Tuesday, November 16, 2004, 12:27 a.m, as I begin typing this

There can be only one

Enough heavy shit. I’ve got The Crash Test Dummies on in the background (thanks to the Always Esteemed Scott Shepherd, who sent me their first CD for my birthday last year), and it’s time to geek out. I mean, seriously Geek OUT.

You have been so advised.

Over the past several days, I’ve been running a Brains vs. Brawn HeroClix battle out on the folding card table I use for a kitchen table. On one side, I had Lex Luthor, Professor T.O. Morrow, Reed Richards, Dr. Doom, Brainiac 5, Iron Man, Diablo, Professor X, and Robert Bruce Banner, clobbered by gamma rays and transformed into a raging half ton of emerald fury, with a gigantic bazooka on one shoulder.

Across the museum map from the, up on a veranda bellowing defiance and death threats, were the Rhino, the Abomination, the Absorbing Man, the Juggernaut, Ulik, Mr. Hyde, the Wrecker, and Doomsday.

Mike Norton is now scratching his greying pate and muttering “Where the fuck is Henry Pym?”, and it’s a fair question, although, in all honesty, Mike probably wasn’t that vulgar. The sad fact was, the only fig I have that I could have used as a Pym substitute was the female Yellowjacket, and I just wasn’t in the mood to short change Hank that way. I also, sadly, rejected putting in any of many possible Spider-Man incarnations. While Peter Parker is undeniably brainy (he did, after all, invent his web shooters, his web fluid, and his Spider-tracers, as well as various gadgets for depolarizing the Vulture’s wings and like that), I felt he just didn’t make the cut, since he mostly spends his time punching out bad guys while his automatic camera takes pictures of it. When he gets a job working in a lab, I’ll reconsider.

I planned to throw in the Beast, too, but honestly, I’ve never been all that convinced he’s a super scientist on the same level as all the others. I know, Steve Englehart SAID he was, and if anyone should believe Englehart it’s me, but I just was never persuaded. Anyway, the points pretty much matched with the line ups I had.

I’ll be honest – I’d expected Brains to win pretty convincingly. After all, in the world of HeroClix, brainy characters have a wider range of powers, and they get all the cool ones, too. My Brainy crew was rife with Outwit and Perplex, and there were pretty overloaded with Leadership, too (Luthor, Professor X, and the Smart Hulk all started out with it, while Doom gets it about three clicks down his dial). Plus, the Brainy crew had all the range attacks, while the Brawn Boys had very nearly none at all, other than the Absorbing Man, who had a walloping range strike of 2. TWO! It is to laugh.

One thing I overlooked, however, is that I was playing with my own house rules. And under my house rules, well, Super Strength just rocks. See, to me, Super Strength should be the cat’s ass. It should be bitchin’. It should smoke.

Who do you want to be when you’re a kid reading comics? Sure, the Flash is cool; he can run faster than anyone, you’d never be late for class if you were him. Green Lantern can do anything, but nobody ever wanted to be him, because he’s an artificial powers cheater. Iron Man gets similarly nixed. (It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I really began to realize that not just anyone could put on a power ring or Iron Man’s armor and do stuff just like them. Hal Jordan and Tony Stark were heroes; they were the necessary human component behind the hardware. But when I was a kid, I didn’t care; I just instinctively turned my nose up at the idea of ‘powers’ that weren’t ‘real’.)

Batman rocks… he’s smart as hell (you just knew you’d have no trouble doing your homework if you were Batman), and he could punch out every single guy who ever messed with you in gym class, at the same time (not that they would; if you had Batman’s powers, you’d get picked first for EVERY team)… but still. What it came down to, for me, was Super Strength. If you couldn’t pick up a car and hit someone with it, well, don’t bother me. And, frankly, I still think that’s valid. Super Strength is just cool. It’s like, the fundamental super power. It’s BOSS.

One of my first real disappointments in HeroClix, after finding out that the Wasp could carry Thor around and Magneto and Cosmic Boy could both levitate anything whether it was made of ferric metal or not, was discovering that all Super Strength was good for was picking up Objects on the board and hitting people with them. I mean, yes, that's definitely something cool you can do with Super Strength, I do not deny it… it may be the Coolest Thing, in fact. But, see, in that first starter set my brother Paul gave me, there was only one character with Super Strength, Mr. Hyde. And when I picked him up and looked at his dial and said “What’s green on Attack?” and Paul said “Um… Super Strength”, I got that old child like adrenaline rush. Super Strength! AWESOME! So what could Mr. Hyde do with his Super Strength? Beat people to pieces? Hurl Wolverine into orbit? Smash through walls? Knock down mountains? Leap tall buildings in a single bound?

Uh… well… he could pick Objects up and either throw them, or hit people with them.

And what else?

Er… that’s it.

Well, that just BITES.

So, on my house rules, Super Strength can do a lot. First, WizKids states that you need to be able to do at least three clicks of damage, all at once, to smash down a wall (technically, a piece of Blocking Terrain). I say fuck that, you can do it if you have Super Strength, too, even if for some reason you only have a wimpy little 2 damage. (As Spider-Man, and Booster Gold, and a few others with Super Strength, all do.)

Second, because even Superman goes ‘ouch’ when someone with Super Strength belts him (sometimes, anyway), I made it a rule that any successful Close Combat attack by a character with Super Strength will ALWAYS do at least 1 click of damage. It doesn’t matter if you have Impervious and roll it off, or if the total wouldn’t normally get past your damage abatement. If Mr. Hyde smacks Black Adam in the puss, Black Adam is gonna see some stars. That’s how it works in comics, so that’s how it works on my house rules.

Super Strength is also one of the things that allows fliers to ferry other characters their full distance. Normal HeroClix rules state that ALL fliers can carry one other figure their full distance. This is bewildering and infuriating nonsense. The Vulture can barely carry a loaded pistol and a sack of loot; there is NO WAY he’s picking up the Abomination and lugging him around. The Wasp just can’t carry anyone, much less her boyfriend Giant-Man. So on my rules, a flier either needs Super Strength, or a damage value of 3, to carry someone else the full distance. In the absence of either, a Damage Value of 2 will allow a flier to carry someone half their normal Speed.

Last, under my rules, characters are treated as Light Objects. This means that if you have Super Strength, you can pick up another character and carry them around (although, if you do that, then by HeroClix rules which I have not modified, you cannot put them down again, you have to hit someone with them). You can also, however, pick up a character and THROW them, just like you could throw any other Light Object. This means Super Strength effectively acts as a sort of junior Telekinesis. A Light Object can only be thrown up to 6 squares (instead of up to 10, the range of Telekinesis), and when you throw someone, they will take a click of damage when they hit, so as a general rule, you don’t want to do it to anyone who doesn’t at least have Toughness. (On the other hand, it’s a handy way to get someone off an annoying activation click, and hey, that’s perfectly fair. If the Avengers need the Hulk in a hurry, Hercules might very well pick up Bruce Banner and toss him across the yard. Bruce is going to get up all green and pissy, and if he happens to be standing right next to Kang when he does, well, it’s all good, baby.)

In case you’re wondering, it’s the second and the fourth house rules, above, that made the big difference in this fight.

Besides the fact that everyone on the Brawn team was doing at least one click of damage whenever they hit, and they could toss each other around like softballs, what also helped them was two other facts:

Quite a few brainy sorts sit there and cry like girls the first time a big meanie whacks them a good one, and in addition to that, my house rules on Outwit make Outwit kind of suck.

See, under the standard HeroClix rules, Outwit is totally out of control. Essentially, if a character has the power Outwit, all they need to do is get within ten squares of an opponent with a clear line of sight to that opponent, and they may counter any power that opponent has showing on their dial until the start of their controller’s next turn. And, it’s a free action, costing nothing.

This means that, in effect, if the Black Panther is standing on a rooftop ten squares thataway, he can decide that Ulik the Troll isn’t Invulnerable for the next turn. No dice roll. No nothing. T’Challa, Prince of the Wakandas, lifts his margarita glass in Ulik’s general direction, and Ulik is a big baby for the next ten or twenty seconds… while Iron Man, Thor, and, I don’t know, Forbush-Man, beat him senseless with bags of Aunt May’s continence drawers and Franklin Richards’ footie pajamas.

It’s silly, and pretty much every HeroClix player agrees it’s silly, but WizKids refuses to do anything about it, so I had to.

What I did was make it an attack for zero damage, that is limited to the range on the Outwitting character’s dial, or 4, if the Outwitting character has no range attack. It’s still a free action, but basically, if you’re going to Outwit an opponent, you have to be within your normal range to do it, and you have to make a successful attack roll on them. In other words, you can’t just sneer at them. You have to actually hit them with something.

Experienced HeroClix players will now realize this effectively makes even the Veteran Brainiac 5 into one helluva good doorstop. I, however, hadn’t played Brainiac 5 under my new Outwit rules prior to this battle, so I did not realize this until he flew over to within 4 of the Juggernaut, completely blew an Outwit roll on ol’ Mr. Marko (Cain’s defense is alarmingly high, while Brainy’s attack is pathetically low)… and then stood there, staring incredulously as the Wrecker picked up the Juggernaut and hurled him across the intervening three squares, letting Juggie put a massive bitch slap on Supergirl’s boyfriend.

At which point I discovered that other thing I mentioned about some brainy types, as Brainiac 5 was carted to the sidelines with little cartoon birdies whirling around his blonde, green skinned pate.

(Poor Brainiac 5 was simply mistrained for this mission. I generally always have Robin guest star in all my HeroClix Legion adventures, or sometimes Catgirl, on the grounds that hey, she’s from the future, too, sort of. This lets Brainiac, and all the other Legionnaires, copy the Batman TA, which lets them hide on Hindering Terrain. But nobody in the Batman Family is a super-brain, not even Bruce, so Brainiac had no cover, and thus proved to be hardly an immovable object when he met the irresistible force known as Juggernaut.)

Aside from Brainiac 5 exiting feet first in record time, one of the other moments I found highly amusing during the battle was when the Smart Hulk squared off against Ulik the Troll. As the Smart Hulk has the Spider-Man Team Ability, he can copy other TAs, the same way Brainiac 5’s Legion TA allows. So I moved Lex Luthor up right behind him. Since Lex has the Anti-Superman TA, this allowed Bruce to gain Outwit, which he then used on Ulik, allowing him to do a little damage to the troll.

That’s the game mechanics. In continuity terms, what I imagined happening was Lex ran up behind the Hulk and handed him some small device he’d created, saying “This should be effective on magically based beings, behemoth. Try it.” The Hulk pointed it at Ulik and set it off and, lo and behold, it momentarily robbed Ulik of his troll-like vitality. I like stuff like this; I think it’s pretty cool.

Of course, then it was Ulik’s turn. Two puny clicks of puny near-Banner smackulation didn’t do a thing to knock down Ulik’s TREMENDOUS damage dealing potential. One whack from him, and a similar thumping from a nearby enraged Rhino, and the Smart Hulk was in the Green Guys Only whirlpool bath next to Brainiac 5, talking trash about how they’d get ‘em next season.

And so it went. I’ll cut to the chase – the smart guys won. But it was tight. In the end, Victor Von Doom had to face down the Rhino, the Wrecker, the Juggernaut, and Mr. Hyde all by himself. Fortunately, they were all beat up pretty bad by then, and Vic was only about halfway down his dial, so he handled them all pretty easy (two targets and Incapacitate is a surprisingly effective combination against big, strong opponents who are on their last couple of clicks).

Something I found interesting, as I was picking out clicks for the various teams… the DC Universe has no super-smart heroes. Or at least, it doesn’t have any I could find, as I looked over my array of figures. Oh, Superman and Batman are both supposed to be really smart, but they don’t show off their intellects the way the various Marvel brainy types do. And the Marvel Universe is just lousy with super scientists. Hell, I left out at least three… Yellowjacket, the Black Panther, and the Beast really should have been on the Brains team, as well.

I mean, check it out. Who does DC have in the Gigantic Brains, I Can Invent Anything Using The Contents Of Your Silverware Drawer And An Old Transistor Radio Department? Villains, that’s who. Lex Luthor (the Silver Age Lex, I mean). Professor Sivana. T.O. Morrow and… you know, that other guy… Professor Ivo. R’as al’Ghul invented the Lazarus Pit, which is pretty spiff, if you ask me. Okay, okay, they do have Ray Palmer, I’d forgotten about him… he took a chunk of white dwarf star and somehow turned it into an intangible costume that lets him change size. (Even more impressive, he somehow managed to pick up a chunk of white dwarf star and put it in his car trunk. Perhaps most impressive of all, he somehow manages to wear an intangible costume. I mean, this guy is GOOD.)

Still, I didn’t have an Atom fig… actually, there is no Atom fig, there is an Atom dial that doesn’t have a fig, and it costs about $70, so I don’t have one, no, and am not likely to get one, either. And other than Ray Palmer, who has never in his life invented one other goddam thing, the only heroic scientist the DC Universe has is Barry Allen, and he’s a police scientist, which I assume means, if he was still alive today, he’d be guest starring on CSI: Central City a lot.

Conversely, as I noted, you can’t throw a rock in the Marvel Universe without hitting a heroic super scientist. (After which, you’d better run, you’d better hide.) Reed Richards invented unstable molecules, discovered the Negative Zone, fairly routinely builds life support costumes for any superhero who needs them, and has turned Ben Grimm human again half a dozen times, although it never takes because Ben doesn’t really WANT to be human, deep down. Hank Pym invented size changing gas and artificial intelligence. Professor X invented Cerebro. Tony Stark created Iron Man’s armor, which incorporates about 400 insanely advanced, physically impossible inventions and discoveries. The Black Panther is capable of casually whipping up microfiber underarm wings capable of somehow allowing a full grown, muscle bound costumed athlete to fly around like a rocket on steroids, just because Captain America asked him for a favor. He also came up with this really cool gyroscopic cruiser that Wyatt Wingfoot and Johnny Storm lost in a desert somewhere, and a buncha other neat stuff, too. Robert Bruce Banner invented the gamma bomb. Yeah, he seems like a real underachiever when you stack that up against the other super-scientist resumes in the Marvel Universe, but, well, let’s remember, he hasn’t logged a lot of lab time in the past forty years. He’s mostly been running around the desert kicking the crap out of Hulkbusters and gamma irradiated supervillains.

In fact, Marvel is almost a mirror image of DC in this regard. Marvel has very few super-smart bad guys. Egghead. Dr. Doom. The Mad Thinker. Ultron, I suppose (he invented Jocasta, although honestly, I don’t know how much credit he should get for that, since he just copied his own blueprints and added boobs). Diablo. The Wizard. The Leader… well, okay. Marvel has plenty of brainy bad guys, so fine, forget that.

But, still. Over at the DC Universe, if you’re smart, you’re pretty much evil. (Okay, Brainiac 5 is an exception to this. But Brainy is only one member of the Legion of Superheroes, he’s never had his own feature, and he’s offset by the fact that his ancestor, Brainiac, is one of Superman’s major villains.)

It’s not that DC’s heroes are dumb. Some of them, we are told, are actually very intelligent, like Batman, who (once upon a time) used his intellect as much as his martial arts abilities to battle bad guys. (Long ago and far away, I grant you.). But they don’t invent things. Sometimes their parents do… Superman’s father discovered the Phantom Zone, and invented the Phantom Zone projector, as well as successfully predicting Krypton’s demise and building an FTL ship in his spare bedroom… but I guess he’s allowed to be brainy, cuz he’s DEAD. The Justice League often uses advanced alien technology they get from Superman, or Hawkman, or somebody, but nobody just creates stuff.

Whereas, again, in the Marvel Universe, not only did all those heroic super scientists invent the specific stuff I’ve already attributed to them, but each of them fairly casually whips up amazing stuff whenever they need it. Need an antigravity ship to fly around Manhattan in? Give Reed Richards or Tony Stark twenty minutes with a soldering gun and a pile of old TV tubes. Want a serum that will let you read thoughts, cling to walls, and fire plasma bolts off of your eyebrows? Hank Pym or the Black Panther should be on your speed dial. Want a robot that can beat you at chess, do your homework, and probably provide you with direct electrical stimulation of your pleasure center? Bruce Banner can throw one together for you on his lunch break (but be careful if it breaks, exposure to the unshielded power source may make you turn green and belligerent). In fact, ANY of those guys can do ANY of that stuff, and pretty much has, whenever they feel like it.

Superman, on the other hand, can’t even figure out how to make Steve Lombard stop picking on Clark Kent.

I suspect there’s a reason for this, and that reason is, most of the ‘modern’ DC Universe was largely shaped in the 1950s. In the 1950s, as I’ve mentioned in recent blog entries on other subjects, intellectual achievement was largely distrusted, and people were for the most part somewhat afraid of science and technology, too. Being an ‘average American, just another joe’ was an accolade. Most likely, DC didn’t want to create any characters who were suspiciously brilliant, or who spent all their time making unlikely and probably really dangerous ‘atomic machines’ and ‘radioactive serums’ in their private labs. Just as DC didn’t create any ugly or monstrous or morally three dimensional characters; all that stuff had to wait for Stan and Jack to come along seven or eight years later and put their own spin on the superhero revival that DC had so successfully pioneered in the mid 1950s.

In fact, geez, that’s pretty obvious if you think about it. In DC’s Silver Age, who has all the super science? The bad guys. And what does it all look like? A gun. Every Silver Age Flash villain has a gun that does something wildly improbable, or high tech gimmicks like special mirrors, or a wand that controls the weather, or something. The only high tech hero in the entire DC Silver Age is Adam Strange, and he’s allowed, because he doesn’t have any other super powers, and he didn’t invent his ray gun and rocket pack, he’s just borrowing it from some egghead aliens… who obviously need a real ‘average American joe’ to bail them out of their problems (all of which are spawned by Science Gone Wrong, anyway) every month.

It’s probably worth noting, in this line, that the Guardians of the Universe also embodied this ‘eggheads don’t really know nothin’ attitude. Hal Jordan was always proving them wrong in his early adventures… they’d tell him to do something ‘logical’, which any Earthly ten year old could tell you wouldn’t work, and Hal would ‘teach them a lesson’ by the end of the story about ‘how we do it on good ol’ Planet Earth’ (always a euphemism for how we did it in the good ol’ U.S. of A., presuming, of course, that we had a power ring harnessing the Guardian’s amazing mental energies in the first place…)

Hey, isn’t the current Green Lantern a male model, or something…?

Hey, that’s all I’ve got this time, other than a killer headache from staring at the CRT for too long. I’m off to the Tylenol bottle, and thence, to bed.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.