It’s a very special religious studies Dogg Zzone 9000, as foretold by Abraham who beget fish which is the Hebrew word for maybeseamonster. We’re joined by science-brained superguest, Katie Goldin, from the Creature Feature Podcast to go through an entire subsection of Sean’s library – Christian Dinosaur Apologetics. She is very frustrated by it!
We used four books as a primer – What is CREATION SCIENCE? by Henry M. Morris and Gary E. Parker, The Great Dinosaur Mystery SOLVED! by Ken Ham, DINOSAURS: THE BIBLE BARNEY & BEYOND by Phil Phillips, and DINOSAURS: Exploring the Scientific Mysteries of God’s Creation by Michael and Caroline Carroll. They don’t all agree on why the Bible got everything wrong, but they all agree it’s the only thing that’s right! Again, Katie found this reasoning very irritating.
Once a general knowledge base was established, we moved on to three enlightening texts. We began with DINOSAURS AND THE BIBLE by Brian Thomas to learn how ancient holy men really only had one word and it meant everything from hippo to quetzalcoatlus.
Next up we read Dinosaurs and the Bible by Ralph O. Muncaster to learn more about how secular dummies are so stupid. Katie was not thrilled with his scientific conclusions.
And finally, we completed our studies with DINOSAURS and the Bible by David Unfred. David Unfred wants to see us all burn, whereupon he and God, Our Loving God, will laugh at the mountains of our ashen bones.
In 2007, a comic book company was formed that set out to make something different– comics about whatever the fuck. Bluewater (who later changed their name to StormFront who later learned that was a Nazi name who later changed their name to TidalWave) published adaptations of ancient novels, profiles of celebrities, reimaginings of 80-year-old science fiction movies, and an entire series about politicians and right wing propagandists called ★Political★Power★. Which means they published an illustrated biography of serial sex criminal Bill O’Reilly.
You’re probably thinking, “A comic book about the cranky guy known for saying racist things from behind a desk and nothing else? How does it open? With him saying cranky, racist things from behind a desk?” W-whoa. That’s exactly how it starts.
This non-fiction tale of heroism opens with the main protagonist screaming at Geraldo Rivera about how America needs to deport a specific drunk Mexican. Geraldo tries to explain to our hero how exile is not how you punish a misdemeanor, but Bill won’t listen. Geraldo tries to ask why Bill is so mad about this guy being Mexican, but Bill won’t listen.
It’s a good example of how subtle modern racism can be. When our grandparents were on the lookout for bigotry, they could simply ask, “I saw the WHITES ONLY sign on your STRAIGHTS ONLY asbestos store… is there any wiggle room there? Because I’m almost positive one of my kids is half Italian.” Today you need to pay closer attention. No one comes right out and says “I’m racist” anymore. They might do something more understated like go on TV and tell a Latino man, “I don’t care what the rules say. Those laws are for white people and Mexicans should go back where they belong.” I mean, it’s sneaky. You have to really be watching for it.
By the way, the first seven pages are like this. Seven pages of Bill O’Reilly arguing with guests on his TV show, getting most of the details wrong, but being noisier. Here’s his interview with Barney Frank where after several minutes of screaming they disagree to disagree about which word they’re fighting about:
Look, adaptation is a difficult skill. Taking something from one media and translating it to another requires a deep understanding of both. And say what you will about this being a dumb idea from the very concept, as an adaptation, it’s maybe not possible to fuck up more than this. These people were turning a cable news show into a comic and their idea was “Maybe a verbatim transcript of an argument furiously scribbled into dozens of word bubbles? Over a picture of them sitting?” It fucking sucks. I dare anyone to read this panel of Bill O’Reilly’s interview with Al Sharpton:
As the only person who will ever live to read that, let me sum it up. Some study came out about fourth graders in Sudan being bad at reading, and Bill O’Reilly blamed Al Sharpton because he’s also black. Well, not “blamed” exactly. Bill was just pointing out how he’s a hypocrite for protesting some black issues while ignoring what’s going on in Sudanese grade schools. Again, it’s “racist,” but only after it’s “stupid,” “insane,” and “belligerent.” The point is, Bill O’Reilly thinks he’s proven he cares more about Sudanese kids than Al Sharpton and he’ll never listen to how he’s wrong, which means blacks shouldn’t be allowed to protest, so who’s the real racist now?
It’s a terrible argument, made even worse when you consider it was chosen as one of his greatest hits for this biography. How empty and meaningless has this guy’s career been that they included the time he screamed at Al Sharpton to ignore Burger King’s civil rights violations because of African elementary teachers? So, yeah, okay, it’s the bigoted trolling of a delusional idiot, but would a delusional idiot also add this detail to the story?
Al Sharpton secretly, after the cameras were off, privately admitted Bill O’Reilly was right.
But so far the comic has only shown us the Bill O’Reilly we knew from TV. He’s a bad listener. A bully. An idiot. A total asshole. A full-blown racist. Smugly confident he’s not any of those things. I was starting to suspect this was a sarcastic hit piece so I looked up the author, Jerome Maida.
Jerome isn’t a prolific comics writer and these batshit ★Political★Power★ books seem to make up most of his work. He focuses mainly on right wing nutbags like Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, and Donald Trump, so it’s safe to say these aren’t sarcastic. Jerome Maida was just the only freelance writer who said yes to the question, “Are you available for a 3 hour contract adapting white nationalism for kids?”
So he’s a bit of a Nazi apologist for money, but Jerome’s real passion is martial arts.
Specifically, Jerome is passionate about The Martial Arts Kid, a 2015 film starring Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Cynthia Rothrock. It very much sounds like a fake movie where a caterer was murdered on an episode of CSI, but The Martial Arts Kid is real, and all 47 articles Jerome Maida wrote for martialartsentertainment.com are about it. Jerome wrote a feature article on every casting decision, press release, and soundtrack choice. One of them was simply called “The Martial Arts Kid Will Be Great Movie.” I’ve extremely never seen anything like it:
I’ve been on the Internet a long time and I’ve seen a lot of articles built from IMDB searches, but I’ve never seen anyone write forty seven articles based entirely on a single IMDB Full Cast and Crew list. It’s unthinkable. It’s a fake mental disorder you’d make up to explain why the killer targeted The Martial Arts Kid on an episode of CSI. It’s also very distracting from why we’re here– to talk about Bill O’Reilly’s heroic origin story:
Bill had an angry and abusive father, but in a… let me see if I’m understanding this comic’s tone properly… a cute way? “MY FATHER WAS THE KUNG AND I WAS THE FU!” jokes Bill O’Reilly, who I was starting to have more sympathy for until he said that.
Starting from the whimsy of a father beating his son, Bill’s journey starts to get darker. Let me show you one of the pages they chose to represent Bill O’Reilly’s childhood:
It’s relentless images of rage, torment, and fascism coming together to make an angry, bitter, fascist. It’s Bill O’Reilly’s origin story, so I don’t know what else I expected. I guess I only find it interesting because my expectations were met so precisely.
This panel of young Bill having a shitty meal actually helped me understand him. Bill O’Reilly finds this strange pride in his misery. It lets him complain constantly while thinking of himself as a tough guy who never complains because he thinks he’s bragging. For instance, his family rarely went out to restaurants, and when they did, they were awful and had no appetizers. This obviously isn’t interesting enough to tell anyone, much less include in a comic book. Bill tells it because he thinks it taught him the quiet dignity of meatballless spaghetti, but what it really did was teach him to hate decadent spaghetti cowards, humiliating America with every calamari for the table. It’s stupid, right? This is a guy who, multiple times, has dropped millions of dollars trying to jam a thumb up a co-worker’s butt and here he is judging you for wasting $4.99 on jalapeño poppers. Shut the fuck up and suck your sad spaghetti, sex pest.
As if you needed to be told this, there are a lot of panels of young Bill O’Reilly alone and angry.
For pages and pages we see how sad, bitter, antisocial, and constantly violent Bill was, but we also learn how self-reflective he can be. For instance, the angry, racist young dick was kicked off his little league team because the coach didn’t like him “for reasons unknown to Bill to this day.” What a mystery! We may never know why this likable team player spent another baseball season alone and angry.
Bill’s childhood story continues through more random images of trauma and fascism…
I didn’t doctor that. This page of Bill O’Reilly’s origin story really does go from Mussolini to child abuse to vandalism to snowballs to the time Bill yawned in church. In storytelling, this is what’s known as raising the stakes.
Bill’s life story just keeps fucking going like this. Like all true patriots, he attacked a kid for trying too hard in school, blew up his neighbor’s house, assaulted a kid with a firearm, and even gave his father a dirty look. And maybe it’s because Bill O’Reilly is a known liar, but it’s hard to believe a lot of these things happened when they’re categorized together like this. No one tells a story like “I once threw a bomb at my neighbor” and then adds “I didn’t give a shit– I’d yawn in church, shoot people, look my dad in the eyes! By the way, my dad was a Nazi who punched my arm and I have a little joke about it: he was the kung and I was the fu. Do you get it? Because I don’t! I say it a lot, but is it a pun? Maybe some kind of unformed racism? This is how you put together a biography, right?”
Anyway, here’s a probably mostly fake story about the time young Bill O’Reilly tormented a kid so much the boy’s father chased Bill into his own house. Right in front of Bill’s dad.
I bet you know what happened next! Bill O’Reilly’s father, the abusive Mussolini of Hitlers who never bought appetizers… calmed the man down! Asked him to leave! Told Bill he needs to stop being a bully! Wait, something doesn’t– holy shit, wait, is the dad not the villain? Ohmygod, is Bill O’Reilly the bad guy in this Bill O’Reilly comic?
The next story is about Bill assaulting yet another kid.
Bill O’Reilly famously called his show the “No Spin Zone,” so I think he’ll appreciate how I’m not spinning this story. Some guy said, “NICE JACKET, BILL!” and then didn’t finish his next sentence before Bill punched him in the face. This is a poorly made book by a disinterested karate master, but his decision to give young Bill the same face, shirt, and haircut as his father is a pretty good way to artistically represent a cycle of abuse. It was definitely an accident, but maybe Jerome Maida is also starting to figure out Bill O’Reilly is the villain.
The next story is one of betrayal.
Bill couldn’t find a date to a high school dance, so he asked some guy to go with him “so the girls would think he’s cool.” The guy said no, but then that “so-called friend” went to the dance anyway. Doing “the twist” like a madman! How could this so-called friend do this!? It’s a real question! Before you read the next panel, guess! Guess why this so-called friend told Bill O’Reilly he wasn’t going to the dance!
You were right! They weren’t friends and he didn’t want Bill around because he didn’t like him and nobody else liked him. Honestly, if this happened to me I wouldn’t tell anyone about it, much less my biographer. How empty is this fucking piece of shit’s life that we’re 23 pages into his story and he’s still sharing every last teenage drama? These sound like the stories of a loser who peaked in high school after you take out all the sports, academics, popularity, drugs, and girls. You’d think a wealthy TV personality who has publicly spent $45 million in sexual harassment payouts would have led a more interesting life than this.
As if you needed to be told this, Bill O’Reilly had trouble getting laid. But actually? A-actually, he’s glad! Yeah, he is glad he had no “moves” and waited until he was more mature to have sex. But enough about Bill being a violent, lonely incel and how honorable that is when you think about it. Let’s move on to the origin story of Bill’s racism.
As if you needed to be told this, content warning: Bill O’Reilly’s comic about himself from 2010 has several hard-r n-words.
Growing up around only whites, Bill didn’t really have a chance to be racist. In fact, since he attacked, shot, and tried to explode many of those whites, he’s statistically less racist than Liberty Medal-winner, Muhammed Ali, who punched a much higher percentage of black m– hold on. I went into that sentence sarcastically, but I think I accidentally wrote a real Bill O’Reilly argument? Do I now “get” Bill O’Reilly?
Bill knew of blacks from his television and was such a champion of civil rights he liked Willie Mays even more than “the white New York Yankees superstar” Mickey Mantle. Bill loved Willie Mays so much he was known around his all-white town as the non-racist, and out of respect for Bill’s famous “No Spin Zone,” I won’t try to spin this story. When the local children accused him of liking black people, Bill O’Reilly would punch them in the goddamn face. How could that be bad, everyone? Why, it’d be almost vulgar to call that racist.
Please remember, this story was proudly told by Bill and included in his biography to demonstrate his dislike of bigotry. And like all colorblind champions of equality, he includes an exact headcount of all the blacks in his stories:
I’m not leaving anything out of this one. This is the whole Bill O’Reilly adventure. He once met four black guys and got to know half of them. If a person had weird issues with skin color would they waste 5% of their biography on that story? Ridiculous. So this person who saw all people as equals but still kept careful track of how many times he met blacks and how many there were on each occasion, tells the story of the second time he encountered non-whites:
The second “experience with race” Bill had was when he met Nate, who didn’t like Bill as much as two of the four first blacks he met (who were funny guys if you can believe it).
Nate was right to hate Bill, who sat next to Nate as part of an undercover sting operation to expose “reverse racism.” See, Bill “heard a rumor” there was a teacher who gave a B+ to every black student which means someone on campus, for some reason, was keeping track of the black people and their suspiciously white grades. I have a suspect, but for now let’s assume it was not angry racist loner Bill O’Reilly, but one of his many friends who uncovered this suspiciously racist data. “Please look into this, bitter liar who tried to grope my roommate! You’re the only one I can trust with my shameful secret prejudice!” they probably said.
So anyway, the bad races were getting B+s in a compulsory course, and College Bill was on the case!
Sure enough, the “sensitive” teacher gave Nate a B! Oh, a B? The “rumors” said he was supposed to get a B+, so never mind. I guess the “rumors” were wrong. You know what, though? Maybe Bill should write a column for the school newspaper about how black people don’t deserve Bs even without the plusses. It’s what any non-racist would do.
Later, off the record, Nate sort of admitted he didn’t enjoy the “jive-ass” class. Busted! From his own account, Bill was more right about race than one of the races again! Ever the journalist and storyteller, Bill kept track of Nate after he dropped out of school and yadayada he EVENTUALLY MURDERED A POLICEMAN.
Over the course of a person’s life, there should be at least a few incidents where, especially with this level of embellishment, they were a hero. Like maybe you only called in a noise complaint when your neighbors started arguing, but if you tell that story right, the cops got there just in time to stop a murder. My point is, Bill has been alive more than two decades at this point and -in his own opinion- the closest thing he’s come to heroism is working to ensure one black guy couldn’t get an education. And when offered the opportunity to make up any details he wanted, he said, “That guy I harassed out of school, I can’t remember what color he was, he went on to… I don’t know… kill a cop, probably? All I know are the facts: twenty percent of blacks go on to murder policemen. Forty percent are funny guys, though.”
After a successful(?) college career, Bill O’Reilly got a job as a teacher.
Once the bitter, stupid asshole arrived, there was an outbreak of graffiti. It wasn’t about Bill, though! It was about a whore named Susan and Mike O. who… what did those rascals say about their fellow teen, Mike O.? Oh, right, he “takes it in the keister.” What I’m saying is the sudden graffiti did not focus on the smug, unloved bigot who has ruined every life he’s touched since he was born.
So what did Bill do? He did what any obvious sex expert would do: he told them there are studies proving people who write graffiti can’t fuck.
“What a genius you are for making up those sociological studies linking graffiti to sexual confusion!” marveled the students and teachers.
“I didn’t fucking make them up!” said the man who made them up to characters he made up.
In many ways it’s the perfect story to end on. It’s dumb, it didn’t happen, and it wouldn’t happen, but it shows how Bill O’Reilly’s mind works. He starts off by making up a story where he solves a complicated issue with his brand of no-nonsense verbal abuse. He then creates straw men who adore him and praise his craftiness, but then he gets mad at them because he’s not playing some game! It’s basic, no-frills, white wisdom! Later, all of the vandals would go on to be immature about sex and murder a policeman.
And that’s the tale of Bill O’Reilly! He attacked many children, has a lot of holes in his stories, wasn’t good at anything, met five blacks, got most of one of them kicked out of college, and told some kids they can’t fuck. And nothing could have trained him better for a life of right wing media. The comic wraps up with a few panels on unrelated tragedy, unexplained deaths, and two soldiers getting torn apart by bullets in a war Bill did not attend? I don’t know why.
After waiting until the last page of his biography and their deaths to describe his five closest loved ones, Bill leaves us with one last thought:
“I was a fucking dick, I did some great racism and punching, my only friends were lost in Vietnam or ‘found dead from some rare illness,’ and I’ll die alone. Bye!” – Bill O’Reilly
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpottyReception, who is going to great movie the The Martial Arts Kid!
No ordinary human mind can comprehend The Grabowski Shuffle, a behind-the-scenes VHS tape about the making of a music video starring non-musicians hoping to recreate the exact careers of Super Bowl champion novelty rappers without the football or charm.
So we did what any Grabowskis would do. We invited Ty Franck, author of The Expanse novels and writer and producer of The Expanse TV series to help us understand it. Could his keen mind decode this ancient riddle of antimusic unfootball? No, but being a Grabowski is not about understanding, probably. Which is why we now legally honor him with the title of Ty Franck Grabowski, GbSki, the highest recognition Grabowskis can bestow on a podcast.
Listen here, or wherever you do podcasts! For more Grabowski reference, read Seanbaby’s article about The Grabowski Shufflehere, and the Chicago Reader article he cites here.
Real Grabowskis who give us money on Patreon are in for even more Grabowski when Brockway and Hugo Award-winning author and Official Grabowski, Ty Franck, try to seduce Sean using pick-up lines from the incel classic, 1001 Best Pick-Up Lines. It’s by Don Diebel, America’s #1 Singles Expert! It gets as awkward and horny as a Grabowski photo shoot!
Ashida Kim, ninja, wrote several books on how to become a silent agent of death, and at least one semi-autobiographical novel about his time as a top secret sex spy. He has a standing deathmatch combat challenge to anyone who can solve his deathmatch combat challenge payment and rule stipulations riddle, which no one has ever done. And in 1985, he published…
If you’re anything like I was in 1985, you’re about to have your heart broken by Ninja Mind Control. The first two thirds of the book confess, over and over, there’s no such thing as Ninja mind control. It’s mostly instructions on how to dress up like a Ninja and then hold very still while you think about different organs. Ashida, which isn’t his real first name, also describes a few common magic tricks. Ninja Master Kim, which isn’t his real last name, title, or job, seems to think that if you used a different book to become a magician, you’d sure look like a real Ninja.
Again, there is no such thing as real mental powers here. This is a poorly educated man with no encyclopedia or Internet trying to remember something he once heard about hypnosis. For a kid in the ’80s, it was like buying the book Santa Claus is Real and finding it only had one chapter called “Okay, He Isn’t, but People do Break Into Children’s Houses.”
Anyway, after 80 pages of costumed meditation tips, Ninja Mind Control finally gives up on its premise and shows you the death moves of the Ninja! I love them so much I’m not even going to do anything cute– this is just the Top 11 Ninja Mind Control Techniques.
It may sound strange for hidden assassins to begin a murder with a gentlemanly flourish, but the CEREMONIAL BOW is important to help us remember this is some hillbilly maniac making shit up.
A bow is nice, sure, but in true Ninja fashion, it’s also a trick. Ashida Kim uses them as a sneaky way to figure out his opponent’s fighting style. If they bow with their arms at their sides, prepare for Karate. If their hands retract and get replaced by scissors, you’ll know to adjust your blows for robot. Ashida does admit it’s hard to squeeze in a CEREMONIAL BOW during a different Ninja’s ambush, but in that case you can avoid combat by giving your attacker a password. Nowhere in his book does Ashida Kim offer this password to the reader because even the polite advice of a master Ninja will kill you.
Speaking of lethal, a bow isn’t only for honoring your opponent. If done correctly, it protects you from any state or county laws against murder. The CEREMONIAL BOW is how you tell witnesses, “Everything’s okay; it was his fault I killed him.” I’m not explaining it very well. I’ll let Ashida run you through the details:
You probably remember the court case Kim v. Moonwolf where the presiding judge famously said, “Am I reading this right? It says here on the police report that multiple witnesses saw the defendant bow at the victim’s body? If that’s true, why was this brought before my court? The victim was warned. Ninja warned. Mister Kim, on behalf of justice, I apologize for wasting your time and the court’s time with this. You’re free to go. Whisper poison 1073.”
Oh my god, do you guys think that bit at the end could have been the password?
Imagine holding a sheet in front of you with both hands, except don’t imagine it. Really hold a sheet in front of you with both hands, and to see if you’re holding it correctly, imagine this Ninja not holding a sheet was:
So the idea behind DRAGON-SPREAD WINGS is to take the psychologically devastating bluff of a kitty cat standing sideways, and apply it to human battles. A warrior will think twice before attacking someone the size of a sheet, which they very well could be behind that sheet they’re holding. At the very least it’s an “intimidating gesture” that will “remind observers about Ninjas using capes to appear larger.” And if holding up a sheet alone isn’t enough (it will be), you could throw it over their head so they can’t see. Ashida’s mind is like this– an endless waterfall of deadly ideas while he changes the sheets on his brother-in-law’s futon. Where you and I might see a bullfight and think “bullfight,” Ashida Kim thinks, “yes, but perhaps also manfight.” The point is, you should always be wearing a Ninja cape in case you need to double in size or blind up to six enemies.
Footwork is an underrated aspect of martial arts. A world class fighter can baffle opponents and prevent attacks before they’re thrown with angles and distance. Ashida Kim has taken that philosophy and added the theatrics of stage magic to create HALF STEP, the coolest, deadliest way to move a little bit forward.
So to recap, during the fury of a raging death match, you raise both your hands as if holding a sheet or cape. This will distract the enemy from your sneaky back foot creeping ever closer. Close enough for groin. Close enough for death.
One of the problems with learning poison foot techniques from a book is that it’s hard to understand how to apply them from a single photo. Ashida Kim, wise Ninja, knows this, so he included a second photo demonstrating the practical application. Let’s take a look:
That clears up all my questions. Thanks, Ashida.
There is a Toddler philosophy where if someone can’t see you, that counts as invisible. So if you walk out of someone’s eyeline, you have vanished. But Toddler legs are wobbly and Toddler socks are slippery, so keep your arms raised for balance as you sneak behind people. Hold on, something’s wrong. Shit, somehow the word “Ninja” in this paragraph got replaced with “Toddler.” Wait, that’s weird– it works both ways?
The application of the MI LU STEP (PIVOT) is… well, here, I’ll just show you:
You can’t see him, but the Ninja is there, behind the confused Karate man who foolishly blinked near a Ninja. From here, the invisible, or behind him, Ninja can shadow the man indefinitely while he wonders why everyone keeps calling him “you two.” It reminds me of what they tell you on the first day of Ninja school: if you’re not already invisible and behind a man, the person with an invisible man behind them is you. Then half the class gets B’s and the other half gets headstones.
So, okay, Ashida Kim is obviously an idiot whose last thought will be, “this lawnmower blade is moving pretty fast; I’ll have to time this just right,” but let’s be clear: he sincerely thinks I can jump behind someone while they’re blinking, and not a single person has ever believed in me like that. This book rules.
Part of what makes Ashida Kim special is how he thinks any physical contact between two human bodies is a mangling train accident. Here, he breaks down the raw devastation of the SCRAPING SIDEKICK.
First, gently Ninja-shove your foot into your enemy’s shin. This shatters their leg, obviously, but you’re not done. Scrape your sock down the remains of their shin to step on their foot. You’ve already maimed, Ninja, but now you’ve annoyed. Let’s see it in action:
The impact has crippled him, the scrape has tortured him, and now the foot has trapped him. Like a fading culture reduced to several overused allegories, Ashida Kim wastes no part of the kick. And as long as that Ninja with all 140 pounds of his weight on his back leg rests his foot there, his enemy can only stand in place and scream. Plus, since his sister’s cat never poops in the litter box, I guess his toes count as fecal bacteria syringes? Basically, Karate Man is already dead fifteen different ways and as long as someone sees Ashida Kim bow, the law can’t do shit about it.
Here’s some Ninja Mind Control for you: FUCKING PUNCH TO THE FACE.
So let me try to explain. What you want to do here is take a fist, right, and if you’re with me so far, you swing it into your enemy’s head. Hey, Ashida. What are we doing here, man? Did you write the first ninja book for squids? How are you introducing the very concept of bashing someone with a human hand 67 moves into your deathmatch book? This was 1985. Did you think your readers were watching Knight Rider and saying, “He’s getting out of his talking car and, my god, what is he doing to that man with his haaaand!? Wait, I know! I’ll find a book on it at my local thrown stars shoppe!”
This punching section gets dumber, but dumb in a way we can use. Here’s his POWER PUNCH training advice:
So after introducing you to “punch,” Ashida tells you to “practice it a few times” with hate in your heart, but a careful kind of hate. It’s ridiculous and stupid, but it lets us establish how long Ashida Kim thinks it takes to prepare for battle. A typical boxing coach might have you train twice a week for six months before your first amateur bout. That’s roughly 75 hours of training and maybe 60,000 punches. Again, Ashida Kim is an idiot con-man who no one could possibly take seriously, but if you did, this proves he’s sending his readers into death matches with approximately .00005% the training of the least experienced boxer imaginable. That being said, boxers train far less in cape dancing, so in a straight style-versus-style matchup things might even out.
When I bought a guide to Ninja mind control and saw it was actually about how to tear a phone book in half I felt the same way you would: oh fucking hell yeah.
As Ashida Kim mentions, you might see this kind of DRAGON CLAW technique from a Black Dragon ryu Ninja, which translates to Black Dragon dragon Ninja because everything about this is awesome. To learn this move, what you want to do is grab a book with your hands and rip that shit in half. It’s useful for disposing of junk mail or rupturing the rectus abdominis, but you can also use it to squeeze the consciousness out of a man’s skull. I use this for everything now. Let the record show, if you ever find a dead body and it wasn’t ripped in half by a man’s hands, I didn’t do it.
A mind is easier to control if it has no eyes. Let’s learn the DOUBLE THUMB GOUGE.
The sequence of events is unclear, but I think you take off your Ninja mask and make a scary face before you remove their eyes. Otherwise this would be silly. And it’s not silly. It’s a deadly serious manual for invisible warriors written by an unconvicted mass murderer and sex spy.
One element of Ninja mind control known only to the Black Dragon ryu clan is called “SAND IN THE EYES.” Its only known defense is the blindfold, and before you get any ideas, Ashida Kim, I’m already wearomg ome.
Ninja Mind Control says SAND IN THE EYES is great for beginner Ninjas because it’s hard to fuck up, and if you do, you can just leave. Unless they have glasses or eyelids and run faster than you. I think we might need to have a backup plan in case our cape draping, fist-swinging, shin kicking, or sand throwing don’t work. Let’s learn COIN TOSS.
This one is pretty much what it sounds like, Ninjas– gently tossing your enemies whatever they ask for.
So if you are ever mugged, presumably in your Ninja costume, what you want to do, as a silent master of the impossible, is, in the great tradition of your Mighty Ancestors, pay them to not kick your ass. If you keep your cash in gold coins, great, that means you can also try throwing your treasure into the air and running away. Ha. Good luck beating you up while everyone is scrambling to get your coveted Ninja treasure. Sorry, I’m already gloating for you and I haven’t even shown you the full technique. Study Figures 57 and 58 until your surrender form is perfect. Then see below to learn how to be a total little baby coward, even in your wildest fantasies, with a partner:
For advanced COIN TOSS practitioners, try adding an asthmatic whine or urination. And you’re going to want to practice saying, “Hnngh! You can have anything, just let me live, you bandit!” until you’ve removed all sexual suggestion from it. Or vice versa, naughty Ninja.
If you knew anything about ninjas, you already knew MONKEY STEALS THE PEACH was going to be number one.
It’s the classical name for the upward groin slap. Here’s how you apply it to your training partner’s balls:
This move will tear a dick off, and it tells a real story about how often Ashida Kim uses his dick when he explains, “if you happen to have energy blast powers this could also be an effective way to hurt someone.” He probably has handfuls of genitals in his garage and tells his cats, “I don’t know what these things do, but they sure do come off easy!” Hey, why are you still reading this? I just taught you 11 ways to Ninja mind control. Go take the night, silent dick ripper.
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rich Joslin, fingerblasting master of the Monkey Peach Ryu style.
In the Bronze Age of comics, it wasn’t unusual for a superhero to suddenly change everything about themselves and their universe to sell you a pie or teach you about smoke inhalation. They were stupid, disappointing, and infantalizing, but it’s kind of fun to look back on them. Which is what we’re doing today! We’re revisiting the ridiculous crossover where Batman teamed up with a group of real life video game players all the way back in two thousand and twenty tw– **RECORD SCRATCH** wait, this happened last week!?
I don’t know if this was Batman’s attempt to cash in on the huge popularity of whatever FaZe Clan is, or if this was esports’ attempt to cash in on the huge popularity of whatever the 17th monthly Batman spinoff is, but it seems to take place in Batman’s world which also contains the actual professional esport athletes so famous you’ll obviously know which of these I’m making up: B00tJeff, jeffmilker_8, JeffsUX, Depression_Jeff2, and xxFuckYouJeffxx.
Anyway, the Riddler’s video game is controlling the minds of Gotham City’s gamers. Robin wants to call his favorite gaming clan to help, but as they’ve discussed many times, Batman thinks it’s a bad idea to deputize children for a murder investigation. Which is not the first time in this comic where you’ll see Batman not act like Batman.
Batman drops through the ceiling of the Hollywood FaZe Clan HQ to tell them about all the Gotham people trapped in a video game. “My guys, Batman is here!” one of them announces. Another idly asks what the shit they’re supposed to do about it while continuing to lift weights. Another walks right up to Batman and says, “This is a gamer issue. Batman’s a dinosaur.” The point is, these are all very strange reactions to the Dark Knight suddenly appearing in your game room.
Not a single line of dialog seems to have anything to do with any of the others. It’s like seven deaf people on a phone call and they’re all dicks. The writing process seems to have been asking these gamers to say one mysterious thing about Batman and then putting them together in a random order. In one chaotic page, they greet Batman, insult Batman, tell him they’ll help him, tell him they can’t help him, ask him for help, give a recap, and ask for a recap. “You can suck my dick,” said language itself after it heard the plot. “I was not invented so you could use me to describe Batman teaming up with some Counter-Strike guild.”
“Sheesh!” says one of the gamers after he hears the plot explained for the third time. It is genuinely weird. The writer, Josh Trujillo, is a competent professional, so I don’t know what happened. If I had to guess, he has no idea what’s going on and he asked each of these guys, “What would you say here?” and then pasted in their terrible fucking answers verbatim.
Anyway, in comes everyone’s favorite, Rug.
Rug is drawn like someone found his 7th grade yearbook and has been trying to hurt his feelings ever since. He arrives like a real cyber influencer of today– carrying a stack of pizzas and pitching a vlog prank. You know old Rug, always making that classic group living mistake of not checking the room for Batman before pitching a vlog prank. And in a zany turn of events, Rug realizes his vlog prank isn’t important and leaves. Sorry Rug fans, that’s all we see of Rug.
Batman brings four of the gamers to Oracle’s secret hideout to plug them into the evil mind control video game and hope for the best. Robin is a huge FaZe Clan fan who totally knows who these guys are, and you can tell because when he meets one of them he calls him “FAZE CLAN!” It’s not like it matters. By this point the plot is complete gibberish. Robin could have walked up and said, “Thank you for Congo Bongo, Rug Doctors,” and it would have been exactly as reasonable and authentic.
Oracle gives everyone Bat-VR headsets and plugs them into the Riddler’s domain. They have done nothing to prepare for this other than be good at different video games. Their plan is “fuck it,” and their training is hearing “BE READY FOR ANYTHING!” after they’ve already been sent to their certain cyber death.
FaZe Clan looks around Riddler’s ultimate genius cyber realm, a lazy recreation of the Blade Runner set. They don’t see anyone, which seems strange to them, since as gamers they know players are supposed to spawn at the final objective. “ANYTHING? MORE LIKE NOTHING!” says one of them two word bubbles too late to make any goddamn sense. Like vlog prankster Rug might say, get your turbo cringe on, Congo Bongo!
Not everyone reacts to the empty streets the same way. Batwoman sees the lack of enemies and decides they’re going to need some serious firepower. One of the gamers says, “Have you seen my clips? We got this.” So to be clear, the survival of all of Gotham’s gamers lies in the hands of a man so delusional he assumes Batwoman has seen edited highlights of him playing video games. And he is using those unseen video game clips to leverage his side of the argument which is, “You’re wrong, Batwoman. We’ll be fine without weapons.” There is just no way these people could have ever predicted starring in their own Batman comic would make them look like such stupid goddamn assholes.
Oracle takes Batwoman’s side in the argument– she thinks they shouldn’t face off against Riddler’s super Matrix army with their bare hands and licensed FaZe Clan t-shirts and hats available now. She upgrades them, another important part of the plan she has kept secret for no reason, and they gain the powers of HEALER, TANK, ARCHER, and MAGE. Like the rest of this, it’s stupid and silly, but just wrong enough to sound inauthentic. In sports terms, this would be like assigning them the powers of a PITCHER, SHORTSTOP, LEFT HANDER, and DOMINICAN.
After getting character types for the wrong setting and genre, they all shout aggressively unrelated catchphrases. “MY FAMILY WOULD LOVE THIS!” says HEALER. It’s a deep cut reference for true FaZe Clan fans who know this is the one with a family. “DAMN, I LOOK GREAT!” says the one who got bitch ass level 0 starting robes.
The team splits up to attack the four quadrants of the cyberzone, each protected by a different Batman villain boss, and I finally have no criticism. What a perfect sentence I just typed.
The first quadrant they go to is Two-Face’s, which is just him and two bombs. He hits them with a brain teaser of a puzzle– one of them isn’t a real bomb!
“Okay, let me think carefully about this,” says the world’s greatest gamer as he tries to slow things down. “Fucking fuck it,” thinks the world’s greatest boy detective as he shakes the shit out of one of the bombs. Whichever one was real explodes, and I’d say this is probably the worst case scenario caused by attacking the problem in the dumbest possible way, but it works!
Cyber Two-Face has been obliterated and they acquire his token! “HUH?” says the world’s greatest gamer who is sort of right? Let’s go see how the next team is doing in Quadrant Two against the Mr. Freeze simulation.
Amidst all this sloppy insanity, “DID BATMAN REALLY THINK A GAMER COULD STOP ME?” is a pretty funny thing for a video game enemy to say. He’s saying it like it’s a racial slur, like Gamers are genetically predisposed to be bad at video games. Anyway, the FaZe Clan guy uses his l33t strats to walk directly into Mr. Freeze’s attack and one-shots him with a hammer. There’s a lot of talk about these being great players, but so far the villains have been defeated by stupidity and stupidity, respectively.
After Mr. Freeze dies, they win a snow globe of his nude wife, and I can’t stress this enough: it’s a snow globe of his nude wife.
I feel like we can skip the next one. Scarecrow is too scary for Batwing to fight, but not too scary for him to give an inspiring pep talk to the FaZe Clan guy…
… who closes his eyes and launches an arrow that bounces off everything until it one-shots the boss. This is trash. A human writer shouldn’t be capable of putting ideas together this poorly. If a gorilla said this to me in sign language I’d tell it, “Shut the fuck up, dumbest ape. Worst ape.”
Next up, Nightwing and the mage face off against The Joker in a “maze” of mirrors!
After smashing a few mirrors, there seems to be nothing they can do other than smash several more, but then they get an idea: a heartbeat scanner! Wait, no, what?
Okay, so this video game Joker simulation has a functioning heart, and it pumps loudly enough you can detect it with a phone. Fine, I buy it. But then the mage says, “YOU PLAYED YOURSELF,” and I have a real problem with this. Sure, it’s a turn of phrase appropriate to these people and their culture, but something about it rings false. Is it because maybe The Joker didn’t “play himself” by having a cardiovascular system? Do you think that could be it, FaZe Clan? This is like killing someone with a banana and telling them “You CAN haz cheezeburger.” In any other comic this dipshit would have been BLAMPHing into a death trap, but in this one he farts on The Joker’s head, posts the wrong meme, and takes us into the finale.
You probably didn’t expect a comic about hyper-competitive narcissists to climax with Giant Super Riddler underestimating the power of friendship, did you? Well, congratulations, you played yourself.
Look, I get how weird it would be if this comic was good. But to recap, Batman flew across the country and into the wrong universe to recruit the four best gamers for a special mission. They won by watching Robin knock over a suitcase nuke, one-shot three bosses who would be too easy for an Elmo Wheelchair Racing tutorial, and then throw the whole plot away to swarm the main bad guy with a bunch of ordinary non-gamers. You can’t write a shittier thing than this. Batman FaZe Clan was adapted from a woman asking her grandchildren what “Roblox” are. This is the non-Bruce Willis parts of something called More Dangerous Die 3000.
The only thing that could make it sadder would be if it ended with these useless fuckers sitting around eating Rug’s pizza and wondering if Batman liked them.
In the only shocking plot twist of the story, Batman does like them! He sends them a gamer Friend Request!
DarkKnight27 is accidentally the perfect joke Batman username. Twenty seven is not his age, and February 7th is not the day his parents got killed. He is the 27th player who named himself “DarkKnight.” On an average Gotham night, dozens of maniacs are escaping Arkham Asylum or pulling citizens into manholes, and Batman is in his cave cursing at a title screen that tells him, “Username DarkKnight is unavailable. Username DarkKnight1 is unavailable. Username Vengeance_Jeff is unavailable. Username SecretBruce is unavailable.” In any other Batman story he would already have the username TheBat and emerge from the shadows to say, “Hh. I camp on the coolest names on every online service. Not all crime is fought in the streets.” But after only thirty pages with these clowns Batman is reduced to, “hi rug! my name is DarkKnight27! plz add me lol! I main SHORTSTOP!”
…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rain Vargas, FaZe Clan’s official Jeff Wrangler.
Unlock with Patreon
