Category: NERDING DAY
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Nerding Day: Stardust, Part 2 🌭
So! We meet again, do-gooder. Last week you fell under the power of Stardust the Super Wizard, a superhero with the abilities of Superman cubed but the mercy of the square root of Ghost Rider.
He was entirely the product of Fletcher Hanks, a cartoonist who dreamed of a finer world built on the skulls of all who opposed him. But we realized something along the way: Hanks understood superheroes better than almost anyone.
Some call Hanks the Neil Breen of comics. Others say the Rob Liefeld of the FDR era. Personally, I think he’s the Mark Millar of the DTs. All I know is a pickled brain tried to imagine the perfect man, and created a bloodthirsty scourge of his chosen people’s enemies for children’s entertainment.
Stardust operated on a simple premise: can Angry Drunk Superman experience dramatic tension? Laughably, no. Yet what Hanks failed to comprehend about drama, he perceived about melodrama. Other superheroes of the time stopped chubby gangsters from stealing helium to ransom the city’s parade balloons. A Hanks crook carpet-bombs the western seaboard to make the President miss his nap, leaving a rudderless America unable to repel Martian invasion. And it was all a distraction to swindle a savings & loan’s safe out of its Save Miami From Mutant Sharks Ray.
We left off with a promise that Stardust would return to fight a warlord named Lepus.
Ah, well, Hanks probably got drunk and wandered away from that idea.
The Emerald Men of Aspus want human slaves, and the best way to get some is to tow Earth into their janky asteroid belt. They can fly through space, so maybe Stardust finally faces a real threa—
Nope.
Like who doesn’t plot a righteous democide after three drinks?
Is anyone else worried what a bored Stardust will do once he’s murdered all the real threats? Mark me: in a year’s time he’s going to be combing through your town’s voter rolls with his psychic iPhone for thoughtcrime.
I found it! I found the Lepus story!
Without a trace of irony Lepus-the-Fiend uses Type II-civilization science to make the universe wild and primitive. It’s up to Buzz Crandall, Venusian Cop, to stop—hold up, who the fuck is Buzz Crandall?
We can’t say for sure that Fletch drank himself under a deadline, much like yours truly a month late with a two-part comic book article. But the signs say he repurposed a half-drawn Stardust story for this assignment. You didn’t even blink until I showed you the title page.
I mean look, here’s the telltale starburst:
Anyway, Lepus is going to smash planets two and three together. Buzz is too busy rescuing his pretty Science-Assistant Sandra from Lepus’s hideout to save civilization. Fortunately:
Missed! Buzz averted nothing! What a shitty Space Patrolman. You suck, Buzz, I hope you die of space-ebola. We’re only alive because Lepus failed trig.
Lepus dies off-panel without destroying a single civilized planet. Odds are high the wildman was a patsy who accepted some advanced tech from his friend “Buzz” in a sting to set up a big bust. Is space patrolman just an undercover identity for Stardust?
In fact, those planets missing each other? That reads like every Silver Age story where Clark Kent can’t change outfits without Lois Lane catching him, so he surreptitiously uses super-sneezing to blow JFK’s toupee off. I’ve got five bucks says Stardust is so overpowered his idea of a mild-mannered cover persona is “intergalactic space cop.”
If not, that means Stardust stories are insane, but also Hanks at his best. Stardust is the strip he dried out enough to pour his passion into. How many times do you think William Hanks switched his son’s behind with a sapling while making him recite the Book of Revelation, that junior’s only creative successes were exertional violence?
Because the Lepus story got bounced, Stardust takes a non-Hanks field trip. Moloka is a solar pirate who burns planets to death for fun and money. Admittedly badass.
To defeat him, Stardust poses as a murder-genie. From punching distance, he convinces Moloka to blow up the Earth, intending to redirect the ray at its wielder. It’s unnecessary, risky, and offers no payoff to a guy with a track record of showing up late: the perfect Stardust threat response.
Stardust outraces a beam traveling 10 million times the speed of light, and it’s proof that he’s using the dev settings on the simulation. How does any gangster have a prayer against a superhero with 10 million infinite masses? His very existence is a bullet through the fabric of gravity. If you stand near Stardust, you’re sliced into 22 different dimensions, all of which deserve punishment for noticing the outline of a woman’s bra strap in church. He’s only a giant because his body contains the mass of 10 million unfurling Big Bangs suppressed by his constantly flexing abs.
Well it’s not Hanks, but it’s a fitting move to maroon the tyrant on the dead planet he once ruled, especially since it was functional 20 minutes ago. Guys, I think Stardust did another genocide.
Oh shit! The Super-Fiend just genocided Mars so it would make a better bullet to fire at Earth! I’m invested.
What if Stardust comics are openly terrifying, yes, but secretly terrific? I know we’re all here to watch a cruel god smite those who defy the American narrative, but this is such a ‘00s “widescreen comics” plot device. If you just challenged Stardust a little and hired Bryan Hitch to draw these world-ending threats, you’ve got the vanguard of 21st-century comics.
This is personal; Stardust had been saving those Martians to massacre for himself. He uplargifies the Super-Fiend to give him a fight.
Stardust shoves the Fiend’s face in the mountain of charred Martian corpses where he will live out his days. Remember, these are the same Martians who took a swing at the Earth after Stardust averted their World War. What’s their deal? The secret narrative of Martian colonization and genocide is the real intrigue through the pages of Stardust. How many societies call it their graveyard now? Stardust is public domain, so this may be canonically how Martian Manhunter’s society died in the DCU.
All life is precious to Stardust except on Wednesdays.
THIS is the guy who gets solitary confinement? The genocide king? He’s punished with the exact scenario Clipp aimed for as victory, but I guess it’s different when the whole planet smells like freezer-burned corpses.
Stardust detects an ambitious robbery scheme disguised as Die Hard 0: I’m So Hard From Your Dying. He rushes to stop it in his “transparent tubular special,” a sort of cosmic body condom that lets him fly faster than light, but only like Michael Phelps making fun of a dolphin.
Ah, the timeless New York dream. This Kurd came here with nothing but the clothes on his back and the skull on his face. Now his Vanuatu-sized army is herding the cops into a bombable mass so he can plunder every safe in the city. I’m fine with it if he starts with Wells Fargo. Let’s see how well his GTA dreams go for him, following an appearance by Injustice Superman (blond skin DLC).
Stardust, you sicko, you’re into this.
Look how self-satisfied he is. I’m not saying terrorists don’t deserve this, but maybe we shouldn’t send the bully who can only get erect when he knows civilians are watching him cripple our mortal flesh.
Anyway, he hauls the surviving terror-crooks to exoplanet Scrooge.
Methodist Hell is just Mormon Heaven with sharing.
Dr. Kaos is an Earthman who has conquered Venus as part of his plan to conquer Earth.
Sorry, but what else is relevant? This plan is so stupid it rules.
He spends way too much time breeding plants to engorge and domesticate giant vultures that will attack everyone on Earth. Everyone except—oh no: The Girl.
The Girl has no name, no identity, and no parents or home as of thirteen seconds ago. The upside of lacking a personality beyond “pretty” is you recover from trauma easily, which makes life more convenient for men, which improves your odds of marrying well. And may the Devil help her, because Old Testament God has one weakness, and it’s our fine American Earth-wombs.
It takes Stardust two panels to subdue Kaos and two pages of showing off for the woman whom Kaos has abducted to be Empress Trafficking Victim I. Thankfully, she’s saved, to live in isolation on a completely different celestial body. And yeah, consent is the mitigating difference, but I’m not sure I trust the snap judgment of anyone whose feet haven’t even touched the ground since their parents were supersonically bisected by the vine-amped vultures of Venus. You know, that old chestnut.
Everything about this is suspicious. One or both of them is certainly plotting to kill the other. Listen, Stardust, I’m sure your dick is perfect, but it’s still not a functioning brain. Best-case scenario, a man the size of a sedan discovers, via geyser of blood, that his chosen virgin wasn’t a gynoid programmed thusly:
if cervix=unruptured.true
Print:”You call that a jolly thrust? Golly gee, I thought you were a real man!”
Else:
plutoniumOvary.DETONATE
If you want a portrait of our vindictive sun-god, Stardust turned Kaos specifically into a worm that can survive space and re-entry to be eaten alive.
Kaos is secondary, because the real punishment is about to occur on Stardust’s private star, which is sometimes an asteroid, and is also not a burning ball of gas. Or maybe it maintains a low temperature that gently warms its rolling hills, I don’t know the basics of solarforming, you tell me. All I know is it has fields, and plowing season starts tonight.
We all know a Bluebeard when we see one. She’s correct not to fret about the death of all she loves when Homelander 0.5 is about to insert a 2-liter penis inside her.
Nazi traitors are everywhere! Which—New York was holding Bund rallies this same year, and we’ve all stopped talking to our relatives these days, so: fair. But these ones have stupid tanks!
You all saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier, right? Okay, it’s that. Bomb New York, cripple the military, overthrow the USA, roll out the Nazi-red Hitlercarpet. Yew-Bee has thought of everything, except what he will scream forever when Stardust captures him.
I don’t know why Stardust hates this guy so much when Yew-Bee gave him the thing he most wants: an excuse to torture his inferiors for eternity.
Also, he shows off his iPhone:
This is the second-weirdest death in Stardust’s scrapbook. After transmogrifying all the goons into icicles and melting them, the Blue Atlas turns his attention to the leadership.
They’re chased by a panther (Stardust), and this is all really starting to feel like Biblical allegory. Star-panther drives the rats into the sea, then churns the ocean to drown them in a Stardust-related ocean churn. You know, so they can’t swim to land and form a rat Fifth Column.
We’re not done!
Picture being so old-time reserved you’re a founding member of the FBI. Suddenly a 9’ splendid blond beast teleports into your office while you’re plotting to round up all the fishy types (pinkos, flits, non-whites such as Italians). He flings a rat with a sulky old man’s head at you, then walks through the wall.
You want to scream, but you know he hears all and sees more. “Thank you,” sputters your ancient limbic system’s defense mechanisms, “Thank you, Stardust.” The Italians will know your violence tonight, as your conscious brain screams to assert a rational order. How can you explain to them that their sacrifice is the only thing keeping you sane?
The Fifth Column arc continues with a domestic Nazi plan to blow up power plants and cripple the govern—Oh, come on! It’s appalling how often Hanks foretold the 21st century’s problems, minus the iron fist of an aloof-at-best science-messiah to save us.
Stardust has his hands full because he has to repel a full-on invasion of South America PLUS the Axis has allied itself with Martian Sky-Demons. I don’t know their story. All I know is Mars treats Earth the way America treats Mexico.
I can’t lie to you, this issue rules. It’s straight out of a Grant Morrison issue of Justice League, minus any stakes. Stardust psychically scans the entire planet for disloyal Nazi swine, then ray-beams them to a decoy Earth that he made to trick the Sky-Demons. Millions of Bund-holes are bombed by their own allies, who fly away convinced they just trecimated humanity.
But there’s still the problem of the invading Axis. To deal with it, Stardust—Oh, no.
Say hello to the Sixth Column, Stardust’s private child army. He abducts thousands of boy soldiers, imbues them with his powers, and orders them to slaughter the field. These lads can’t be older than 13. He’s drowned their childhood in blood.
The Stardust Youth form transnational Sixth Column chapters to intimidate dissenters, and Stardust flies home, this once breaking his rule about only smiling when an audience watches him bully the helpless.
The Fifth Column wants to take over U.S. business, so they do it in the most Fletcher Hanks way possible: targeted missile strikes on the U.S. from Europe.
In this world, every crime is a Nakatomi Tower. If you want to steal candy from a baby in Stardust’s world, you throw a rock at a truck. In the commotion of the truck swerving into a ditch, you adopt the baby and send it to Swiss Business School to major in Chocolate Studies with a minor in Wonkalogy. Then you send a fleet of planes to bomb its house. Anyway, now the army of teen snitches has fascism leotards. And telepathy. Oh no.
Stardust gave teenagers ESP. Teenagers! The most notoriously emotionally unstable people in life’s journey can now hear what everyone thinks about them, as they tilt headlong in America’s most repressed era. I’m sorry, do you know what happens if you give American teen boys Jean Grey powers? Because in the same strip he gives them telekinesis, too. Imagine Scott Baio’s Zapped! but scaling up its crimes against humanity.
And I’m sorry, but every one of these kids looks like the bassist in a 1987 new wave band called Freeing Tanith.
One of the boys fucks up and thousands die! Stardust does nothing to prevent it! This is exactly how two U.S. wars have started. Oh well.
While his boy soldiers round up disloyalists, The Anti-Fascist Fascist hangs his enemies in midair, and—oh my God. He blows through them like a baseball bat through cake. Every one of these boys is an accomplice to grand-scale murder! Say, this is great fun!
I mean it’s Nazis, so I’m not sad, I just think the children weren’t required for our bloody work. This feels like death-grooming to spread the war crime culpability around.
I’m not confident you’re ready for how weird this one’s going to get. Don’t blame me for the fugue state you’re willingly striding into.
Mastermind Destructo has a ray that can suffocate every elite in America simultaneously: industrial executives, bankers, FBI agents, Secret Service, and all three branches of federal government. Sir, I will give you fifteen dollars for three minutes with this ray right now.
The Secret Army/Fifth Column alliance is going to be so mad when all of their undercovers get snuffed. It’s the kind of superheroics we wouldn’t see again until The Authority, but hold up: turns out this isn’t one of Stardust’s allies:
Okay, from that perspective they do look a little like the bad guys.
Stardust loves ironic punishments, but focuses on the unironic aspects. Are you ready? No, you are not! Get set! And! BEHOLD!
Ha ha ha ha! What a bully, the people’s hero. And yet, there is a very good chance Stardust possesses a device that allows him to read this column, and the trans-membrane ray technology to come here and punish me for it. Who cares? You’re the worst of C’thulu’s children, Stardust!
Reader, you just let your guard down! That was the normal part!
Stardust has a pet mutant that he feeds heads. This giant is the superhero’s version of my dog knowing he gets toast crust. Again, this comic makes perfect sense if you’re a minister’s drunk son.
And still, there are more sinners who need the stern hands of an angry god!
A thousand minds, but only one undying shriek.
You did it! You survived Stardust Madness! The Space-Wizard at his weirdest was no match for your fortitude!
BETRAYAL: That was merely preamble to his most elaborate torture yet.
A gangster whose name is definitely not reproducible here plans to rob the U.S. Bullion Depository four ways at once by gassing Fort Knox. Stardust’s Illegal Brain Surveillance Ray alerts him to the plan.
Man, Hanks must have been so ticked when James Bond made millions doing his exact plot.
Stardust arrives quickly enough to save the gold, though not the poisoned soldiers from a bludgeoning. He really is the Captain Planet you’d get when a DuPont, a Dulles, Douglas MacArthur, and the remains of Joe McCarthy’s liver hastily join rings over the backstabbed corpse of the Heart kid.
Stardust has thus far revealed his true nature, but only now, in his final kill, do we glimpse his true form:
That hand! That horrifying hand! I’m sorry. You came here for comedy! I’m sorry! I’m sorry. I’m sorry—
This is like the Harlem Globetrotters versus only the retired Washington Generals. The entire time Stardust taunts him with promises of undying agony. He’s plainly showing off for the girl, unless she’s already hanging undead in his species’ mating web, her bloated abdomen undulating with Star-babies chewing their way out. The only space aliens who do this kind of thing stem from the Warhammer/Doom/Lovecraft outerverse.
As the Earth itself pays the wages of the Tough Babies’ sins, Stardust keelhauls our villain through the island’s underwater caves, flips its landmass, yanks him back out, and then, only then:
He wanted gold. But he never considered the supreme irony that it might be a gigantic golden mollusk!
A lot of Stardust adventures end with him tweet-lighting the sky. Sometimes they’re useful messages like “Tidal wave threat over, cease your panic-crimes,” but mostly it’s unhelpful grandpa observations, like “Don’t trust your neighbors, they eat fermented cabbage.” Nothing compares to his final message of hope to the people:
Showily curb-stomping someone who’s no threat to him, then broadcasting to the world how great he is for doing so well past reason. Stardust really is a hero for 21st-century America. And you survived him. I’m so proud of you. That’s it. That’s all the Stardust in existence. You’ll never gaze upon him in fear again!
You should read Brendan’s superhero conspiracy comic now so you’re caught up when Stardust appears.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Toasty God, who once turned all children into knives and used them to eviscerate Meepo, the Blood Freak whose only two weakness were child-blades and democracy.
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Nerding Day: Stardust, Part 1 🌭
Hey, you—with the love handles: how would you like to fistfight Old Testment God?
That was the trick question asked in each issue of Stardust the Super Wizard, a comic about an omnipotent, unelected space-sheriff who only had one combat level, meaning horrified mobsters suffered the same ferocious punishment as galactic warlords, and it was The Infinity Gauntlet #4 treatment.
Sorry, I forget some of you don’t speak superhero. I’ll explain. Alcoholic comic artist Fletcher Hanks arguably created the first superheroine, Fantomah, but his second-most famous work was Stardust the Super Wizard, a misanthropic asshole’s version of Superman wearing Batman’s utility belt.
Stardust had every power except empathy, no weaknesses, and even less drama. No matter what the peril, he had a ray or gas to solve it. He was said to be invulnerable, dodged every attack regardless, and was proportioned like the Titan who bullied the Gigachad in high school. It’s unknown if Stardust had any weaknesses, because the one time an opponent landed an attack, Stardust let him do it just to toy with his hope of survival. I’m highly confident he’s related to the Engineers from Alien, given that he’s 9’ tall, and despises all the parts of humanity he can’t seed with his starspawn.
Also, Hanks put all of Stardust’s physical stats into the X and Y axes, leaving him with no Z for the ass:
“The most remarkable man that ever lived” is an all-seeing, all-powerful sky-wizard who lets bad people hurt good ones so he can mangle crooks for committing crimes he could have stopped. The superhero genre was still in the neonatal ward when Fletcher Hanks realized it was Gods vs. Mortals, and decided Mortals needed more body horror to tamp their big ideas.
I hope it helps you make sense of why your grandparents vote the way they do. Because of their choices, all of the 1930s’ sci-fi nightmares are just the 2020s’ everyday slog. Hanks was a 1940s gonzo cartoonist and a 1930s abusive father, so he was a torturous Da-Da who made torturous dada; yet somehow he predicted our entire stupid existence.
Stardust can eavesdrop on the entire universe and flies 10 million times the speed of light, but never arrives in time to save the man in the street, just the elites. If you wondered why God lets bad things happen to good people, it’s to justify the murders and mutilations he’s plotting in his lab. Phobos University awarded him an honorary doctorate in devising punishments for the crimes he let happen. It’s like, torture for poetry’s sake, man—you dig?
Like most superheroes, Stardust has a code against killing: it disrupts his important work of mutilating still-screeching criminals. He might grant you eternal life, but only so you could suffer forever for kidnapping a billionaire. Stardust stories are duller than the knives his readership uses to make their victims squirm more, because to Hanks, narrative is just build-up. The real attraction is incommensurate retaliation. It’s the “Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker” of superheroes, but instead of crashing through a wall at the end, we’re all cast into hopeless agony.
If Stardust caught you jaywalking, he’d transform-ray you into a blue jay, and then tear your legs off. “You, who sought to be king of the crosswalk racketeers,” growls this parody of art deco, “You shall never walk again!” Then he’d fling you across the galaxy to Cybertron, so you could be stepped on by cars for a million years. It was a drunk’s idea of irony, and it was hatefully rad.
Got it? Now let’s look at the highlights reel from The Further Adventures of Young YHWH, all of which perfectly predict the 2020s.
Stardust enemies tend to declare themselves the enemies of civilization, and want to return to a savage state when they can enslave everyone else.
You know, typical enemies-of-America stuff.
First off, Will Eisner fixed this panel; I’d put $100 on it. The Eisner studio was practically teenagers, and in walks this middle-aged lush mumbling, “Kids whaddaya do a supes hero ok I’ll super you this man of star-metal skin f’r $20 and rum,” then immediately draws all of his characters facing away from the camera.
One Eisnerian correction later, The Secret Army sees a headline that says “Wizard-cop incoming at framework-breaking speeds to mercilessly annihilate crime” and recognizes it as the hornets’ nest they want to roundhouse. Forgivably, they have awesome weapons.
Suddenly: common sense! It doesn’t last.
“Oh God. Oh no. We’re fucked, we’re all fucked, it’s seen us, save yourselves with cyanide.”
Six pages in, Stardust has already floored the pedal to Spectreville. We’re still shaking hands with this new superhero, and suddenly he’s murmuring beneath a sweaty brow about the divine wind reaping the wicked.
Our—well, not hero, but our featured deus ex machina—brings the feds up to the roof to gawp at these men reliving the horrors of their crimes for five minutes. This is what people did for fun in the age before television.
Would it surprise you to learn at this point that Fletch’s dad was a 19th Century Methodist minister? I’m going to assume the method was locking Hanks in the closet to contemplate why sneaking a second fistful of rye flour for morning stirabout was the devil’s breakfast.
To prevent meddling, The Notorious RtB plans to capture Stardust with glue, wind machines that aren’t fans, and magnets. Rip, you moron, those are what you use to catch vermin in a produce warehouse, and Stardust is powered by the energy of an unreachable sun.
World War II’s barely begun, but Rip-the-Blood wants to get a global conflagration going by kidnapping the president via fake Japanese plane. What the hell? Stardust debuted two years before Pearl Harbor.
Anyway, he kidnaps the president like it’s nothing.
Stardust never administers one punishment when nine will murder that man so hard his atomized remains think twice about ever forming covalent bonds with known felons. Stardust makes Rip-the-Blood watch as he blows up the man’s (occupied?) munitions factories, then flings his accomplices into space to die.
I can’t lie, this is great. Only when Rip has nothing left does Stardust hurl him into the sea, a.k.a. the space of earth. It’s a slow death for warmongers. Suddenly, I’m listening to what this peacenik space-fascist has to say. Do the Bush administration next!
Stardust casually leaves to end another world war on Mars, off-panel. Or at least talking about it loudly. This is the kind of thing witnesses clearly remember you saying before you commit a premeditated crime: “Time to go tutor some blind nuns how to bake bread for the poor! Goodbye, everyone! I am leaving the party now, at 9:05 p.m., a forty-minute spatial tubular from my private star if I break all universal constants!” A month later, the bodies of four dozen cosmic terrorists are found drifting in Martian orbit, screaming endlessly in quantum-superpositioned flames.
Ummm…wait. I don’t like where these are going. All of 1939’s imagined threats are our real ones: air pollution, megastorms, rising seas, war profiteers, overpopulation, overheating Earth. At one point a global pandemic stops all industry. We get the worst of the Space-Wizard’s world minus the terrifying benevolent tyrant to save us.
Most Stardust foes employ a private army to increase odds of survival when he inevitably turns their weapons against them. The Demon is the first idiot to take on Stardust with nothing more than an assistant, which means he has to eat a city-killing tidal wave all by himself. Stardust sidearms him headlong into the force of all the hate in the cosmos, but feels there’s important work left to be done in desecrating his body.
The Giant has a lot of subtextual backstory. He’s older than Babylon, the same size as Stardust, and the only person who knows how to disrupt the blue Atlas’s technology. He has a very supportive friend named Kamet. He hates Chicago, so you’d guess he’s from Milwaukee, but he loves slavery, so you might figure Baton Rouge. Anyway, he’s retired to the Southwest, like all old people.
Can’t believe we’re all gonna die at the hands of a guy with a pro wrestler mullet.
I don’t think I’m conjecturing too much that these two are the same ancient race, making Mad Gobi the Sinestro to his Green Lantern, the Venom to his Spidey, the Brockbaby to his Seanway. Maybe that’s why Stardust is oddly restrained for once.
Either it’s professional deference or these monsters can’t die. Then again, maybe our space cop figured no point in a harsh lesson when the guy’s just pressing the gas to our destination.
Racketeer Wolf-Eye and his Crime Wizards, a.k.a. the Miracle Men, have a vacuum ray!
They’re kidnapping elites like “automaker Henry Lord” to destroy the economy. Oh, boo hoo, did a union-busting Hitler-patron dangle in the sky for a bit? My heart, she shudders for that poor, parboiled Nazi.
Without titans of industry to do whatever the telegraph version of shit-tweeting is, the economy tumbles. The dismantling of public transit is delayed an entire week now! But this being Fletcher Hanks, he’s nested at least two extortion schemes in this kidnapping.
Seems like that ray could just vacuum up the money and resources directly, but no one consulted me about my hobbyist schemes to assault billionaires.
Wolf-Eye embiggens himself with a growth ray (now his third super-science ray) but is immediately shrunk by Stardust’s “Fuck your ambitions” ray into a little guy.
It’s unclear if the superhero drops Wolf-Eye off with the Feds or the interplanetary police, but at least this crook’s not doomed to live forever in contemplation of his agonies. Stardust must recognize and respect a fellow ray-pervert.
This one’s not by Hanks, so we don’t care! But he’s an Earth warlord who subjugated Mars.
Let’s see how Superman vs. John Carter fan-fiction shakes out.
Hahahaha, look at these giant feebs, I’m glad they’re dead.
This is what happens when you stop body-shaming people for being different and marry someone for their oversized mind. Martinious conquered this planet by seizing control of its economy entirely through milk money muggings. Thank goodness Captain Eugenics shows up to kill them in the sixth-most horrific manner possible.
Boy, this one tapdances on the thorn of “Is it a slur or does he travel the byways?” You can’t outright say Hanks strips are racist, but then again, Stardust might have eradicated all the other races already.
Here it is. This is the dumbest plot any comic crook ever farted out, and I’ve read villains who want to turn all water on earth into gold. Three idiots with a little knowledge want to halt the Earth’s rotation and send everyone else sliding off at 800 mph so they can keep all the good stuff. They chain themselves to the wall while—wait, this can’t be right…“half a billion” humans rocket to orbit. Is that what they thought overpopulation was? Dear lord. We are a cancer of the earth’s biomass. The Demon wasn’t wrong, he was just inept. To my point:
Orbis non rotat, orbis non sufficit. This is the most realistic panel in the entire series, even though it’s suddenly the lost Canterbury Tale.
The world might have stopped turning, but Clipp doesn’t. Stardust sidewinds him into space like M. Bison.
Then chases him down to inter him in agony.
This is it. Peak stupidity provoking peak cruelty. This is Stardust’s The Creation of Adam, his Purple Rain. A plan this dumb requires a complete syllabus of crime does not pay. Everything after this is going to be weird conceptual stuff that has fans saying “His old stuff was better.”
And we’ll see those avant-garde kills when Stardust returns next month to fight Lepus the Super Fiend! This one is a rare 1900🌭 two parter!
Brendan quit Twitter, but his newsletter now lives unobtrusively in your inbox.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: EveryZig, who is forever boiling in orbit of our sun for downloading one episode of Designing Women.
I’m really going to do it. I’m going to write 2,000 words about a six-minute interview between Los Angeles weatherman Mark Kriski-
And his interviewee-
That’s Sidney Liufau, a Polynesian martial artist who you might recognize from nothing. This, I guess. If you needed a Pacific Islander leading man, which the 1990s rarely did, he could stand in the background and be Chinese or whatever. He had bit parts in Bloodsport III, Blade, and was actually in the Mortal Kombat movie as Shang Tsung! … … … ‘s unnamed henchman. His biggest role was on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the episode where Worf married Dax. He played the erotic Fire Dancer at an alien parasite’s bachelorette party.
Sidney’s chance to step into a major role came with the Mortal Kombat Live Show, because this was 1996, and studio executives figured if you wanted to watch Ninja Turtles or Thundercats or Mortal Kombats or whatever, you probably also wanted to watch somebody who kind of looked like them sing a song about friendship in a hockey rink. Local news affiliates fucking loved live shows because every time one swept through town, they could kill 5 minutes of show for the cost of a craft services table (accidentally pictured below).
This puff piece opens with thirty seconds of adequate stage fighting. The frantic techno Mortal Kombat theme plays. It is 8:31 in the morning. It is officially too early for this shit.
Right from the jump, we can see this promo is not going well. This appearance is beneath both Sidney Liufau and Mark Kriski, and they’re both in a race to see who can make the other acknowledge that first.
These two are the stars of this unfolding disaster, but they’re not the full cast. Let’s check in on your Mortal Kombat Players!
Everyone knows our first warrior, he’s the white drama kid earning Experience Credits, it’s-
Seen here wielding nunchucks he made from dowels and twine like he’s me in the sixth grade, it’s criminal mastermind-
Looking pretty good from afar, just don’t get too close to the-
Or you’ll see his mask looks like papier mache bananas made by Outworld children at remedial summer camp. This isn’t Scorpion, it’s-
A last minute replacement, it’s the hairdresser who owed his hungover stuntman boyfriend a BIIIIG favor, meet-
Fresh off the set of a Rage Against the Machine video where they played Socialist Raver #17 and On Call Crowd Filler (Uncalled), it’s-
Baraka should have full prosthetic make-up and blade arms or at least something, anything at all, while Kabal should definitely not have a military surplus vest, but I guess nunchuck twine is shockingly expensive.
That’s not the full cast, but we’ll meet Sonya Blade later in deeply unfortunate circumstances.
You know how these segments go: The real reporters can’t be assed, so it falls to the weatherman to toss an adult in foam suspenders softballs like “what kind of good time should children expect from Mortal Kombat Live?” But Mark Kriski absolutely does not give a shit about how well this piece goes. He’s vaguely heard something controversial about Mortal Kombat, and you know what? Maybe this is his chance to show he’s more than just a weatherman and host of Kooky Kriski’s Wild Wacky Animal Corner every Sunday from 6:15AM to 6:20AM.
He calls it a video, so he might not even know what a video game is, he definitely doesn’t know this is from one. It’s possible Mark Kriski thinks these people are Mortal Kombat, and they’re some kind of brutal dance troupe famous for their stage gore. Regardless, he leaps at this chance to fire some hardballs right down the gullet of a sleepy career extra.
Now, surely the Mortal Kombat Live showrunners understood the controversy around Mortal Kombat. The pearl-clutching morality police of the ‘90s, fearing their own increasing irrelevance, made that game a crusade. It was under constant fire to justify its own existence, of course the higher-ups would have coached their cast before all TV appearances. Take it away, Sidney:
He is a possum playing chicken with an 18-wheeler. Sidney has been coached on up to seven Mortal Kombat puns and nothing else. Now he has to wing an eloquent answer for a bad faith moral campaign.
Those of you with social anxiety might recognize this as a nightmare. Just an audible nightmare coming from somebody’s mouth on live television. To say nothing important, or to sidestep the question entirely would have been one thing. To reflexively fall back on positive martial arts talking points when you’re playing a guy who eats souls is what those of you with improv training will recognize as a nightmare again.
But shit. He got through it, right?
Mark Kriski takes one step forward, three steps back, and high punches.
This is quite possibly the worst thing that ever happened to Sidney Liufau and he was an extra on You, Me, and Dupree. This is a strong, confident adult man who got dressed up like 4th place in an elementary school costume contest and he’s getting dunked on by a weatherman. That’s so humiliating it’s somebody’s fetish now. They call it Krisking and you can buy special leather blazers for it on Etsy.
I’m not here to take Sidney Liufau to task. Mark Kriski is winning but it’s like watching the Washington Generals shut out the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s no fun, against the natural order of things, and possibly a hate crime. The morality panics of the ‘80s and ‘90s were in as bad faith as they are today, and Kriski is only doing this because he’s hungry. He knows the anchor desk is where you pull the real tail, and there’s no such thing as a weather groupie. Sidney Liufau is not trained for this, he shouldn’t have to be, he’s on the spot, he has a lot of excuses… but he still might have just said the dumbest thing in knowable human history. Saying Mortal Kombat’s main message is teaching children to be concerned about violence is like saying the real point of Doom is to make Sunday School fun for toddlers.
Mark somehow lets Sidney bail without pressing that terrible answer. He does not grill Shang Tsung about how he just said that ripping out video game spines is an educational tool to keep kids out of fistfights. Either there’s mercy yet in Kriski’s dark heart, or he wants to skip to the part where Sonya Blade beats him up. I can’t tell which is the real answer, so let’s check Mark’s body language-
The clenched teeth smile, the little fists gripping the cuffs of his own blazer. Mark Kriski looks like he just found out that big box under the tree is a Playstation. This is what a dog does when you open a pack of bacon. A beautiful young woman is going to beat the hell out of him at his place of business and the only reason Mark Kriski is not visibly hard is because he just came and your refractory period ain’t the same in your ‘40s.
Mark interrupts the instructions to walk right up to Sonya and point at her body parts. He talks to everybody in the room but her about how hot he finds them. This is how you find out that thing has a hemi at a car show, it’s not how you react to a human being. This is a man who has absolutely been thrown out of a shoe store. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading the situation wrong. Let’s check in with Sonya’s body language-
That’s Kerri Hoskins, the actual motion capture model for the original Sonja Blade. She’s a Playboy playmate too, which means she has a Master’s Degree in Received Creepery and she’s going for a Doctorate in Unwelcome Touches. She’s not taken aback because of what Kriski said. Vanilla Ice has said ten times worse in the grotto, and praising someone’s six-pack is fine in most scenarios – if they didn’t want you to notice their abs they’d eat bread. It’s the fact that Mark broke a news segment to walk over and yell to his ancestors about the hot meat he found. Anybody would be thrown by that, because it’s madness. Kerri’s also been diagnosed as on the spectrum, so she might struggle some with social cues. Going on live TV to have a weatherman aha her body parts like he’s just found Waldo is an unsolvable social dilemma. And Mark isn’t done! It’s like he’s just discovered ogling, this might be his first ogle and he’s trying to explain to everybody what he invented. He starts to go on about Kerri’s body again and Liufau actually says-
What! What a fucking champion, holy shit! I’d say this is revenge for Kriski putting him on the spot earlier, but Sidney Liufau says that with the automatic authority of someone who has bounced for a stripclub. He’s a man very comfortable using his size to enforce a woman’s physical boundaries, and I’m going to go ahead and guess that if he’s an LA local, this ain’t even his first dance with Mark. He might have Kriski protocols and special holds that make use of a poorly tailored blazer.
The demonstration must go on, despite the dangers we have established: A scantily clad, very hot young woman within strangling distance of a mediocre middle-aged white man in a position of authority. We really should’ve seen what happens next coming.
Now, to be fair Liufau tells Mark “this is what happens when you try to go for her neck,” and gives him the nod. But nobody expected him to GO for it. That is not the lunging strangle of a first time woman strangler. Everybody knows what these martial arts demonstrations are – you move in slowly so they can show you some choreography that almost looks like fighting. But Mark Kriski just saw the last nut before winter and he didn’t give a shit that the hawk was circling. He charges past Sidney, gets to Kerri’s neck, and starts squeezing.
She’s once again thrown off – all the careful anti-choke strategies she uses on Pauly Shore at the Playboy Mansion go straight out the window. For just a fraction of a second, for one brief, insane moment, we watch the Channel 5 weatherman strangle a half-naked autistic woman on live television while six men dressed like video game characters idle helplessly. Mark Kriski will never beat this moment. You can see it carve into his brain like a muscle memory. He’ll be able to recall every second of this every single time the r/Strangling subreddit leaves him soft.
Then Kerri gets back in the game, throws her memorized stage combo, and Mark Kriski mock retreats to tuck his erection up behind his JCPenney belt.
The post orgasmic clarity hits Mark and he stammers through the rest of the interview. That hungry sleuth ready to nail a fire dancing himbo to the wall for video game violence is gone. In his place is a reedy and awkward Mark Kriski, most of his brain working on what to tell his wife about this. “I tripped going in, honey – you know these loafers are slippery! It’s just like that time in Foot Locker, darn it all sometimes you just stumble and a college student’s foot winds up in your mouth. We’ve been over this!”
He hops over to interview Kerri Hoskins about nothing, which was also clearly not in the game plan. Mark Kriski is trying to sell a sense of normalcy he does not feel after the real Mark briefly exploded out of its Kriski shell. I actually can’t tell if Kerri’s buying it, let’s check in on her body language-
Mark Kriski better memorize that expression, he’s going to see it again – first on his producer after the segment ends, and then again on his wife when he gets home.
Right as they cut away to commercial, Mark goes back in for some playfighting with Kerri Hoskins. He does a mocking crane kick pose, which we all recognize means “this karate stuff is bullshit garbage for children and fuck you for thinking otherwise.” Kerri steps in on him in a way that says less “sure, I’ll play” and more “I’m planting my feet for an uppercut.”
Decades later, Mark Kriski would be involved in another scandal with everybody’s favorite comedian, Kathy Griffin. If, totally unprompted, he just jumped in and started strangling again I think we as a culture would have been fine with that. But that’s not what happened: Mark interrupted during perhaps the only valid and reasonable point Kathy Griffin has ever made, that older women are vastly underrepresented in comedy, and said it wasn’t true. He wasn’t even doing the interview! He butt in to a separate segment somebody else was filming just to Well, Actually a woman comedian about women and comedy. Kathy shut him straight down by asking him to name five, he schooled her by naming zero, and then said “um, I’m not into the comedy thing.” The sole subject was comedy, Mark.
I don’t know, maybe if he’d gone and seen the 1996 Mortal Kombat Live Show he would’ve come out a changed man, I hear it had some really positive messages.
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Nerding Day: Insektors 🌭
In the early ’90s, computer animation was still in its infancy. Shows like Transformers: Beast Wars and ReBoot by Mainframe Entertainment and the decidedly more Christ-like Veggietales from this period have managed to stick in the public consciousness, but one CGI TV series from the era seems to have slipped out of history: Insektors. Produced by French studio Fantome in 1993, Insektors features all of the classic themes of early ’90s children’s entertainment: bugs, environmentalism, and the forcible conversion of your ideological enemies to your — the only correct — world view.
Starring a walking stick insect named Fulgor (David Gasman, who also voiced Goku in a bunch of Dragon Ball Z movies and has somehow appeared in every game by Quantic Dream), Insektors is the tale of the sunny, color-loving Joyces and their struggle against the villainous Yuks. It was a pretty standard set-up. The Yuks are industrialist bugs who have mined all of the coal out of their side of the planet and are now turning their sights on the abundant flower stalks in Joyce territory. It was very evil, and the exact same business model as most of the show’s sponsors.
What do they need all of these resources for? Building giant war machines to collect more resources, for one, but more importantly to throw into a giant furnace to keep their Queen warm. Is Insektors thus a metaphor for the real-world colonialist adventures that have fed the insatiable desires of the metropole through history? I’m going to say that yes, yes it is. Americans want low gas prices and the big insect Queen wants to stay warm. Same thing. Anyone telling you differently is about to throw you into an oven to keep their Queen warm. The oven knows it’s the bad guy by the way:
One might ask why the Queen doesn’t simply move someplace warmer than the Yuk’s frigid swamp. First off, maybe she likes it in the swamp. Maybe the swamp has good schools or it’s really walkable or something. Second, it’s implied that the Queen is in fact so cold because of how evil she is. This suggests that, were the Queen to cease in her quest for domination and destruction, she would be relieved of the very conditions which make it necessary in the first place. Oh, the irony! The cruel, probably not intended, Shakespearean irony!
Meanwhile, the Joyces are sustained by The Great Prism, a magical entity that can spontaneously grow plants. As it turns out, it’s rather easy to be pacifistic naturalists when all of your needs are supplied by an omnipotent crystal god.
The Joyces spend their days embodying Marx’s adage of the man in communist society who spends the morning gardening, the afternoon making music, and the evening gathering pollen for the semi-sentient terraforming prism at the center of their culture. And we should follow their example. Let’s all work together and worship the prism.
It may seem like the Joyces are carefree layabouts who look like characters from a local exterminator commercial, but they aren’t idiots or cowards. When the Yuks start encroaching on their land and cutting down their flower forests to fuel their furnaces, they square up against the invaders with a ferocity that belies their beneficent image, like a drunk guy at Santacon.
Given how Insektors was aimed at young audiences and that it was developed well after the heyday of violent ’80s cartoons, Fantome seems to have been interested in portraying conflict in a way that didn’t rely on fisticuffs or laser battles. Thus, the Joyces resist the Yuks through technology like Fulgor’s Kolor Guitar. Behold:
When strummed, this instrument produces blasts of colorful energy which are harmless to Joyces, yet send Yuks into laughing fits. Rather than kill or maim, these weapons seem to literally convert their targets into peace-loving Joyces. An ethnic bioweapon, yes, but one where you can sincerely add the words, “wait let me explain.”
We should really stop to think about this for a minute. Mind controlling weapons were pretty common in ’90s cartoons, but they were typically wielded by villains. For one thing, it’s dramatic when a hero is turned against their allies. For another, bending the very will and identity of a living being is usually understood as pretty fucking evil. While plenty of kids’ stories end with the villains seeing the errors of their ways and recanting, few of these come to Jesus moments happen because the characters in question got hit by a personality-warping rainbow money shot. I hope. I actually don’t remember how Care Bear tummies worked.
The Yuks, those miserable bastards, don’t take this subversion of their free will sitting down. They have their own weapons called Koal Juice Guns, which cause depression in any Joyces they hit. Additionally, they’ve got a machine called the Dark Box they toss their incapacitated goons into to turn them back into sad industrialists. Presumably, they could also use it on Joyces to make them into Yuks. Again, the show was just acting out the best-case scenario for its advertisers.
So we have two civilizations — one industrialized and militaristic, the other nature-loving and peaceful. And both of them are armed with weapons that don’t outright annihilate their foes, but rather strip them of their very being and make them more like their wielders. Imagine living in this world, where in every conflict with your enemy you risk not just injury or death but the complete reversal of your personality. In their effort to make Insektors less violent, Fantome inadvertently created a vision of a hellish existence where the self is as fragile as the petals of a flower. It seems like something Philip K. Dick would come up with, not Saturday morning cartoon fodder.
Insektors isn’t all psychological horror, though — it’s also got some interesting worldbuilding. In the episode “Planet Karbon,” for instance, Prince Acylius of the Yuks has run away to live with the Joyces, preferring their music and color to his people’s… toil and misery, I guess. And yes, okay, that’s the exact same thing the show always does, but when he’s shown the Great Prism, Prince Acylius touches it and triggers a giant sky beam and booming voice that tells the story of the planet.
Once upon a time, it seems, the only living things in the world were the Yuks. Then the Great Prism fell from space and introduced color and plants. While most were disturbed by this new presence, a few overcame their fears and were rewarded with the “awakening of their souls.” Which looked like the loading screen for a 1995 CD-ROM encyclopedia.
They developed a new way of life and became the Joyces. This is a fun kind of inversion of the typical “advanced” industrialist society versus the “primitive” hunter-gatherers. It suggests that the Yuks are the backwards ones, sticking as they do to their timeless plan of burning stuff for fuel until there isn’t any left.
That said, what exactly is the message here? That you should embrace novelty? That mysterious and incomprehensible sky shapes are to be trusted without question? Or is the Great Prism meant to stand in for clean nuclear power, perhaps? Was Insektors propaganda meant to get children onboard with fission reactors? Admittedly, probably not. But like all good art, it makes you wonder, right?
Lacking the brand recognition of Beast Wars and the on-trend computer theming of ReBoot, Insektors isn’t as well-remembered as its contemporaries. Maybe that’s because of how little of it there was — Fantome only produced 26 episodes, each of which is 12 minutes long. Maybe it’s because the characters look like first drafts of the cast of A Bug’s Life. Or maybe it’s because “Insektors” sounds like the name of a toy line of insect-themed superheroes sold exclusively at K-Mart for a few months in 1990 that six undiagnosed bug fetishists on the Internet are absolutely obsessed with to this day.
Insektors was released outside of its native France in both the UK and North America, and received two different English dubs. I grew up with the North American version, but watching it on YouTube it does seem that the UK version is the superior one even though it’s a little less faithful to the original. The voice acting is generally higher quality, and there are a lot of fun little bits that didn’t make it to the North American dub.
For instance, in the NA dub a character complains that he’s allergic to flowers when caught in some rapidly-growing plants. In the UK, the line is “I’m in the Day of the wretched Triffids!” It’s truly a sad indictment of the state of American education that children of the ’90s wouldn’t get a John Wyndham joke.
And it isn’t just the voices or tenor of the humor that changed across the two versions — each region got different names for all of the show’s characters and locations, making the Wikipedia page for the series a real mess. Most of the differences aren’t especially notable — the Yuks become Kruds in the UK dub, and Fulgor is named Flynn — but there’s one crucial difference.
In the UK, the evil Queen Bakrakra was named after a certain medical device. She isn’t Queen Krutch, or Queen Kannula, or Queen Kautery. Her name is Queen Katheter. In their effort to make Insektors more amusing to an audience of wry and sardonic children, the UK was, quite literally, taking the piss.
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