Thursday, January 26, 2012
Teen Titans #3
Red Robin steals Batman's most infamous move: The Batfart
Starting where we left off last issue, Kid Flash is rescuing some smoking girl named Solstice. She's probably Wiccan. Kid Flash uses an old Family Circus trick to rescue her in a single panel.
At point five, we see he can pee at superspeed. And at the end, he has to guess a four digit code on the panel to open the way out. That means he's got to guess from, assuming a pad with the digits 0-9, 10,000 possibilities.
This brings me to a problem with superspeed. Just because an outside observer would see him guess the combination within a few seconds, from his perspective, he's got to manually enter thousands of combinations. Bart Allen is a total ADD spazoid who would never have the attention span to do this. Even at superspeed. Because from his perspective, it's not really going super fast. He still has to experience the monotony of trying every single combination!
I guess it's nice to think of the Super Speedster as experiencing things just as fast as everyone else but then how would he function? He'd start running and just slam into the first obstacle since he wouldn't be able to react in time. His mind has to be able to perceive things as if he were going at a normal speed and everyone else had just slowed way down.
Plus, how did he know they needed a four digit code? I'll allow that he heard four beeps or something earlier while near someone entering a code. Or it was a lucky guess.
The super hero they need for this is some Quantum hero (or some Mr. Lucky!) who can get the code on the first try every time. That's more believable! Oh! I just realized I'm sort-of referencing Red Dwarf again when they find the Luck Virus. I think Lister guesses at some code while on it and gets it on the first try. Homer probably used this trick in one of his stories too.
The comic gets a little bit crazy after that, flipping between too many threads at once with each plotline getting one or two pages each before moving on to the next at weird breaks.
First up, Bunker in his secret identity meets up with Red Robin in disguise.
Let's see...dresses nice while hopping train cars, faux-hawk, screams when startled...Bunker is gay! Or Castilian.
It's easy to tell that the old hobo is Red Robin because there is a giant cocoon in the train car and I'm pretty sure he is wearing one of Batman's old disguises.
Next up, Cassie is dressed as a nurse trying to get information from one of N.O.W.H.E.R.E.'s metahuman dupes, Thrice. He's called Thrice because he has two brothers who can share the same bodily space and teleport into and out of each other.
She's looking pretty hot in her nurse's outfit but I can't be bothered to scan it.
Next back to Antarctica for a single page. That's where Kid Flash and Solstice were being held captive. We learn Solstice can fly. And maybe read thoughts.
Then back to Bunker and Red Robin where we get the incredible fight promised by the cover:
Wait. Really? That was the big fight! To be fair, Robin did try to kick Bunker. But Robin was still wearing the old hobo disguise. And they weren't on top of a train. And Bunker wasn't in his costume. I really need to make sure I call out these fake covers every time! The last issue showed Red Robin and Wonder Girl in Skitter's cocoons but Skitter never even wove any webs! She did spit some sort of acid all over Red Robin at one point but he blocked it with his wings which were made by WayneTech out of Inertrite! And you know how powerful that stuff is! It's even harder than Alloy 1090!
So it must be made from precious stones or something. Leave it to Waynetech to create some fictional thing harder than the hardest thing in reality.
So Bunker decides he wants to join Red Robin's super group.
If he was just talking about pooling their resources, then why did he already have the name Teen Titans in mind when fighting Skitters? I think Red Robin is a big liar. Or maybe since he said the thing about the Teen Titans in a narration box, I'm just confused about when or how or why it was being said and it had no actual relation in space and time to the action of the comic.
More antics ensue as the train stops for a quick break in some town where Red Robin meets a future villain.
It's brain must be an iPhone running Siri.
Red Robin returns to the train car with no memory of, ahem, Detritus to find that Skitters has hatched from her cocoon and she's returned to her normal girl-self. How useful is this woman going to be? Sometimes she's a spider girl who tries to kill everyone and sometimes she's just naked and confused!
Then Kid Flash hallucinates Danny the Street in Antarctica right before the comic ends. Now I don't know for a fact that he actually saw Danny the Street. But I have my fingers crossed!
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The problem with super speed and time perception is actually a key plot point in Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. One of the psychotherapists in that book has a theory that many mental illnesses such as autism are actually caused by altered states of time perception. In other words, autistic kids are the way they are because their brains work much faster than everyone else, so they perceive events around them as occurring at a glacially slow pace. This explains why they fail to engage with their surroundings--it would be like expecting someone to get excited watching snails chase each other. It also explains why people with autism are so bothered by things like the flickering fluorescent lights, which would seem like strobe lights to them.
ReplyDeleteDamn, I have not yet read Martian Time-Slip. Yet another great idea by the master. My theory of Autism is that there are only so many souls to go around. And our population has finally passed the amount of souls where every body can have one. So people with autism receive a fraction of a soul. The only problem with this theory is I don't believe in the concept of a soul.
DeleteMy other theory is that it's a social disease and caused by the continued fraying of the parent-child relationship due to outside distractions such as work and World of Warcraft and Women's Lib and World War I and addiction to Laudanum and Daytime television and comic books.
It's also worth mentioning that the speed at which Kid Flash urinates would be likely to cause damage to the bathroom fixtures. High pressure water cannons used by riot police have a delivery rate of 15 liters per second. Considering that a full bladder may hold a half liter of urine, for Kid Flash to void his bladder in a small fraction of a second and the fact that his urethra is (presumably) much smaller in diameter than a water cannon, it's difficult to imagine this wouldn't cause a significant amount of damage. It's also obvious that he didn't wash his hands after urinating--which is pretty rude when you're going to be entering numbers on a keypad immediately afterward.
ReplyDeleteThanks for being the back-up noticing the things I should have noticed! Nice one. I'm not sure you can say "it's obvious that he didn't wash his hands" since he's moving at super speed. Also, you can tell he visits two places in the water closet with the picture at its regular size.
DeleteWhich is actually disappointing because it would make more sense for the character of Bart Allen to have him not wash his hands.
Speaking of Super Speed and bodily functions, check out how The Flash in issue #5 takes out three villains at once with a super speed bukake!