who is at this point possibly dead.
Molecular Master still has a robot nose but its not as terrifying. Thanks for showing me that, Superboy. I'll sleep easier tonight!
So it turns out that MM was working for *yawn* the Time Trapper, who really wanted that Miracle Machine, darn it. I can't remember if the thing was still uneaten at this point - if it wasn't what the Time Trapper was after here then I don't have a sweet clue what's going on. Oh, the perils of writing that hooded buffoon into your stories: I will never remember what the hell is up.
Hey, I just noticed - Saturn Girl is giving him the guns!
See? Lousy power.
Flying machine gun-attack is better than jeep-attack, but still.
Eventually, Molecular Master resorts to throwing rocks at the Legionnaires. Snazzy costume or not, that's pretty lame. Also, this version of the Master exploded when too many people attacked him at once. Were I more fond of the original version of the character, I might have concealed the existence of this one but the big atoms and the horrible robot nose and the Time Trapper connection all come together to spell NOT APPROVED.
There we go. Two hundredth post.
Holy Hannah. I did it!
I mean *ahem* of course I did. And look: I planned things out ahead of time. After starting on the Legion Christmas tale in Adventure Comics No. 289 we wrap up with the Legion yarn from the Super-Star Holiday Special, which is very likely to make an appearance here next year as well.
The setup: Superboy is visiting the future yet again and it's Christmastime. He's oddly upset that the world of the one thousand years in the future is not full of familiar 1950s (or 1940s, or 60s or whenever Superboy was from at that point) holiday traditions. Saturn Girl tries to cheer him up with some old-fashioned invasion of privacy:
"To be shared only by close friends and whoever happens to be spying on them from the Clubhouse."
Karate Kid's tree isn't as nice as that one from the Adventure story. It's still cool and all, but there's just something about concentric rings...
Also, who here thinks that Sun Boy invited himself along to this thing? I for one would not take my main squeeze home for a "private tea ceremony" and also bring along my womanizing pal. Unless there's more to the KK/PP relationship than we were told... or less, I suppose.
Fireworks trees! Terrific, improbable, hazardous!
Forcing your friend to work because he doesn't celebrate the holiday that you're all taking off? Not cool.
I think that this might be the first time that we learn that Colossal Boy is Jewish, which was always a nice touch, especially as all of the black characters kept getting shuffled off to other dimensions or weren't black at all and then were killed. Colossal Boy is the face of Legion diversity, folks!
Not sure if it's necessary for him to be so big, though, even if the Allons do have a gigantic dining room. My brother is in the army, and we discourage him from showing up at dinnertime in full camouflage and armed. This seems similar to me - "Look everyone! I'm a super-hero!"
Here's something for you to think about, Superboy: you flew to the future under your own power. You could very easily jaunt off to Smallville for Christmas, or go back to watch the invention of the first piece of tinsel (and then take the inventor Hans Tinsel to the moon to fight 17th Century Dominators or something). The future is, after all, another country - you're acting like someone who goes to France and complains about the lack of English and Coors.
Now just calm down and...
... go completely over the top. Say one thing about Superboy, folks: he doesn't mess around. No candlelight service for him, no sir. No going to Bethlehem to check out possible manger sites or trying to summon the ghosts of the Wise Men or feeding Tenzil gold, frankincense and myrrh until he pukes Christmas spirit. No, it's time to fly to the Christmas star. Basically the only way to top that would be to travel back to watch Mary giving birth, but that's too obvious.
The rest of the story is concerned with the legion haring off on Superboy's mad quest and helping a planet full of fairly dumb aliens ("The ocean's freezing, huh? Well, I guess I'll just sit here and die.") It's okay, but the real attraction is the sheer scale that Superboy thinks on. And his super-demented facial expression.
JOHN APPROVED
All together now!
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Twelve beasts of lightning,
Eleven Tyrocs shouting,
Ten Stone Boys standing,
Nine Police sciencing,
Eight Trappers timing,
Seven boys a-bouncing,
Six Tenzils snacking,
FIVE LEGION RINGS!
Four head-shaped worlds,
Three Luornus,
Two Turtle Boys,
And a Brainy, out of his tree.
A retroactive happy whatever if you choose to celebrate something at this time of year, a good time anyway if you don't and may your smugness be extra satisfying if you're one of those types.
Oof. I meant to write this senses-shattering finale to the sizzling, stunning, uh, saturnine review of the Concentrator earlier this week, but ran up against a couple of stumbling blocks: firstly, I’ve been pretty danged busy at work, so those occasional slow half-hours that were good for a paragraph or two about Saturn Girl’s costume have gone the way of the dodo. Secondly, my evenings have been taken up with Hallowe’en preparation – super-hero boots require a fair amount of sewing, it turns out. If I ever develop fantastic powers you can bet that my costume is going to be off-the-rack. (I wrote this before the previous post, but am too lazy to edit out the redundant information. Instead, I use up more of your neurons with useless info! Ho ho ho! A similar principle applies to the slight overlap between this and Part 3 of the Concentrator saga)
The Concentrator sounds kind of… lame. Not that I wouldn’t want to have one in my apartment, mind you – I assume that it can concentrate matter into a decent batch of chicken wings – but I can’t really see it as life-imprisonment-worthy. I mean, wouldn’t you have to know how to make a weapon in the first place to make it in the Concentrator? So... doesn’t that really just make it a faster way to get things? Not so good in the hands of a villain, I know, but I can think of half a dozen DC baddies who can do stuff like that without even trying hard. Pre-computer nerd Calculator, for instance, or the entire Sinestro Corps, even that one guy who's a hermit crab.
Living Between Wednesdays is a place for people who love comic books and superheroes.
