TWENTY REASONS WHY QUISLET IS AWESOME

1.) He is a tiny alien in a tiny spaceship
2.) Who talks like Yoda if Yoda had gotten himself totally buzzed on like seven dozen espressos beforehand
3.) Or possibly like Spongebob Squarepants, again with the seven dozen espressos
4.) Or most accurately, a combination of Spongebob Squarepants and Yoda, buzzed out on caffeine
5.) Which come to think of it explains a lot of Quislet’s mindset really
6.) Stated official reason for wanting to fight crime: “What fun!” (Legion of Super-Heroes v3 #14)
7.) Brainiac 5 could never actually explain how his powers worked
8.) But so what, because his power was turning inanimate objects into giant warrior-smashy things and using them to beat up bad guys
9.) Seriously: tiny spaceship
10.) Which he stole
11.) From his home planet which is in an alternate dimension
12.) Frequency with which he would shout “hurrah” when beating up bad guys with inanimate objects
13.) Or when he was blowing things up by possessing them and then leaving immediately
14.) Essentially he is a sentient spark of energy
15.) From a world of sentient sparks of energy who really, really hate the concept of individualism
16.) And who really don’t like it when you shout “hurrah”
17.) Which is why when they recaptured Quislet, he basically invented lying (for sentient sparks of energy, anyway) by pretending that if they didn’t let him go the spaceship would blow up and kill everybody
18.) So he got to rejoin the Legion, and fought the Emerald Empress to basically a standstill before she blew up his ship
19.) Which forced him to return home, but not before he uttered the best last words of any comics character in history: “Never stop having fun!”
20.) Seriously. Tiny spaceship!

Serious question: does anybody actually like Major Force?

I mean, yes, I get he’s a villain, but everybody has their favorite villains. Mine is Lex Luthor. Lots of people love the Joker or Dr. Doom. And there’s always going to be one or two holdouts for the lesser lights, somebody who really loves the Gambler or the Ratcatcher or Big Wheel. That’s natural. But does anybody really love Major Force? Or even like him?

It’s not a problem with his concept, which is actually pretty clever. Since the experiment that turned Nathaniel Adam into Captain Atom also flung him twenty years into the future, the people conducting it had no idea that they hadn’t killed him – so they tried again, but this time they used a psychotic murderer on the basis that if they killed him, nobody would care. (Of course, the question of “well, what if they had succeeded” is one that is casually walked around. I have always favoured “they wanted data on the huge explosion, but needed someone expendable to trigger the huge explosion, and so…”) And then a little while after Captain Atom pops into the future, hello, it’s Major Force! Perfectly good start to a story, right? And Wade Eiling (who was never, ever interesting until he became The General, which is just so comics it is perfect) makes him a government agent, and…

…that’s when it goes downhill. Because Major Force is just kind of boring: he’s a self-interested thug with a tendency to get violent who is basically indestructible. He has never done anything interesting ever. “A ha,” you say, “but he killed Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend!” And my answer is “big deal,” because A) all of Kyle’s girlfriends die sooner or later and B) her death wasn’t about her, it was about Kyle, and Major Force could have been absolutely anybody and it wouldn’t have mattered. Similarly, he killed Guy Gardner’s mother for some reason I forget and again, nobody cares. Nobody cares about anything Major Force does, because he doesn’t have any personality worth mentioning: he just does things other people tell him to do. Why does he do these things? “Because.” Commenting on Major Force as a character is like commenting on the character of the gun that killed Batman’s parents. “Well, he has this trigger. And if you pull the trigger… people might die!”

And the worst thing is that he just keeps showing up. Every time DC wants to have the government be sorta-malevolent (which is like seven times a year now), up pops Major Force like a bad pimple. He just showed up in the godawful Captain Atom backup story in one of the Superman books that doesn’t currently have Superman in it, because the very moment that Captain Atom found out that the government was behind him being in a fantasy world – hey! Major Force! I think if you say “government” five times fast in the DC Universe, Major Force just kind of shows up. Like Candyman. Except he sucks.

I always felt Warp got a bit of a raw deal getting killed off in Salvation Run (which has numerous flaws as a story, not least the idea that half of the supervillains would willingly say “sure thing, Joker can be the leader!”). I mean, yeah, he’s a teleporter and all so he can come back easy enough, but even so – Warp is a cool character, and cool characters shouldn’t get sacrificed for a lousy climax to a miniseries most people didn’t even read. Warp’s ow-tray-zhuss French accent should be fiat armor enough to protect him in any crossover. That’s my belief and I’m sticking to it.

And really, that goes for most of the New Brotherhood of Evil – including Monsieur Mallah and the Brain, also both victims of Salvation Run and writers who don’t know awesome villains when they see them. But also Plasmus (a Nazi made entirely of acid goop, which is almost as good as Swarm, the Marvel Universe’s Nazi made out of bees) and Phobia (a fear inducing villainess with awesome costume). Those are awesome characters.

And then there is Houngan, a character who is really kind of dumb, and who escapes criticism mostly because the vast majority of his appearances have been drawn by George Perez. If ninety percent of Carcharo’s appearances were drawn by George Perez, he would be a totally awesome villain, rather than the worst of all the DC shark-themed villains. But Perez aside, sometimes you just have to recognize when a shitty character is shitty, even if they have a pretty nifty costume. (And Houngan’s, while a bit dated at this point and in need of a small bit of revamping, is pretty nifty.)

And Houngan is shitty, because his origin doesn’t exactly work. He’s a computer scientist, right? And he goes back to Haiti and he learns voodoo. Fine and good. Computers and voodoo, mix of science and magic – this could be a pretty good villain concept! And then what does he do?

He makes a voodoo doll, but it’s a computer voodoo doll. That’s it. That is Houngan’s entire fucking shtick.

Voodoo is this massive goddamn religion, right? With tons of nifty occult trappings: slave-zombies, evil spirits, secret societies, ancestral protection… hell, voodoo’s entire thing is that it is the religion that takes whatever it likes from every other religion. It is like open-source religion (which, and I know Houngan was created in the early 80s before open-source was really a thing, but whatever – the next time someone uses Houngan, they should understand how a computer scientist would think about open-source as applied to religion). All of this could be combined to make a pretty damn awesome character. (In fact, it did. And then they decided for some stupid reason he should be Sorcerer Supreme. Sorry, “Houngan Supreme.” Yeah, still bitter about that.)

But all Houngan does is one thing. He does a voodoo doll. Which he says is better because it’s done with computers, but whatever – it works the same as a regular old voodoo doll. All Houngan’s voodoo doll does that other voodoo dolls don’t is spark electricity every so often. Plus, given that Houngan needs a sample of skin or hair or whatever for his supposedly superior voodoo doll, every time he actually wants to use his voodoo doll, it’s the same scenario: the hero is unconscious or tied up or whatever, so he has time to stroll over and get a skin sample and put it in his voodoo doll, and then he uses the voodoo doll to hurt the hero.

So basically Houngan is the supervillain who’s really only threatening once you’ve already lost.

Last time on Thursday Who’s Who, we examined a successful spear-carrier in the All-Star Squadron. And most of the Squadron were spear-carriers, when you get down to it: they can’t all be slumming members of the Justice Society (or Johnny Quick). A lot of guys in domino masks who punch baddies. This is how it was done in the old days, see.

However, there are degrees of how awesome these guys are. Tarantula, for example, is pretty cool. But Neptune Perkins? This guy is a schmuck. Initially he had the good sense to realize that the “superpower” of having to immerse himself in saltwater every day or die was not exactly grade-A superheroing material, but then he went and joined the All-Star Squadron’s Young All-Stars adjunct, presumably because with Tsunami on the team what they needed was another aquatic hero to emphasize how cool she was.

Seriously: no powers. He’s not super-strong from a life in the depths – he’s fit, sure, but not even, like, Captain America strong. He can’t breathe water (he can hold his breath for seven minutes, which means that he can’t even listen to all of “D’You Know What I Mean?” by Oasis whilst underwater). He’s not a super-swimmer (although his webbed feet give him the ability to swim as strongly as… somebody with a pair of flippers!).

How useless is Neptune Perkins? He is so useless that when he grew up, he eventually became a U.S. Senator. That is how useless Neptune Perkins is.

Also: his most prominent role in comics was serving as the Old Guy Who Doesn’t Get It in Young Justice. That is a damn useless character.

The Tarantula is interesting in that everything that’s been done with him in the modern era is effectively unconnected to the Golden Age rendition of the character. After all, if you’ve read any of the Golden Age appearances of the character, he’s probably one of the most generic mystery men out there. A boring yellow-and-purple costume (which would later be adopted by the Wesley Dodds version of the Sandman in a weird coincidence), boring stories, boring name (come on, his name is literally “Johnny Law”), and token gimmick: suction cups on his boots so he could walk up walls.

And that was pretty much it. Unlike a lot of the Golden Age heroes DC bought over the years, the Tarantula was boring and one-note: he wasn’t that successful in the Golden Age (his run in Star-Spangled Comics was pretty brief) and didn’t do anything memorable, unlike for example the entire Justice Society, which really was an all-star assortment of characters back in the day.

So when he was brought into the All-Star Squadron in the 80s, he was effectively a blank slate. What Roy Thomas and Jerry Ordway did was take the name and create an interesting story hook: John Law wanted to write a book about superheroes, so he became one. They added a “wirepoon gun” that fired “thin but superstrong” nylon cord as his version of a spider’s web-shooter: a joke on the fact that in Tarantula’s first Golden Age appearance, somebody called him a “spider man.”

The “why does he have the same costume as Sandman” thing was resolved by having Dian Belmont design a costume for Wes, and then when Wes initially rejected it John took it for his own use, but eventually decided to go his own route and thus Jerry Ordway (who, incidentally, had one of the best artistic runs on any superhero comic ever when he worked on All-Star Squadron) created one of the more memorable and successful costume revamps in comics: the Tarantula’s new outfit still feels “Golden Agey” but adds a welcome touch of modern complexity.

The result of all this was to take a character who was the definition of “fringe” and make him into a mainstay of one of DC’s more successful team books for about fifty issues. That’s the definition of a successful reintroduction of a character. Tarantula might not be a star player, but he filled his role in the Squadron very well.

I really want to punch Tim Trench in the face. Sadly, he is fictional, so I cannot do this.

It’s not because of his association with the nonpowered era of Wonder Woman comics. Which, incidentally were bad comics, and the attempt in recent years to rehabilitate these bad comics as being good or at least decent kitsch amazes me; not only were these comics bad comics on the basis that Wonder Woman shouldn’t be a normal person being a swingin’ secret agent, but they were bad comics about a woman being a swingin’ secret agent period. Too many comics fans suffer from the delusion that the great creators were/are infallible, which is why people can actually say that Devil Dinosaur is a work of genius, rather than the far more obvious answer of “Jack Kirby having an off-day.” (And the “Diana Prince era” of Wonder Woman isn’t actually even by any great creators, so really it’s just the same old nostalgia for stupid old crap that motivates so much of modern comics fandom.)

But I digress.

No, that is not why I want to punch Tim Trench in the face. Why do I want to punch Tim Trench in the face? Because he is a fucking poser. He blathers about how Hollywood doesn’t make good movies any more and he names his gun “Lulu” and he spouts one-liners blatantly stolen from old Raymond Chandler novels. If he were a modern-day twentysomething, he’d be drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, wearing a trucker hat, and telling everybody how he loves Superchunk, but only their old albums. If you knew him in person, you would hate his fucking guts.

Even though he is fictional.

Seriously. Fuck this guy.

The Predator, being as it is a reflection of Carol Ferris’ “inner masculine drive,” is sort of the first transsexual supervillain, albeit only in a weird Bronze Age sort of way where issues of gender had to be addressed with space magic. (Marvel would later refine the concept with Vamp, the pretty girl who turns into a male monster thing, and make the whole gender-changing thing a lot more explicit.)

What’s weird about the Predator is that, when Carol Ferris split off into herself and the Predator, the Predator immediately started trying to get with her. Is that supposed to be a reflection of her masturbatory urges or something? I hate it when supervillains make you want to check psychology textbooks to see if they make any sense. (Invariably they don’t.)

And of course, this being a Green Lantern villain, he is woefully underequipped to fight Green Lantern. No superpowers, no awesome weapons, not even anything made of yellow. Hell, at least Javelin had a yellow costume. Predator doesn’t even have that. Which means that in order for him to have ever posed a threat to Green Lantern, someone’s going to have to come along and revamp him.

What I’m saying is that I live in dread of the day Geoff Johns decides to revamp the Predator for the modern era.

It’s rare that you find a historical hero who is instantly anachronistic, but Miss Liberty is that hero. Count the stars on her top (which, at the time, would have probably only have been suitable for a really, really weird prostitute, but never mind that now). At a bare minimum she has sewn 24 into the fabric. This, at a time when there were thirteen states. Presumably Miss Liberty was either innumerate or very, very optimistic.

But she can’t be optimistic, because her reasons for wearing the ridiculous costume in the first place are inherently pessimistic – she was worried that if she openly opposed the British, that the British would retaliate by doing bad stuff to her brother who was captive in Britain. Given the even-then large population of the colonies and the multiple-week travel time, this seems terribly unlikely; given the general lack of anything resembling a census or organized databases of geneological information it seems nearly impossible. Perhaps this was merely an excuse; Ms. Lynn decided that, by gum, she was going to put on her ridiculous costume better suited to the mid-18th century (at least in terms of state count) and fight the British with a sword and whip.

Also note that Miss Liberty was eventually crushed to death by the Liberty Bell, which definitely earns her a spot on the Stupidest Superhero Deaths Of All Time roster. I mean, at least Batman was shot with magic death eyebeams rather than, say, being smothered by bats. Miss Liberty’s Liberty-Bell-themed death is worthy of The Puzzler. “You called yourself Miss Liberty and your real name is Bell! Now you’re dead because of the Liberty Bell! PUZZLER!”

Although she is quite sad, she is a patriotic-type hero, and the bar is set lower for them. I didn’t make the rules. Well, I did, but in this case it’s more of a societal trend re: comical books.

I don’t really need to introduce the Phantom Stranger to most of you, I think, so I just want to say something about him.

The reason the Phantom Stranger is great is because he is the elemental expression of something we all, deep down, want to believe is true (even if we don’t), and that is that the universe gives a shit about us.

In recent years, the Phantom Stranger has gotten more exposure than he ever has since his series (which he shared with Dr. 13 – man, that was some awesome old-school comics), but with that exposure has come – not surprisingly – the need to explain the Stranger a little more than he has been. This is the biggest mistake that could possibly be made with him. The Phantom Stranger is remote and unknowable. That’s not a minus; that’s who he is and who was designed to be. There’s a reason his issue of Secret Origins contains not one but four separate possible origins: we aren’t supposed to know who the Phantom Stranger is, and it doesn’t matter who he is.

What matters is what he is: he’s the purest possible expression of hope in superhero comics. He only shows up when things are at their absolute worst, when it looks like there’s no possible way the good guys can win, whether those good guys are the Justice League or a single mother and her only child stuck in a house of horror or a lonely policeman on the brink of personal despair, and he helps. He never outright saves the day; he just gives the good guys a bit of a nudge, exactly as much help as they need to get themselves out of trouble, and then he disappears again before he can even be thanked. Oftentimes he doesn’t do much more than remind the heroes of how strong they really are.

And it’s cool because you know that the Phantom Stranger is crazy-go-nuts levels of powerful. He could solve all of the heroes’ problems for them. But he doesn’t, because to do so would be to take away the opportunity to triumph from them, and what kind of help would that be?

That’s a wonderful thing. That it comes in one of the best superhero costumes ever is only a bonus.

The Dummy isn’t handicapped – he’s handi-capable! Or possibly handi-killifying. I don’t care what anybody says: you have to admire a deformed midget who takes a look in the mirror and says “I think I can make this work for me,” and then doesn’t go into a life of circus work. The Dummy figured out that he was freaky and that people would naturally recoil from this, and so chose to use that to scare people when he got into gunfights.

Of course, the Dummy was also really intelligent to boot. That’s why when he started up his own crime ring, he pretended to be just a ventriloquist’s dummy, with the real boss hidden in the shadows. (As this was the Golden Age, it is entirely possible that the Dummy was the eventual inspiration for the Ventriloquist’s personal brand of insanity – although the Dummy doesn’t look anything like Scarface, of course.) This was brilliant because when hoods would go gunning for “the boss,” they’d ignore the dummy on the floor just lying there – except the dummy was The Dummy, and he would then shoot them in the back. That is planning.

Plus, the Dummy would invent super-weapons. Net guns, electric traps, fire machetes, that sort of thing. Okay, maybe these aren’t the most impressive things in an era where you have the Metal Men walking around, but again, for the Golden Age this was pretty wild stuff. They were impressed by robots who took off their pants back then, you know.

And the Dummy had a great nemesis: the original Vigilante. The original Vigilante is awesome because he’s a cowboy on a motorcycle who fights crime. He’s so cool that in Justice League Unlimited he was voiced by Nathan Fillion; that’s how cool he is. The Dummy never got a speaking role in JLU, but you know that if he did he probably would have been voiced by Alan Tudyk for nerd humour value.

Top comment: A top hat? Classy.
Suit? Classy.
Monocle? Classy.
TWO MONOCLES? Classiest motherfucker to ever stride across the earth. — chenry

You really have to wonder about comic book writers sometimes and if they’re not just playing a gag on you. Such is the reaction I get when I look at The Gang. They look like a comic book writer got inspired on a trip to Bulk Barn. “Hey, what if we had no-name brand X supervillains?”

Hence, The Gang. You have Brains, with the red uniform, who is the Smart One. You have Kong, with the green uniform, who is the Strong One. You have Ms. Mesmer, in yellow, who is The One With The Gimmick. And you have Bulldozer, in blue, who is Also The Strong One. (Presumably they felt that Ms. Mesmer having a thing was almost too individual, so they doubled down and made Bulldozer a shorter version of Kong with a slightly different fighting style.) If The Gang were pills, they would all be generic aspirins.

No coincidence that they made their debut in The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl, quite possibly one of the dullest comic books of all time. (Seriously, go track it down sometime. Then pawn off the books on somebody else. That is how dull they are; you have to witness it to understand it. They are the event horizon of dull.)

I want this entry to be longer, but The Gang is just so goddamned plain. It’s like talking about vanilla ice cream, and not good vanilla or French vanilla or vanilla mint; The Gang are the vanilla ice cream you get for $2.99 at the back of the freezer, the one you know probably gets made with artificial vanilla extract and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. It tastes like inoffensiveness.

Top comment: I’m surprised you didn’t notice that out of a group of criminals supposedly determined not to go to jail, the one named “Brains” is the only one not concealing her face. — 01d55

Sometimes a good comic can make a big mistake. In Manhunter, that mistake was killing off the Monocle.

This is because the Monocle was a pretty goddamned great supervillain. First off, he has exactly the right amount of tragedy in his origin to be one of your more compelling supervillains. He was an honest businessman and a skilled scientist who got screwed over by greedy bankers (see? See? He’s even more relevant now) and then went the overreacting-because-he’s-a-villain route and started murdering them until Hawkman (who, as a good conservative, of course has to protect Big Bidness from the dangers of the little guy) stopped him.

On top of the great origin story, though, the Monocle brings more to the table. First off, he looks really cool. Full 40’s-style evening dress, complete with opera cloak? Bad. Ass. (Consider how many super-characters wear opera cloaks. It’s Monocle and the Phantom Stranger. That’s pretty rarified company.) And that’s before you get to the Monocle’s monocle, which could shoot lasers and strobe blinding lights and just generally be wicked cool.

Secondly, it’s not just that the Monocle looks classy – it’s that he is classy. When the Ultra-Humanite recruited him for the Earth-2 side of the Secret Society of Super-Villains, the Monocle was in retirement, having stolen quite a lot of money and not needing to be a criminal any more; it took the promise of humiliating Hawkman to lure him back. (This is because Hawkman is a dick and everybody hates him.)

So, the Monocle is cool. What happened? Well, first Brad Meltzer used him for the first time in eons for a brief walk-on in Identity Crisis, where he basically said the Monocle was not all that and a bag of chips. This was hardly the worst thing about Identity Crisis but certainly proof that the comic was flawed on every possible level rather than just being an otherwise okay comic with a big event that was a bad idea. But then, after that, Monocle was used in Manhunter, where he was A) depicted as a whiny coward and B) shot through the eye (and monocle) by Manhunter and killed instantly.

LAME. That moment was the low point of the entire run of Manhunter, an otherwise good comic.

There reasonably has to be a son or twin brother or something who can pick up the Monocle’s monocle and carry on. Good villain concepts are rare. Why waste one?

Poor Firebug. Out of all the characters to get boned by Crisis On Infinite Earths, he may have gotten it the worst.

Now, sure, he didn’t die or anything. But so what? Supergirl came back. Barry Allen came back. The Anti-Monitor came back. Pretty much the only person who died in Crisis now is Prince Ra-Man, and he’ll probably come back next month. No, what happened to Firebug is worse: he became redundant.

See, pre-Crisis, Firebug was Batman’s official Arsonist Villain. If you needed to do a story that needed an arsonist, Firebug was your guy. It wasn’t a big thing, but it was a niche. Firebug had his little place in Gotham lore, back in the days when Batman had a lot of villains who wore costumes and who were not crazy. (Nowadays, all Batman villains are crazy. Even Ra’s Al Ghul is a megalomaniac with psychotic tendencies.) A comics writer would go, “I need a fire here. Hey, Firebug!” and he’d get called up. It was reliable.

Post-Crisis, though, Firefly became the fire-oriented Batman villain of choice. Which is interesting, because pre-Crisis, Firefly was a Golden Age dorkus who fought Batman with coloured lights. Post-Crisis, though, somebody realized that “Firefly” is a more poetic name for an arsonist villain than “Firebug” is, so Firefly became an arsonist – and, because Batman now officially Fought The Crazy Types, a pyromaniac as well.

And that left Firebug out in the cold, so to speak. There was only one potential career path for him now: that of the loser semi-retired ex-villain who gets made to look like a schmuck, preferably by a C-lister or below looking for a bit of a boost rather than a major heroic type. And of course, that’s exactly what happened in the very first storyline for Gotham Central.

But even then, he did his best, and was a quality schmuck.

The Star Rovers struck an early blow for alternative lifestyles in comics.

See how Karel cheerfully grasps both Rick and Homer’s asses? This self-described “glamor girl” is in charge. You can tell by the look on her face. That is the face of a woman in total control, who understands and recognizes her power, and likes that she does. Nothing, she thinks – nay, she knows – is finer than the ass-cheek of a starfaring man who knows his place. Firm yet fleshy, that’s the ticket.

See how Rick is confident in his obviously bisexual swagger. As he sashays through the stars, seeing everything sapient – and a few choice lifeforms that technically aren’t – as something to nail, he is nothing less than the galactic predecessor of The Todd. Except Rick gets much, much more ass than The Todd. But what do you expect? He’s a playboy and an athlete. He’s filled every orifice he’s found in every sector of the galaxy.

And Homer – well, Homer’s getting on in years, so he’s really just grateful for whatever tender moments he can get.

And if you think I’m going too far with this, I’d suggest you read Twilight, Howard Chaykin’s re-imagining of the classic DC space comics – because really, I’m fairly conservative by comparison.

Top comment: I have read too many “re-imaginings” to ever be optimistic about another one. And Chaykin is not the man to change my mind. — Greg Morrow

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