The Carnival of Doom, Part 2: The J'onzz Corollary

So, the bad guy has engineered a crack in the track of the mechanical horse that John Jones and Willy are riding on at Wonderland, and we listed a few of the, oh, 17 or so reasonable ways J'onn could use his powers to fix the situation so that it no longer threatens (assuming that it really IS that big of a threat).

Of course, J'onn uses none of those, because he never does anything obvious or sensible, or even comprehensible.  Instead, he adheres to the Martian Prime Directive:

"All problems that can be solved by spinning must be solved be spinning."

Galileo said, "Measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not so." J'onn is the Galileo of Martian culture and his motto is, "Spin what is spinnable and make spinnable what is not so."  This is the J'onzz Corollary to the Martian first principle.

Yes. It hardened. Immediately. With no cooling application of Martian breath required.  Sigh.

So, with a child's life at stake, J'onn decides to... do nothing. Not even spin.

Yeah, Willy is wearing the same outfit he was wearing when introduced so... John was on the night shift.

This is not at all the only way to find out, but it is the way that J'onn chooses so that he and Willy can be put in danger again as soon as possible, because, well, his stories are really short. The bad guys oblige.

You could have robbed the box office and left by now.

Dick Dastardly goes to set another trap for John and Willy.

Really? The plane ride is 5 cents cheaper than the horse ride?

It's been a while so you may not remember that planes in Apex City invariably FALL. And amusement park planes are no different.

Second verse, same as the verse.

Again, JJ/MM has to figure out some way to fix the situation without Revealing His Secret Identity. Really, he does this kind of thing every day, you think he'd be better at it.  Obviously the situation calls for Martian breath, because everything you don't solve with spinning you solve with Marshalation.  

I wouldn't call it "super-breath" out loud, MM, or you're likely to get a letter from Clark's lawyers.

So, John falls out of the falling plane and manages to land FASTER than the plane does, rolls away somewhere to change form/become invisible with still enough time to use his sup--Martian breath to guide the plane to safety.  Those planes must have an impressive glide path for park rides.

DO 
NOT
LOOK
at the assembled flock at gawking Apexians forming a unified but many-headed blob in the background, if you ever want a good night's sleep again.

Meanwhile, the crooks are adhering to their strict time table and have robbed the box office, even though John's not dead yet.

Hot pursuit!

"Nothing can stop our getaway through the Tunnel of Thrills!"
You'd think saying it OUT LOUD would make you realize how ridiculous it sounds.

Now that the source of the danger is evident, it's clearly incumbent upon John to ditch Willy, which, clearly, he doesn't because Martians do not think the way we do and besides, you know he's seen all six original "Lone Wolf and Cub" films and has sidekick envy.  

Just spin the kid away, JJ.

To his credit, John THINKS about leaving Willy behind. But Willy is already in the boat and-- somehow-- John is powerless to change this. In the same way that once the mechanical horse track was damaged, John couldn't STOP the ride, he had to go through with it. John can never change or avoid his circumstances; he has to overcome them somehow. My theory is that Speed Saunders and the Martian Manhunter are sort of conceptual opposites and this is one of the reasons I was inspired to visit Apex City again.

Speed Saunders is, superficially, a perfectly ordinary man with no special power or ability.  But he doesn't need them because he has meta-textual authority.  Speed unknowingly controls the reality of his narrative: his hunches will come through, bullets will not hit him if he does not wish it, people will confess if he wants them to, evidence will be deposited on his dinner table, and answers will appear in the closest book if he needs them to.  The world arranges itself AROUND Speed Saunders.

"I shot the fourth wall because I found it inconvenient. You have a problem with that?"

The Martian Manhunter is perfectly extraordinary, with every special power and ability.  But he needs them all because the narrative will always conspire against him.  Meteors fall right next to him, everything around him bursts into flame, his secret identity is under constant threat of exposure, and the writers force him to use his powers in the least simple way possible.  The world arranges itself AGAINST J'onn J'onzz.  

It's always something, isn't it, J'onn?

I think if I wrote Martian Manhunter, I would have Speed Saunders do occasional walk-ons as a visiting detective who unintentionally makes John look like a fool every time he shows up and solves a case while John gets himself trapped in a broom closet.

Anyway, John is now STUCK with Willy as he tries to follow the crooks into the Tunnel of Thrills, so tomorrow we'll see how that goes.

Hint: it will NOT be thrilling.

The Carnival of Doom, Part 1: Peachy Rides

 What's this?

A comic book amusement park? Where? 

We can't be in Star City, because we know what the name of their amusement park is.  Are we in Gotham City? Wonderland would certainly be an appropriate venue for the Batman villain The Mad Hatter!  

But no. You see, I am temporarily overwhelmed with trying to keep up with the godlike Speed Saunders, who, with his reality-bending powers, meta-textual reading habits, and transquartomuralistic lectures, is like the love-child of Grant Morrison and Dr. Manhattan. So I decided to spend some time with a much less powerful, more down to earth character, with more comprehensible abilities and reasoning.

So here we are in his town, APEX CITY, about to attend:

Note: this story contains no actual doom.

And a lower-stakes, less exciting adventure you will never have!

It begins in the office of hardy Captain Harding, the weighty head of the Apex City Police Department, where he and Detective John Jones (the human guise of J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter) are... being held up!

Judging by the height, it must be Arnold Hugo.

No, it's not Prof. Arnold Hugo; it's just Captain Harding's scamp of a nephew, Willy.

Captain Harding's a big man, and his Willy is quite a handful.

Sometimes I am little torn as to whether early MM stories are more Golden Age than Silver Age, but incidents like this cinch it. MM is clear Silver Age because if this were the Golden Age, the cops would have answered Willy with a hail of bullets and then, though exonerated for their natural (over-)reaction, they'd be burdened with guilt for killing Willy, until the end of the story after they'd tracked down the sidewalk swindlers that were selling kids realistic-looking toy guns, who were REALLY to blame.

J'onn, being a suck up, volunteers to take Captain Harding's Willy in hand to the amazing local amusement park that's never been mentioned before and never will  be again.  Besides, as we've repeatedly established, he never has anything else to do, and like the rest of Apex's citizens, spends most of his time wandering the streets.

In comic books, all white children are red-heads. And brain-dead.  And Jimmy Olsen is their god.

Check your watches; the story says John just got off duty, yet he's volunteering to take Willy to Wonderland for the day, which means... it's the morning and John had the night shift?  Or maybe he means the next day.  Congratulations, you have already put more thought into this story than the author.

Once at Wonderland, they look at the peachy rides.

For you modern folk unfamiliar with retroslang; this is really not how someone would have used the word "peachy".  Willy would not have called the rides "keen".  He would have described the opportunity to go on them as "peachy". "Would you like to go on the rides?"; "Gosh, yes! That would be peachy!" Concrete things are not peachy; only abstracts are peachy. 

Heed my retroslang warning. If you time-travel for any reason to the Golden or Silver Age and use "peachy" incorrectly, the cops will answer you will a hail of bullets, knowing you are an imposter. And they will NOT be guilt-burdened by it.

Those peachy rides include:

The Vertical Geodesic Dome

Sure, it takes a while to climb, but the view of Rainbow Beach is worth it

The Salt Shaker of the Future

Officially, the "NaCl Dispensotron"

The World's Second Largest Roulette Wheel

If you have to ask where the largest one is, then you don't read enough comics.

The rides are nice, I'm sure, but probably superfluous since, as we know, the main thing that Apexians enjoy is simply FLOCKING, and the fairgrounds give them plenty of room to do that. But they do like to gawk, so I guess the rides give them something to gawk at. 

But, despite the enormity of the area and the apparent distance between the two word balloons, it seems that...

evildoers are within earshot!

Uh-oh; that's not peachy at all.

You have to respect comic book crooks; they are COMMITTED. Once they make a plan, buddy, they do not put it off.

Criminals are an orderly, OCD lot.

Delay our heist by a day? Or even just a few hours? Don't be absurd; we'll just kill a cop and a kid; it'll be a great distraction! Besides, do know what a headache it will be to change this in our group planner?  Do you how hard I worked on those Gantt charts, Larry?! This is why I'm the one with the PMP, Larry.

Besides, these guys have "special clothes and tools".  ORLY?!  First of all, you're robbing an amusement park office, not an underwater bank vault. Second... you're in Apex City.  The bar for "special clothes and tools" is pretty high.  Do you have a crime suit that shoots flame and electricity out its nipples? Do you have a giant robot bear? Do you have a thematically-shaped helicopter, headgear, or a special ray-gun?  If not, you may want to think about relocating somewhere more appropriate, like Star City.

Where "a bag of rocks" qualifies as a special tool.

Let's see what their first plan is.

You know what Batman did in this issue of Detective? He and Robin went to the State Fair, where they boarded a rocket ship ride, which turned out to be real, then went to the planet Tora where he led a revolution against a dictator, while giving two depressed Earthers new leases on life.  Because he's Batman. Meanwhile, omnipowerful Martian J'onn is trying to surviving a mechanical horse ride while babysitting.

Oh, okay; they're going to kill the Martian Manhunter with a mechanical horse.  Is it a giant one designed by Prof. Ulixes and filled with Greek soldiers? Does it breathe Greek fire?

Oh, THAT'll do it.

Good luck with that, Dick Dastardly; I doubt that would even kill WILLY.  How fast do such things go?  What is this, Final Destination 3?

Naturally, J'onn even SEES the trap in advance. Wouldn't want him to have to strain himself.  Besides he needs time to come up with some ludicrous solution to his problem.

"How can I, with my panoply of superpowers, avert a crack-up, without giving away my identity to little Willy?"

Let's see, J'onn, it's hard to remember what powers you are supposed to have at any point but if NOTHING ELSE... you could FALL off the horse with Willy, taking the brunt of the fall yourself. You can do that without even being Martian.  

I know you can't fly. Can your Martian vision melt the rails together yet? Maybe you can't do that yet.  With a bit a Martian breath (which you can direct with unerring accuracy) you could probably just lift the horse past the crack.  Or you use your legs (or Martian breath) to slow down the horse as it approaches, passing it off as a failure of the ride.  

In fact, now that I think of it, there is only one way, one power that could be of absolutely no use to you whatsoever in addressing this situation....

Aerial Espionage, Part 3: I Thought You Were Rather Dumb

When we last left Speed, the timbers of the burning, exploded house were falling all around in the basement, where he lay trapped by his bonds.

But, in the interests of time, Speed willed away his bonds in between panels, or just silhouetted out of them.

Escaping through the house is impossible because Speed says so.

One must not let soot besmirch the Face of Judgement.

So he escapes through the cellar window, which you'd kind of think would have been his first instinct anyway.

What do you mean "how am I to chase them?"
Use the Speedmobile. Your car is parked outside, you JUST told Kelvey that while you were tied up. Did they evaporate it? Did that, too, happen off panel?

For some reason we mere readers are not privy to, Speed's Speedmobile is not available to him, even though he drove there in it.  But, you know, I'm okay with that, because it gives us this, one of the most perfect Speed Saunders panels of all time.

I really want Old Speed Saunders to start showing up in random modern stories and doing things like this. Not as a way of contributing to any story, mind you.  Just as comfort food for my soul.

An authority figure approaches Speed out of the blue; Speed takes command of him by identifying himself and begins giving him absurd orders with zero further explanation.  It's sublime.

It's like Speed is practicing for a beat poetry competition.

"Watch for spies along the road." Yeah, you can recognize spies because they are the ones carrying goldfish.  The mad god Saunders continues his reign of absurdity at the railroad station as he exercises authority over a train conductor WHO CANNOT POSSIBLY KNOW HIM.

I mean, he's not even wearing the white fedora.

The mad god is, well, mad now and Major Kelvey's larger typeface won't save him from Speed's power of performative utterance as Speed prepares to STATE his way to victory:

EMPHATIC PUNCH-YOU-ATION!

Through force of will and impending deadlines, Speed generates another safeybelted authority figure to take charge of Major Kelvey, because that's not the kind of thing you can leave to train conductors, snazzy though their uniforms may be.

I don't really know what "parcel post" is, but I know it exists on a lower level of reality.

Speed descends to the lower level of reality that is "Parcel Post" where he finds the escaping goldfish along with their accomplice:  THE COLONEL!

Apparently, his name was "Jacks", although this is the first time we learn it.

Okay, sit back in your chair and prepare for THE SPEED-EXPLANATION.

Don't worry; nothing you do will help it make any sense.

If Fred Guardineer had drawn this, all fish would have little black marks on them. Everything would.

Spend some time thinking about how hard it would be to paint coded message on goldfish; now, continue and watch as Speed summons a police car from the ether.

"And all you had to do was train the goldfish to stay in the right order. Why, with several characters per fish, you would only need several hundred fish to send a coherent message. I'm surprised the boys at IBM haven't started using them in their differential engines."

Once Speed explains it all to you, don't just you feel stupid?

"I was going to tell you so at the time, but I didn't know your name."

It ends, as it so often does: with us learning that Speed was just guessing, but it turned out okay because naturally...

he was right.

Aerial Espionage, Part 2: A Queer Egg

Naturally, we have no idea who that bespectacled officer was who wandered away from away from Speed Saunders because Speed never asks what anybody's name is.

Queer Egg. Goldfish lover; expert shot; Army major.
I'm certain I've seen this guy on Grindr.

Harrumph. Okay, FINE, Mr. Speed Saunders; make a liar out of me, see if I care. Major Kelvey, with his unusual Grindr profile, becomes a person of interest to Speed Saunders (and a lot of other guys within a 3 mile radius of Magellan Field, I'm sure).  

I love how Speed's hunches mystify even Speed, as if his thoughts and emotions were detached entities all their own: 
"He seems to interest me."

Speed is revving up to tesser Colonel Safetybelt through the fifth dimension where Major Kelvey can't notice them tailing him, when suddenly--

"Then use the copies. Holy carp, Lieutenant, do I have to do all the thinking around here?" 
"I'm sorry, sir, you're right; I don't know why everyone says you're dumb."

Speed, hot on the trail of a queer egg, has no time for stolen plans, and so leaves Colonel Safetybelt, hurtling away through the Sea of Yellow in his Crimson Speedmobile, Crimson Speedmobile, Crimson Speedmobile.

Take a moment to consider just how striking a man in white fedora, shirt, and tie in purple suit would be.  No wonder everyone recognizes Speed Saunders.

Oh, I get it now.  Speed's theory is that the bomb was "released" from outside of the plane; specifically, that the bomb supports were shot off by someone with a telescopic rifle as the plane flew by at, you know, the speed that planes fly.  That's... well, I'm not going to comment on the likelihood of that.  That should be left to someone who's both an expert on military bombing AND an expert long-range sharpshooter and the odds of someone like THAT reading this post are... oh, wait, they are 100%. Okay, you know who are, so comment.  Personally, I'm still preoccupied with trying to figure out why a colonel flew an armed bomber to transport a civilian on a short hop for an anti-espionage investigation.

While we wait for that, we join Speed at Major Kelvey's swinging bachelor pad.

I mean, we haven't been TOLD the man's a bachelor, but, really now.
It seems like a safe bet.

Saunders and Kelvey bond over goldfish, of which Speed is a great aficionado.

Examine these fish carefully! They contain the traditional Speed Saunders clues that you have NO MATHEMATICAL CHANCE of discerning and I want you to fully enjoy the frustration.

Do not be surprised by this ridiculous reveal.
I ALREADY TOLD YOU again and again that Speed Saunders collected goldfish for a hobby but you thought I was kidding and didn't believe me.

Through reasoning opaque to us non-goldfish experts, Major Kelvey someone intuits that Speed has figured out that he's the spy!

"ANOTHER correct hunch? I really need to start keeping score!"

Kelvey promises to kill Speed immediately, which is what bad guys always do immediately before they don't kill someone.

"Also, I ordered 13 pizzas in your name and they should be here with 15 minutes,  less if they travel by silhouette."

So, Kelvey DOESN'T immediately kill Speed, but leaves him tied up in the basement. 

Sounds like a thudding sickening thump to me.

Did you know you can send goldfish by parcel post? It's 1941, all things are possible.

"But I bought them matching suitcases and everything, so you could travel together!"
"There's no time to get them registered as emotional support animals now!"

Speed now realizes that there's more than one spy and resolves to escape.  Maybe he'll just rip out a window like he did in Chinatown or hypnotize some snakes like in another story I didn't have the fortitude to show you.

Fortunately, the spies kept a cartoon bomb handy for just such an occasion.

When a villain says "and this will SURELY take care of the hero",  it usually means it most surely will not. Still, the situation is not looking good for Speed: the bomb does explode, the building is collapsing, and doing so atop Speed, who still hasn't extricated himself from his bonds. 

Speed, don't SAY things like that or you can CAUSE them to happen, do you not READ you own stories? 

Can this be the end of our hero, killed by a fellow goldfish fan?