Don't Bring A Knife To A Mr. Terrific Fight!

Just how terrific is Mr. Terrific?

That's how terrific!!

From Sensation Comics #34 (1944)

Why Every Super-Hero Should Know Morse Code!

Terry Sloane--a.k.a. Mr. Terrific--is taking a walk in the park, when he notices:

A quick costume change--because obviously, reading Morse code is easier in costume--and Mr. T reads:

The crooks leaving the message attack him, and are quickly subdued, as Terrific figures out what is going on.

Well, Mr. Terrific deep knowledge of Morse code and grounds keeping serve him well:

Mr. Terrific is Jiminy Cricket!!

And by gum, it works!

Oh, don't worry--Mr. T is on hand to save Dekker from getting rubbed out.

So, anyway, Morse code--learn it today!! You can never tell whose life it might save!

From Sensation Comics #34 (1944)

Manic Monday Triple Overtime--Fair Violin Play!!

Famous violinist Allegro and his Stradivarius are going to give some concerts at "Townagie Hall"...

And he's a hit!

But Terry Sloane is concerned someone might try to steal the Strad!!

Well, it's put in the safe...but it's stolen anyway!!

Sloane is convinced its an inside job...

So he lays an elaborate trap for our evil music critic!

Well, now comes stage 2, just before thew next night's concert:

Yes, Mr. Terrific is soooo terrific that he's a total master of disguise, and he can play a "standard" violin better than a famous concert violinist can play with a Stradivarius!

Which, leads, of course, to Mr. Terrific's best bit of Terrificality:

He's going to punch your lights out!!

From Sensation Comics #45 (1945)

Manic Monday--Who Needs T-Spheres?!?

A lot of uninformed folks like to dismiss Terry Sloan, the Golden Age Mr. Terrific, as just a forgettable non-powered guy whose only gimmick was a now-corny slogan.

Guys, please.

Mr. Terrific had special talents comics out the wazoo!

For example...

Again, please.

Now, please don't ask, but this case revolves around finding the body of a dead parrot. Don't ask.

No, it's not a Monty Python routine.

But in order to flush out the killer and the hidden corpse of the ex-parrot, Mr T needs to unleash more abilities!

See--"Master Of The Art Of Shadow Casting"!! Let's see Batman pull that off!!

But wait--there's more!

Scoff you may, but it works!!

And Mr. Terrific's true talent?

Punning while punching!!

Mr. Terrific--lip-reading, shadow casting, ventriloquism--FAIR PLAY!!

From Sensation Comics #27 (1944)

April Madness Round I--No Surprises!

Welcome to the first round of The Seven Justice Soldiers of The Victory League Society, our insane little tournament that exists for no reason whatsoever!!

Our first round features:

vs.

That's Earth-2 Green Lantern, Earth-2 Robin/Batman in the most godawful costume ever, and Mr. Terrific.

It's no surprise, or at least it shouldn't be, that Kal-El's team is the top seed--any team that has a Kryptonian and a guy who turn turn his body into any shape and virtually any element is going to be pretty tough.

The other team? In the biggest pre-Crisis gathering of heroes ever, our creators couldn't even find a spot for these guys--they showed up late, and didn't even take part in any of the quests. Sad!!

In my completely arbitrary (and totally unappealable) view on how this fight would go, it's not too much of a contest. Alan Scott could perhaps give Superman a moment of trouble, as some tellings have his ring being magical in nature. But a quick spritz of sleep gas from Sandman would break his concentration, and Superman would smack him with a tree. Meanwhile, between bouts of laughter at Robin/Batman's costume, Metamorpho would make pretty quick work of the Man Wonder, leaving Mr. Terrific to cry about "FAIR PLAY" as he gets pummeled.

Our winner:

Can anyone stop the Superman group?

Tune in later today for another match!!

Jim Phelps, Meet Terry Slon(e)

And the rant begins...now.

As we all know by now, something pretty tremendous and earth-shaking happened in Earth-2 #1 this past week. A classic Golden Age hero, who has been around for 70 years, completely had his history and lifestyle revised, and not for the better.

No, I'm not talking about Alan Scott:



Yup, Terry Sloane, the original Mister Terrific, is now Terry Sloan, apparent villain.

SLIGHT DIGRESSION RANT:

You may recall the television series Mission: Impossible. For eight seasons, Jim Phelps risked life and limb for his country, leading his IMF team on almost 200 missions.

Then came the 1996 movie, which decided to make Jim Phelps the villain, turning him into a traitor who slaughtered his entire team and sold out his country for no particular reason other than a lack of the writers' imagination. It was an idiotic move, one that offended many of the fans (and all of the original cast).

(In fairness, the first three Mission: Impossible movies all revolved around traitorous IMF agents. So, profound lack of imagination all around.)

Still, it was galling: why take a character who had been nothing but a good guy, and arbitrarily make him into a vile scumbag? What was the point, except to say, "Look, we're edgy, and this isn't your father's Mission: Impossible!"

You really can't imagine them doing this with a character that "mattered"...having James T. Kirk actually go rogue and try to assassinate the Klingon Chancellor in Star Trek VI, for example. So in a way it's doubly insulting--having the good guy go bad, and the implicit statement that Jim Phelps wasn't important enough to make the filmmakers think twice about destroying his character.

END DIGRESSION RANT--TRANSITION INTO SLIGHTLY LESS DIGRESSING RANT:

Of course, this isn't the first time James Robinson has done this. Golden Age hero The Spider, of the series Alias The Spider, was just another archer hero from Quality Comics. After the original Crisis, he made an adequate fill in for the now non-existent Golden Age Green Arrow.

But Robinson decided to retcon him in the pages of Starman (along with Geoff Johns in Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E). Now the Spider hadn't really been a hero; he was really a master criminal who had been pretending to be a hero in order to eliminate the competition!! (OK, I'll concede a couple of points for cleverness there.) He had betrayed and tried to kill his teammates on the Seven Soldiers Of Victory!! The Shade killed him, but his son carried on his evil ways!! It's OK, because there are only 12 people on Earth who even remember Alias The Spider!!

Which is not to say there stories were bad. But why go to the same well again in 2012?

RETURN TO MAIN RANT:

Heaven knows Mr. Terrific wasn't the most significant or important or popular guy out there. Let's face it, most folks considered him irredeemably corny and old-fashioned and twee. And let's not forget about the costume:

Still, he was considered enough of a role model to have inspired Michael Holt to become the modern Mister Terrific. (So, in the nu52, Holt just decided to tattoo FAIR PLAY on his arms without it being a tribute to a past hero? Now who is being twee?)

Terry Sloane was a Renaissance man, master of all trades, a genius and self-made millionaire who, instead of wallowing in his own crapulance, dedicated his skills to helping others. He was a hero.

Yet now, James Robinson has transformed him into, in the words of my pal Siskoid, an Ozymandias knock-off. Why? What possible reason, except to show (yet again) that this isn't your father's Earth-2?

Why destroy a hero (again)? Are there so many that we can cavalierly discard them? Aren't there 157 existing villains we could have used in this role, Golden-Agers or Earth-2ers or people who haven't been used yet in the nu52? The villains out there far outnumber the heroes--why are we burning off one of the latter, instead of using the former?

Why not make Alan Scott your bad guy, then? Nope, too popular, fans would be upset. We can't do that to any "important" character. Mister Terrific? Him we can use--he doesn't matter.

Hell, why don't you create an original character? Oh, wait, that wouldn't make readers go, "Oooooo, he's being edgy." And people would call the new character cliched and uninteresting. And inventing a new bad guy would require an excess of imagination. Never mind, let's just use this guy who has been lying around unused. And let's not even bother to spell his name correctly.

Because he doesn't matter. Sure, that's why they killed him off in the first place, back in Justice League #171 (1979)--because when you "need" to kill of someone for shock value, you do it to someone the writers don't know how to use, and to someone the readers won't care about. You do it to someone who doesn't matter.

Well, I'm here to tell you that Terry Sloane matters. Heroes matter.

Heroes are a precious commodity. You don't defame them and run them through the gutter and turn them evil just because you lack a better story idea. It's cheap, and it's lazy, and it's profoundly insulting to say, "This fellow has been a hero for 70 years, but let's just chuck that and make him Lex Luthor without the hair problem."

Yes, James Robinson, no one knew Terry Sloane, or had even read any comics that had Terry Sloan in them. Yet he was deemed enough significant to use in this new role, because you thought people would recognize the name. So you don't really believe he was that insignificant--you just did it for the shock value (again). And you're a better writer than that.

Yes, I'm admittedly corny and old-fashioned and twee sometimes. But I believe down to the core of my being that heroes matter. They belong to all of us, and you don't just flush them down the crapper.

Heroes matter.

And so does spelling....It's SLOANE!! Don't drop the E, dammit!!

Spoiler Saturday--Mister Terrific #6

By now we should all be used to modern DC heroes killing their foes. We don't have to like it, but we're used to it.

But still, this...



...this is not what we should expect from a man who has FAIR PLAY tattooed on his arms, is it?

Yeah, of course, this is a comic book, so the "Tomorrow Thief" probably survives just fine.

Still, Michael Holt is the third-smartest man alive, so if he believes that throwing the guy into a boiling hot subterranean volcanic lake in Iceland will disable his powers, and thus his ability to escape, shouldn't we believe him? And when he says "good luck, you're definitely going to need it" to survive, well, don't we have to believe that "Mister Terrific" believes that there's a good chance the guy will die screaming?

Not so "Terrific," then, in my book. FAIR PLAY my ass.

BraIn and Brain--What is Brain?!?

Do you know what the most disappointing thing about the Flushpoint universe so far is?

It's this caption from Mr.Terrific #1:

Wait a minute. Given that Michael Holt is the third smartest man on Earth, that has to be correct. But if brain transplants aren't possible, that means...

...that the DC Universe has lost this guy!

Now, I know what you're saying..."Sure, snell, a genius human brain inside the body of an albino gorilla is cool and all, but what's the big deal?"

Well, here's the big deal. Did you know that the Ultra-Humanite was the very first super-villain ever faced by Superman, way back in Action Comics #13 (1939)?

And did you know that Ultra-Humanite (we never learned his real name until 2009) was the very first recurring super-villain...at any comic company?!? He cheated death many a time--he was the origin of the cliche!!

And in Action Comics #20 (1940), with his body dying, the Ultra-Humanite kidnapped comely young actress Dolores Winters, and had his brain transplanted into her body!!

Soon after that the Ultra-Humanite was put out to pasture, not to be revived until the late Silver Age, first as a recurring villain for the Mr. And Mrs. Superman series. Then he got hold of an albino gorilla from Gorilla City, put his brain in there, and the Ultra-Humanite we're most familiar with was born in 1981.

He became a mainstay then. Roy Thomas used him as a frequent villain in All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc., and he would regularly plague the Justice Society.

Did I mention that he once had his brain transplanted into a T-Rex?

He survived Crisis On Infinite Earths, with the fairly easy Roy Thomas retcon of "all his old Golden Age stories happened, he just fought other people." (See, DC writers--was that so hard?)

He survived Infinite Crisis, although his origin was messed around with a bit (and of course made more disgusting).

But now? Where the Crises couldn't bring him down, it looks as if Flashpoint might have done him in.

Of course,there's plenty of wiggle room in Holt's caption, and he is only the third smartest person (maybe the Ultra-Humanite is 1st or 2nd?). And maybe DC will reintroduce him in the nu52, no doubt with even more carnage and blood and bestiality and whatever passes for "more real-world" in nu52.

But if they don't revive him, a tangible piece of comics history will be lost.

Maybe Grant Morrison will make him the first super-villain that Clark Kent has to face...we can only hope.