Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

[Narratio]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Back at Insupportable Premises...

 

Surviving the entropic death of your current universe and the followup "big bang" that creates the next one. (Yes Galactus, I'm looking at you) The energy levels involved... astonishing. And then, after several millenia gobbling down planets across billions of galaxies like they were peanuts / chocolate coated raisins / gummy bears - you get taken down by some two bit punks on an out of the way planet called earth? What? Agreed, the "big bang" thing was never part of Lee/Kirby's original concept, but still!

 

And the the whole "Your "girlfriend" gets mutated into some giant form, kidnapped, beaten, tortured, given super powers for a day etc, etc" (Lois Lane come on down!) And yet never seems to seek psychiatric help, maintains a "normal" life style, is able to keep steady employment and still likes you for getting her into/out of those scrapes. I've had girls bust my chops for far, far less.

 

Back at the aging. During Byrnes period at the FF, I remember he did a couple of pages on the Torch visiting an old girl friend who was now married, mother of 3 or 4, gained 100lbs... She had aged, he had not.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Except that Gotham likes to keep things close to home and Arkham has better facilities than the average prison.

 

Also Moth, Ivy, Black Mask and the various Clayface were all clinically insane.

 

Batman's clinically insane. Dude's obsessive as all get out.

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Batman's clinically insane. Dude's obsessive as all get out.

 

Obsessive behaviour is not (necessarily) insanity. If it was, most of us gamers would probably be locked up.

 

Granted, Bats basically lives on (and is Landlord, Supreme Leader and High Priest of) Planet Obsessive.

[Nuclear Fridge]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Batman's clinically insane. Dude's obsessive as all get out.

 

I keep thinking of the Robot Chicken sketch where the other heroes keep trying to get him to do his chores - and then, Bats goes all "The Call of the Night!" and jumps out of the window.

Then we see him drowning his sorrows at a bar...

[SSgt Baloo]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Just once I'd like to see a hero who's old, apparently out of shape (and out of out of breath from "speeding to the rescue") show up to the fight, get laughed at by the villain, then pwn the guy. Yeah, I did re-watch Kung-Fu Panda recently.

[Greywind]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Mr. Incredible came close...

[Clonus]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Just once I'd like to see a hero who's old' date=' apparently out of shape (and out of out of breath from "speeding to the rescue") show up to the fight, get laughed at by the villain, then pwn the guy. Yeah, I did re-watch Kung-Fu Panda recently.

 

Well, Bruce Wayne wasn't wearing the costume when he went to rescue the protagonist from the Jokerz in the first episode of Batman Beyond, but other than that...

[GoldenAge]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Just once I'd like to see a hero who's old' date=' apparently out of shape (and out of out of breath from "speeding to the rescue") show up to the fight, get laughed at by the villain, then pwn the guy. Yeah, I did re-watch Kung-Fu Panda recently.

 

Wildcat does that regularly, though he's equally as pwn'd as he does the pwn'n.

[RexMundi]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

The Great Destroyer........he did it. Old guy whoops much backside. Odd Art, great Story.

 

~Rex

[Cygnia]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Just once I'd like to see a hero who's old' date=' apparently out of shape (and out of out of breath from "speeding to the rescue") show up to the fight, get laughed at by the villain, then pwn the guy. Yeah, I did re-watch Kung-Fu Panda recently.

 

As they say in Discworld: "Do not act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling men."

[clsage]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

The discussion about comic book supergeniuses who somehow barely affect the overall tech level of the world at large got me thinking about some of the tropes/conventions/premises of comic book universes (as depicted in a typical Marvel/DC book) that seem insupportable on closer inspection:

1. Nothing the heroes do will alter the general status quo very much--Reed Richards can create FTL drives, artificial intelligence devices, limitless power supplies, and none of it will ever filter down to the guy in the street or have much impact on his job or his personal life. The world can repeatedly make contact with alien empires capable of laying the planet to waste or invading at any time, and it has little to no impact on international relations or how people see themselves in relation to people in other countries. Even when the world does seem to change, or react, it tends to "reset to default" within 6-24 issues or so.....

 

In regard to "super-tech" one answer (which I impose(d) on my Team Norfolk campaign/universe) is described in a old issue of "The Adventurers Club" magazine for Hero System, circa 1985-ish: The Papa Schimmelhorn Effect. While I don't have my copy of the article at hand, it basically says that weird science devices, etc can be "one offs" but are virtually unreproducible by anyone except perhaps the inventor (and then again, maybe even they won't be able to reproduce the darn thing..). And they might only be operable by the inventor as well. In the Team Norfolk Universe, this is (in part..) a manifestation of "super-geniuses" having a form of uncontrolled cyberkenesis....

 

Or it could be, as per a cartoon in an old gaming supplement notes, when one police officer asks another (re: UNTIL): "How come they got ray guns and we don't ?" To which his fellow officer answers: "Dunno...Better budget maybe ?"

 

-Carl-

[Chuckg]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

What gets me re: the Joker is... ok, I am going to list three highlights of the Joker's career that are still in-continuity.

 

* Attempted to kill the UN General Assembly, in session, with nerve gas. Stopped literally in the act (with the gas safely inhaled by Superman and then super-breathed out into space) by the World's Finest. ("Death In The Family")

* Attempted to destroy New York City with sea-launched cruise missiles mounting nuclear warheads. Stopped by the Birds of Prey. (BIRDS OF PREY #16-17)

* Released a biological warfare agent that mutated dozens of supervillains into crazed killing machines. Summer crossover event spanning many titles. ("Last Laugh")

 

What is the common factor among all the three above events? They involved terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction.

 

Seriously. In DCU continuity, to this day, the Joker is the only living man to have not only attacked the United States with WMDs, to not only have attacked multiple times, but to have attacked with every kind of WMD. Nukes, germs, chemicals, he's used them all.

 

And they still treat him as a criminal case? Why is he not the DCU's equivalent of Osama bin Laden at this point? Why does his showing up anywhere not result in people saying things like 'terror alert to red', 'mobilize the National Guard', 'lock down the city', 'NEST teams on standby', 'CDC biowar response teams on standby', 'Delta Force has been given orders to terminate', etc?

 

So yeah, allow me to register my own annoyance at a comic book trope: in the comics, far too often indiscriminate mass murder and attempted mass murder of zillions is treated the same way as would be a simple homicide during an armed robbery: with measured law enforcement response and scrupulous attention paid to your civil rights. As opposed to people actually acting like real people would react to a dude who's tried to use nerve gas to kill the entire United Nations building, or blow up NYC with a neutron bomb, or unleash super-plagues.

[Nuclear Fridge]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Chuckg, you've been reading my mind?

The Joker should be cackling away in a cave up in a Far Eastern country's mountain range by now, given the WMD criteria...

 

I'm considering this issue for when I return to my 1986 campaign - and Eurostar starts a major campaign of death, destruction, and widespread mayhem. My players are heroes, make no mistake... but how many innocents will Fiacho's crew wipe out if they aren't taken out of the game?

[wick]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

In regard to "super-tech" one answer (which I impose(d) on my Team Norfolk campaign/universe) is described in a old issue of "The Adventurers Club" magazine for Hero System, circa 1985-ish: The Papa Schimmelhorn Effect. While I don't have my copy of the article at hand, it basically says that weird science devices, etc can be "one offs" but are virtually unreproducible by anyone except perhaps the inventor (and then again, maybe even they won't be able to reproduce the darn thing..). And they might only be operable by the inventor as well. In the Team Norfolk Universe, this is (in part..) a manifestation of "super-geniuses" having a form of uncontrolled cyberkenesis....

 

-Carl-

 

For my campaign I am thinking that there is a Secret society of powerful individuals that want to keep tech on a leash. They know that they cannot and perhaps should not stop all progress they just don't want Tech to leap beyond our civilization to deal with or thatd shift the balance of power. They are not always successful or else there would not be any Mechanon type villians , note that his existence is a strong argument in favor of controlling technical revolutions. They may monitor any new tech based heroes and villians and take measures to limit the impact of the tech on the world. A TonyStark type making a powered suit is one thing, him mass procuding lesser versions for wide scale military use is quite another. This organization is wealthy enough to buy patents for tech and seal them in a vault if or when it is deemed ok to release into the world. Or buying out corporations/ bankrupting them. Influential enough to make supertech disapear from military warehouses and forgotten. They may even have some super powered agents to do missions and enforce their will. Probably the biggest hurdle would be to keep this organization on the right track meaning their has to be a powerful leader that is also benevolent and wants to use the tech only for good.

 

I am thinking the leader is a time traveler from the future who is also long lived/immortal he knows that in the late 20th/early 21 century many new technologies were release upon the Earth without restraint and the Earth paid the price horribly. Despite his worry over tech destroying the world and even time itself he has made the trip to the past with the intent on changing the future, possibly creating paradoxes and certainly destroying his own alternate timeline. Perhaps his tampering with the timeline has created it's own problems such as an increase in the number of super powered people which may be as bad or worse than the technology rushed that doomed his own reality..only time will tell. He has since destroyed his own time machine to prevent the temptation to retroactively cange the timeline even further and possibly make matters worse.

 

By the way, you mentioned a Team Norfolk ? Is this campaign played in Norfolk, VA perhaps?

[mattingly]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

And Iron Man's origin -- getting bitten by a radioactive iron, and gaining the proportional strength and agility. That's just hard to swallow.

[megaplayboy]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

For my campaign I am thinking that there is a Secret society of powerful individuals that want to keep tech on a leash. They know that they cannot and perhaps should not stop all progress they just don't want Tech to leap beyond our civilization to deal with or thatd shift the balance of power. They are not always successful or else there would not be any Mechanon type villians , note that his existence is a strong argument in favor of controlling technical revolutions. They may monitor any new tech based heroes and villians and take measures to limit the impact of the tech on the world. A TonyStark type making a powered suit is one thing, him mass procuding lesser versions for wide scale military use is quite another. This organization is wealthy enough to buy patents for tech and seal them in a vault if or when it is deemed ok to release into the world. Or buying out corporations/ bankrupting them. Influential enough to make supertech disapear from military warehouses and forgotten. They may even have some super powered agents to do missions and enforce their will. Probably the biggest hurdle would be to keep this organization on the right track meaning their has to be a powerful leader that is also benevolent and wants to use the tech only for good.

 

I am thinking the leader is a time traveler from the future who is also long lived/immortal he knows that in the late 20th/early 21 century many new technologies were release upon the Earth without restraint and the Earth paid the price horribly. Despite his worry over tech destroying the world and even time itself he has made the trip to the past with the intent on changing the future, possibly creating paradoxes and certainly destroying his own alternate timeline. Perhaps his tampering with the timeline has created it's own problems such as an increase in the number of super powered people which may be as bad or worse than the technology rushed that doomed his own reality..only time will tell. He has since destroyed his own time machine to prevent the temptation to retroactively cange the timeline even further and possibly make matters worse.

 

By the way, you mentioned a Team Norfolk ? Is this campaign played in Norfolk, VA perhaps?

 

If I were an altruistic gadgeteer/inventor in that campaign and I found out this guy was the reason I couldn't use my know-how to reduce world hunger, poverty and disease, I'd probably never stop punching him in the face.

[kahuna's bro]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

For my campaign I am thinking that there is a Secret society of powerful individuals that want to keep tech on a leash. They know that they cannot and perhaps should not stop all progress they just don't want Tech to leap beyond our civilization to deal with or thatd shift the balance of power. They are not always successful or else there would not be any Mechanon type villians , note that his existence is a strong argument in favor of controlling technical revolutions. They may monitor any new tech based heroes and villians and take measures to limit the impact of the tech on the world. A TonyStark type making a powered suit is one thing, him mass procuding lesser versions for wide scale military use is quite another. This organization is wealthy enough to buy patents for tech and seal them in a vault if or when it is deemed ok to release into the world. Or buying out corporations/ bankrupting them. Influential enough to make supertech disapear from military warehouses and forgotten. They may even have some super powered agents to do missions and enforce their will. Probably the biggest hurdle would be to keep this organization on the right track meaning their has to be a powerful leader that is also benevolent and wants to use the tech only for good.

 

I am thinking the leader is a time traveler from the future who is also long lived/immortal he knows that in the late 20th/early 21 century many new technologies were release upon the Earth without restraint and the Earth paid the price horribly. Despite his worry over tech destroying the world and even time itself he has made the trip to the past with the intent on changing the future, possibly creating paradoxes and certainly destroying his own alternate timeline. Perhaps his tampering with the timeline has created it's own problems such as an increase in the number of super powered people which may be as bad or worse than the technology rushed that doomed his own reality..only time will tell. He has since destroyed his own time machine to prevent the temptation to retroactively cange the timeline even further and possibly make matters worse.

 

By the way, you mentioned a Team Norfolk ? Is this campaign played in Norfolk, VA perhaps?

an organization like that would make life interesting in steve's ICONS campaign

[wick]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

And Iron Man's origin -- getting bitten by a radioactive iron' date=' and gaining the proportional strength and agility. That's just hard to swallow.[/quote']

 

Even though the organization's leader is from the future, he does not have prescience. As soon as he started to interfere the history from that time line began to diverge from his own. The catalyst that drove Tony Stark to design and build his Iron Man suit may not have happened in his own timeline. Perhaps someone else made the armor or a dozen different variations. The leader would say, " That's funny I don't recall from my 20th/21st Century American History class there being Power armored developed until 2035 and by a group of Swedish scientist and it was definitely not as advanced as this Iron Man's armor." Starks Armor was developed privately and was made public after it was fully functional. The Leader has to find out about technological break throughs the old fashioned way..i.e. spies, news, informants, or sometimes from his history etc... Also, the history that he was taught remains the same even as his actions are causing those same books to be rewritten.

 

He may know some individuals and events but his active interference (schemes) as well as his passive interference ( side effects from ripping a hole in Time and traveling to an earlier Era) are changing history. I am runninng with a no Grandfather paradox..if he kills his grandfather he will be here still becuase he is now a part of the timeline and the present, but it will cause a strain on reality that can have unforseen consequences like more super beings are showing up than what he learned about in history. And if he killed his grandfather and was able to go back to the future he would discover a world where his parents and himself never existed.

[Nuclear Fridge]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

High-Tech Enemies covers a lot of this - there's an outline in the back called 'The Sci-Tech War' in which a secret conflict between various factions is going on. They're all out to steal/confiscate/control super-advanced designs and discoveries; the premise being that if the police dept. in Podunk, Nebraska, has access to blaster weapons, then blaster weapons are no longer cutting-edge & desirable toys. There's one group - Cy Force I think - in the book that's led by a self-appointed messiah out to save the world. He knows he's the best choice to decide how super tech is doled out to the unwashed masses...

...Hmm. Sounds weirdly familiar...

[Greywind]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

And Iron Man's origin -- getting bitten by a radioactive iron' date=' and gaining the proportional strength and agility. That's just hard to swallow.[/quote']But he does wonders owning that little Chinese Laundry...

[Egyptoid]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

>>> that if the police dept. in Podunk, Nebraska, has access to blaster weapons . . .

 

Hmmm. might have to address that in the USA-5O

[clsage]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

By the way, you mentioned a Team Norfolk ? Is this campaign played in Norfolk, VA perhaps?

 

No, the actual playing group was in the mid-central region of IL (Decatur to be exact...). The name "Team Norfolk" derives from the fact that the characters in the campaign all begin their activities in and around Norfolk, VA. Long story short, I had some inspiration(s) a few years back while working in Norfolk and, when the opportunity to run a campaign arose I combined them with some other concepts from the back burners of my brain and voila' the scenario came to be. I suppose that I should actually call the group "Team Corona" since that ties into the organization which was responsible for their powers but I just liked the sound of "Team Norfolk" better....

 

I discuss a bit about the campaign and such in my blog here on the Hero forums

( http://www.herogames.com/forums/blog.php/3308-clsage ) and in my Yahoo group "Corona Research Group" ( http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/CoronaResearchGroup/ )...Feel free to take a look.

 

-Carl-

[mattingly]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

But he does wonders owning that little Chinese Laundry...

Iron Man, Iron Man

Does whatever an iron can

Presses shirts, squashes ants

Puts the crease in your pants

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

Forget where I heard this one, but I got i from somewhere

 

Iron Man, Iron Man

Does whatever an iron can

Presses pants, any size

Gets those pleats just in line

[wick]

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes

 

High-Tech Enemies covers a lot of this - there's an outline in the back called 'The Sci-Tech War' in which a secret conflict between various factions is going on. They're all out to steal/confiscate/control super-advanced designs and discoveries; the premise being that if the police dept. in Podunk' date=' Nebraska, has access to blaster weapons, then blaster weapons are no longer cutting-edge & desirable toys. There's one group - Cy Force I think - in the book that's led by a self-appointed messiah out to save the world. He [i']knows[/i] he's the best choice to decide how super tech is doled out to the unwashed masses...

...Hmm. Sounds weirdly familiar...

 

....My wife and I are from Nebraska.........

 

I thought up the whole idea on my own becuase I want my campaign to o follow real world type repercussions. Super heroes/villians are pretty new with the precedence of a few costumed (heroic level) heroes/villians before that, say around the mid 40's to 50's. A gap of a few decades with a smattering of heros showing up and then in the mid 90's the first "Supers" make their appearence but only a few at first with more showing up over the years. That way the Age of Superheros is still pretty new to the world but the PC's don't have to be the ones leading the way in changing the world.