9 posts tagged “news that sounds like a comic book”
Those poor schmucks in the video above decided to disguise themselves during their break-in by scribbling over their features with a black marker. Shockingly, It didn’t work.
But dammit! This would have worked in a comic book! Hell, all you need a domino mask or a pair of glasses to fool your most intimate friends and family. Clark Kent worked around photographers and even as an anchor man for a while and no one spotted that he was also Superman who was constantly in the news!
Hell, you don’t even need glasses! Take a peek at the disguises of the original Flash and Doll Man! The Flash’s disguise was a dopey metal hat that might keep the CIA from beaming their mind controlling messages into brain (Stop denying CIA! We all know that the Culinary Institute of America is really a front for our alien overlords!), but it would hardly fool people into thinking you weren’t who you are.
Doll Man’s disguise was short shorts! Granted, Doll Man’s legs might have been distracting and he was small, but I’ve been able to recognize dolls based on famous people I barely know, so I’m pretty sure I’d recognize my friend if he was doll-sized.
Of course, the worst is the original Black Condor who had nothing to disguise his identity except that his bare chest might have drawn the eye away from his face. Additionally, when the Black Condor, Richard Grey, Jr., was unable to save Senator Thomas Wright, Richard just took over his identity and no one noticed. That’s right! Not only didn’t people notice that a U.S. Senator was replaced by some guy raised by condors, they didn’t notice that it was the same guy who was flying around the Capital Building even though he did nothing to conceal his identity except take his clothes off. One of the people who didn’t notice was Senator Thomas Wright’s fiancée, Wendy, who Richard also appropriated with the Senator Thomas Wright identity. I will remind you that the Black Condor was the hero of his comic and not repugnant identity thief and rapist.
So be proud scribble faced crooks! Sure, you were caught in part because you had no way to remove the indelible ink from you faces before you were confronted, but you stand in long and illustrious line of American heroes with terrible, terrible disguises! Things may look bad for you know, but remember, no one will recognize you as those dimwitted burglars when you get out of jail, clean faced, years from today!
But just to be on the safe side, I'd invest in a pair of glasses.
Ant-Man, the Wasp, Swarm, The Queen Bee, all of them control insects. And guys like The Bug-Eyed Bandit used mechanical insects in their nefarious comic book adventures. Now, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has been working with University of California, Berkeley to create remotely controlled cyborg insects!
Electrodes were implanted into the pupal stage of a beetle. That beetle grows to a winged adult, and scientists could fly it around a room, controlling its direction with a lab top!
DARPA hopes to create a Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) using this technology that could carry ... who knows what? Tiny spying microphones! Electromagnetic field generators to scramble computers! Poison darts! It’s the Defense Department! Read the story here!
Unless you’ve been living on an alternate Earth where news organizations concern themselves with actual news, you are familiar with “Balloon Boy,” a.k.a. Falcon Heene, the six year old who supposedly flew away on a flying-saucer shaped, experimental weather balloon and disappeared before the balloon landed. As it turns out, Falcon was hiding in box in his garage and the whole thing may have been a hoax cooked up by his attention seeking parents. On one interview, Wolf Blitzer asked why Falcon didn’t come out of his box when he heard his parents calling for him. Falcon couldn’t hear Wolf, so Falcon’s father asked him, and Falcon said, “Umm, you guys said that ... mmm ... we did this for the show.” More than a little fishy, eh? And watch how dad hems and haws while trying not ask his son what he meant by that later. He is soooooo afraid of the answer.
Anyway, this story sounds a lot like a comic book origin except in a comic the reason Falcon wasn’t on the balloon when it landed would have been that he’d gained the power of flight from being exposed to cosmic rays or was mistaken for an alien by a race of bird people (Thanagarians?) who gave him flight powers and he had to battle Nazi zeppelins! Seriously, named Falcon and accidentally flown into the stratosphere on a flying saucer shaped balloon? You can’t get much more comic booky than that.
In fact, it’s very similar to the origin of The Ray. In that Happy Terrill was in a weather balloon when something went wrong, and Happy had to climb out onto the balloon. He was struck by lightning and voila! The power of flight and light control. Happy’s son gained the same powers because ... well, apparently Happy had lightning in his sperm or something, which sounds like something you’d see in the BDSM section of Xtube.
A German teen was hit on his hand by a meteorite!
That’s a favorite origin story in the Legion of Super Heroes. Meteor powers work into the origin of the original Colossal Boy, Satan Girl, and (my favorite) Fire Lad of the Legion of Substitute Heroes. What I love about Fire Lad’s origin is that he’s wearing a flame themed outfit and hairdo when he encountered the meteorite that gave him dragon-like breath. The Chlorophyll Kid was wearing a plant themed green outfit as a toddler when he fell into the vat of super fertilizer that gave him his plant growing powers.
Clearly, the trick to getting super powers is half being subjected to a strange occurrence and half wearing the right clothes. So far, there is no indication that Gerrit Blank has gained super powers from his run-in with the meteorite. If only Gerrit had been wearing the right Underoos the world would be a lot more interesting.
Oh, all right, this isn’t really news but it was news to me.
There is a fire pit from Apokolips on earth!
Well, not quite, but it’s not far from it.
Derweze underground is rich in natural gas. In 1971, during a drilling, geologists accidentally found an underground cavern filled with natural gas. The ground on which the drilling rig was placed collapsed, leaving a large gaping hole exposed with a diameter of about 50-100 meters. To avoid poisonous gases coming out of the hole, it was decided to let the gases burn. As of 2009, gases in the underground cavern are still burning without interruption. Locals have named the cavern The Door to Hell.
So there is a rational explanation for the place, but don’t you half wish there wasn’t? If the dolphin’s foiling a pirates was the comic booky thing I’ve ever seen, this eternal fire pit is the most comic booky place. Of course, if this place was out of a comic book, we’d be seeing demons climbing out of it or our heroes being thrown into so maybe it’s all for the best.
A woman dropping off churchgoers at a nursing home on Sunday was shot by an arrow in the Bronx! Really! An arrow in 21st century New York!
How the hell does something like that happen? One of the answers below is the real one!
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It was bound to happen once Bullseye became the new Hawkeye.
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Some dick was showing off with his friends and shot the arrow through his fence and didn’t bother to see what happened with it even after hearing the woman he shot screaming.
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Oops! Roy “Speedy” Harper's aim is off for ... umm ... some reason.
You can probably guess which is the real answer, but if you’re anything like me, you had a more colorful (green? red?) answer in mind when you first saw the story.
An enormous pod of Dolphins foiled the plot of Somali pirates, and it isn’t the plot of an Aquaman comic! Are you kidding me? Seriously, this is the most comic booky thing I’ve ever read. I can hear Aquaman saying, “See? I told you I wasn’t useless!”
Thousands of dolphins block Somali pirates
BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhuanet) -- Thousands of dolphins blocked the suspected Somali pirate ships when they were trying to attack Chinese merchant ships passing the Gulf of Aden, the China Radio International reported on Monday.
The Chinese merchant ships escorted by a China's fleet sailed on the Gulf of Aden when they met some suspected pirate ships. Thousands of dolphins suddenly leaped out of water between pirates and merchants when the pirate ships headed for the China's.
The suspected pirates ships stopped and then turned away. The pirates could only lament their littleness befor the vast number of dolphins. The spectacular scene continued for a while.
China initiated its three-ship escort task force on Dec. 26 last year after the United Nations Security Council called on countries to patrol gulf and waters off Somalia, one of the world's busiest marine routes, where surging piracy endangered intercontinental shipping.
China's first fleet has escorted 206 vessels, including 29 foreign merchant vessels, and successfully rescued three foreign merchant ships from pirate attacks.
About 20 percent of Chinese merchant ships passing through the waters off Somalia were attacked by pirates from January to November in 2008, before the task force was deployed.
A total of seven ships, either owned by China or carrying Chinese cargo and crew, were hijacked.
Tianyu No. 8, a Chinese fishing vessel with 16 Chinese and eight foreign sailors aboard, was captured by Somali pirates on Nov. 14 and released in early February.
The second fleet of Chinese escort ships arrived at the Gulf of Aden on Monday to replace the first fleet.
(Xinhua and Cri contributed to the story)
Remember that scene in the Swamp Thing where our hero caused that tomato from that crook's sandwich to sprout inside of him, killing him in a really disgusting manner? You do if you read it! Creepy!
Yeah, well some guy in Russia has a spruce sprouting from his lungs. Really!
Russian doctors find tree growing in man's lung
MOSCOW, April 13 (RIA Novosti) - Surgeons in Russia's Urals Region were staggered to find a 5-centimeter high spruce growing inside a man's lung, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported on Monday.
The discovery was made while Artyom Sidorkin, 28, from the Urals city of Izhevsk, was undergoing surgery.
Sidorkin had complained of extreme pain in his chest and had been coughing up blood, doctors suspected cancer.
"I blinked three times and thought I was seeing things," Izhevsk surgeon Vladimir Kamashev told the paper.
Medical staff believe Sidorkin had somehow inhaled a seed, which later sprouted inside his lung. The spruce, which was touching the man's capillaries and causing severe pain, was removed.
"It was very painful. But to be honest I did not feel any foreign object inside me," Sidorkin said.
Boy, but does this sound like a comic book origin:
By Clara Moskowitz
updated 10:34 a.m. CT, Wed., March. 18, 2009
A small bat that was spotted blasting off with the space shuttle Sunday and clinging to the back side of Discovery's external fuel tank apparently held on throughout the launch.
NASA hoped the bat would fly away before the spacecraft's Sunday evening liftoff, but photos from the launch now show the bat holding on for dear life throughout the fiery ride.
"He did change the direction he was pointing from time to time throughout countdown but ultimately never flew away," states a NASA memo obtained by SPACE.com. "Infrared imagery shows he was alive and not frozen like many would think ... Liftoff imagery analysis confirmed that he held on until at least the vehicle cleared [the] tower before we lost sight of him."
You can see the rest of the story here.
In real life, it poor thing probably was incinerated after falling through the shuttle’s exhaust, but a comic book reality, I think we can assume that one of the following would have happened:
It would become a humanoid bat.
It would cosmically fuse with the rocket to become a mechanical missile bat.
It would become gigantic bat beast that would attack Tokyo.
But the poor thing is probably dead, which is why comic book reality is better … so long as you wouldn’t miss Tokyo.
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