Stump the Doominator, week of March 8, 2009

Welcome one and all to this week’s edition of Stump the Doominator, brought to you this week by a nasty Yuengling hangover and a sinking feeling inside me.

Remember the fun of it all – you ask me a question, and in varying degrees of accuracy and a solid state of flipancy, I try to solve them in one sentence.

Nate Winchester of Hunting Muses asks:

Explain Zero Hour

Christ. Here goes:

Hal Jordan, green with yellow rage, decides that it’s high time that he make DC even more confusing by remaking all of time, and the heroes have to intervene and take down their old friend, triggering new beginnings, supposedly realighing continuity, and setting the course for everything to radically change, just like every cross over – except that it was so confusing that Mark Waid invented turdy Hypertime to explain discrepancies and DC spent four years having more Crises in a completely vain attempt to correct the problems fraught with Zero Hour.

Sum up the 200 issues of the Sonic the Hedgehog comic (in honor of his, yep, 200th issue).

You’re on notice, Nate.

Screw it, I’m stumped – I haven’t read any part of this series since I was at my friend James’ house in sixth grade and his weird little brother was obsessed with all things Sonic, and would expound on it while I just kept thinking to myself “I really wish I could beat the final Robotnik in ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2′” and contemplated ways I could do this with the ‘Sonic and Knuckles’ plug in, the greatest idea for a video game ever, and I say that currently slogging my way through the DS port of Chrono Trigger, which somehow, despite all the time jumping, manages to be MORE coherent than any crisis DC has thrown our weigh in the last 23 years.

So Nate, you did it. You get a Not Prize, which is similar but legally distinct from the No Prize once given out in Marvel Comics.

Former Doomkopfer Jean Claude Van Doom, currently writing under his “real” name at Graphic Fiction, threw a few my way.

Why did Dave Sim and Jeff Smith quit being buddies?

Probably because Dave Sim is a notorious prick and misogynist asshole.

How many times has the Xavier Mansion been destroyed?

Too many – there have been a number of destruction scenarios, from early alien attacks sometime after Days of the Future Past to the Inferno event where it was levelled by Mr. Sinister, then beat up a little by Onslaught, gutted by Bastion, took a nice beating during the Riot at Xaviers and got levelled again, supposedly beyond repairability, by the Messiah Complex event.

Which Avengers iteration is objectively best?

The universe refuses to conform to absolute truth – it could be surmised that early iterations with Captain America, Thor and Iron Man on the same team have cemented the Avengers through out the years, certainly supported by Dark Avengers, but still, this doesn’t reflect on the quality of the writing so much as the idea of the heroes and how they go about what they do, and there’s usually a second tier leaning towards it also including the Maximoff siblings and some other stragglers, a la Ultimates – and even here, the readers on the outside must think to themselves of their own favorite moments, and in their minds, this is the best iteration, even if said iteration is West Coast Avengers or A-Next, a book I will staunchly defend until the day I die, and one of the few series that I can say I have the entire run.

That’s all for this week. I’m going to go celebrate the fact that I haven’t vomitted my veggie bacon sandwich on myself, and I will also eagerly await your stumpings in the weeks to come. Don’t forget, you can email them to doominator_at_doomkopf_dot_com.