Meet… Machine-Gun Maggie!

She’s a tough-talking lady with eyes of steel and the heat to back it up! A post-feminist icon for the ages!

She’s unstoppable! A wrecking machine in stiletto heels! There’s nothing she can’t –

Oh.

Never mind.

Comment that wins the thread: Think of how her life might have changed if only that drawer had held a chemistry set, or some construction tools. She could have gone on to become a constructive member of society, but no the careless misplacement of random tommy guns claims another victim. — Brett

A friend forwarded me the link to this Comic Book Resources forum thread, wherein Ethan Van Sciver, best known for extremely detailed drawings in comical books and for deciding that Green Lanterns all have a little Lantern logo made out of energy floating in front of their chests, pontificates on matters political and economical.

It is always interesting to see a comics professional reveal themselves as a right-wing nabob, but my favorite bit comes when, after Van Sciver asserts that the United States is a good place to live in terms of having a high degree of social mobility and people rapidly point out that compared to most other first-world nations the USA actually is notso-hotso on the social mobility scale, that he resorts to sarcasm and moving the goalposts.

Still, I would encourage Van Sciver to blather some more about his political and economic philosophies, because he has a long way to go before he can catch up to the likes of John Byrne or (glory hallelujah!) Dave Sim. YOU CAN DO IT, LITTLE TROOPER!

Hey, are any of you people the people who buy the comic books with the variant covers that cost like thirty dollars because the comic store has to order twenty of the standard cover to get one copy of the fancy cover?

And do you pay for those special comic books in retard dollars?

Hey, what else can you buy with retard dollars? “Gourmet-quality” dog food? A block of wood to make your music sound better? The chance to tell the whole world that you play World of Warcraft? I need to get my learn on!

So I started doing these things almost two years ago now, and I’ve gotten self-righteous emails about them at times. I’d figure I’ve gotten maybe two for every post (not sequentially, just overall). There’s the “who do you think you are” variety, of course, and the “why don’t you use all this talent to make something yourself” sort (because I talk so much about the writing I do that’s not for this or other sites, you see).

But one letter I got stuck with me, and that was a mail complaining that everything I was writing was setup. There wasn’t any payoff. Now, there are reasons for that, of course. These are essentially pitches to readers; a series of tests to see if what I like to write about is what people want to read. And, on the off chance I ever get to use them (writing Legion, or far more likely adapting what I’ve presented here for my own use in other formats and settings), I don’t want to give away the endings.

But let’s be realistic: the odds of me getting to write the book are dramatically low, even should I get the level of success necessary for DC to take a shot with me, because the Legion is a core property. (How many years did it take for DC to let Gail Simone write Wonder Woman?)

So I figured that for this – the last one of these, and this time I mean it – I’d change things up a little and give you more than just a teaser. Something fleshier. This was one of the first ideas I had when I started doing this thing two years ago – I referenced it in both reasons 6 and 29 of the original thirty – and it’s still, out of all of them, probably my favorite. So call this my 33rd birthday present from me to you. (I would’ve gotten you a card, but I’m cheap.)

I was not a big fan of the Mark Waid reboot of the Legion when it first hit stands four years ago, and even now – having developed a better appreciation for the ideas and capabilities behind the reboot – I think he botched some things. I’ve discussed these elements before and don’t feel the need to drag Waid through the shit all over again.

One thing I particularly disliked at first was his reimagining of Triplicate Girl. Removing the “triplicate culture” that previous versions of the Legion had had and replacing it with a hive mind sort of gestalt being? It was weird, and at the time I felt it was pointlessly showy. I missed the idea of “tri-jitsu.” Worst, it was kind of creepy.

But then I started thinking about it some more, and I realized – it was kind of creepy! And this wasn’t bad – it was great! Because in issue #3, Triplicate Girl’s origin story? Is told entirely by Triplicate Girl herself. This immediately offers the possibility of an unreliable narrator. Unreliable narrators are one of my favorite storytelling devices because they really let you fuck with a reader’s head in a way that the reader will not only not get irritated by, but will instead thank for you doing so (when it’s done properly).

In issue #3, Triplicate Girl explains that she has no memory of what happened before the great disaster on Carggg that left only her; that she has no memory of how she came to be or how she got her power to self-replicate or how it works; that when she split her three-selves off to join the Legion from the rest of herself, that those three grew isolated from the rest of her self-society.

Bullshit.

All of it.

This is what really happened:

The entity now calling itself “Luornu Durgo” was created in a laboratory on Carggg, a small self-reliant, self-sustaining planet outside of the usual galactic traffic, one of the long-lost remnants of the colonization protocols initiated by President Thomas Lorenzo in the late 21st century when Earth’s ecosystem was on the brink of total failure. They were looking to create a next-generation antibiotic – a living compound, something that would kill virii by absorbing their genetic material. A “virus-eater.” But what they got instead was something that reflexively absorbed genetic material.

The real Luornu Durgo was a lab technician who wasn’t careful putting the failed experiment into the matter disposal unit. The compund killed her quickly, in a matter of seconds. When it did so, however, it imprinted upon her genetic template, merging itself with her, gaining sentience at the same time, marrying intelligence to a natural drive to consume. The new entity quickly realized that if anybody realized what it – she? – had done it would be destroyed, and pretended to be Luornu for a period of weeks.

During that period it started absorbing other citizens of Carggg, always careful to do so in a manner that would not raise suspicion. Each time, it gained the ability to generate a new body – and more interestingly, every time it did so it created more personality within itself, gradually becoming the hive mind it would later in fact claim to be. It/she felt guilty about killing people, but the urge to absorb was of it/herself; there was nothing to be done.

Of course, eventually the Cargggites realized what was happening, almost too late to even do anything. By that point Luornu (for so they now thought of herselves) was almost a fifth of Carggg’s population and growing rapidly. What happened next was a short and brutal war, which ended when the last bastion of Cargggites launched bradyonic bombs in a last-ditch, suicidal effort to destroy her before she captured the planet’s only remaining spaceport. The bombs wiped out all life on Carggg…

…except for Luornu. A few of her bodies were in an underground bunker at the time, and that was how she learned that the bradyonic energy – also used in teleporter technology – had not destroyed her bodies but instead, in a sense, hyperlinked them. She could now transfer her accumulated bodymass between bodies at any range, any distance. But she couldn’t teleport off the planet or anywhere else she wasn’t already, so she was trapped – and always feeling the hunger. She rebuilt the planet more out of boredom than anything else, taught herself whatever books could teach her. She continued to feel conflicted and guilty for obeying her natural urges, and tried to use the isolation to teach herself restraint.

When the United Planets exploration crew finally arrived planetside, it took all her control to keep from immediately consuming them. She spun her story of destruction and mystery, and then separated three bodies from her packself to go with them.

The restraint didn’t last, of course. She spun more bodies off herself the moment she landed on Earth and went hunting, never letting her primary three consume anyone even as they joined the Legion. This time she had the benefit of experience; she consumed the valueless, the ones nobody would miss, the underclass and criminals which avoided the Public Service. There were hundreds of millions on them in every system in the UP, plus the entire population of Rimbor and countless fringeworlds. When the Public Service was destroyed in the wake of the Dominator War, it got even easier.

All the time she kept rationalizing. Nobody would miss these people. They were leeches, parasites, better off gone. If the Legion knew, they’d destroy her, so she couldn’t tell anybody. Saturn Girl’s telepathy didn’t pick up any of this – for much the same reason that somebody drinking water from a lake doesn’t taste the whole lake.

Nobody should have noticed; nobody should have cared. But even criminals sometimes have an influential friend, and two of them were old gang buddies of Jo Nah. When one of them disappeared and the other called for help before disappearing herself, Ultra Boy took an interest, and started investigating. Not well, because he wasn’t a natural detective by any means – but he didn’t give up. It took him a long time to piece together the chain of disappearances, longer still to see the spikes wherever the Legion had had a mission.

By that point, she was one billion strong and counting. And hating herself, none moreso than her selves in the Legion – one of whom was now in a serious relationship with Element Lad. (It helped that, even though she believed she would never consume a Legionnaire, that the auras generated by the flight rings prevented her from doing so.) That self, more than any of the others, was purely restrained, never absorbing anyone. Even the other two-thirds of Triplicate Girl did so occasionally. But that one, the one dating Jan – no. Could never do it.

And that’s where the story really starts – when Ultra Boy confronts her before the Legion, demanding an explanation he doesn’t entirely want. That’s when it’s revealed that Triplicate Girl is really the Infinite Girl, as she sprouts bodies into the room faster than anybody can imagine, flooding the Legion with duplicates of herself. They may not be superpowered, but what does that matter? They can carry weapons, and they can kill any organic lifeform not wearing a flight ring – and increase their numbers at the same time. And the Legion doesn’t want to kill them – not even those with more violent tendencies (like Timber Wolf or Shadow Lass) want to carve up someone they thought of as a friend.

The Legion is swiftly divided between those taken prisoner and those managing to escape, to help in the frontlines of an instantaneous war as Luornu attacks the United Planets on a dozen different worlds simultaneously, her fight-or-flight instinct kicking in on a genocidal level. The prisoners have to escape so Brainy can come up with a plan. Element Lad has to convince the sole remaining Luornu to help, and she has to find it within herself to do it.

And in the end, they find a way to beat her – and, yes, destroy her – within a matter of hours. But it costs them one of their own; there’s no way around it. Who do you think goes? The last sane Luornu-self, desperate for redemption? Element Lad, determined not to let his lady die entirely? Ultra Boy, convinced he has to finish what he started? Maybe it’s someone else. But not everybody gets out of this one alive.

—

And that’s that. Thanks for reading it, but now I’m done.

By popular (okay, one repetitive) request:

First off, understand that Roy. G. Bivolo (yes, that is apparently his real name, which is one step above Kite-Man’s real name being Charles Brown) is an embittered super-criminal who turned to a life of super-crime because he could have been a truly great artist if only he had not been born colourblind! Of course, the fact that you can create perfectly brilliant works of art in monochromatic tone (Escher did it all the time) never seemed to pierce Roy’s psyche. So probably he was lying about being a potential artistic child prodigy.

But it would make sense that he was lying, because Roy didn’t build his super-powered light generators himself – his father made them for him, shortly before dying of natural causes. How lame is that? At least Weather Wizard killed his brother to get that weather-wand. How does Roy have any self-respect at the super-villain club nights? Really, it’s supervillainy, not soap box derby racing.

“Yeah, I fell into a vat of super-chemicals and they turned me into a massively strong giant. How’d you come up with that light thing you do?”

“…my dad made it for me…”

On top of that, the powers themselves? Well, he’s got a sort of made-in-Chinatown version of the Green Lantern ring since he can create solid-light objects, although he never uses it for anything other than to create rainbows to travel upon. But even less impressive than that is his power to use colors to influence emotions. For example, he can use red light to make you angry! I imagine this is particularly useful when he is fighting Hawkman.

Hawkman: I am going to stop you, Rainbow Raider!
Rainbow Raider: A HA! Red light in your FACE!
Hawkman: I WILL KILL YOU AND WEAR YOUR BALLS AS A HAT! MACE MACE MACE!
Rainbow Raider: Oh, fu- (rest of sentence ended by mace smashed violently into mouth)

Finally, it is worth noting that among a criminal history that included such noteworthy moments as teaming up with Dr. Double-X (“less randy than Dr. Triple-X, more daring than Dr. Single-X”), one of the Raider’s most infamous criminal moments was attempting to drain all the colour out of Central City. Which left all the other criminals scratching their heads, because… why?

“Now they won’t be able to use… traffic lights! The city’s traffic will come to a standstill without giving me the riches I demand!”

Oh, Roy. Roy, Roy, Roy.

There’s a reason Geoff Johns used this guy as a stupid whipping-boy.

Top comment: This character makes much more sense if you assume he’s trying to get revenge on the world not over his colorblindness, but over his father cursing him with a really stupid name. I mean, come on… Roy G. Bivolo? It’s like his father wanted him to have the crap beaten out of him in school. — Skemono

“War. War never changes.” Which is why in order to beat it, you have to change instead.

Terraforming? Doesn’t work.

Well, it does. It just doesn’t work at any speed that’s meaningful to any civilization. Even the quickest terraforming techniques take centuries to transform dead worlds into only moderately livable ones. (There was this one set of experiments with the Speed Force in the mid-2600s – but that’s a whole other story…)

Think about that for a second. Hundreds of years. Most humanoid civilizations don’t have the lifespan necessary to consider terraforming on any serious emotional or mental level. Think about how hard it is to get global warming policies enacted right now, when we pretty much know that we’re fucked as a species if we don’t get on the horn immediately. Now let’s extend the scope of action even further. That’s terraforming. It’s hard for a government to initiate a series of actions that have the potential to outlast the lifespan of the government itself.

So terraforming barely ever happens. Alien civilizations guard their lush systems with near-paranoia because the perception is that that’s all there is – and as perceptions go, it’s mostly not wrong. Dead worlds serve as mining camps and little else, because everybody learns soon enough that there’s no point in stripping your own world’s metals when there are perfectly good asteroids nearby.

But of course there are outliers. Fringers ekeing out an existence on rimworlds barely capable of sustaining life. The United Planets, the Khund, what used to be the Dominion, and every other small stellar empire occasionally send out a tax collector, but really, who cares? They show up every so often, sell some raw minerals, buy some food – it’s money into the economy and who cares about them otherwise, right?

But there’s one system, smack dab between the Khund and the United Planets – the two giant gorillas of interstellar politics. Four planets, all barely inhabitable, all desert worlds with fringertowns and rimvilles. They’re called the Sandworlds, when anybody bothers to wonder what their name is. Nobody lays claim to it; the locals trade with both the Khund and the UP. And that’s pretty much it.

Until a routine UP surveyor ship, using the system as a stop point to recharge jump engines, notices that one of the worlds is suddenly a lush jungle paradise. And Khund intelligence finds out soon after. And then suddenly the issue of claim is very important indeed.

Nobody quite knows how that desert world became a rich life-bearing planet. (Even if the world was transformed into fertile soil, where did all the plants come from?) But it doesn’t matter, because this is the Holy Grail of interstellar colonization. (How much energy does it take to do this thing, anyway? Where do you even begin to get it?) And the fleets mobilize, and move into the Sandworlds system, because you can’t let anybody else have this technology if they won’t share it.

And that’s why Timber Wolf in particular is positive that somebody’s running a giant scam. Somebody wants the Khund to go to war with the United Planets. He doesn’t know why – but he knows this stinks. And what’s more, the United Planets government won’t let the Legion investigate, because they want that technology for the UP so badly they can taste it and no way some bunch of punk kids are going to ruin this – so the Legion gets drafted into the UP military.

This isn’t a story about battles and war – like we said, war never changes, and it’s always the same story with different trappings. This is a story about spying. Because, more than most superhero teams, the Legion has a proud tradition of being willing to out-sneak the bad guys just as often as they out-fight them. This is a story where Mon-El and Ultra Boy are the distraction to let Invisible Kid and Chameleon do the real work.

In short – this is a story about the Legion Espionage Squad.

There’s a river flooding! And a horse in danger! What can possibly be done?

Well, maybe you just ride that horse along the river wreckage, if your name is Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog.

Say I had found a piece of fanfic.

Say it was erotic fanfic.

Now say that the fanfic featured two comic book characters having sex with one another, but that the author has a serious sweat fetish – not only does he focus on the individual characters sweating, but in fact has them actively fetishize the act of sweating, indeed so much so that the characters turn up the heat where they are having sex so they can sweat more, and furthermore that they choose to use sweat as a lubricant.

Yeah, I know, pretty freaky. But here is my question:

what two superhero characters do you think were in the story?

(Yes, it’s real. No, I’m not going to link to it.)

“Fear me, Legionnaires! I am your doom! For mine is the power of ultimate bondage!

I see that your taut, sinewy muscles struggle against my cosmo-restraints! But your struggle is futile. Even as solitary beads of sweat inevitably roll down your lean, firm stomachs, so is your continued imprisonment within my clutches inevitable! There is no safeword you can utter that shall free you, Legionnaires! The 30th century belongs to Grimbor the Chainsman!

For Cosmic Boy, chains of invulnerable ceramic! For Element Lad, ropes of solid, untransmutable energy! For Colossal Boy and Shrinking Violet, size-changing proton-bonds! For Chameleon Boy, shape-adaptive manacles! For Dawnstar, Tyborian wing-shackles! For Mon-El, links of superdense Zarnium, laced with lead! For Karate Kid – well, for Karate Kid I just have regular old chains, to be honest, but they will do the job! There is no Legionnaire that Grimbor cannot entangle!

Within my confines, Legionnaires, you are vulnerable! And within my confines – which imprison, but do not harm, at least not without prior consent – you shall ultimately submit to the authority of Grimbor! Only through submission shall you be freed!”

The early 70s were a different time.

DC has oft-times gone to ridiculous extent to justify its tradition of kid sidekicks and teenaged superheroes. But every so often you come across one that they quietly swept under the rug – specifically the stupidest possible concepts they came up with. This is one such.

Yes, it is the Kiddie Version of DC’s tradition of theme paramilitary units – Easy Company, the Losers, the Haunted Tank, the Creature Commandos, and the lesser lights like the team of acrobatic brother-soldiers who repeatedly got caught on Dinosaur Island. But that wasn’t enough: they needed a young team to whom the Kiddies could better relate. And hence… the Boy Commandos.

Led (or possibly owned, it is unclear) by Captain Rip Carter, the Boy Commandos were not just a standard frontline unit but indeed an elite special missions team, every single one of its members apparently precocious in all the deadly arts. There was Andre, the handsome charming French lad; Alfy, the fat stupid English boy; Jan, the “soft-spoken” Dutch boy with stereotypical page-boy haircut; Tex, who – and I am certain this will surprise you – was a young cowboy who did rope tricks; Percy, who wore glasses and was therefore an intellectual powerhouse; and of course, there was Brooklyn, about whom the less is said the better.

(Except you can’t say “less” about Brooklyn, because thanks to the stupid, stupid need of DC comics writers to desperately tie every little goddamned thing together in their vast patchwork universe, Brookyln eventually grew up to become Dan “Terrible” Turpin, and therefore also eventually became Darkseid as well. I assume that at some point there will be horrible, horrible fanfic about this demonstrating how Brooklyn’s experiences in World War Two eventually led to him becoming Darkseid.)

You can say so many things about this that are righteously terrible things, but let’s put it this way. If DC decided to do a modern-day revival of Boy Commandos?

Oh, yeah! Best comic book ever!

Seriously, when Mark Waid used these guys in Brave and the Bold last year, I simply had to be impressed with his sheer ballsiness and/or lack of common sense. Some things can stay in the vault.