A New Product at the Spa of Haunts!
/Hey Teens!
Do you suffer from unsightly acne? Do the other kids call you Crater Cranium, Butter Face or Just Plain Ugly? Now you can get clear skin in four easy steps!
1. Mix a Mint Julep.
2. Throw the drink in your own face (with vigor).
3. Turn into a horrific monster.
4. Finish with a cleansing toner.
What's that? Yes, I said "monster."
You'll turn into a ghoul who sucks the souls of living, or a zombie who hungers for warm, young flesh or even grotesque Frankenstein!
But with smooth, clear skin you can take anyone you want to the drive in (and murder them!)
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?
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?
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.
Pork! No alien can resist pork!
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.
