Somebody back me up on this:

www.barnyardmovie.com

The main character is a male cow voiced by Kevin James (a lesser man would make the fat joke sitting on the tip of my tongue). It has an udder. Now, I'm no scientist, but on a list of things that boy cows don't have, I think I'd start with "milk-producing secondary sexual characteristics."

I want a bowler hat that looks like a cartoon bomb.

This is Bomb Vivant. He loves the good life and also blowing things up. He is what would happen if a young Benjamin Disraeli had a child with the Riddler.

He's going to be punched in the face on the next page of Inertia City Blues.

Get excited.

(Also on the newest page: another transparent homage to a better-regarded comic than my own! If you can't spot it, you're probably blind!)

I know good games. I'm a friend of good games. You, sir, are not a good game.

Say, you remember Operation: Galactic Storm? You know, when the Avengers interfered in the war between the Kree and the Shi'ar and there was a big bomb and like nine-tenths of the Kree empire got blown up? Well, if you didn't, that's as good as summary as any.

(Well, later, thanks to the crazy continuity machinations of Kurt Busiek, it turned out that Immortus was screwing with Iron Man's head and that's why he was such a dick for the duration of the story, but that's neither here nor there.)

Anyway, it turns out that Data East, the guys that made the fairly awesome Captain America and the Avengers arcade game, were so inspired by the story of interstellar war and giant green betentacled heads in jars that they made a game based on it.

A game that no one on earth remembers. Because it's terrible.

Since my incredibly bad luck means I can't manage to stealdownload working copies of good games, I end up with the cream of the crap. Strider 2? Won't work in a million years. Probably acts as some kind of virus, who knows? But The Avengers in Operation Galactic Storm? Works perfectly.

The game itself is a 2D fighter with 3D pretensions. You know the type: typical Street Fighter perspective, crappy-looking characters made not of attractive sprites but a polygon count so low a three year old could give you an accurate assessment as to their number by holding up one hand and yelling "this many!" Apparently, it was released to something like four arcades in the entire world, making it like a holy grail of crap. The wrong Cup of Christ; the one that didn't make you live forever but turned your ass to dust instead. And then a very old knight mockingly points out that you have chosen poorly.

There's a damned good reason it didn't get a wide release: beyond the fact that they game controls like a three-legged cow with a Yugoslavian drive train, it also presupposes a tremendous working knowledge of an Avengers story that sort of blew. It explains nothing. You'll cut from a fight with some Q-list Kree villain (Doctor Minerva? In a video game? Seriously?) to a still frame of the Shi'ar ordering... something to fire. Seriously, I just gave you the exact same amount of context for that shot as the game did.

To get down to brass tacks, in the single-player game, there are a shocking four playable characters. Keeping in mind that the crossover this is based on featured, seriously, every Goddamn late-eighties/early-nineties Avenger you can think of, take a shot at guessing which four they are.

Come on, guess.Yeah, nobody guessed Crystal. Don't lie. She didn't even cross your mind. You were all "Iron Man, Vision, Cap and maybe Black Knight." If you thought "but they need a girl just to keep things balanced," you probably went with, Hell, I don't know, Sersi or Scarlet Witch. Or She-Hulk. Or Spider-Woman. I mean, Jesus, Crystal?

The worst part? Data East had character models for Iron Man, Vision, Giant Man and Thor handy, but only used them as crappy run-in buddies. So you're stuck with Captain America, Black Knight, Thunderstrike and freakin' Crystal. Actually, wait, I misspoke: the worst part is that the Black Knight is, without question, your best possible pick.

How can you be told to make an Avengers game and think "well, Black Knight's going to cakewalk over everybody because I'm going to give him E Honda's Hundred Hand Slap -- EXCEPT WITH A LIGHTSABER!"? Honestly, if you want to kick this game's ass, there's maybe one guy that isn't a huge sucker for getting stabbed a million times. The bad guys can all call in friends to jump you mid-fight, which is profoundly annoying the hundredth time Minerva drops Captain Goddamn Atlas on your head or that weird-looking She-Ra villain above has Ronan the Accuser fall out of the sky on top of you (while yelling "RONAN!"). Other than that, it's a straight-ahead fighter that manages to suck beyond reason.That's your reward for finishing, by the way. That screen followed by a still shot of the four playable Avengers awkwardly standing atop a building, gazing longingly at the universe they just saved (by murdering the Supreme Intelligence and allowing the Shi'ar to blow up the Kree empire, but still). And then the game taunts you one last time:No. I am not ready. I am insufficiently prepared on an emotional level. I do not want to play your versus mode, you son of a bitch.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

I seriously have pictures ready for a post, but for the last day or so I've been puking up things I, frankly, have no recollection of eating. If you take any lesson from me, heed this: Natural Ice is fucking poison.

Amazing Screw-On Head

SCIFI.COM | The Amazing Screw-On Head

You can watch the whole pilot for the Screw-On Head animated series on SciFi's website starting today. I don't know how long it'll stay up, but the episode's due to air in two week's time.

Seems to be trying way too hard to be funny. I mean, the premise is funny on its own, and playing it straight is probably funnier than throwing in jokes. There's a survey on the site, presumably there to determine if the show'll get a full pick-up. I hope it gets a chance if just because it's so damn pretty. It looks just like a moving Mignola book, and you can't fault that.

Transformers fandom makes comic book fandom look vaguely normal

You know what makes me feel a little bit better about taking comic books kind of seriously? People who take twenty-two minute toy ads from the 1980s waaaay too seriously.

Ain't It Cool News posted what was purported to be a shot of Optimus Prime's vehicle mode from the upcoming Michael Bay Transformers flick, inciting a flurry of nerdly wailing and geeky gnashing of teeth. Paramount demanded that the picture be removed hours later, but I'm just assuming they don't read this site, so here you go:Looks a smidge fake to me. The smokestacks look Photoshopped. Whatever, though; the fun here is in watching the internet version of that one weird lunch table in your high school cafeteria absolutely losing their Goddamned minds. Highlights in italics, commentary in nonitalics.

-What the f*ck is wrong with these people? If any people from this movie are reading this: I have one thing to say: I am never going to see this movie. If you can't even get a semi truck right, then you are not worth my $10 at theaters and my $30 for the special edition DVD. Go to hell, have a nice day.

Take that, Paramount! You won't be getting his forty dollars!

-is shockwave gonna be an ipod for all the youngster who don't know what a walkman is? I wouldn't be surprised

I may not worship at an altar shaped like a robot that's sometimes shaped like a jet, but I know enough to know that he means Soundwave. Shockwave turned into a big purple gun. And only had one eye. Make of that what you will. Soundwave turned into a jambox. Needless to say, several other geeks hopped to the chance to flame the Hell out of this kid for his ignorance.

-I weep for the species

Me, too. Probably for different reasons, though.

-BOYCOTT anyone?

-Let me rephrase, the truck mode is terrible for Optimus Prime. We have an iconic style for Prime for over 20 years. Hell, whenever I see that cab design on the road (which is increasingly rare nowadays) I smile to myself and think "there goes Prime." It's like giving Kirk the Enterprise-D and telling everyone "Pay no attention to the design differences, it's still the original Enterprise." It's insulting. It's unnecessary and who gives a flying fuck about Bumblebee being a Camaro when the real main character is Prime and he's the one they needed to get right in the first place.

I can't think of many ways to make an argument about the kind of truck Optimus Prime turns into nerdier than to drag Star Trek into it, but saying that every time you see a flat-fronted tractor trailer you think "there goes Prime" is probably up there.

By the way, Bumblebee was the one that turned into a Volkswagen Bug back in the day - VW won't let Hasbro or Paramount use their cars for Transformers products anymore because they don't want to have their products associated with war. Which is a good call, considering who founded the company. Anyway, most of these superfans either don't know that or are willfully ignoring it in favor of crucifying Michael Bay on a cross that turns into a cassette or spouting lunatic theories about Paramount being too cheap to pony up for the likeness rights. Just thought I'd mention it.

-This can't be Prime!!! I know thay have to make the movie as realistic as possible, that's probably why they're making Megatron a tank instead of a gun. Soundwave an I-POD??? make sure it's not one of those really small and thin ones or else Laserbeak, ravage and rumble are going to be about an inch tall if we're lucky.

You see how rumors get started? That Soundwave/iPod thing, I mean. He's already angry about it, and it was a poorly-done joke not forty posts prior. God, I love the internet.

-thanks Mr. Bay for fucking up my childhood

Something along those lines will show up within the first hundred posts of any thread dealing with anything even kind of old. Anything that's been around long enough to have existed during someone's childhood is either getting fucked up or raped as we speak.

-What is next turning Knight Rider into a Mini Cooper?!?!?!?

BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE RIDICULOUS AM I RIGHT?!?!?!?!?!?

-why the fuck does optimus have flames?!?!?! sometimes its all about minimalism

Minimalism. Just to put this in context, he's looking for minimalism in a movie about an interstellar war fought by giant robots that turn into cars and tanks and jets. Oh, and dinosaurs. And construction vehicles that could join together and form an even more gianter robot.

-O. PRIME IS A FLAAAAAAMER!

-I THINK I JUST THREW UP ON MY MONITOR. SCREW YOU MICHAEL BAY, IT'S BAD ENOUGH I JUST FOUND OUT FUCKING TYRESE IS IN THIS FUCKING THING, BUT YOU HAD TO GO AND MAKE OPTIMUS A FUCKING FLAMER!

-He's a red, flat-fronted truck not a gay flamed juggernaut....

-Hey look, it's Optimus Pime's gay redneck cousin

Nothing says "dear Paramount, please listen to my well-thought-out criticism of your production design RE: Transformers the Movie" quite like homophobia and racism. Speaking of...

-They should call it Niggerformers and Transgayers. I have a great idea, lets cast OJ Simpson as Prime, Eminem as Jazz and Elton John as Megatron. Fucking typical Hollywood liberal crap.

Not to downplay the absurd horrible-osity of the above, but I would absolutely see a movie where Elton John played an evil robot that turned into a gun.

I want a robot dog butler

This is Mr. Wells. He's one of those deals where I draw something stupid and then decided that I love it a whole bunch.

I wouldn't doubt a ridiculous Mr. Wells - Science Butler one-shot at some point. Imagine the groundbreaking storytelling opportunities. He could... get people drinks. And be shiny. And maybe go to space, or something.

Anyway, this is a roundabouts way to whore my stupid, stupid webcomic, now in its stupid, stupid second issue. Read it. Or Mr. Wells will make that whimpering noise dogs make when they are sad.

This is totally going to end in Spider-Man wearing an evil, living black costume

West mounts 'secret war' to keep nuclear North Korea in check - Sunday Times

Commando is on AMC right now

Eight PM EST. If I'm ever easy on Jeph Loeb, it's solely because he's been riding on goodwill for writing this, the Greatest American Film.

Stupid shadows

Got to love the whole Silhouettes That Don't Hide Much thing DC's had going in their solicits lately. Does anyone look at that and go "maybe the guy with the hurricane for an ass is Martian Manhunter!"?

My favorite bit brought up by this image is the couple of places where I've seen Alan Scott ruled out as a JLA member. Not based on the fact that the character in question here isn't wearing a giant cape or anything - he could have a new costume, it wouldn't be the first time they've taken a ride on the Bad Idea Train - but because the GL ring is on the wrong hand. Alan Scott wears his ring lefty and this is a righty! Continuity guides me this day!

Honestly, you know Michael Turner drew this, right? I was just saying that every time (it happens surprisingly often) I feel the need to speak ill of Turner's work, I have to go "I know he's had cancer, but..." It's kinda like saying "not to be a racist, but, God, I hate eskimos." I'm trying to assuage my own guilt before I get into the really negative stuff. Point is, this is a man who, when asked to draw the Elongated Man on the Identity Crisis #1 cover, drew this:Is that Wally West? The teenage version of the Atom? Damage? I really, really thought it was freaking Damage when I first saw it. Seriously, if you're looking at that cover and ruling out Alan Scott on a basis of ring handedness in a picture drawn by a man that gives every single guy he draws the same jawline and nose, you are thinking way too hard.

I'm a firm believer in balance.

I have no idea what in the Hell these things are, but I've got to say that I've never wanted anything as badly as I want a toy of an infant Doctor Octopus.

Now, since that was almost painfully cute, I feel I need to tip the scales back over to manly:Jonah Hex. Shirtless. Fighting a bear. On a cliff. While an arrow is aimed at him. That? Is true grit.

Ridiculous Ways To Die, Finale

In which deaths burn brightly but briefly, like so many spoiler-filled fireworks:

Eaten by, Digested in, Defecated out of Ultimate Hulk: Herr Kleiser, Chitauri commander, The Ultimates, Volume 1. Honestly, I can't think of a worse way to go than through the digestive system of a 98-pound biologist's out-of-control id.

Obliterated by Ancient Gods of Jewish Myth: The Pride plus one, Runaways, Volume 1. Nobody ever expects to get blown up in an undersea chamber by giant angels mentioned in one passage of Genesis. Just not something you factor for.

Eaten by a Man-Eating Cow: Triggerman Society goons, The Tick. Man-Eating Cow was the sole survivor of a group of similarly-trained bovines unwisely left in a pit with alligators - it seems that the alligator is the natural-born enemy of the cow. Which was good for the Tick, but bad for Chairface Chippendale (and the cows that were eaten, obviously). Imbued with a taste for both justice and human flesh, she rescued the Tick from two assassins. Unsurprisingly, Tick left The City under her watchful eye when he left for New York.
Caused to Explode by Having an Enormous Iron Nail Fashioned by Dwarves Jammed into the Sun That Powers You: Morningbright, Firstborn dragon, Smax. Every villain has a weakness. For some, it's their own hubris. For others, it's being sucked into a giant vacuum because you are made of sand. For Morningbright, it's having a large quantity of iron stuck into his body because he can't fuse that on an atomic level and use it for energy. Any time you explode because dwarves built a nail on a big, wooden wagon and rolled it into your chest, it's fairly ridiculous. And awesome.

Hurled into Space While Dressed as an Outmoded Form of Conveyance: Biplane, Invincible. A man being thrown into orbit is a pretty ridiculous way to go, but a man dressed as something Snoopy would fly being thrown into orbit is Ridiculous Way to Die GOLD.Accidentally Launching Yourself into Space By Pushing Your Robot Grasshopper Suit to the Limit: Grasshopper II, GLX-Mas Special. Getting chucked into space is funny, but ending up there by overclocking your stupid bug-themed armor is even funnier. When Iron Man uses the focused totality of his powers, evil gets punched in the face extra-super-hard. When Grasshopper does it, he kills himself. One of them is a real Avenger, and the other is on a team that basically exists as Ridiculous Ways to Die-fodder.

Talked into Suicide by Way of Walking into the Precise Type of Soundwave That Will Kill You. By a Robot: Atoman, Top Ten. This is a case where the death is really, really awesome but you've just got to feel for the crime scene investigator who has to write it up.

Lifted Several Stories into the Air Upon a Chunk of Pavement Held Aloft by a Cosmic Rod, Crushed by Said Chunk of Pavement While the Freakin' Ragdoll Looks On: Doctor Phosphorus, Starman. If I find myself where I'm in a position to choose my cause of death, it's going to be this.

For eighty-odd issues, we see the Cosmic Rod used to shoot energy blasts, make forcefields and allow flight. Not much else. Nobody was expecting Ted Knight to go Wile E. Coyote on Doctor Phosphorus' ass. Which is precisely why it's so awesome when it happens.

What totally makes it is the look on the good doctor's face in the second panel there.

You don't get to see skeletal supervillains covered in radioactive fire instead of flesh looking that terrified all that often.

One of life's simple pleasures, really.

Ridiculous Ways To Die, Part the Sixth

Something like a weekend after moving in the Baxter Building, the Fantastic Four ran afoul of a previously unknown alien race, as is their custom. Reed Richards can't make a s'more without having a subatomic universe attack him from within the crystalline sugar matrix of his marshmallow on a stick. It's just how the man rolls. This time around, the FF faced the shapeshifting menace of the Skrulls.

After the alien sons of bitches impersonated our heroes for a few pages, Reed Richards hops aboard their rocketship (cleverly disguised as Ubiquitous Comic Book Background Element #24, The Building-Top Water Tower) and convinces the head Skrull that earth is thoroughly uninvadeable by showing him panels from Strange Tales and Journey Into Mystery. That Stan Lee, what a scamp.

Of course, this leaves three Skrulls planetside in the custody of a stretchy mad scientist. Which is almost certainly the last place I'd want to be.

Since the only law Reed obeys is that of the Comics Code Authority, he couldn't just kill the aliens. No, things would have to be much, much more insane.

Reed Richards is an expert in many, many fields. He's an almost archetypal Comic Book Scientist - any baffling science-related thing is right in his wheelhouse. Except difficult childbirths. For those, he calls in a atomic scientist with robot arms and Roy Orbison specs. I mean, obviously. Anyway, not only can Reed build doorways into Negative Zones, handcraft flying cars shaped like bathtubs and utterly fail to cure Ben Grimm's Thingism, he's also an accomplished hypnotist.

He quadruple-minored at State University, see. While Vic Doom dicked around in Exploding Chemicals 224, Reed took on a more varied courseload, including two semesters of the Charlatan Sciences. He's eminently qualified to both host and debunk a séance.

His skills in mesmerism, coupled with the fact that he was dealing with particularly cowardly, self-hating Skrulls, allowed him to do the craziest thing he'd done since... well, the prior issue, when he turned his best friend, his girlfriend and her brother into affronts to God in an effort to beat the Reds to the moon. The Cincinnati Reds, yet.

(By the way, if Skrulls can shapeshift, why do they insist on looking like that? I wouldn't want my chin to look like it was made out of a bunch of tiny asses in a row.)Take that, Skrulls!

What happens next is, I'm pretty sure, impossible in light of Roy Thomas' brave efforts to keep Marvel's then-nascent continuity straight during the Kree-Skrull War, but roll with it.

Sure, cows are content, Reed, but it's not like they get to live to a ripe old age in a retirement home. No, they're generally killed and eaten.

Seriously, way to think stuff through, Stretch. It's kind of emblematic of Reed Richard's scientific method on the whole, isn't it? A whole bunch of "it seemed like a good idea... until Blastaar jumped through the dimensional gate. Thank God I've got the Thing here to punch him in the face!"

Hell, Hank Pym may have created Ultron, but at least Ultron wasn't his freakin' roommate beforehand.

Now, being hypnotized into shapeshifting into a cow until the point you get to graduate Bovine University ("Don't let the name throw you, Jimmy. It's not really a floor, it's more of a steel grating that allows material to sluice through so it can be collected and exported") is a pretty Ridiculous Way to Die, but this one gets kicked up another notch thanks to Grant Morrison and Mark Millar being total crazypantses.

The central premise of the five issues of Skrull Kill Krew is that the three Skrulls Reed Richards condemned to cowdom were slaughtered and ground into hamburger. These Skrullburgers would either kill those that ate them outright or give them Skrull-type superpowers. Of course, there's a downside:Yeah, so Skrull DNA acts as a virus, giving people superpowers, but also slowly eating away at the brain, first giving the victim seizures, headaches and a general bad attitude, and then killing them to death.

And dying thanks to a brain virus created by ingesting Skrull DNA found in hamburgers made out of three alien invaders hypnotized by Mister Fantastic so as to take on cow form? Is a truly Ridiculous Way to Die.

Ridiculous Ways To Die, Part the Fifth

(Hey, if you've never read The Golden Age, this is totally going to ruin it for you. Wizard spoiled it for me about a decade ago because they are heartless monsters, and I'd hate to do it to anyone else. That said, it's time for a Ridiculously Patriotic Way to Die.)

Daniel Dunbar, probably better known (though not by much) as "Dan the Dyna-Mite," sidekick to wartime mystery man TNT, thought he deserved a better life than the one he had. Things were looking up on that front when Tex Thompson, Americommando, drafted him to be America's first great post-war superhero. Thanks to comic book atomic science, the Dyna-Mite became Dynaman, capable of flight, impossibly strong, and more or less invulnerable.

Act three of James Robinson and Paul Smith's Golden Age dusts off everybody's favorite JSA plot: the Justice Society versus the Nineteen-Fifties. You know the deal. The post-World War 2 government, whipped into an anti-Communist fervor either by Joe McCarthy or a thinly-veiled stand in for same, demands that the Justice Society unmask. The Society refuses and disbands. Vandal Savage giggles in the background. This time around, the aforementioned Thompson, now a senator, wants all of the wartime mystery men to pledge allegiance to the flag before Congress.

Not really a huge deal, except for the fact that a good chunk of the heroes know that Tex Thompson is, in fact, the Ultra-freaking-Humanite. And they know the Terrible Secret of Dynaman.

Knowing they're hopelessly overmatched by the atomic-powered dynamo, the heroes show up for the congressional meeting with a plan that basically boils down to Hourman, the strongest guy they had handy, going up on stage and telling America that their favorite senator has a super villain's brain before, presumably, getting his ass kicked clear off his body by Dynaman. Unfortunately, a distraught Miss America, who'd been sleeping with Thompson, went on ahead of the Man of the Hour and blew the whistle on the Humanite. Robotman, the Humanite's murderous lackey, shuts her up permanently with an Inspector Gadget extendy arm.

And then things go nine kinds of crazy.Wait for it... waaaaait for it...OH SNAP. Snap and a half, even.

Humanite saved Hitler's brain! And then he cut Dyna-Mite's brain out of his head, jammed Hitler's all up into the now-empty noggin, and gave the resulting mishmosh superpowers. That, my friends, is evil.

Hitler loses his cool in a big way, taking all the heroes on at once. Now, he's pretty well stacked, power-wise. He's a Silver Age character fighting guys like the Black Condor, whose entire gimmick is that he can fly. DynaHitler can fly and punch your head off your body. Tarantula knew some karate - DynaHitler knew how to be pretty much invulnerable. That one ended in a broken neck.

As for the Red Bee, well, he had trained bees. I've mentioned the invulnerability, right? Yeah, pretty one-sided fight, there.

In fact, most of the fight is decidedly one-sided, what with the Society's heaviest hitters being elsewhere when the fight broke out. Ted Knight's in an asylum, feverishly working on a new Cosmic Rod while bugging out over his involvement in the Manhattan Project. Alan Scott hung up his ring after the war, focusing on his business over punching out the Fiddler or whoever. It takes the death of the Sportsmaster - a reformed Green Lantern villain - at the hands of Dynaman to get GL into the action. And, even then, Dynaman drops him. By hitting him with an entire tree.

Johnny Quick runs off to grab the last hero he can think of, bringing a slighty off-kilter Starman in as a last-ditch measure.It doesn't go well. But you've got to love the trademark Starman dramatic flair.

A young Captain Comet rushes Dynaman, but even his mutant powers come up short. He finds himself about a tenth of a second from taking an entire school bus to the face, which is a pretty ridiculous way to go. Luckily, Liberty Belle is on the scene and somebody must've rang her namesake extra hard, because she's ready to kick some Ratzi ass in a major way.Half a Cosmic Rod through the chest plus school bus to the head equals GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Ridiculous Ways To Die, Part the Fourth

Meet the Grasshopper. His real name is Doug Taggert, and he works part-time as security for Roxxon with some light superhero work on the side.

He's pretty much what would happen if Spider-Man and Iron Man had a kid. Or maybe the Fabulous Frog-Man and War Machine. It doesn't much matter.

Anyway, while two members of the ill-fated Great Lakes Avengers traveled from Milwaukee to New York on a recruitment drive, Doug ran afoul of Batroc's Brigade. Batroc the Leaper, for those of you blissfully unaware, is a running joke of a stock Marvel villain. He and his Brigade are Ringmaster and His Circus of Crime-level bad guys - they'll succeed for as many pages as the plot dictates until everyone involved remembers that they're total losers and they end up beaten to a pulp by, say, Hawkeye while the rest of the Avengers have a good laugh. Also, Batroc speaks in a heavy French accent, pronouncing his own name with a "ze" between "Batroc" and "Leaper." And Taskmaster says he's gay. Stee-rike three.

The Brigade consists of Batroc, Machete and Zaran, at this point. Batroc is an acrobat. Machete transforms into a gigantic dragon with mind control powers. Hah, I'm just fucking with you; he's got a sword. Zaran wears a cowl without a shirt and throws wee little sais. I'm serious, like half the time, they're drawn like they should be used to pick up pieces of pineapple at a wedding, not murder people. Not really a wrecking crew, but they're trained killers and Doug is a man in a robot grasshopper suit with a meager two week's experience as a superhero.

His mighty grasshopper suit manages to outleap the Leaper, though, and things are looking up for the novice hero... until the GLA arrives.

The Great Lakes Avengers are a group of well-meaning, if kind of incompetent, heroes from the midwest. Introduced in West Coast Avengers by John Byrne ostensibly to give Hawkeye something to do after he quit the team, they kicked around for a few years as a one-note joke (THEY ARE NOT PARTICULARLY GOOD AT BEING SUPERHEROES, TEE HEE) until She-Hulk's Dan Slott wrote them a mini. Sure, he pretty much used it as a soapbox to bitch about everything he hates in comics, but that's what I do here in my spare time. He made a career out of it. Admirable.

The members that show up to give 'Hopper an assist are Flatman, Doorman and new inductee Squirrel Girl. In mid-fight, Doorman asks Doug if he wants to join the team because he has a shoddy sense of timing.Keep in mind how cold of a day in Hell it has to be for a sentence like "no one turns their back on Zaran and lives!" to actually pay off in Zaran's favor.You'll note I didn't explain the GLA's powers above. Helps for the payoff here. Flatman is basically a two-dimensional Mister Fantastic, both in terms of physical appearance and, to a lesser extent, characterization. Squirrel Girl is a mutant with a furry tail, buck teeth, climbing claws and the ability to communicate with squirrels. She has defeated Doctor Doom. Alone.

And Doorman... well, Doorman's a low-grade teleporter. He leans up against a wall and you can walk through him and the wall. Not exactly Nightcrawler, but it still doesn't bode well for whomever's standing behind him when a sai is thrown at his head.See, it seems his power is reflexive. Whoops.

And getting hit in the face with a sai thrown by an assassin who has never actually managed to kill anyone I can think of after said sai has teleported through the face of a member of a joke superteam is a fairly Ridiculous Way to Die.

Ridiculous Ways To Die, Part the Third

Since death in a comic book is so impermanent, characters tend to have to shuffle off this mortal coil in amazingly over-the-top fashion just to make their probably-soon-to-be-undone death memorable and meaningful, if fleetingly.

Dracula's died probably more often than any fictional character ever. Hell, he's dead to begin with. Being dead is right in his wheelhouse. He's gotten his head cut off, he's been burned, he's been left in the sun, magicked to bits, staked - you name your favorite vampiric cause of death, he's had it happen to him in his long career in the public domain.

But when he died in Planetary, he died ridiculously.

A young Elijah Snow has just found an aged Sherlock Holmes. The latter is apparently a member of a worldwide conspiracy boasting the detective, the Invisible Man, Doctor Frankenstein and a few others as members.

Oh, and Dracula. Him, too. He's hiding in the shadows of Holmes' office, waiting in the wings for Snow's arrival. Now would be an opportune moment to point out that Snow's power is temperature manipulation. He's pretty much a low-key Iceman - not to say that Iceman's more powerful, or anything, it's just that Snow's less flashy about it.See, if Iceman'd done that, by virtue of his extensive self-narration training at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, he couldn't've resisted the temptation to explain what he was doing aloud as it happened. This kind of stunt would involve the focused totality of his powers, and Dracula would be frozen, body and soul.

But freezing vampires isn't on the list of many, many things that off the horrible bloodsuckers, no. Killing Dracula requires a bit more work.My God, he kicked the man's crotch off his body. So hard that it broke the panel. But, yeah, that won't kill Dracula, either.That'll do it, though.

What makes this one ridiculous is the convergence of factors - Dracula can die headless and no one'll bat an eye, that happens all the time, but headless and crotchless ratchets things up a notch. Headless, crotchless and frozen in Sherlock Holmes' office is the kind of death coroners tell their grandkids about.

Ridiculous Ways To Die, Part the Second

Since death in a comic book is so impermanent, characters tend to have to shuffle off this mortal coil in amazingly over-the-top fashion just to make their probably-soon-to-be-undone death memorable and meaningful, if fleetingly.

The Warren Ellis/Bryan Hitch/Paul Neary/Laura DePuy run on Authority is probably Teenage Jon's favorite book ever. Where Slightly Older Jon would put Starman or maybe Invincible or Fables and Tweener Jon would rank Morrison's JLA, Teenage Jon puts Authority. It's one of those things that I think you probably had to read at a certain age - I didn't read Catcher in the Rye until I was in my early twenties and thought it was the whiniest book ever while my friends who read it at age sixteen swear by it - but I still love it, regardless of its ludicrous one-upmanship and the total mess the book became later.

But we're here for the Ridiculous Way to Die. Yesterday, we learned about the effects of turning off a switch and allowing the massive powers of the fourth dimension to spill into Darkseid's Zombie Factory on the moon. Today, we learn why Teenage Jon thought Jack Hawksmoor was the best idea ever.

Hawksmoor was introduced as soon as Warren Ellis took over StormWatch from whomever the Hell was running that charnel ship prior. If you don't know StormWatch, think Checkmate minus all the chess imagery, but plus all the crappy characters inherent to a universe created whole cloth. Ellis' first act was to clean house, dumping something like two-thirds of the cast and introducing a few new characters. He brought in Rose Tattoo, a largely silent, terribly underdressed female embodiment of death. He brought in Jenny Sparks, a cranky British woman with lightning powers. And, like I said, he brought in Jack Hawksmoor. Hawksmoor's your typical Ellis protagonist: wisecracky, abrupt, and dressed like he's fronting a ska band. If you know Pete Wisdom, you know Jack Hawksmoor.

You'll note I didn't describe Jack's powers above. That's because, unlike Sparks or Rose, his powers are a little more... esoteric than would be easily explained in a sentence fragment. See, Jack was kidnapped by aliens with unsettling regularity as a child so as to make him into the God of Cities. His organs are all alien in nature - he's pretty much only human- looking. The abilities granted by these modifications are weird and varied: cities "talk" to him, he's strong, he's fast, he can mess with gravity on a local level, he can tell buildings to fall on people, he can do vaguely-defined other stuff. On one occasion, he wore the city of Tokyo as a suit and beat the Hell out of a city from the future. But I have no idea if that's actually in continuity or if Mark Millar was just screwing around.

Anyway, Jack and the rest of the Authority traveled to an alternate Earth by way of the Bleed after said alterna-Earth invaded their world. The bad Earth is run by a blue, horned fellow by name of "Regis" who is a very, very mean blue, horned fellow. He's also ridiculously hard to kill.See? In the foreground there, crumpled up like a used tissue in a teenage boy's room, is the Authority's resident kicker of ass, the Midnighter. Midnighter's power, basically, is to be the best fighter in the room, so him losing a fight means that the guy he's fighting is one bad mother you don't want to... et cetera, et cetera. The "other one" Regis is calling out is our boy Jack.

Regis is about to learn a very important lesson.For a while, over in StormWatch, the book focused on a different alterna-Earth, one where Jack ran the team instead of Henry Bendix or Jackson King. In that story, somebody mentioned that the crew of the SkyWatch satellite, StormWatch's headquarters, talked about something called "the fear of Jack."Not wholly unwarranted, obviously.

If there's anything Warren Ellis is good at, it's speechifying. By now, Regis has to be at least a mite concerned for his own safety. I mean, a scary voice is listing off his crimes while rocks dramatically fly around him for no readily apparent reason. Tell me you wouldn't be nervous.

But what's Jack's game? Oooh, he's going to jump right through Regis, effectively rending him in twain. That old chestnut.