Stump the Doominator, Week of March 1, 2009


Well, it seems that despite my own superpowers, my car is not invincible, and Sunday when I should have written this, I was stuck in a snow storm in Aberdeen, MD waiting to see if I could get a serpentine belt for my car. Wouldn’t you know, you can’t find those on a Sunday night in the middle of nowhere, and in real life, I don’t have any powers to conjure those out of my ass or the ass of the patient mechanic witnessing my desperate pleas to any and all friends who live or know somebody who lives in the Baltimore metropolitan area.

So here’s your stumpening for the week. Remember the rules. You throw me a storyarch, origin or trivia item, and I have to try my best to sum it up in one sentence. It’s like a Cliff Notes of nerdery.

As is cumpolsory, seemingly, at least one member of the Legion of Doom threw a question my way. This week it was Doom Fritter. He asks:

Since you’re an X-Fan, I’m going to throw you a curve ball and ask for the summary of the first twenty-five issues of X-Men 2099.

Damn, I never much read this series, but here goes from my hazy recollections …

There was this guy with a hand of life and a hand of death who found a bunch of half-assed heroes and assembled a team and a few of them died, another painted his face, one tried to be like Wolverine but with wings, some weird people like the original X-Men (but not) showed up, there was some lazy plotline about a carnival, it spun off into some Humberto Ramos bizness then got cancelled like every other title, even Ravage 2099.

Marcus of HotMarcus.com wrote in to ask:

Explain why Marvel and DC crossover and why the public let it happen.

It’s the fault of the public – after years of stupidly clamoring, a weak Superman / Spider-Man crossover and an X-Men / Teen Titans fiasco wasn’t enough to sate them; instead, they had to have every theoretical fight happen, and tie it in with some weak yin-yang plotline because it was the mid-90s and of course combine the two universes for an interesting-in-theory universe that looks more like a little kid drawing Batman and Wolverine into one character and calling it his own.

And our own “Friend of the Show” Grifter, he of digital tales of graphic narratives, asks a few good ones:

What’s the deal with Wolverine, Romulus, Sabretooth, Weapon X, Fantomex, Weapon numbering and all that jazz?

The X wasn’t an X, it was a 10, hence a sequence, meaning that nine more came before, and Weapon Ten was the program Wolverine was under with Sabretooth as well, with Fantomex a few down the line and Captain America a few of head, which doesn’t really account for where the hell Romulus came from, because Marvel can casually do what DC never has been able to: white wash over established continuity and call it a retcon and make the pieces match together magically so Romulus somehow was involved in the Weapons programs, no matter what Grant Morrison originally set out to say.

If Bishop prevented his future from happening, shouldn’t he not exist in this timeline? and with his current baby-hunting spree, now it seems he hasn’t really prevented his crappy future?

Hefty question. I’ll still nail this in one paragraph, I think.

A paralel universe runs with each action – ones where the opposite or an entirely different set of circumstances occur, branching off into a multitude of universes, thus making all time-travelling actions on the part of Marvel heroes in effect exercises in futility as they’re actually doing nothing more than creating new places of divergence that had until then been unintroduced, if you subscribe to linear time, which some don’t; in their view, Bishop had to come back because all the events in the universe have already happened and our brains comprehend these actions in a linear fashion, rather than overlooking as all events happen at once, making it so that the supposed paradox was actually unavoidable, and that future would continuously happen, which is why aside from one bad plotline in Cable about the Askani future not happening and Rachel getting stranded at the end of time, a time traveller never really disappears and a timeline is never truly avoided so much as the course of circumstances can be changed in a specific time lineage, if such a thing exists.

Well, damn. I want to thank the makers of Dos Equis for helping that answer flow easily.

How do we know you’re really pulling the answers from your brain and not googling the wikipedia or reading from a website that stores all these information?

The column title is misleading in the sense that the true stumping comes from my ability to pull my fragments into one sentence – and sometimes I’m recalling a comic I read once three years ago or a Wikipedia article I read two months ago but at all times trying to be earnest, honest and stupid; in other cases, it’s obvious I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about and am conglomerating disparate things into a fractured narrative while hoping the readers are at the very least entertained and Jim Doom shakes his old man head at my sub-Doom DeLuise antics.

Next Sunday, barring a natural disaster in our nation’s capital (my fine, fine home), I’ll be around to support Fantom Comics and answer your questions, which can be sent my way at doominator_at_doomkopf_dot_com.