If This Week were a Comic Book

If this week had been a comic book it would have been something like this.


Aquaman came to the rescue of a stranded cruise ship today. While delighted passengers watched with amazement, crustaceans crawled up the hull of the ship, carrying electric eels which they hooked up to power the generators, then graciously jumped into steam-pots to become the evening’s dinner, “My finny friends, even the ones without fins, are always happy to lend a claw to the over-privileged land-dwellers who prey on them," Aquaman said. “Might as well be comfortable while we are waiting for whales to tow the ship back to shore!” Ship’s engineers have confirmed that they have enough Spam to feed the electric eels that are continuing to power the air conditioners, casino, and karaoke machines.


Gabrielle Doe, a.k.a. “Halo”, marvels at how far she’s gone on “Dancing with the Superheroes”.


The Prime Minister of Italy received a vote of Extra Confidence today for hiring time consultant Rip Hunter to repair the 2000 year old House of the Gladiators near Mount Vesuvius. “It was not merely a cultural imperative, but a practical matter,” the PM pointed out. “He’s much cheaper than Cave Carson…"


Haitian government admits to inaction on cholera epidemic. “With all the super-science available at the Haiti office of STAR Labs, we could probably stop it immediately, using, oh, nanobots or some such,“ said Haitian President Wyclef Jean. “But we’ve kind of been hoping it would activate somebody’s metagene so we could have our own national superhero. Every year, we try to have several major disasters of a various kinds, just in case. In fact, we keep Paul Booker on retainer.”


President Obama arrived in Indonesia this week for a meeting with assembled superheroes of the archipelago, including Prince Elongated and Princess Star. Aquanus had been scheduled to join them , but was detained helping Aquaman take care of a cruiseshipful of spoiled Americans. The meeting went well, despite a potentially embarrassing incident where Herbintang disintegrated the main course at the ceremonial dinner. “It’s quite alright,” Obama quipped, “I hate Indonesian food any way!” The assembled heroes duly laughed at the president's lame joke for nearly 30 seconds while the credits rolled.

If This Week Had Been a Comic Book

Recently, I talked about the occasional momentary confusion that major comic book geeks can have when they forget which earth they're on. In effort to help solve this problem, I'm trying out this new feature, "If This Week Had Been a Comic Book". ITWHBACB highlights the differences between our world and the comic book world, by noting how the week would have gone if we were living in the comic book world.


The Birds of Prey would have revealed that a female vice-presidential candidate was, indeed, a genetically altered female canine, under the control of Prof. Milo's female daughter, Monroe Milo.

There would have been no observations of 9/11, not because heroes would have prevented it, but because two such hideous and featureless buildings would never have been drawn by a self-respecting comic book artist to begin with. Except in Central City, where no one would have noticed that they were missing.

Oracle and the Calculator would have joined forces to purge the Anti-life Equation from Google Chrome.

Aquaman -- the real one-- would have used controlled bursts of sea-water to extinguish the Chunnel fire and plugged the holes with giant tortoises until permanent repairs could be made, thus thwarting Vandal Savage's scheme to take over the world by slowing down the European economy.

Hurricane Hannah and Ike would have been redirected by Weather Wizard toward Central City, as part of a plan to rob the Sundoller at the Keystone Coffee Pier, but the potentially incredibly destructive hurricanes would have been dispersed by two miraculously non-destructive counter-tornados generated by Barry "Flash" Allen and Wally "Mid-Flash" West.

The political crisis in Zimbabwe and the Zuma trial in South Africa would have been solved, somehow, by Vixen (with secret help from the Bronze Tiger) and an improbably young and sexy black international troubleshooting U.N. diplomat who was Vixen's never-before mentioned first husband when she was modeling in, oh, let's say, Paris.

Wonder Woman would have led a parade against Sanlu Milk Company.

Wayne Enterprises would have bought Lehman Brothers Holdings, not because of its intrinsic value, but to save its employees' jobs, beating out a bid by Lexcorp, which intended to sell their body parts to scientists on Apokolips and Prof. Milo's female daughter, Monroe Milo.

S.T.A.R. Labs in Central City would have activated its new Large Hadron Collector (because where else would you put something that big?). It would, in fact, have caused an unanticipated disaster such as:

• the creation of miniature black holes, that would mostly suck in people rather than other matter, which the JLA would stop, and the people, instead of being crushed into their constituent atoms, would have been rescued by Zatanna, Vixen, and Red Arrow.
• angering a tribe of sub-atomic warriors who use miniature black hole cannons as weapons, whom the Atom would have to defeat.
• alchemical cascades that spread elemental changes through the surrounding area like a plague, which Firestorm would have to stop.
• the discovery that "dark matter" is a personified force that would then threaten to consume all bioenergy in the area, which would have been defeated by the JSA, but not before critically injuring the Ray, and, unbeknownst to his teammates, turning comic's only regularly recurring openly gay hero secretly evil. Again.
• a new color of kryptonite.
• the re-retro-re-creation of the Multiverse.