Makes a great wedding song, though.

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1. Gambling at (P)rick’s Casino
2. Red in the face
3. Imperial stupor

The cut bled — and hurt — like a motherfucker, and required a improvised tourniquet and half a bottle of peroxide to treat. Still, I managed to get it under control and assumed the worst was behind me…until the dreams began.

Delivering colorful candy eggs under the cover of darkness. Taunting hunters with bizarre speech impediments. Fighting space bandits under alien skies, the light from twin suns shining on my emerald fur.

I dunno. Maybe I’m just imagining things.

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1. Jamming down the bunny trail
2. Overlooking the obvious
3. Halloween Countdown: October 14 – I’ll stay away

…in which I use the character creation rules in the Marvel Super Heroes RPG’s Ultimate Powers Book to roll up a random batch of powers and abilities, then sit back and watch as some incredibly talented folks work their creative magic upon the quantified chaos.

This week’s superstar simian was swung in courtesy of Leonard Pierce (writing) and “Calamity” Jon Morris (art).

As part of their mandate to study the superhuman condition and the ways it can be controlled and contained, the think tank/penitentiary known as Project Pegasus does a great deal of laboratory research. Happily for humanity, much of this research is conducted on animals, making it – or so goes the argument – more humane.

Sometimes, though, things don’t go quite as planned.

Dr. Alison Crowmartin-Fitzjimson, an earnest young psychiatrist at the Project with a background in media studies, was the first person to suggest that the global population might be suffering an unacceptable spike in its stress level thanks to constant media exposure to tense and frightening news about destructive superhuman rampages. So it was that she began testing the psychological and physical effects of such exposure by performing Ludovico-style experiments on her lab gorilla, “Pogo”.

At first the experiments were inconclusive; Pogo’s general reaction to being forced to watch sixteen hours in a row of various Spider-Man villains wrecking up central Manhattan was to become cross and uncommunicative, but as the gorilla was a sullen 12-year-old, this may have been attributable to mere adolescent contrariness. Dr. Crowmartin-Fitzjimson decided to ramp up the exposure, forcing on Pogo endless online news articles, web videos and podcasts about super-villainy; also, on the advice of fellow Pegasus scientist Dr. Henri Sorel, she decided to “throw some radiation in there”, bathing the ape’s daily media sessions in gamma and cosmic rays.

Unfortunately, like 94% of humans, 57% of gorillas, and a surprising 23% of broadclub cuttlefish, Pogo possessed latent mutant powers that were unleashed by constant exposure to the cocktail of radiation and bad news. Within weeks, he was manifesting bizarre powers in reaction to his environment: his already formidable gorilla strength doubled, allowing him to toss his caretakers around like rag dolls after viewing news footage of destructive supervillain rampages. Angry internet trolls made him behave like an actual troll, hiding under bridges and waylaying unwary muggers and pickpockets into a sound thrashing while in a berserk rampage. Flame wars made him actually burst into flame. He reacted to superhuman brawls by spinning around ferociously, kicking up a cloud of dust and causing nearby objects to fly about in a whirlwind of cartoonish violence, powered by his no longer latent telekinetic powers. Worst of all, when the stress and tension instilled by a steady stream of sensationalist super-news got too much, he was forced to use his mysterious powers – or his head would literally explode.

Breaking free of his captors, Pogo fled into the wilds. Unluckily, the nearest wilds were those of Central Park, and the internet’s angriest gorilla soon found himself lost in the city with the highest concentration of superhumans on the entire planet. Wandering the thoroughfare in a crude costume of garbage and discarded product from the Garment District to disguise his simian nature, Pogo stumbled across the villain Blacklash in the midst of a criminal rampage; simply to alleviate the stress building up inside him, the super-gorilla used his own powers to give the whip-wielding ne’er-do-well a sound thrashing. A gawk-eyed onlooker wearing a hat and a brown suit goggled “Holy smokes! That gorilla’s going apeshit!” – and a legend was born.

Since that fateful day, Pogo has hidden out in a utility closet in the Bronx’s Mott Haven library, aided by local pre-teen ragamuffin José Rumiante and friendly microfiche librarian Becky Mae Pirgeson. He emerges after hours to use its shamefully outdated internet terminals. Using the only method of communication he knows, he nightly surfs the web, hoping to find respite and reason to calm his fiery brain. But on the news feeds, message boards and chat rooms, he finds only fuel for his rage, and takes to the streets once again to tamp down his superhuman-inspired fury by doing the only thing he can do: go APESHIT!

(Astounding art by Jon Morris and wonderful words by Leonard Pierce. UPJ logo provided by Dave Lartigue.)

Are you an artist, writer, or terrifying combination of the two who’d like to try your hand at the Ultimate Powers Jam? Then drop me a line at bitter(dot)andrew(at)gmail(dot)com and I’ll commence the dice to rolling. (If you’re still waiting for an assignment, I apologize. Things have been a little crazy at the day job lately, but I’ve got a nice long weekend to play catch up. Hopefully.)

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1. Ultimate Powers Jam #4 – DJ Cavalier
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…who should not be confused with Ultra, Ultra Boy, Ultragirl, Ultraman ( Japanese or American version), Captain Ultra, Ultra the Multi-Alien, the Ultra-Humanite, Gary Concord the Ultra-Man, Ultraforce, or Lords of the Ultra Realm.

Ultraa was the first superhero of Earth-Prime, which was the plane of existence where we readers dwelled in the days before Crisis of Infinite Earths did away with DC’s multiversal cosmology.

Ultraa was meta before it was cool, yo.

Ultraa was supposed to be our universe’s equivalent to Superman, if Superman’s spaceship crashed in a white American writer’s hazy approximation of an Australian Aboriginal community and the infant alien grew up to resemble a ‘roided-out Robin Gibb.

Ultraa’s decision to reveal himself to our world was complicated by “misunderstandings” with the Air Force, the Justice League, and a goofy alien invader who rode around in an inverse pyramid ship.

The Justice League was on Earth-Prime because they were accidentally summoned there by the psychic turbulence caused by “Who is Your Favorite League Member” poll in the letters page of their comic series. The stranded heroes were forced to seek out the help of DC editor Julius Schwartz, who offered to help them get home. (A quid pro quo lapdance from Black Canary was not mentioned, but could be inferred from the historical record.)

I am reminded of this sequence whenever some fanboy waxes nostalgic for the grandeur of the old school DC Multiverse.

Ultraa realized that Earth-Prime was not ready for superheroes and accompanied the League members back to Earth-1. Upon arriving in his new home, Ultraa embarked on a series of bad decisions.

First he tried to using an apathy generator to eliminate all superhumans from the world…

…then he teamed up with a shady lawyer who was actually an alien hivemind composed of sentient cotton candy that wanted to steal all earth’s hydrogen. (because SCIENCE has shown us that hydrogen is the rarest of substances and totally doesn’t constitute three-quarters of the universe’s total mass).

Ultraa truly hit the skids, however, when he hooked up with a petty criminal to rob Atlantic City’s casinos. This heinous (and pathetic) act caused the Justice League to unleash the most dire sanction in their arsenal…

…having a jilted, mopey Hawkman engage in a heart-to-heart rap with the morally confused transdimensional expat.

“You think you have it bad? My life is nothing but one doomed relaunch after another. I had to share a book with the Atom, for fuck’s sake. You’d think ‘dude with wings who punches shit’ would be easy enough to pull off, but noooooooooo — they keep adding more layers of stupid mysticism and sci-fi cliches to the package. Even Aquaman gets more respect.”

Ultraa promptly returned to the Outback to live his life among the broad caricatures of an ancient indigenous culture.

Though Ultraa’s Bronze Age adventures were retconned out of the post-Crisis DC Universe, a Chromium Age incarnation of the character eventually popped up in an issue of Justice League Quarterly as a would be suitor for Maxima, the horny Queen of Planet Hackey-sack.

The less said about that waking nightmare, the better.

Ultraa was the thinnest of characters sustained by the thinnest of concepts and some of the most mediocre, boilerplate stories the Bronze Age JLA had to offer. Even as a kid, I felt there was something horribly goofy and offputting about Ultraa — which had less to do with the precocious sophistication of an inveterate paste-eater than it does with the inecapable truth that the so-called “Ultimate Warrior” (no to be confused with this guy) was the very definition of Nobody’s Favorite.

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1. Nobody’s Favorites: Jumping the pterodactyl
2. Nobody’s Favorites: Dampening the squib
3. Nobody’s Favorites: Sick burn

Also, some dude who may or may not be an elaborate government hoax.

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3. Good dog hunting

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(from Adventure Comics #394, June 1970; by Cary Bates, Win Mortimer and Jack Abel)

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Well, that would certainly explain all the abandoned mineshafts, homeless craftsmen, and evironmental degradation in my Terraria gameworld.

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The online chatter about what “Superman ought to be” is fascinating in that the offered suggestions reveal more about the person making them than they do about Superman himself — the parental anxieties of wanting to be protective yet not stifling, a faith in virtue rewarded, the ability to transcend petty limitations to create something noble and grand. While these are all interesting takes that I’d love to see manifested in the comics/movies/cartoons, they also speak to the difficulties of rekindling poor Kal-El with a sustainable level of broad-based appeal.

To paraphrase Pal Dave, Superman is an icon first and a character second. His popcultural mark has fractalized across multiple formats, millions of beholders, and over seven decades. Furthermore, his role as the symbolic flagship for a publishing empire (and genre) has led to an unfortunate state of stagnation in the name of brand maintenance. It’s similar to what happened with Mickey Mouse when he became the public face of Disney. Works featuring the character grew more cautious and formulaic, and was eventually eclipsed in the creative realm by Donald Duck (thanks to groundbreaking work by guys like Carl Barks).

For a good three decades of his existence, Superman existed in a bubble of creative stasis dominated by a specific narrative and visual style. Set up some contrived tangle of a plot which can only be resolved by a clever/absurd use of Superman’s extensive arsenal of powers and set it to Curt Swan’s or Kurt Schaffenberger’s clean, square-jawed vision of 1955-in-perpetuity. It was a formula eminiently suitable for the target kiddie audience, but it failed to account for evolution of reader tastes and demographics…especially after Marvel hit upon its own compelling spin on the superhero genre.

It’s not that the Superman franchise should have been retooled into a weak clone of a Marvel offering (which is a mistake which has been made over and over again in the past quarter-century), but it could have benefited from following the example of Batman’s ongoing efforts to reflect the zeitgeist. The efforts that were made — such as the “Kryptonite No More” arc or Jack Kirby’s Jimmy Olsen run — were eventually abandoned under the weight of editorial inertia. They weren’t terrible as much as they felt hopelessly anachronistic, and more so with each passing year.

Many fans who grew up on the post-Man of Steel side of the generational divide have a rosier view of the high concept craziness of 1970s and early 1980s Superman stories. I can dig that, but I also have clear memories of a time when these stories were the sole representation of the Man of Steel in funnybooks, one that filtered down into guest appearances and the JLA.

Allow me to use an autobiographical experience to illustrate my point, using two comics with the same publication date (January 1980).

The first is X-Men #129…

…the epilogue of the “Proteus” storyline and the first leg of the “Dark Phoenix Saga,” which also happened to mark the debut of Kitty Pryde.

The second is Action Comics #503…

…where Superman has to deal with an Amazing Kreskin analogue while being stalked by Null-O, the mopey vacuum cleaner…from SPAAAAAAAACE!

You’re eight years old. Bronze Age Superman comics are your dominant frame of reference for the medium. Watchmen and “gritty” superheroics are still half a decade away from arriving and becoming instant cliches.

This?

Or this?

Yeah, I know, “apples and oranges.” But if you’re predisposed to liking fruit yet have never eaten anything but apples, even the blandest orange will seem pretty damn exotic.

Related posts:

1. Comics That Meant Something: Part 2 – Grim and gritty
2. Comics That Meant Something: Part 3 – Switch and bait
3. Comics That Meant Something: Part 1 – Keep watching the skies

…in which I use the character creation rules in the Marvel Super Heroes RPG’s Ultimate Powers Book to roll up a random batch of powers and abilities, then sit back and watch as some incredibly talented folks work their creative magic upon the quantified chaos.

This week’s plug-and-play contribution was submitted via cyberspace by Johnathan Munroe.

Count Denno Damnato believed in making do with the resources at hand: when traditional methods failed to keep the peasants of his tiny mountain fiefdom under his sway, he turned to the dark rituals collected in his family’s secret library. When the Soviets annexed his lands, those same magics soon saw him installed as Regional Commissar Damnato. When politics and civil war tore through the mountains he stole the face and life of a young UN peacekeeper and relocated to North America.

And, once his continuing explorations into the nature of life and death (and particularly into the mass application of the latter as a way to extend the former) drew the attentions of one Dr Stephen Strange and forced him to go to ground in a small manufacturing town, what he had at hand was a warehouse full of surplus late-90s computer equipment.

Undeterred, Damnato set out to find a way to refocus his power through such unorthodox materials, and through bloody single-mindedness he created a bizarre new school of techno-necromancy within a frenzied six months. Elated with his success, he grew overconfident, and so a simple trip outside for supplies escalated into a mystical confrontation with Strange that ended with Count Damnato trapped in a bubble of looped time, half a country away.

SOME YEARS LATER: Virtually the only thing that Joe Sobaud had in common with Count Denno Damnato was that belief in making do with what one had, and to that end, if the girl he was set on dating thought that urban spelunking was an interesting hobby then so did he. After putting in some serious time at Town Hall looking over old blueprints, he’d even managed to find someplace completely new to spelunk: what looked like a whole bricked-up office level of the old abandoned computer warehouse. All he needed to do was make sure he could actually get in and maybe stash a six-pack and a blanket, in case things got romantic when he showed off his find.

Joe found his way in without a hitch. Trouble was, the first thing he saw once his eyes had adjusted to the gloom was a pair of golems made of yellow-grey plastic, shambling forward to grab his arms. One of them babbled about how pleased it was that the Master had finally found a worthy volunteer while the other fiddled with some kind of home-made syringe, and before Joe could get a word in edgewise he was rendered unconscious.

Later, after he’d explained their mistake (and yelled a great deal, and cried a bit, and smashed a fair amount of glassware) the golems felt terrible. If they’d known that they’d had the wrong person, they explained, they certainly wouldn’t have performed radical technomantic surgery on him, really they wouldn’t. He eventually had to forgive them, if only to keep them from moping. Besides, the damage was done: his hands were gone, and in their place were Spiritual Transition Facilitators. His veins were replaced with coaxial cable; his heart with a Frankensteinian device that had begun its life as a dial-up modem. He had been reconfigured into a perfect spiritual conduit – the ghosts of the world flowed through him.

Seeing no other option, Joe made do with the resources at hand (or giant coaxial cable end, whichever). The townspeople, after a brief panic, were surprisingly accepting, and so he and the golems played to their strengths and opened a computer repair business. And when Joe started making house calls, he discovered that the ghosts didn’t just move through him but that they sometimes left bits of information behind. When he was able to casually point out the location of Great Grampa’s long lost coin collection while waiting for a reboot to finish, a tip was almost guaranteed. And when Great Grampa was actually a deep-cover HYDRA agent who was starting to worry about what the corroding drums in the work shed might end up doing to his genetic legacy, well, when you exist in a grey area between ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ it can help to make yourself useful to people like SHIELD.

So Joe putters along at The Modem & Golem Computer Repair and Psychic Detective Agency and occasionally puts his giant coaxial cable ends to a bit of crimefighting. The spiritual energy that courses through his body enables him to emit blasts of poltergeist energy (a more fine-tuned application of which filled the role of his missing hands) or to imbue inanimate objects with the semblance of life. He’s faster and stronger than he ever was before, and his giant coaxial cable ends are registered weapons (literally – the guys from SHIELD insisted). The only drawback is that if he pushes himself too hard he can easily process all of the spiritual energy of a region, leaving him barely able to function. And if he really exhausts himself, the world starts to shift and flow into nightmare shapes as unformed things from outside of reality try to use him as a gateway to the world of men… probably. Or maybe he’s going mad – whichever it is, he doesn’t like it, so he tries to take it nice and easy.

(and of course what’s really happening is long-distance mind control by Count Damnato, who wants to be free, FREEEEEEEEEEE!)

(Artistic and written wizardry by Johnathan Munroe. UPJ logo provided by Dave Lartigue.)

Are you an artist, writer, or terrifying combination of the two who’d like to try your hand at the Ultimate Powers Jam? Then drop me a line at bitter(dot)andrew(at)gmail(dot)com and I’ll commence the dice to rolling…eventually. I promise.

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