Chapter 1: January 22, 2007

One of the more entertaining exercises in futility to be commonly found these days is the process of eating dinner in a bar.

High-backed barstools make it look inviting. Come, sit, they say in the silent language of burnished, hand-lathed cherrywood from Cost Plus. This is not just a bar, you understand, it is in fact a bar and GRILL. There is more to do here than wax nostalgic to an indifferent bartender, more to eat than month-old novelty pretzels shaped like Santa hats. Viva La Eighties loves you more than your mother ever could. This is a lie that barstools practice all their lives on everyone who meets them. It is the furniture equivalent of an angler fish’s glowing lure.

A diner stool is always honest. You’re not here for the atmosphere, they say, in a cracked leather voice with dirty cotton batting bulging through. Sure, we put a jukebox in the corner and a clock with Fonzie’s face over the door, but you’re not here to pretend it’s the fifties; you’re here because Ysidro, the overnight cook, cares more about serving you an inexpensive but tasty chicken-fried steak than your congressman cares about keeping drugs out of elementary schools. Hunch over the plate and don’t look up from that glorious mess until your waitress asks you if you feel like some pie.

Liane knew, as soon as she sat down in it, that the barstool had lied to her. Again.

The bartender, shaven-headed and lanky, looked like a portrait of Ebenezer Scrooge as a young man. He took down a shot glass for her without being asked, hovering his fizzy-gun over it as he waited for her order. When it became clear she was asking for food, his expression changed from professional indifference to acute personal disgust. He grabbed the glass back and fairly hurled it into the dishwasher rack. Apparently anything the bartender touched had to be cleaned afterward, whether it was used or not. Liane had actually intended to ask for a Coke, but now felt like she’d be imposing on the bartender’s personal time. This was, of course, exactly the impression he wanted to give, but you don’t call someone on their douchebaggery when they’re holding a carbonated water pistol.

Maybe this was her own fault for being so hesitant to drink in legitimately sleazy bars.

Perhaps it was time to experiment in that department? This town had to have an actual underworld somewhere– a place to go alone, speak to no one, load your empty stomach with depressants, and eventually slump over your beer and allow the sleaze to grow over you like moss.

Any sleaze to be found in Viva La Eighties was antique, fully intentional, and scrubbed clean with corporate sanitizers. The neon sign that would say “No Dirty Dancing Please” if the artistically broken word “No” had been actual neon lighting and not colored plastic. The wall with a monochrome picture of Ronald Reagan’s face blown up as tall as a refrigerator, with sunglasses and a word balloon saying “Yo!” stenciled on in day-glo green spraypaint. A roller-skating waitress wearing a pre-distressed Mr. T belly shirt.

Liane looked at the neon lights at the windows. Awesome, they said backwards. Gnarly. Radical. Outrageous. All of these words had existed in dictionaries since the turn of the 20^th century, but now they had become artifactual icons of a decade. The youngest word of the lot was probably Cowabunga, and she knew for a fact that Cookie Monster had been saying that in the seventies.

Liane had been only a child in the 1980s, but she felt much the same way here, she imagined, as Edward Teach and William Kidd might have felt upon boarding the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride. Someone had taken the world they lived in and remembered, caricatured it into abstraction, and was selling it back to them at a tidy profit, plus a bonus from Coca-Cola for including their latest and lowest-calorie product in their re-imagining of strangers’ childhoods.

To Liane, the 80s was sun and sandboxes, daycare and dandelions, Superman, Spider-Man, and Superfudge. It was laughing at anything, crying at nothing, hitting people and getting hit by people and everyone going to the principal’s office. It was a childhood like anyone else’s from the previous generation or the next, and much of what was celebrated at this bar was things she had at the time considered none of her business. It was not a Dance Dance Revolution machine burbling a techno remix of the theme from Tim Burton’s Batman. It certainly wasn’t a 52-inch plasma TV with an average-looking Asian-American man serving as muted commentator on a football game from earlier in the day, his words spilling into alphabet soup at the bottom of the screen as the closed-captioners struggle to keep up. And it definitely wasn’t a plate of dry, spottily reheated buffalo wings and icy celery for $11.50.

The bartender gave Liane a surly look as he handed over her meal. I have real customers to serve, so be quiet and eat this microwaved garbage we sell at a loss while I make an actual profit by pouring two beers, he seemed to be saying. And don’t let me hear you ask for Christmas off again, Cratchit. She hadn’t had a meal served to her this grudgingly since fifth grade, when a friend invited her over for dinner without telling the parents to set an extra place. It turned out to be a very bitter lasagna.

Liane turned her chair around to peoplewatch as she ate, putting the plate on her lap to protect it from sullen bartender spittle. Immediately her mistake in judgment snapped into focus. She hadn’t noticed it before because she was too intent on the wait for her meal, but now it was all too clear.

For one thing, even at 27 she was probably the youngest person in the room. The other patrons were all office ladies and drones in their forties and fifties, some equipped with suspenders in a Wall Street homage, some equipped with paunches in homage to nothing but their own advancing age. An argument could be made that, even coming up on thirty, Liane was still in her prime, but this bar and grill catered to those who wanted to relive primes that had come and gone. Come to Viva La Eighties and be twenty-five again!

The other side of her mistake was in coming alone. It was apparent from the tones of the various conversations that everyone here was in a party. This was no singles bar. There was no mingling, only loud laughter erupting randomly from the various tables as beloved and time-worn in-jokes came up once again. There was no time to meet some lonely person who wanted to know what was so funny; if she doesn’t know already, she’s not one of us and we have no use for her, right? The only people we have time with are people we see every single day at work and are specifically avoiding our families in order to see them even more today!

Liane glumly dipped one of her chicken wings into the tub of syrupy bleu cheese dressing that had come with it, and watched most of the sauce come away with the wing only to drizzle itself across the front of her new hoodie on its way up to her mouth. “Shit!” she hissed under her breath.

From the back corner of the room, someone heard her.

A man who was silhouetted by the UV light illuminating the exit door behind him was approaching her now, focused on her. She turned her head to meet his eyes just as they were opening for what seemed like the first time. It made her wonder if she should apologize for waking him up. It seemed ridiculous to assume that he’d heard her, but thinking back she realized that she’d actually heard him hear her, which was not only equally ridiculous but also very confusing to write and spell, so she hoped it would turn out to be a misunderstanding. Her journal was poorly spelled enough already.

Anyway, we’ve got way too much food. We also have way too many cookbooks. My mom was part of a cookbooks-by-mail club for years and only recently has their flow begun to stem. We have cookbooks for all sorts of awesome things; Spanish food, African food, one-pot meals, three-ingredient meals, homemade versions of restaurant favorites, and quite a few books about appreciating garlic. Oddly enough, while scouring our bookcases, I only found one book that seemed to deal with leftovers:

After Man: A Zoology of the Future is a rather cryptic title for a cookbook… I’m guessing that it’s short for “After Man Leaves The Table,” or else it might be a sequel to To Serve Man.

This book has a very interesting variety of meat dishes; it doesn’t seem to have much of a vegetarian bent, although there’s a lot of mention of the eventual ‘decline of the carnivore’. Perhaps it’s an eat-meat-drink-milk-and-be-merry sort of sentiment? Here are the dishes that looked the most appealing to me.

Red Meat

Rabbuck

I’m sure we’ve all seen that classic Warner Bros. cartoon, “Louis Pasteur Meets The Tasmanian Devil”. Some of us can even recite the famous “breed a bigger rabbit” exchange from memory… *coughcoughloser* I’m sure the director of that cartoon would be happy to see the progress we have made in that department. The common rabbuck is the size, shape, and flavor of the deer that game hunters and certain farmers enjoyed as venison, with a new pork-like tenderness borne of its rabbit heritage.

Serving Suggestion: If you’re new to the rabbuck experience, I’d suggest starting with some of the delicious Ontario rabbuck sausage, which is equally delicious for breakfast or dinner. Their sinewy haunches are best enjoyed in soups and stews, but rabbuck ribs and chops are personal favorites of mine.

Hornhead

We owe so much to the hornhead, which serves us in as many ways as the extinct plains buffalo (or “bison” as it was called then) served the early American Indians. Every part of these magnificent animals can be harvested for our use; millions of the opulent horn structures are consumed by the Jell-O company alone, for example. Of course, families who raise them at home pay tribute to the animal by keeping each horned skull on display after butchering. I myself spent last Thanksgiving in a mountain hotel whose light fixtures and pillars were decorated with hundreds of such skulls, each with the individual animal’s name engraved on a plaque between the horns.

Serving Suggestion: Hornhead flesh, like that of the extinct hog, has several names. Seto is the finest cuts from the belly, best eaten “blue” and cold in the center. The legs are typically spiral-cut and sold as lunch meat, often called ’seto’ to trumpet its quality, but the culinary name of those cuts is murfreesboro. Some gourmets will tell you that to grind hornhead meat is tantamount to wasting good food, but my mother makes an terrific hornhead meatloaf using just fresno, which is minced offal and neck meat, and Raisin Bran with the raisins picked out. (Picking out the raisins was always my responsibility as a kid.)

White Meat

Flightless Guinea Fowl

Could there ever be a Thanksgiving again if not for the flightless fowl? This meaty and economical Australian import sells well all year, but in November their sales more than quintuple– which means that one-third of American homes have a whole 200-pound guinea fowl to themselves. This can be trouble for farmers, who frequently suffer lacerations from the flightless fowl’s frequent challenges of dominance in the barnyard; this gave rise to using “Thanksgivings” as a slang term for a noticeable scar.

Serving suggestion: Let’s get this out of the way right now: no, the inflatable wattle has no miraculous health benefits, and will not cure your impotence, purge your body thetans, or increase your midichlorian count. And it doesn’t make a difference whether the wattle was intact or punctured when the bird was butchered, either. Get with the times, people! What do you think this is, 2009?

Oh, yeah, servings. Roast guinea fowl breast and drumsticks are an absolute must for the holidays, but if you insist on roasting a whole one, be sure to marinate it for 24 hours in a citrus brine first, and never rent a cut-rate guinea fowl oven without air convection. Your bird’s limbs will be charred to a crisp, while its breast and thighs will be so raw they’ll practically crow when you poke them. Alternately, you can use a professional pizza oven if you butterfly the fowl first: it’s a tremendous effort but I’ve had wonderfully tender and flaky results with this technique.

Fatsnake

I can hear all the kids in the audience cheering at the appearance of the fatsnake– and a lot of parents groaning, “Again?” Truly the macaroni and cheese of our time, fatsnake’s mild (some might even say bland) flavor has made it one of the favorites of the younger set.  Though gourmets may turn up their noses, this inobtrusive flavor is one of the meat’s best strengths. One of its great disadvantages, though, is the debilitating poison it carries to make up for its comically slow slither; about 10 unwary farm employees are poisoned a year. In previous decades fatsnakes were defanged for farming, but these snakes didn’t fatten very well and the process was abandoned. So when you sit down to dinner, remember the farmers– many of them are losing limbs, and sometimes their lives, for your favorite treat!

Serving Suggestion: Of course kids across the country practically live on fatsnake, enjoying ’snake fingers’ cut from the meaty abdomen in the school cafeteria, then hitting the deli after school for fatsnake jerky– and you know how fierce the rivalries can be between Southern US communities over who makes the best and hottest fatsnake riblets. If you’d like a less ‘fast food’ approach to this common meat next time you bring a fatsnake home from CostCo, try fatsnake sashimi in a California roll– as many assert, it tastes even better cold.

Wild Game

Desert Leaper

When the desert leaper was reported as a species, the ghosts of thousands of decadent pre-millennial Romans must have slapped their ethereal heads in disappointment. Ancient Rome took great care in fattening dormice for their most hedonistic parties– and now, some million years later, they’ve become a race of man-sized, slow-moving beasts that intentionally fatten themselves as a matter of survival. Looks like you really missed the party, huh Cassius? I’ll bet knowing we’re eating these is even worse torture than having Satan chew on you forever. Of course, you probably wish you’d had the rifles we shoot these with, too.

Serving suggestion: For one thing, you can’t eat a leaper “on the cob”. Being wild game, the desert leaper tastes best when it’s gamey, so you’ll want to let it hang a while until it’s just starting to turn. The most desired part is naturally the rich, marbled tail, but the thighs and belly shouldn’t be discounted either. In a seaside lodge in Arizona, I was once served leaper tri-tip, seasoned with Santa Maria. That, and the light cerveza I enjoyed with it, was one of the most delightful dining experiences I’ve ever had.

Meaching

I babble a lot about my Danish heritage, but the idea of living where meaching are plentiful makes me wish I were Norwegian. These little fjord-dwelling bonbons are always the first thing I head to at a Lutheran plate lunch. One of Norway’s most beloved Christmas traditions is the ‘meachygge,’ which is a sort of naturally occurring advent calendar– when a developing meaching nest is spotted, they watch it grow until Christmas Eve, whereupon the head of the family will break into it with an axe, his whole family standing in a circle with baskets to catch the fleeing meachings and lesser ptarmigans. I would love to be a part of this someday.

Serving suggestion: I hate to talk about this because it’s so bad for you, but one of my guilty pleasures is the meach fry– whole deboned meaching, buckwheat battered and deep-fried. If you’re not trying to declare war on your heart, the traditional Scandinavian recipes for braised, stewed, and boiled meaching are much healthier. A favorite fusion cuisine in Denmark is to serve spaghetti and quartered boneless meaching, or “meachballs”.

One more thing, have you ever heard of a ‘guineabuckfatching’? Some enterprising chef in Louisiana came up with the idea of stuffing a fatsnake with braised meachings, then stuffing that into a young boneless rabbuck, then stuffing that into a boneless guinea fowl. Apparently it takes nearly 24 consecutive hours to prepare, but when you’re done you can just slice it like pie and serve it up! I’m debating whether to just order one online, or attempt to make one myself when I next have a free week and more meat on my hands than I know what to do with.

Man, I really need to stop watching Food Network. In The Future.

Had enough of me being cruel to nonexistent animals?
If not, check out my Youtube review of Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals!

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Some of my admittedly few readers may have asked, where did the name The Hungry Reader come from? It wasn’t my original choice: in the year or so that I daydreamed about this blog before starting it, I was calling it “Dandelion Library,” after a series of books with a unique two-in-one structure. Eventually that title was abandoned, it sounded a little wimpy. I’d like to think that The Hungry Reader is a bit sharper-edged than that, despite my vague attempt to keep the articles clean enough for you to share with kids who may be reading these books for the first time.

Then the name “The Hungry Reader” struck me out of nowhere like a lawn dart to the center of memory.

Everybuggy who’s anybuggy has heard of Cricket Magazine. If you were a kid with a taste for literature in the last 30 years, you’ve probably either had a subscription or read copies in one of your classrooms. The late Lloyd Alexander, an accomplished author best known for his Chronicles of Prydain series (which are themselves best known for inspiring Disney’s least successful feature), was an important player in the creation of Cricket, and a contributor of words and art until his death in 2007.

1989 was the “Year of the Young Reader,” or at least it was heralded as so in the pages of Cricket. I never heard anything about it outside of the magazine… did anyone participate in something related to this in school? Either way, in April of 89, Cricket ran a contest in celebration, the winners of which would receive full Encyclopedia Brittanica sets (YEE-HAW!) and a trip to Washington D.C. to visit the museums. It was an essay contest: write 350 words about how books have changed your life. Lloyd Alexander was the judge of this contest, but just to demonstrate his qualifications, he wrote an entry of his own.

His essay was called, “A Hungry Reader”.

Usually I just clip out a few paragraphs to comment on, but this is a special case. With apologies to Cricket and much respect to Mr. Alexander, I’m reposting the entire essay here, complete with buggy cartoons by Jean Gralley.

Thanks for the inspiration, Lloyd.

Like all adults who are not pod people, I was filled with rage upon seeing the trailers for that film. Not just because it used hundreds of millions of dollars worth of CGI to create legions of my least favorite domestic animal in the middle of an Incan temple (how did they get to Peru?), performing the whitest rap since Bea Arthur sang “Do The Urkel”, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mexican-Americans need to be oppressed much harder so they’ll stop embracing their most negative stereotypes. It was more than that.

It was that the animation was gorgeous.

The models themselves weren’t that impressive, but there’s this one scene where a dog jumps up in front of the camera and yells CHA-WA-WA~! and it just looks like pure Muppet. We’ve brought CGI to the point where we can actually simulating having a human hand inside an animal’s head. Why are we wasting this technology on such expensive ephemeral garbage when there are so many wonderful talking animal stories to be brought to life? Where’s my Cricket in Times Square movie? What about The Great Cheese Conspiracy? Could The Eleventh Hour be done justice as a film? And what about… uh… what about…

…Oh my.

Here’s one of the all-time classics of my generation, and probably the generations preceding and following as well. It almost seems superfluous to describe this book since just about everyone I ever knew seemed to have read it, not to mention that its title gives you an excellent idea of what goes down in the book in general. If you’re a new reader or a Martian, though, I’ll hold your tentacle and walk you through it.

The Monroe family, mom and dad and two boys, have two pets, Chester the cat and Harold the dog (who is also the narrator). One night they come home with a shoebox full of dirt containing a tiny, quivering bunny, whom they name ‘Bunnicula’ because they found him in one of the theater seats at a Dracula movie. This name turns out to be quite appropriate, to Chester’s horror and Harold’s glib indifference.

There are about seven Bunnicula books, and they have a certain formula. Harold and Chester’s comfortable pet lives are interrupted by a change in their situation, and Chester, a hungry reader himself with an overactive imagination, immediately places the blame on the supernatural. Harold dubiously follows him in his efforts to defeat the perceived menace, only to find that there is no actual menace and it was just the humans being unpredictable as usual. In later books they’re joined by Howie, a dachshund puppy who believes everything Chester says, but doesn’t necessarily take it seriously. This is important because Chester is always, always wrong.

Except the first time. Chester is absolutely right in his assertion that Bunnicula is a vampire. However, he also assumes Bunnicula is a threat to the members of the animal kingdom in the house, and there’s never any suggestion of that from his behavior. Bunnicula is a vegetarian vampire: when everyone’s gone to sleep, he mists his way through the cage and goes to the fridge to find victims in the crisper drawer. He drains the juice from them and hops back to bed, leaving ghost-white vegetable jerky in his wake.

How do you thwart a vegetarian vampire? According to Chester, it’s simple; pound a steak through his heart. Har har.

Bunnicula is the first example I’ve seen of the trope of vegetarian monsters, but it’s far from the last. One of the very best was the 2006 film Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, featuring Wallace and Gromit. Its creators referred to it as “the world’s first vegetarian horror film,” and they’re technically correct in that it’s the first  one released worldwide. If you want the very first one ever made, though, look no further than this unreleased 1982 Hammer featurette…

It’s A Monster Party!, not to be confused with Monster Party, is a cute little story from England about monsters… kind of. It’s never made very clear whether the title refers to the size of the party or its guests, who are only referred to as ‘creatures’ in collective. Let’s look at some of the beasts who were invited to this party and see if we can classify them taxonomically…

Jloop: An intelligent species that seems to have sprung from an ancestral species filling the niche of Earth’s elephants, even featuring the same versatile trunk adaption to the nose. Their only really monstrous characteristic is the bright purple fur, which may indicate that they are toxic and should not be eaten.

Vrink: These seemingly mammalian creatures have found a niche very similar to that of the Emperor penguins of Earth. Their broad, flat feet and flippery, Bubs-like manipulatory appendages suggest they may have started out as pinnipeds. One unique feature is the swollen bulb-like proboscis; this may be a secondary sex characteristic, or perhaps this blood-filled appendage could used to melt through ice, like the Hothead of biology folklore.

Twisum: These delightfully cuddly-looking creatures resemble nothing so much as an anthropomorphic pit bull, with a thin coat of white down that their pink skin shines through. Their short and stocky appearance belies a world with high gravity, and yet they are obviously aerial creatures with fantastically small wings. This suggests a complex evolutionary chain wherein the Twisums migrated between several environments before finding one where their near-vestigial wings could find purchase in the atmosphere.

Grollig: A fascinating example of alternate paths to sapience, Grolligs are arboreal beings that resemble a constricting snake in their shape, but their vestigial fur patterns and skull structure actually indicate a feline ancestry, a race of big cats that gave up their legs for a lower-metabolism existence. The jaunty Stan Marsh hats they wear indicate that they can still use tools, so perhaps the antennalike whiskers on their brows have become articulated manipulators.

And then there’s our main characters, who are not quite as remarkable in their setup. Blot (the yellow one) seems to be a relative of the Giant Purple Snorklewacker, but with rectangular Jhonen Vasquez eyes and a rather self-pitying attitude. His little blue friend Og, who could have auditioned for a Sega game called “Sonic The Rhinoceros”, is much more positive and upbeat, so there’s already a cute sort of Ernie & Bert character dynamic between the two. Blot and Og are the only two residents of their town, so it’s called Blogsville. Why wasn’t Wordpress called Blogsville?

For a complete lack of anything to do, Blot and Og start daydreaming about a throwing a fantastic party:

The sky will be pink! And filled with guitars!
Streamers and hooplas will loop over the stars!
Whojammacallits and Widjammifoos
will zoom round on clouds playing koogabazoos.

The thought so delights them that they start writing invitations with this description and releasing them via helium balloon. It’s just a way to kill an afternoon, there’s no chance that anyone will show up, is there? (Here’s a hint, go back and look at the different monsters’ profile pictures again.)

Oops. Apparently their bleak little planet was more accessible than they’d thought, and dozens of species they’ve never seen before show up at their address, intent on enjoying pink skies, flying guitars, yellow moons, green clovers and the like. They are understandably a bit put out at having been promised a smorgasbord and arriving instead to find plates of famine.

Oh boy! Now the monsters are going to FIGHT! Right?

Well, no. You can guess from the title of the story that the party goes on after all– it would be kind of a downer to have everyone go home sad. Wise little Og is so dazzled by the many shapes and colors of the monsters who’ve arrived, that he exclaims that seeing them all is more amazing than any of the things they promised in the invitation; the monsters look at each other and go, “hey, yeah!” Luckily, quite a few of them brought potluck dishes and musical instruments of their own, so partying commences!

Also, my copy was apparently once owned by kids named Eva and Aa.

You know what month it is? It’s October! And you know what THAT means!

…You don’t?

Oh wait, this is the first year, isn’t it. Well, we’ll start the tradition now.

The Hungry Reader Presents: OctOGREfest!

By borrowing and slightly modifying a Piers Anthony pun, we’re kicking off a new tradition. Because October is the month of the supernatural, this month we are doing fantasy, much like Sci-Fi July. Unlike Sci-Fi July, however, non-fantasy books will also be featured. What element will they have in common? Well, what book did I just review today? What’s the one thing I love even more than robots?

MONSTERS!

OctOgrefest is all about monsters! This means there’ll be a healthy dollop of Tolkienesque ‘hard fantasy’, but also spooky Halloween stuff, and maybe even some more Sesame Street. Stick around and we’ll have our own Monster Party!

Seriously. Get equipped with Procrastination Cracker.

Thus, in lieu of an actual post, I treat you to the kinds of things that happen in my head. It’s not a real book– but it’s a book I actually dreamed about, last night, and got up to copy down before I forgot it.

The Zombie Novel Dream

In my dream I read a novel that was given to me for my birthday by my mother when I was 25. It’s even inscribed by her on the title page, with a message about this being the best birthday ever because she intends to make up for a bad birthday last year, and how she promises all the fun I can handle after I get home from work. Amusing in retrospect, since I wasn’t working that year…

The title of this book is unclear, but it’s a hardcover novel with a glossy black cover, with text in a large sans-serif font. There’s some sort of glowing green trim, which I’m remembering as Wolverine-esque slash marks through the title and author’s name.

The novel is a suspense story about zombies. There are four principal characters, although three of them are inert for a large part of the story and their personalities are only implied. Their names weren’t clearly defined, so we shall use stand-in names: these are not the names used in the dream.

Mario: The main character, whom most of the action follows. Mario is a white man about age 25 or so (appropriately) who is, at the beginning of the story, the only person to have survived the zombie apocalypse intact. His problem is that the zombies know about him and where to find him, so he has to constantly be on the move from them: to complicate matters, he has three friends that he must protect from the zombies as well.

Luigi: A younger man than Mario, about 18, slimmer and prettier. Possibly Italian, or some other swarthy ethnicity. He’s actually a vampire, although he didn’t show any vampiric traits in the dream. They hadn’t met before the apocalypse, and he was inert when Mario first found him, but nevertheless Mario has fallen in love with him.

Toad: The biggest and heaviest of Mario’s three inert friends, Toad is a black man in early middle age who may be a scientist of some kind; he seemed to have invented the process that makes people go inert and thus zombie-resistant. In the movie that played out in my head he was very much in the Samuel L. Jackson character mold.

Peach: The lightest of Mario’s friends. She has some history with him and Toad, possibly professionally. I’m pretty sure that their ultimate destination was her house. She struck me as a sort of Joss Whedon butt-kicking supergirl– when not inert, of course.

The actual plot action follows Mario as he tries to not only escape from the zombies, but carry his three friends with him so he can wake them up. At the beginning of the story, all three of them are in a sort of stasis that makes them statue-like– hard, dense, and heavy. I don’t think they really were made of stone, there never seemed to be any danger of them breaking. There was at least one place where Mario used his friends as weapons against the zombies by pushing them over and having them fall on the zombies like dominos.

Mario and his friends are trying to either escape from or locate a particular room in an enormous castle.  Much of the suspense involves Mario trying to juggle his three statuelike friends; if he leaves them alone, the zombies will just pick them up and carry them back to their lair.

I’m not really sure what kind of zombies these were, they weren’t necessarily ‘living dead’ zombies, they didn’t leave gobbets of their own flesh when they walked, but they weren’t as fast as the new breed of Reaver / Rage Virus types. They were a bit more like Morlocks than either of those, so actually let’s call them Morlocks from here on. They were definitely into cannibalism and brain-eating, though.

Mario gets into many close calls while exploring the castle. Sometimes he saves his friends, sometimes they inadvertently save him. There’s at least one place where, in his attempt to escape from Morlocks, he knocks his friends off a ledge, then falls off himself, but somehow they’re positioned to catch him safely at the bottom. As stonelike as they are, it’s better  to land on them than on the floor.

The character relationships weren’t implied very well, and these parts may have been implied rather than shown in the dream: Mario actually doesn’t like Peach very much, but since she’s small and light it’s not much trouble to sprint up a flight of stairs with her inert statue. Toad, on the other hand, always ends up last to be picked up because he’s the heaviest: however, that also gives him a natural defense against Morlocks because it takes about four of them to pick him up. (Mario can pick him up himself, so this implies the Morlocks are kind of weak.) Luigi is in between them in weight, but he’s in a kind of awkward position to be carried around, unlike Toad and Peach who are just standing with arms folded. However, Mario always prioritizes his rescue first because he’s in love.

After many scrapes and spills, Mario manages to bring his three friends to a pink room that is apparently not on the Morlocks’ radar; they can get into it, they just don’t  know where he is while he’s in it. This is a nice, sunlit room with pink wallpaper, sort of like a hotel suite. This is where the other three leave their inert stage, for reasons I don’t know; it may have had a time limit, or the equipment to wake them up may be here.

Toad and Peach are suitably impressed that Mario went to all the trouble to get them here. They’re not exactly happy that they’re vulnerable to the Morlocks now, but this gives them an opportunity to start formulating an escape plan. There is in fact a happy ending for Mario and Luigi; it turns out Mario’s gaydar was spot on and Luigi now regards him as a knight in shining armor. Mario feels the same way about him, since more often than not it was the inert Luigi who knocked out the Morlocks to save him.

The actual ending isn’t as happy. Being holed up in this room for a long time takes its toll on the relationships, and as they begin to fight and bicker, the equipment to make them inert is broken. This is just as the Morlocks are finally figuring out where they are and breaking down the door. Mario and Luigi jump out the window, and it’s unknown whether they jumped to their deaths, or if they’re both vampires now and can fly away to escape. Toad and Peach are left to fight off the Morlocks, but Toad commits suicide, leaving Peach to fight alone. She says something like “Come on, you bastards” to the Morlocks, just as the story ends.

There is a certain kind of person who cannot see a forest for the trees with a given medium. If you mention a beautiful performance of Die Fledermaus you saw once, they assume you spent an evening watching morbidly obese lady Vikings shrieking in German. If you mention some powerful scene in a video game, like the death of Aerith or something similarly heartbreaking, their brain cuts straight to PAC-MAN FEVER!

These are the people who still associate superhero comics with POW! BAM! OOF!

Every year as you come out of that summer’s superhero blockbuster, you will hear the same conversation: LOL SUPERHEROES. Dude, I’d be Beerman! No, I’d be, like, the Human Bong! Cherise and Melissa would totally be Jailbait and Cocktease, am I right? WHOOO!

With Champions, these people can make their stupid joke characters a reality. Here are ten examples.

#10. Power Crusher

“Your strength makes me stronger, fool!”

Power Crusher is a violent, not-too-bright bully who grew up to be a villain-for-hire for VIPER, Champions’ answer to Cobra. This is what’s known as ’second-party’ villainy; it’s like being a sidekick, except more expendable.

What are Power Crusher’s abilities? He wears mechanical gauntlets that enable him to– I know what you’re thinking, CRUSH stuff, right? No, they let him sap other people’s energy! …So shouldn’t he be Sapper or Siphon or Bleeder or something like that? You’re not going to “crush” power by using it yourself, are you?

Not only is he a really boring character, and his name makes no sense, but he has probably the second dumbest-looking costume in the book. It looks bad enough rendered in black and white, with that sort of Masked Muscle / El Santo vibe that has never worked for wrestlers nor superfolk, but take special note of the coloration detail:

As Power Crusher, he wears a jet-black hood. His tunic is orange above, dark blue below with a purple stripe charged with a red gauntlet. His actual gauntlets are also red and crackle with yellow power. He wears brown trunks and boots, and light brown pants with white side stripes.

Count the colors in there; red, orange, yellow, blue, purple, light brown, dark brown, black, and white. Is BLINDING people also part of your superpower, Crusher? Why didn’t you call yourself ‘Roy G. Biv’? Or maybe ‘Beating Rainbow’? Or ‘Visible Fight Spectrum’!

#9: King Cobra

In the last one I mentioned VIPER, Champions’ prefabricated terrorism group. They’re led by the Supreme Serpent, have members with names like Copperhead and Asp… so they have a sort of snake theme going on. Then there’s King Cobra, who is the leader… of a rival group known as The Coil. One group of snake flavored bad guys wasn’t enough for Iron Crown Enterprises, I guess.

While we’re on the subject, another quick digression about my brother’s campaign: rather than use either of these properties in their game, the Vogue Vigilantes were instead faced with threats from ‘Black Flag,’ a shadowy terrorist organization who were so dangerous that they, and I quote, “made Cobra look like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon– and made VIPER look like something ripped off of some role-playing game.”

King Cobra is an extremely dangerous villain. He seeks world domination, and the transformation of all of humanity into monsters like himself. He has no regard for human life and sees all the world as not a stage, but an experimental lab. He is an arrogant megalomaniac with delusions of godhood, but for all his arrogance, he is neither stupid, nor blindly overconfident. He is a brilliant madman; there is nothing funny about King Cobra, and those who make jokes about him are grossly underestimating him.

“Nothing funny about King Cobra”? I got one word for you, book: loincloth.

That has to be the most defensively toned passage from this whole book. King Cobra is serious, you guys! Deadly serious! Stop laughing! He gets really mean when you laugh! You are SO underestimating my character! All right, that’s it, I’m giving him the power to tear up character sheets!

#8: Griffin

HAHAHAHA oh wait, wow, you were serious.

Griffin is yet another pimp serving out his time in prison who volunteered to be a lab rat in exchange for early parole. It’s really hard out there for a pimp.

The experiment was led by a rather unstable scientist who had an overly affectionate view of the Paleozoic epoch. He wanted to investigate human evolution by stripping away layers of genetic development, using drugs, radiation patterns, and the embryos of a baby bald eagle, which have a strong genetic resemblance to dinosaurs.

A scientist who believed humans evolved from dinosaurs? Where did he get his evolutionary biology degree, Bob Jones University?

Carlos emerged from the experiment as a functional birdman, a fierce and violent killer.

This is one of those origins that hints that something even cooler could have happened. Sure, he’s an eagleman and a raging killer, but he could have been a dinosaur man! Stupid scientist!

The Griffin is 6′ tall, 120 lbs (hollow boned) and has a twenty-five foot wingspan. He is covered in moderately short golden fur, his wings are a bright gold and his eyes are yellow.

Wait wait wait back up. FUR? You regress a man to an avian state and he gets covered in fur? And he grows a long lion’s tail too? Your origin completely fails to account for your leonine characteristics, Carlos. And this is Champions, it’s not like it would be hard. Just throw in something about using golden lion tamarin DNA as a stepping stone backward for human evolution or something– there, I did it for you.

#7: Gremlin

“What’s the matter little man? Bad luck? Guess there must be a Gremlin around here.”

For some reason, the female villains in Classic Enemies have a really dumb habit of dropping their own names in their quotes. There’s another one in this book called Ladybug (who escaped the lame list because she’s a Canadian supremacist, which is awesome), whose extremely forced-sounding quote is, “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to try to crush a Ladybug?” This doesn’t work in real comic book situations. “Did someone just fart, or is there an Invisible Woman around here?”

Anyway. The bio doesn’t really have a whole lot to say about Gremlin, instead going into detail about WITCH, the group she works for:

The WITCH organization is a loose alliance of a few radicals. They believe that it is morally just for violence to be used against the enemies of the women’s movement, be it bombing video stores that stock pornography, terrorizing prominent politicians that are seen as anti-women’s movement, etc. Legitimate women’s groups unanimously condemn WITCH, but WITCH doesn’t care. WITCH doesn’t employ magic; the name represents what its members believe is the pinnacle of radical feminism; witches are persecuted (as they believe they are) and are powerful enough to need no one but themselves (WITCH condemns anyone who doesn’t agree with everything they believe).

I was hesitant to quote that, because now I’m afraid I’ll get trackbacks from political blogs. Seriously, it sounds like someone from Fox News posting about the Hillary Clinton movement back in April.

As for Gremlin herself, take a good look at the artwork. It’s probably not immediately apparent to you, as it wasn’t to me, that she’s not wearing a costume; she’s actually supposed to have reptilian skin and horns and things. Apparently she can change at will into a slightly larger lizardlike form. That’s all well and good, but what power does it give her? Armor-piercing claws, extra endurance and damage resistance, stronger willpower(?) and flight. So… how does she use this in a campaign?

In combat, she likes to lure her opponent into an area laced with booby traps designed to impede as well as humiliate.

Wow, All that mutation and backstory and buildup, and it all leads up to “The Riddler, but a lady.”

Also I just realized she probably got the name from the movie Gremlins. She should have been a space down the list.

#6: Thok

Quote: None. Thok’s communication is a chitinous series of clicks. The Universal Translator talent might be used to understand him, but it would require telepathy to speak to him.

Thok here is an alien prince, of the “First Order of the Together,” who escaped from NASA and is running around on Earth trying to steal parts to build a spacecraft to get himself home. Gremlin, Thok, are any of these villains not based on Spielberg movies? Is there going to be an aquatic supervillain called The Great White whose taunt is “You’re going to need a bigger boat!”? A truck-themed guy named Duelist?

Thok’s real problem is laid out in a quote from the Game Mastering Champions campaign book:

For example, it would be difficult to run a satisfying hostage scene with characters who were designed as Saturday morning cartoon characters.

See, Thok is a pretty good character– for a science fiction campaign. Why is he in a supervillains book, though? How does a stranded alien who happens to have claws count as a supervillain? Does simply not knowing your way around the world qualify you for supervillainy now? And he can’t speak, so how do you start him monologuing about how he’s finally going to get home and leave this accursed mudball behind once and for all?

My theory is that this character may have originally been in a Sci-Fi Adventures campaign book, but he somehow got lumped into this one as padding. If I’m right, that’s pretty weak. If the Hero System is as malleable as you say and allows for this kind of character tradeoff, you should really give the players credit to come up with stranded alien stories on their own. Unless the Sci-Fi Hero campaign book had some sort of cultural exchange thing with a supervillain stranded in space and trying to get home… that’d actually be kind of cute.

#5: Mechassassin

Hey, looks like Hawkeye/Goliath decided to merge his two superhero identities, and also suck. This guy’s assness can be summed up in two quotes from his bio.

“When you’re the best, you can get away with murder.”

He has absolute contempt for most superheroes and supervillains, viewing them as “weirdos who don’t know how to put on their underwear.”

Mechassassin combines two of my least favorite things: Rob Liefield style characters of the 90s, and Anonymous. Here is someone who goes out to commit crimes, wearing an outfit that covers him in padding, belts, pouches, holsters, shields, armor, goggles, and God knows what’s underneath it all to keep him from chafing– and yet he mocks people who are wearing much more practical outfits, who frequently don’t need said outfits at all to do amazing things. Unlike him.

Mechassassin is a furry who goes to Something Awful to laugh at furries. Yiff in hell, Mechassassin.

#4: Shamrock

DERP

Shamrock is a supervillain who supports the Irish Republican Army. He has the proverbial luck o’ the Irish, and bare-knuckle boxing talents that can knock most common heroes cold. OK, we can build a character around that.

Now let’s have him operating in the United States… as a thief…?

He will usually return to Ireland to visit his mother on her birthday, and will try to steal a large present for her before he goes back home.

Hey, moron, if you’re trying to get support for the Cause, why don’t you try being a super hero? How is beating people up and taking their stuff going to make anyone more sympathetic to your nation’s problems? I never saw anyone get their purse snatched and say, “Oh, that poor minority, forced to steal to survive… I’m going to donate to his United College Fund.”

Much like Thok, I suspect that Shamrock was actually a player character that got shoehorned into a villain role– no one who was truly evil would wear an outfit that stupid.

#3: The Whip

“Feel my lash, you fools!”

Oh my god. Where to start?

The Whip is a highly skilled Gypsy whippersnapper. He’s actually a member of Eurostar, the same group Fiacho and Mentalla are in, but why they let him in is beyond me. Maybe they needed a buttmonkey.

Shamrock had a shamrock symbol on his chest. It looked dumb. The Whip… has a drawing of a whip on his costume that goes from his right hip to his chest. And it has a little cartoon whipcrack at the end. It looks like a happy snake wagging its tail. Plus there’s those jagged boots and gloves that seem to suggest shark fins or something. And the two-toned mask. And that freaky off-center cummerbund. NONE of it goes together. The Whip would be the first person to benefit from Queer Eye For The Straight Guy: Superpowered Terrorist Edition.

The book does not actually say what color his costume is. I’m going to assume it’s a day-glo pink and glossy navy blue, with a puke orange whip symbol.

To their credit, ICE recognized how dumb this character is, and in Champions 5th Edition he was completely overhauled, starting with his doofy name. Now he’s called Scourge. Better, I guess! Maybe Shamrock will be lucky and start dressing like a normal person too. Maybe he could call himself Shillelagh?

#1 and #2: Panda and Raccoon

I’ll bet you weren’t ready to see that.

Panda and Raccoon are a husband and wife villain team who… uh… You know what, I think this warrants the full backstory from the book.

Background: Two people. Two totally different backrounds. Opposites do attract. Panda and Raccoon.

Ginger Hobart (nee Bosworth) was born to a poor British family. They rejected her because of her mutated appearance, and left her at an orphanage. At least she’d be happy here, they thought, but she wasn’t. The other children taunted her endlessly because of her looks. As they got older, their attacks became more violent. One day she was physically beaten by a group of children, and her latent mental powers came to the surface. She lashed out and left her attackers motionless on the ground. Terrified by what she had done, Ginger fled.

She had good reason to flee. Her ununsual appearance had already brought her to the attention of PSI, the Parapsychological Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to gaining control of all of the world’s mental mutants. Unfortunately, they caught up with her. They took her in and trained her mentally and physically. She became one of their most effective agents, and called herself Panda, and for the first time in her life, Ginger was happy. Even if she had lost her free will …

PSI assigned Panda to travel to America and eliminate the newly discovered mutant Raccoon, who was helping VIPER destroy PSI’s Midwest operations. Panda tracked Raccoon down, but instead of killing him, she fell in love. Raccoon told her his life story while their romance blossomed.

Robin Hobart was born to a wealthy family. They gave their unusual son what love and attention they could, but they hid him from all contact with the outside world. Eventually, the prospect of lifelong confinement became too much for young Robin, and he ran away from home. VIPER found him and trained him to use the full capabilities of his mutant body, and he became one of their best operatives. Naturally, given his physical appearance, he called himself Raccoon.

Then VIPER found them together, and VIPER tried to eliminate Panda. Raccoon went berserk and slew many VIPER agents while Panda made her escape. Raccoon followed her, and they were married. The constant pursuit by VIPER and PSI has deepened their dependence on each other, and this dependence makes them a very effective team.

Ain’t love grand?

All right, let’s go down the list.

1. Panda and Raccoon. Now there’s two intimidating animals to build villains around. Maybe they’ll have a baby and name it Tapir.
2. “Opposites do attract.” Opposites? They’re both kemonomimi mutants, who else were they going to date? Is one a mannequin or something?
3. “The other children teased her endlessly because of her looks.” And yet she has a COM (comeliness) value of 20, equal to that of Mentalla, who was described as being exceedingly beautiful.
4. “…her latent mental powers came to the surface.” Because giant pandas are known for their skill at telekinesis.
5. “Even if she had lost her free will…” OOH, good use of the dramatic ellipsis there!
6. “They hid him from all contact with the outside world.” He has a TAIL. Those can easily be excised at a young age and usually are!
7. “Naturally, given his physical appearance, he called himself Raccoon.” Also, his half of the story is almost completely implied rather than told. I think we know who the author was more concerned with out of these two.
8. “Raccoon followed her, and they were married.” Because obviously a legal ceremony is the first thing that two fugitive members of terrorist organizations would be concerned with. And she took his name!
9. “This dependence makes them a very effective team.” Or maybe it simply makes them CODEPENDENT.
10. “Ain’t love grand?” Duh.

So what we’re left with is a pair of villains, who aren’t really villains, just victims who don’t play by the rules, and they successfully escaped, and… um… lived happily ever after.

On the Christmas morning that I received this book, I happened to open it to the Panda and Raccoon page, and my brother told me, “I swear to God I’ll kill you if you use those characters in your campaign.” A noble sentiment, to be sure, but how do you even work these characters into your campaign? Their story is all told! You can’t even retell it in your own words because the actual stats include stuff about their marriage! Why was this even in the book to begin with?

Oh. Nepotism. But of course.

That’s exactly what it felt like: either trying to get the wife in on the game, or her asking to be included because she feels left out when the boys have Champions night, but girls didn’t read superhero comics when Stacy Thain was a kid. Now I feel bad; why should I expect her to have an intrinsic knowledge of the elements that make successful entries in the superhero genre? She did her best, bless her heart, she was just trying to help make a fun game for everyone! It’s not her fault that the famous Glenn “Icestar” Thain is already so great at making up characters (like Shamrock) and she’s on her first try!

We forgive you, Stacy. Just please, before you make another Classic Enemy, pick up an issue of Thunderbolts or something, Like the book said, it’s hard to do a satisfying scene with characters designed for Saturday morning cartoons, and this duo looks like they popped right out of Inspector Gadget.

Champions was, and is, the premiere tabletop role-playing game with a superhero theme. I grew up watching my older brother play Champions 3rd and 4th edition with his friends in the mid-eighties, fascinated the whole way. I wanted to play, but was too young to really get the rules of the game. When I was old enough to comprehend it more fully, I could never pull together enough of a gang to have a real game with. My lifetime best friend now works for Wizards Of The Coast– he didn’t get into the Hero System the way I was able to.

Nevertheless, I had Champions stuff because it was too cool not to have. My brother got me my own copy of the 4th edition sourcebook one Christmas, and bundled a copy of Classic Enemies in with it just because it was Christmas. I pored over these vast tomes for what must be the equivalent of days and days by now; you’ll notice that this article has the ‘read to death’ tag, which only goes to books that I still keep around despite the fact that their spines have completely disintegrated, leaving them as mere piles of paper sheets with a loose cover serving as a sort of folder to keep them in.

These are the gods and monsters of my childhood. Let’s start with the gods.

#10: Bulldozer

“I realize that you may be wondering why I took up a life of crime? The only crime in my life is that the banks and jewelry stores don’t open up their vaults and invite me in to take what I want! Don’t they realize I’m Bulldozer! No one tells me what to do! Yeah! And if you’re some woman who thinks she’s the next best thing to Mata Hari, let me tell you something, get rid of that costume, and go home where you…”

Bulldozer is the weakest character in Classic Enemies. He’s one of maybe five characters in the book with no “Villain Bonus,” an extra pile of points tacked on to most of the characters to show how tough and successful they are. In the index in the back of the book, he is the only character graded with a single star, marking him as “very weak; laughable.” He’s built on 175 points, which is characterized as a “highly competent normal” in Champions– so technically he’s not even a real supervillain. Yet here he is, barely squeaking onto the ten BEST list. What did he do right? According to the book:

Consider Bulldozer’s goal to be the most obnoxious professional wrestling villain on Earth, and you’ll have an idea about Bulldozer’s personality.

Good lord, the pathos there. Bulldozer is a wrestling heel lost in a world of real superhumans. He’s the Champions equivalent of Mr. Satan. The poor guy probably thought he could rob a few banks, garner a few boos, then get the public’s sympathy by making a big face turn against Dr. Destroyer or something… but no. Instead he loses, and loses, and loses. And it just makes him sadder and sadder, which makes him meaner and meaner, which he takes out on women who would otherwise love him for being so pathetic.

Bulldozer is #10 because he so desperately needs a hug.

#9: Powerhouse

Powerhouse is the consummate jock. Having superpowers is just a game, another competition, and nothing more. He is opportunistic, arrogant, vain, and self-centered; those are his good points. Powerhouse doesn’t care about anything or anyone except himself; anyone who can do something he can’t do is “a loser” and anything he can’t do is “stupid”.

Another winning personality just like Bulldozer! This is one of those characters that you feel certain was created by a sniffling geek who’d just had mud kicked onto his brand new embroidered Christopher Cross jacket. You big goon athletes think you can push smart people like me around? Yeah, let’s see how you like getting beaten up by the Academic Decathlon of Justice in next Friday’s game! Ha!

Powerhouse is actually part of the Champions sourcebook, not Classic Enemies, but he makes the list because of his origin:

The drug was a mutagen that took his natural abilities and expanded them– along with his size. Eddie was now over twelve feet tall and weighed several tons. The drug also enabled him to fly. He would never compete in professional athletics again.

A drug that turns you into a flying giant– and they called that a failure?! Good lord, do you know what colleges would pay for such things to apply to all their athletes? Heck, I want some! Why do the spammers keep trying to sell me Viagra? I’d click any spyware button they showed me if it meant I could get my hands on some AeroGigante P or whatever…

#8: Hideous

“Mommy!” a little girl screamed. “He’s hideous! Make him go away!”
Ron stared into a store window. She was right! He was Hideous! But how can you make that go away?

Hideous can be best described as Hero System’s answer to the Grey Hulk. He’s a big strong angry guy who does grunt work for a few bucks here and there, and takes out his anger on the world by destroying beautiful things. He’s filled with resentment toward anything beautiful, because he was a really handsome guy, and knew it, before meeting the radiation accident that gave him superpowers and the most awful face in the Classic Enemies sourcebook. He wears a silver mask to prevent anyone from seeing his face, and according to the book:

If someone were to show Hideous affection and compassion, Hideous might be able to build a bond of trust. However, that person would have to look at Hideous’s true face without flinching (an Ego roll at -3 is required, -1 per level of Unluck that activates).

For those of you just joining us, an Ego roll is how you resist temptation or make personal sacrifice in the HERO system– think of it as “Save Vs. Ugly.” If you’re an average person, your Ego value is 10 points: that means that when you throw three dice, you have to get less than 11 pips on that throw to accomplish your goal. In this case, however, you get an automatic minus three, so a normal person has to get a throw of less than eight. Try it yourself; throw three dice and see how many times it comes up less than eight.

Now that is one fugly guy.

#7: Blowtorch

“Fire, the gift of the gods! Watch them, more beautiful than ballet, more powerful than opera, leaping from the stones as the building wastes away! From fire the universe was made, and into the fire it shall be destroyed! There is nothing more powerful than my beautiful flames!”

[...]

Other times, he’ll be in a very child-like mood, making silly rhymes and chains of nonsense words, occasionally breaking in with a rock n’ roll song about fire.

That got your attention, huh? Blowtorch is an arsonist-for-hire who feels that murderous infernos are their own reward. He dyes his hair flame red, wears flame red contact lenses, and wears a flamethrowing suit that is actually very fragile and will explode and burn him alive if the hull is ever breached. Blowtorch is probably well aware of this– and may in fact fantasize about it.

It’s reading things like this that make a twelve-year-old think, “What fun game mastering must be.” If you had a really good campaign, where everyone acted out all the characters as they played them, you would have to have characters like Blowtorch in it. Just imagine a bunch of college guys losing their breath with laughter as their GM makes up a rock song about fire in a high squeaky Blowtorch voice, air-guitaring his way across the kitchen table as he rolls for damage. “SPARKY SPARKY WOO WOO YEAH!”

Would a character like Blowtorch ever show up in actual comic books? Parenting groups would bite right through their retainers…

#6: Mentalla

Guess what her powers are. Come on, guess. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Mentalla is a member of Eurostar, which is the only supervillain team in Classic Enemies that does not ultimately come across as kind of laughable. They have an excellent selection of powers, a bunch of good quips and talking points, and most importantly, they have a sympathetic cause; European unity. Sure, they’re trying to accomplish it through terrorism, but heck, they’re villains, right?

Let’s not present ourselves falsely; a major reason that Mentalla makes the list is that outfit. Seriously. There are about ten characters in the book who wear their initial as a symbol, and two more who actually have their names written right on them (Bulldozer [above] and Lazer [sic]). Mentalla is one of the only ones who really makes it work on a subtle level, not unlike Hawkeye’s H-shaped bandoliers. A lot of the costumes in this book are only at about the “Booster Gold” level, not really up to the Steve Ditko / Jack Kirby gold standard, but hers is easily up there with the best.

Also, there is her thought-provoking quote:

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Is she using her mental powers to make her enemies offer her cake?

#5: Halfjack

I know I just namedropped Jack Kirby in the last entry, but seriously, this guy is SUCH a Kirby character. He’d make a terrific Fantastic Four villain.

“Half of me is more handsome, more perfect than anything you could ever imagine.”

Halfjack’s origin includes a cameo from one Dr. Samuel Levy, who appears in some other villain’s backstories as well. The Halfjack story introduces him thusly:

But Dr. Levy wasn’t the type of doctor that heals people He was the type who plays with their anatomy.

OH GOD NO

He fed the mercenaries who brought Smith to his cyborg panthers, and looked on Jack Smith’s half-corpse with great interest.

Oh, you mean he augments their anatomies… OK, good, I was worried for a second there. Heh heh.

…Wait a minute, cyborg panthers?!

#4: Firewing

Firewing’s image graces the back of Classic Enemies, and for good reason; he’s easily the most impressive character in terms of sheer looks. Not a big fan of those falcon-headed boots, but the rest is pure Ditko.

Firewing is the only character besides Doctor Destroyer, to whom I’m fairly indifferent, who receives a two-page spread for their character sheet. His background is almost a novella in itself, telling the complex story of a disgraced alien gladiator’s search for absolution.

On the planet Malva, there is a rare stone much like a pearl that is reknowned for its luster. Long ago, the Malvans discovered that if one placed this pearl in a very hot fire, it would melt and produce a new stone. Nearly all of these new gems became charred, burnt and ugly, but one out of about ten thousand pearls would be transformed into a gem of exceeding beauty, the Firewing.

There is a legend on Malva that valiant men are like pearls, and that one day, a man would walk into the fire and himself become a Firewing. No ordinary man would dare submit himself to the furnace, so for many centuries, the legend went untested.

Firewing is the best villain for hungry readers who want a cool supervillain bedtime story.

#3: Fiacho

Look back at your past, Danar Nicole, and what do you see? A young Danish politician, handsome, idealistic, and eloquent? A man dedicated to world peace, eager to learn new cultures, mediate disputes, unite warring peoples, turn swords into plowshares. What do you see, Danar Nicole? The biggest fool who ever lived.

Fiacho is totally awesome for several reasons:

1. He’s the founder and leader of Eurostar, the previously mentioned terrorist group of European villains who basically serve as the evil opposite to the Planeteers.
2. He speaks nine languages, but his favorite is Esperanto.
3. He became a supervillain through, among other things, a self-inflicted injury.
4. He hates association football. I’ll bet he calls it “soccer” just to piss European heroes off.
5. He fills me with megalomaniacal Danish pride. If Europe refuses our hygge, we will hygge them!

Danar had tasted chocolate ants once. He didn’t know if they were red ants or black ants, but he was sure they tasted the same.

#2: The Black Paladin

Clearly, destiny had brought him back into the world at the right moment, when the powers of light shone brightly. There were new knights to battle, knights in armor of colorful skintight cloth, sorcerors of a new age. Superheroes. These knights would soon learn that the Black Paladin was the deadliest of foes.

An undead anachronism, the Black Paladin is like Firewing in that he has a specific code of conduct that may not always apply to how he interacts with the heroes. My brother and I both share a sort of reluctance toward crossing magical stuff over into superhero universes, but I’d make an exception for this guy, especially if there was some way to drive him insane by proving that his magic powers were just a form of technology too advanced for him to comprehend.

The thing about Black Paladin that suggests the most story ideas is this:

One of his cherished goals is the destruction of religion; he especially hates superheroes who openly espouse Christianity or ally themselves to churches.

I don’t know about you, but that would never have occurred to me as a kid. Christian superheroes? Real heroes, not just prefabricated ones like Bibleman? I guess there wasn’t a lot of talk about that in the comic books of the late eighties, but it’s silly to assume that just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Marvel Comics started touching on their heroes’ religious beliefs during the Infinity Crusade storyline or thereabouts, after all. Today I think it would be absolutely fascinating to run a campaign with a character with strong religious beliefs– whether or not they match your own.

Hmm. Let’s see, Black Paladin comes from England, wears armor, has full life support, and has a mace that comes back to him when he throws it…

COINCIDENCE?

#1: Mechanon

The first and greatest of the world-class Champions villains. Mechanon is, in my opinion, the best robot supervillain of all time; far superior to both Ultron and Brainiac, a darn sight better than Sigma, and above and beyond the class of Master Mold or Nimrod.

What makes Mechanon so awesome? He has a very simple and perfect origin:

Mechanon was a nearly unstoppable robot invented by a superhero group to protect their headquarters against supervillains. Unfortunately, a flaw in Mechanon’s programming made him pledge himself to the painful death of all organic life.

Whoa, stop right there. The painful death. Somehow, a failure to communicate the Three Laws managed to reassert itself in his head as a vow to not only kill all humans, but hurt them while you do it. That has to be the worst case of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” in programming history. At least he didn’t conclude he also needed to spit on living things and call them names while painfully killing them!

To guard against the unlikely event of his own demise, robotic factories have been planted all around the world. They are programmed to rebuild Mechanon with any improvements necessary to stop whatever destroyed him.

So basically if you kill him, he’ll kill you right back. That’s fair, right?

In my brother’s fascinating and long-running campaign, his group (the Vogue Vigilantes, named for their propensity toward black costumes) actually did manage to kill Mechanon, and these factories really did come online and rebuild him. However, the twist in the Vogues’ universe was that Mechanon was aware that he’d come back from the dead, and thus concluded he was in fact the second coming of Jesus Christ. I would have liked to have seen him meet up with Black Paladin in that mindset!

Ten awesome characters who make you want to sit down with your friends,  a bowl of Cheetos in one hand and a bowl of d6es in the other. Next time we’ll look at the ten characters who make that dusty Atari 5200 in the garage look strangely appealing by comparison….

Richard, you were a fine and talented man, and I come to praise you, not to bury you; but let’s be honest, the best word book ever is Little Monster’s Word Book. (coming soon).

Your word book is strange and confusing and presents a world of chaos and anarchy. Let me show you what I mean.

Here are some happy, playful anthropomorphic animals. They come in all different shapes and sizes, just like people! They have all kinds of different interests and occupations, just like people! You see, a world of talking animals really isn’t such a bad concept for children’s books– it gets across the idea of diversity without bludgeoning us over the head with an oar carved from your family tree.

Your typical English-speaking kid will encounter probably three or four ethnic groups not their own in everyday life. For me, a white Danish kid living in Fresno, I grew up identifying the major races as Mexican, Hmong, Armenian, African, and white; a Londoner kid, on the other hand, will probably see a lot less of the first three and instead include things like Pakistani, Rumanian, and, I dunno, Black Irish. The more specific you get about diversity, the less it applies to people who aren’t you. Having a community of talking animals makes a metaphor that kids grasp from a very early age.

This page of medical scenes includes a number of interesting animals; a lion doctor performs a physical on a small tiger, a brown bear dentist cleans the teeth of a little hippo boy, a walrus hygienist demonstrates proper tusk-brushing technique to a kitty who boasts no ivory. The hippo and walrus seem to be chosen for their facility at opening wide and having big teeth, respectively, but I don’t see a major reason for the other creatures in the panel to be what they are, apart from that it’s the bodies they were born with.

But now things start to get weird.

This two-page spread shows exactly what happens when you carry a world of talking animals to its logical conclusion; the metaphor completely breaks down. We just saw lions and bears performing general medicine and local-anesthetic surgery, fully clothed, and now here they are wallowing around naked and behind bars? Is that the little hippo boy in the right corner, submerged up to his neck and screaming for help? Where’s the little elephant’s tricycle and sailor suit?

Maybe this is just how things work in this specific page and next we’ll be back to normal. Like that weird scene in Maus where, confronted with actual cats and mice, the anthropomorphic cats and mice turn into Nazis in cat masks and Jews in mouse masks. Sometimes you have to stretch the metaphor a little for purposes of a lesson in words, right, Mr. Scarry?

Oops. Nuh-uh. Still in the world with no rules.

A page ago the lion and tiger were side by side in separate cages: now the tiger is serving as the ringmaster, collecting money and praise for objectifying his former fellow inmate. “Behold the African Lion! The most horrifying carnivore ever to stalk the veldt! (Psst! Harv! Play it up! Look scary, you’re a predator!)”

The elephant is defined as a ‘performing elephant’. OK, wait, we’ve seen elephants that wear clothes and go to kindergarten, and we’ve seen naked illiterate elephants in zoos. Does that mean that this is an actual ‘wild’ elephant that they’ve trained to put on a little tutu and pink panties and do a dance under the big top? Are there ‘civilized’ elephants in the festival seating, hooting and cheering for their less-evolved sister, or pelting her with peanuts when she flubs? Would there be a shameful scandal if it turned out the performing elephant was one of the humanoid ones and was taking home a check for pretending to be a trained Neanderthal?

I can’t even begin to explain the clown bear with a fully clothed pig boy on a leash. That’s like some horrible urban legend: a pig couple’s baby is kidnapped and never found, but years later they recognize him, dulled down to a nigh-feral state by abuse and lack of mental stimulation, being dragged around the stage in an ill-conceived clown act.

But the horror doesn’t end here…

Bacon.

She is looking RIGHT AT THE BACON.

And thinking, “You know what? Yeah! I want in on this!”

Maybe they look at it the way we would approach the serving of orangutan or gorilla meat…? Actually, no, there would still be an immense public outcry and backlash over any great ape being butchered. Yet these civilized pigs, who wear clothes and drive cars, are perfectly happy to eat their mute, helpless brethren… David Brin never dreamed that biological uplifting could be put to such callow ends. I’d love to shove this book in the face of a PETA activist. “See? The pigs don’t mind when pigs live in slaughterhouses and get mechanically inseminated! They think it’s just dandy!”

In closing, anthropomorphic animals are a swell way to introduce kids to diversity. Just make sure the line is never crossed. Neither you nor your kids want to find out how far down that rabbit hole goes.

]]> http://www.thehungryreader.com/?feed=rss2&p=216 http://www.thehungryreader.com/?p=215 http://www.thehungryreader.com/?p=215#comments Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:56:13 +0000 Krepta http://www.thehungryreader.com/?p=215 Another big break there between posts, largely due to being hospitalized for diabetic conditions thanks to too many Willy Wonka posts in a row. Anyway!

Going Down

On page 88 of a 163-page book, the adventure in space with the Great Glass Elevator comes to a crashing end, literally, as Mr. Wonka sends the Elevator back down to Earth at increasing speeds.

“Mr. Wonka!” he yelled above the noise. “What I don’t understand is why we’ve got to come down at such a terrific speed.”
“My dear boy,” Mr. Wonka answered, “if we don’t come down at a terrific speed, we’ll never burst our way back in through the roof of the factory. It’s not easy to punch a hole in a roof as strong as that.”
“But there’s a hole in it already!” said Charlie. “We made it when we came out.”
“Then we shall make another,” said Mr. Wonka. “Two holes are better than one. Any mouse will tell you that.”

Needless to say, they survive. Once the debris has been swept away and everyone’s gotten a look at the fantastic Chocolate Room that we visited in the first story, Mr. Wonka orders the three old people in bed up and out of bed.

Just as a reminder, the ones in bed are Grandma Josephine, Grandpa George, and Grandma Georgina, who is about to become a major character. In the 2005 film, Grandma Georgina was portrayed as rather addle-pated, but in this book she’s a cantankerous old Scrooge of a woman who is constantly yelling at Mr. Wonka and being selfish when miracles are handed out. And oh yes, miracles are definitely about to be handed out.

Wonka-Vite is a wonder drug invented by Mr. Wonka himself, the raw materials for which resemble a Chinese aphrodesiac recipe; the hoof of a manticore, the tail of a cockatrice, the whites of twelve eggs from a tree-squeak, and a one-ton block of high quality chocolate, just to name a few. Each pill takes 27 days to prepare, and he happens to have a bottle of twelve pills on him at that very moment. That’s a year’s worth of effort, yet he’s just passing them out like– well, like candy!

It should be noted that this segment of the story has more lampshade hangings than just about any other I’ve read.

“I handed him the pill. He looked at it nervously. I couldn’t blame him for being a bit jittery after what had happened to the other one hundred and thirty-one volunteers.”
“What had happened to them?” shouted Grandma Georgina. “Why don’t you answer the question instead of skidding around it on two wheels?”
“Who knows the way out of a rose?” said Mr. Wonka.

“Thus was Wonka-Vite invented,” said Mr. Wonka. “And thus it was made safe for all to use.”
“Why don’t you use it yourself, then?” said Grandma Georgina. “You told Charlie you were getting too old to run the factory, so why don’t you just take a couple of pills and get forty years younger? Tell me that?”
“Anyone can ask questions,” said Mr. Wonka. “It’s the answers that count. Now then, if the three of you in the bed would care to try a dose…”

If Mr. Wonka has a personal flaw, and no one will argue that he doesn’t, it’s that he recognizes that people won’t take good advice when they hear it, yet he is perfectly happy to let them learn things the hard way as long as he gave them fair warning and is technically in the right. He didn’t slap Violet Beauregarde in the back of the head to knock the gum out of her mouth, and he doesn’t stick around as the three old ones in bed divvy up 12 pills among themselves. Grandpa Joe (age 96 1/2) seems content to be the age he is, so the three in bed take the whole bottle, four pills each.

Each pill makes you twenty years younger. You see where this is going, right? Quick refresher:

• Grandpa George: Age 81.
• Grandma Josephine: Age 80 and three months.
• Grandma Georgina: Age 78.

OOPS. The bed full of screaming, incontinent old people is now full of screaming, incontinent babies– and yet quite a bit less full.

“My dear madam,” said Mr. Wonka. “If she was only seventy-eight and she took enough Wonka-Vite to make her eighty years younger, then naturally she’s vanished. She’s bitten off more than she could chew! She’s taken off more years than she had!”
“Explain yourself,” said Mrs. Bucket.
“Simple arithmetic,” said Mr. Wonka. “Subtract eighty from seventy-eight and what do you get?”
“Minus two!” said Charlie.
“Hooray!” said Mr. Bucket. “My mother-in-law’s minus two years old!”

A terrible accident to happen to an old woman, but Mr. Wonka has foreseen this difficulty; this is what happened to those other Oompa-Loompa volunteers, after all. Wonka-Vite has an antidote– it’s called Vita-Wonk, and it has the bizarre temporal effect of moving your birth date backwards in time. Mr. Wonka used it to rescue all his brave workers, but to do that you have to go to Minusland.

Charlie stood at the open door of the Elevator and stared into the swirling vapors. “This, he thought, is what hell must be like. Hell without heat. There was something unholy about it all, something unbelievably diabolical. It was all so deathly quiet, so desolate and empty. At the same time, the constant movement, the twisting and swirling of the misty vapors, gave one the feeling that some very powerful force, evil and malignant, was at work all around.

Minusland is the ‘waiting room’ where people who are not yet born must remain until their time comes; however, most of them never do because the rest of the population of Minusland is made up of Gnoolies, invisible arithmetical vampires that subtract and divide their victims in order to multiply.

Luckily, before any Gnoolies can sneak into the elevator, Charlie sees Grandma Georgina’s shade floating prone across the bow of the elevator, and Mr. Wonka pulls out his “Quick Henry the FLIT” spray gun and pumps her full of Vita-Wonk, which comes in liquid form. Just like that, she’s alive!

…Or is she?

Because it takes so much Vita-Wonk to soak a Minus like Grandma Georgina enough to take an effect, Mr. Wonka has inadvertently made her the oldest woman in the world at age 358, also making her a world record holder in that she has a daughter who’s only 40 or so. Her attitude has considerably mellowed with age– I like the ancient Georgina better than the merely-wrinkly one.

Thankfully, there’s a huge bottle of Wonka-Vite left over to cure her… my god, Willy, how many years did you spend boiling down elephant trunks and stuff to make all this? Mr. Wonka dissolves it all in a tumbler and pours it down the mummy’s throat, and now she has the very peculiar effect of her life flashing before her eyes as it gets shorter and shorter.

Every second now she was growing slightly less and less shriveled, becoming more and more lively. It was a marvelous thing to watch.
“Gettysburg!” she cried. “General Lee is on the run!”
And a few seconds later she let out a great wail of anguish and said, “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!”
“Who’s dead?” said Mr. Bucket, craning forward.
“Lincoln!” she wailed. “There goes the train…”
“She must have seen it!” said Charlie. “She must have been there!”
“She is there,” said Mr. Wonka. “At least she was a few seconds ago.”

All that fuss and excitement, and everyone ends up exactly the same age as they ever were. Wasted effort? Not really; it’s important to have an experience like that so you know what’s going to happen as an employee of the Willy Wonka chocolate factory. It’s important to expect the unexpected– a point driven home when the President’s helicopter lands outside!

Remember President Gilligrass from the first half of the book? He’s back, and he wants something from Mr Wonka.

Keep in mind– this is all happening on the same day that Charlie & The Chocolate Factory took place. No one has slept since the initial visit to the Factory or the visit to the Space Hotel or the escapade with Wonka-Vite. And now the President of the United States wants them to come see him.

It’s a good thing Mr. Dahl never got around to the third book in the series… it would probably have ended with Charlie’s underfed heart blowing out from the exhaustion of a single day.