BATMAN: So I saw you fighting another giant robot on television. Luthor again?
SUPERMAN: No, this one wasn’t Luthor.
BATMAN: Are you sure?
SUPERMAN: Of course I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I be sure that it wasn’t Luthor?
BATMAN: You tend to believe the best of people too often. I want to be sure this wasn’t another case of “maybe he’s reformed this time.”
SUPERMAN: I’m telling you, it wasn’t Luthor. It was aliens.
BATMAN: Hn. Aliens.
SUPERMAN: What’s that supposed to mean?
BATMAN: Nothing. So what did the giant alien robot want?
SUPERMAN: No, the robot wasn’t itself an alien. It was built by aliens.
BATMAN: I understood that.
SUPERMAN: Oh.
BATMAN: The robot?
SUPERMAN: Oh. Enslave all humanity. You know.
BATMAN: Again? That’s the third one this year and it’s only May.
SUPERMAN: Actually, this one was kind of interesting. See, there used to be this intelligent alien race that lived on Earth before humans.
BATMAN: That we’ve never discovered any archelogical evidence of? Ever? Pull the other one, Clark.
SUPERMAN: No, really! They left.
BATMAN: They left.
SUPERMAN: Yes.
BATMAN: They left the most fertile planet in this entire quarter of the galaxy.
SUPERMAN: There was some virus or something and it was wiping them out.
BATMAN: They invented interstellar space travel and couldn’t figure out antibiotics or vaccination?
SUPERMAN: They didn’t invent faster-than-light space travel; they used hibernation ships.
BATMAN: Where did they go?
SUPERMAN: I’m not sure. They seem to have been lost.
BATMAN: Really.
SUPERMAN: It’s not entirely implausible, you know.
BATMAN: Hn.
SUPERMAN: I keep telling you, it wasn’t Luthor.
BATMAN: I’m sure. Continue.
SUPERMAN: Anyway, a few of them stayed behind and transferred their consciousnesses into the giant robot.
BATMAN: Does that mean when you destroyed the giant robot, you wiped out their race?
SUPERMAN: …well, there’s the ones in the hibernation ships.
BATMAN: That were lost.
SUPERMAN: …oh, crap.
BATMAN: (sighs) Look, they weren’t really alive anyway. They were computer copies of dead people.
SUPERMAN: Good point.
BATMAN: And it looked like that giant robot was giving you a hell of a fight.
SUPERMAN: It was. Battle lasers, nearly indestructible, that sort of thing. Hey, you know what was interesting?
BATMAN: No.
SUPERMAN: It would send out the alien spirits to possess people – wait. If the spirits were in the robot –
BATMAN: Probably advanced hypnosis of some kind. You didn’t kill anybody. It’s obvious.
SUPERMAN: Oh. Good. Anyway, whenever it sent out those “spirits” to possess people, it would get weaker. But when it recalled them, it got stronger.
BATMAN: That doesn’t make any sense.
SUPERMAN: Sure it does.
BATMAN: No, it doesn’t. If it was really recalling “spirits” back to its mainframe, it would be using up additional processing resources and therefore should have been getting weaker. Or at least slower.
SUPERMAN: But –
BATMAN: Come to think, freeing up processor space like it did by expelling “spirits” should have made it more efficient, but instead it got weaker. That confirms the hypnosis theory; it was running additional subroutines when it hypnotized people and “possessed” them.
SUPERMAN: Well –
BATMAN: So to sum up, you fought a giant battle robot that claimed to be made from an Earth-native intelligent race that conveniently managed to predate humanity and invent starship travel – but not moderately advanced medicine, despite their ability to supposedly digitally transfer souls into machinery – without leaving a single trace of their civilization behind for us to discover. Then it behaved in a manner contrary to all the laws of computing that we know, unless it’s completely consistent with those laws. And you barely managed to destroy it.
SUPERMAN: Well, that’s the thing, see.
BATMAN: …what?
SUPERMAN: I couldn’t quite destroy it by punching it or anything.
BATMAN: Why didn’t you just throw it into the sun?
SUPERMAN: …look, sometimes you forget these things in the heat of the moment.
BATMAN: So what did you do?
SUPERMAN: I pretended I was defeated and figured that if I left myself open for possession, they’d all try to possess me at once and bad things would happen.
BATMAN: You did what?
SUPERMAN: Well, it worked.
BATMAN: That’s the most idiotic thing I think you’ve ever done. Counting the whole glasses thing, which I still don’t believe works.
SUPERMAN: Well –
BATMAN: I’d tell you more at length how stupid it was, but it doesn’t matter since we know “they” weren’t trying to “possess” you.
SUPERMAN: Then what did the robot do?
BATMAN: My guess would be that it initiated a deep-core biological scan, transmitted the data, then self-destructed to disguise its true plan.
SUPERMAN: …
BATMAN: Yes.
SUPERMAN: Look, it’s still not necessarily Luthor…
(It’s still a really cool-looking battle robot, regardless of origin.)
Top comment: Wait, so it’s a robot made of thetans? Huh. — Master Mahan
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The “no archaeological trace” thing — I seem to recall reading that if you go back far enough, there are gaps in the fossil record far bigger than the 50,000 or so years it’s taken human civilisation to rise. My knowledge is sketchy, but I’m pretty certain there are gaps bigger than the three million years humans have existed in a recognisable form.
Also, Batman totally does this just to make Superman paranoid. Because an off-balance Superman is a Superman you can manipulate.
From the WW entry, it sounds like Host is itself archaeological evidence.
I say we drop a 0, and handwave them into being contemporaries of Arion era Atlantis. Saves us effort.
You know, a guy that teams up with the King of Atlantis, a Space Cop with an imagination solidifier, the last survivors of two seperate alien planets, and the princess of an all-women island civilization that managed to stay hidden for like 2000 years really has no grounds to be that skeptical about the fantastic.
I mean, that’s not even counting the guys he only occasionally hangs out with.
Like the dude that uses telephone wires as his personal railway and who has found about 73 different subatomic societies.
Or the dead guy who lives in the magic pseudo-buddhist city that served to bring back Batman’s finally dead immortal nemisis.
Or the guy in the bird suit who turns out to be a reincarnated alien pharoah who secretly (and historically invisibly) ruled Egypt with Alien technology.
Or the Gorilla City in Darkest Africa populated by unknown-to-history super intelligent gorillas.
Or the girlfriend who is part of a long line of “Magic Humans” that has been historically dismissed despite the truth of their existence (like Merlin).
Or the Scandinavian Ice Lady who turns out to be part of a hidden enclave of demi-gods that live out in the middle of nowhere not being important to history.
Or the prehistoric, previously undiscovered Antarctic Martian scientific research lab that his Martian buddy used to use as a house.
Or the two guys that got superpowers from the same ancient, half dead god’s head/god from Earth’s Kirbian pre-history.
*Batman really has no grounds to be that skeptical about the fantastic.
Whoah. A 15-ft. tall alien mummy robot? With laser eyes? That’s *fantastic.*
This may be the first of these Who’s Who entries wherein I remember actually reading the issues in question!
Much, much later, like five or ten years later, Superman is catapulted around in time, in a situation where he jumps from historic event to historic event whenever his body is subjected to sufficient heat and energy? He meets the Legion of Super-Heroes, he beats up Nazis, stuff like that, and at one point he’s stuck millions of years before humanity, so, no technology capable of generating the heat/energy necessary (I don’t know why he couldn’t fly into the sun, either), and then he’s like, whoa, what about those prehuman aliens who made that one giant alien mummy robot? And he goes looking for them, and manages to get himself caught in the propwash of their hibernation ship, and sent back to the 20th century.
See also Star Trek Voyager’s space-faring Saurians from Earth…moving on.
So………
…..Scientology reference?
For some reason, I kept imagining Superman voiced by Hugh Laurie in his Bertie Wooster role. It worked disturbingly well.
SLEESTAKS
Nimrod, is that you?
@DistantFred. Aside from the obvious just-fucking-with-Supermaness of the thing Batman is just employing Occam’s Razor to the situation. Which is more likely, the story Clark spins about an acient technomantic alien race or the work of a guy who releases a new giant robot on Metropolis to kill Superman a couple of times a year?
Besides, Batman himself explains his own skepticism regarding the fantastic as some point (it wasn’t in “Dark Knight, Dark City,” but it was sometime around there). Yes he’s battled/befriended aliens and ghosts and monsters and mythic beings and things that shouldn’t exist, but those things are VERY RARE and the more obvious and likely solutions should be investigated and elimianted as possibilities first.
This conversation is made up of awesome.
T’he na’mes nee’d m’ore a’pos’tro’phes.
Um, it gets weaker when spirits leave, but when they all leave it gets enough energy to explode? Riiiight……
Still, a cool backstory for a seemingly minor enemy. You´d think all these coexisting super-races would have met each other back then and teamed up or fought to enslave humanity. Like weren´t there also laser-vision super inteligent dinosaurs? I seem to recall them leaving earth as well once they started dying, and then their hive-minded warriors came back and fought for earth´s resources.
All we’re saying is that, given all possibilities, and given the fact that Luther has his hand in half the pies in the DC Universe, it’s not unfair to suggest that he might have had something to do with it.
Kinda like saying, “Oh but, Spiderman, maybe this New York crime syndicate isn’t necessarily having its strings pulled by the Kingpin. Maybe it’s aliens. It could totally be aliens.”
It’s almost criminal that I’ve never seen this guy until now. What an awesome character design. I mean, look at that head to body ratio. It’s awesomely out of whack.
It looks like Nimrod wearing Randy Parker’s snowsuit.
I’m still not clear on how a terrestrially-originating race qualifies as ‘alien’. Unless Batman’s just pissed about NAFTA costing WayneCo. jobs or something.
Somewhere, there’s a bunch of domestically made super robots standing in a room, shaking their fists, and shouting, “Dey tooker jobs!”
Later, in a story named “Time & Time Again”, Superman is accidentally stranded back in time due to explosions and gets to their city – just in time to watch them leave. We never found out what they looked like.
Oh, and I’d change that ‘Predate’ to ‘Pre-Date’. It’s a minor, obsessive-compulsive quibble, but you’ll admit there’s a significant difference between merely coming before another species and keeping their numbers down by devouring them.
Not a huge, difference. But a significant one.
It might have come from a past from an alternate timeline.
That robot looks almost exactly like the Shingu from Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars, which was both a very good show and the only show that ever made me say “Stop going on about aliens and secret powers! I WANT TO SEE WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE CULTURAL FESTIVAL!”
He’s so cute!
Fat Nimrod FTW.
So, now we have “why you should write World’s Finest”. Great stuff. I’m still hoping for you on the Legion.
It was kinda an awesome robot in truth, not every supervillain can get punche and blasted by superman and look unscratched. Also his style was simple and elegant at same time. And distant Fred is right, batman had no groudn for ebing so skeptical, albeit….Well in world full of fantastic things, is hard ot be all that skptical, and Batman , being Batman, know that this make you more vulnerable to being mind tricked. If you do not make some search and investigation how do you know an alien is not a fake? Given the information the he got Batman’s suspect are justified. Superman can be extremely naive sometimes, ya know.
Looks a bit like the Fantastic Four’s opponent Terminus.
Wait, so it’s a robot made of thetans? Huh.
I remember that issue. Byrne dropped a lot of hints that the ‘H’v’l’e’r’n’i’ were proto-Kryptonians. They left Earth, ignored Rann, and settled on a high-gravity thin-atmosphere tectonically unstable planet orbiting a flare star.
Yes, according to John Byrne the early Kryptonians were idiots.
Look, millions of years ago the Dinosaurs evolved and created/headed a galactic civilization that spanned galaxies. Like the UFP from the 30th century, many of them came to Earth. As the Dino Federation of Planets died off, the enclaves of the different species died off – some of them leaving behind artifacts like this one.
As for why we’ve never found any trace of them, their civilization was made of car keys and socks which will, obviously, disappear into nothingness. Why are they showing up now? Because we don’t need them!
Makes sense to me, anyway…
I think it’s the lovechild between Nimrod and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
It makes PERFECT SENSE.
(And it was probably programmed by Luthor.)
Damn, but that’s a lot of tap-dancing in order to remove one count of genocide from Supermans rap sheet…