Thursday, May 10, 2007

Pure excitement

Tonight, you will be transformed from dead-eyed suburbanites into white-hot grease fires of pure entertainment!

All except you. You're not working out. I'll be playing your role:

Awwww, maaaan...
I mean, some guys own penthouses, and others own islands - this guy has his own frickin' private star, and it's very restful. (Not the first adjective that comes to my mind in that discussion, but then again, I'm not the most remarkable man who ever lived.)

It's fair to question whether she's crazy about this, or just generally barking nuts.

  • Hi, incredibly small woman I just rescued from doom! I know you're only 3' 9" but would you like to play basketball with me?
  • Yo, doll-face. I need you to shoot me up with the clear. You in?
  • Hey... I was checking you out from across the ward. I heard you're Cleopatra. I'm a Super-Wizard named Stardust. You want to share a Prozac sometime?
I'd be crazy about it!

All this madness comes to us courtesy of the Ace of Spades (with credit to David Thompson), from the unfathomable mind and pen of Fletcher Hanks. At least, some people may fathom it. For example, this starts out reasonably, if badly-drawn - the late 30's isolationist paradise of the United States is threatened by Fifth Columnists, who luckily are total idiots who think conquering South America first is a winning strategy. (Maybe they were counting on the three bonus armies per turn.) You'd think that, even if they didn't anticipate the mind-reading guy that flies around in a "tubular spacial," any fifth columnists would tackle the dangerously-unprepared superpower and then dig in. But, oh, on page two we see that they have secret allies.

Believe it or not, it gets a little weird at that point. The secret allies are sky-demons from Mars. Luckily, Stardust has a ray for everything: super-accelerated solar rays, fusion rays, paralyzing rays, repelling rays, shadow-transfer rays, Fay Rays (used exclusively on simian threats)... Admittedly, the first story I ever wrote featured swirl-rays - but they were planet-based and not wizard-based technology. My witch character worked exclusively in spells. And was the bad guy. And I was 5 years old.

Onward - to the most stupendous thing you are likely to see this calendar year:

Man are THESE guys in for a let-down when they get topside.
You're seeing this correctly - he freezes everyone and then sends them whizzing up to meet him in the clouds, leaving the good guys behind.

It's the Inverse Rapture.

By the next page, he's brainwashed and kidnapped a bunch of demented schoolchildren and sent them to fight the enemy soldiers now entrenched across an entire continent. To recap - the Super-Wizard, "the most remarkable man that ever lived," likes to spend his time playing at evil mirror-universe Jesus (complete with a new heavens and earth), when he's not hitting on fourth-graders who think he's just dreamy. He can't be counted on to risk his own remarkable self doing any of the actual fighting. He just yutzes around with some David Copperfield crap and lets his enemies blow each other up, while little Johnny and Stevie are swapping fusion rays with the Nazis - who for the purposes of this story have gotten to South America before, rather than after, WW2. (It may be historically true, I suppose, but if so I'm willing to guess it was an accident.)

It is such a bizarre story at this point, it must be expressed mathematically.

((Ator + Santa Conquers the Martians + the Watchtower) * negative art talent)² ÷ cos(bad writing) = Suckitude

It almost seems quaint and plausible that this guy hangs out on his own private star with vibrating crime detectors.

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