Supers vs. Military

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

If a powerful bunch of supers finds itself at war with (say) the US' date=' it's unlikely to content itself with beating up tanks on the battlefield - they'll teleport or drop in from orbit into the White house or the Pentagon or Cheyenne Mountain and start tearing stuff up. This sort of threat is precisely why the government would be wanting to deploy battlesuits in the military - and cost be damned. Tanks aren't much use when the supers are in ur base killing ur doodz.[/quote']

 

Very true, and I am NOT saying that a Superman-type (or a team of supers) would be easily dealt with. Or even that this situation COULD be dealt with conventionally. But, hey, if there is no other choice ...

 

Note that the US military (and others) dispersed their Command/Control/Communications nodes during the Cold War - just so they wouldn't lose everything in a classic "decapitation strike" from the other side's nukes. Something similar arguably applies here. Sure, your super-target might be able to trash the White House, but also note that there have been protocols in place for years to evacuate the President elsewhere damn fast if it should ever hit the fan, and a whole bunch of alternate locations he could be moved to. AND contingency plans for if the President is ... taken out early in a battle.

 

Actually, if I was a cluey (and stereotypically ruthless) military leader, this is one of the first contingencies to seriously consider - and that could be used against the super-target. You can more or less predict where he might go early on, so prepare accordingly - look at ways and means to tweak his Psych Lims en route; have a significant DNPC there to talk him down or get him off guard; and/or site a bunch of covert operatives or snipers with suitable "special" weapons close by; and/or (if all else fails) just have a frakkin' big bomb preset to go off when he gets close.

[Clonus]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

While artillery would be effective against ground-bound bricks, they sort of have to be cooperative with you to set it up. They have to be willing to advance across open ground in an area where you knew they'd be coming an hour or so previously so you could set up. And artillery is going to be easy prey for opponents who can fly or teleport.

[Markdoc]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

These sort of discussion go on all the time in military forums .... "Yes, but" Pretty much all of the points being made here are good ones - but to my mind, it just illustrates why, if you want to play in a classic supers universe, it simply best to willingly suspend your disbelief. As Megaplayboy said, supers fight supercrime and the military doesn't deploy supertech .... because. If you follow logical lines of development, you end up in a game of Marshall Law or (at best) The Authority.

 

I speak as one who has been there - back in grad school we started a champions game set in the "near future" - the 1990's as it was back then As the GM's supervilians behaved more like super-powerful mobsters than weirdoes in suits, things escalated pretty rapidly. Fights turned ugly. Bystanders, cops and DNPCs started to die. The military was called in. Our first big victory over the major "evil superteam" turned to ashes as they escaped from prison - the next big fight in downtown Manhattan resulted in mass destruction and hundreds of civilian deaths. My character ended up killing some of the villians responsible (despite a code vs killing: one of them was taunting me with the fact that all these deaths were my fault for letting him live the first time round and he was going to do it again) - and then had a nervous breakdown. We got flayed in the news for the destruction, even though without us the death toll would have been many thousands instead of a few hundreds.

 

As the game ground on, the superfights became battles to the death. Collateral damage rose and the public turned against heroes: martial law was declared. The army started to deploy and then manufacture captured supertech .... costumed vigilantes were outlawed ... superpowered weirdoes were to be arrested or killed if they resisted. Our team - or at least the survivors - fled the US, kicked over a small African nation to set up a nation where super-powered beings could live ... an international crisis over this rogue nation started brewing. At that point the campaign collapsed, mostly due to player trauma. We'd signed up to play Champions. My character took "Code against killing" for pete's sake! Two of the early PC casualties didn't even have any resistant defence!

 

If this sounds drearily familiar, remember this was 198-freakin' -5! A year before the first issue of the Dark Knight was published! Genosha didn't exist back then, nor did Cable. Aquaman still had both hands and no beard, Wolverine didn't kill people (indeed the wolververse didn't exist yet). The Joker was a sinister clown, not a serial mass-murderer. I stopped reading mainstream comics in the late 80's when they started taking the exact trend we had played through 3 years before. Now to be fair, the GM had told us he wanted a more "realistic" take on supers and his game, while rapidly becoming very grim, did not contain any WTF!? moments. Pretty much everything we tried turn to c*** but it wasn't as though any of it felt like we were being arbitrarily stiffed. It was just .... grim. Everything was grim. And it must be admitted that I still recall pretty vividly the big battle in Manhattan - it was much higher intensity than most superbattles, for the players as well as the characters. But we learned a useful lesson* - a battle like that would have made a great climax to a game - but you can't run a game like that full time. Players need victories too.

 

* Well, maybe some of us did: the same GM went on to run a series of GrimDark campaigns, where the PCs were used as punching bags by an actively malevolent universe. We even coined a phrase "Mike-capable" to describe characters built to survive in his games.

 

Talking to the GM afterwards, he was actually blindsided when the game ended: he thought it had been going well. His original plan had been for the players to become a government sanctioned team - a sort of super-powered delta force. Us fleeing the country took him by surprise, but then the idea of setting up a country took his fancy. It'd be the players against the whole world, supers against whole armies! There'd be superbattles that devastated whole cities! It'd be epic! It'd be great! ..... and then we quit. Interestingly, apart from a few one-offs that I ran, I don't think that gaming group ever did a supers campaign again

 

cheers, Mark

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

Interestingly' date=' apart from a few one-offs that I ran, I don't think that gaming group ever did a supers campaign again[/quote']

 

Well, colour me surprised.

[Markdoc]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

Well' date=' colour me surprised.[/quote']

 

Actually more surprising than it sounded - we had (with another GM, who was part of the same group and played in the game I described: in fact his first PC was the first player casualty ) two quite long-running supers campaigns before that. A high powered game featuring a group called "The Protectorate" who were a sort of JLA analogue: that campaign more or less ended with a "war of the worlds" scenario where The Protectorate led a campaign against invading aliens using high-tech walking machines, death rays, etc. It was very much a 4-colour campaign, where - for example - one of our arch enemy teams, Eurostar, teamed up to fight the aliens alongside us. The first Hero system game I ever played in and great fun. It included typical 4 colour tropes such as "Back from the Dead" and "The Hero who temporarily becomes a villain" etc. After a brief hiatus, it was followed by a deliberately lower powered campaign, set in the same game universe, called "The Nu-men" where most of the PCs were mutants and Genocide was a major foe: that was very X-man inspired.

 

So we had played and enjoyed Champions before "Grimworld" but for some reason we didn't do it again. Instead we turned to heroic level gaming - a post-apocalyptic bounty hunters game (Very Strontium Dogs inspired), two games set in the world of Judge Dredd, and of course lots of fantasy. Three of these games were run by the "Grimworld" GM, so it's not like we stopped playing in his games either.

 

Ah .... college. When I could play in and run 4 different campaigns every week and still have spare time

 

cheers, Mark

[BLHarrison]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

While artillery would be effective against ground-bound bricks' date=' they sort of have to be cooperative with you to set it up. They have to be willing to advance across open ground in an area where you knew they'd be coming an hour or so previously so you could set up. And artillery is going to be easy prey for opponents who can fly or teleport.[/quote']

 

So lure him/her/them to one of your training grounds. Where you have years worth of preset/pre-registered sites for your artillary. Also remember the blast fragments go in all directions (including up) so a low flying super could still get caught. And the mine-fields I memtioned. They do have shells that can be used do drop mines.

 

Now granted high flyiers could avoid this, but if you are taking on a team you are seperating them and making thier effectiveness less.

 

Which is a good argument for combined armes. The artillary in question is guarded by variaus anti-air assets while scout/snipers or forward obserbers direct the fire. Also many artillary pieces today are selfpropelled and practice "shoot and scoot" tactics

[megaplayboy]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

Mentalists are a genre staple, but supertech capable of shielding people from them is not, generally speaking. Nor is there any easy means of detecting them, or their powers in use. Frankly, I think they'd be a nightmare not just for the military to deal with, but the legal system as well. Telepaths can find out the entire military plan, well ahead of time. Mental illusionists can play havoc with enemy targeting and unit morale and cohesion. Mind controllers and cyberpaths, if powerful enough, can actually turn the military's weapons/soldiers against them. Mind Scanners can actually figure out where the President(and/or the one Cabinet member they keep in a "secure location" in case of catastrophe) is.

There's other powers, like invisibility, desolidification, shrinking, teleportation, etc. that I think would be difficult to adapt countermeasures for. But I think espers are probably the worst, particularly if they have a tendency to keep a low profile.

[Netzilla]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

All this talk of competent military and whatnot just isn't Silver/Bronze agey enough for me. In a supers setting I want military leadership like General "Thunderbolt" Ross. You know, career military with all the tactical and strategic acumen of a comic book author or Hollywood scriptwriter. Same goes for most any other setting where the heroes aren't the military and especially for settings where the military is the opposition.

 

So, you can take your combined-arms approaches, pre-conflict intelligence gathering, decentralized command structures and what-not and keep 'em. I got no use for 'em.

[JmOz]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

All this talk of competent military and whatnot just isn't Silver/Bronze agey enough for me. In a supers setting I want military leadership like General "Thunderbolt" Ross. You know' date=' career military with all the tactical and strategic acumen of a comic book author or Hollywood scriptwriter. Same goes for most any other setting where the heroes [b']aren't[/b] the military and especially for settings where the military is the opposition.

 

So, you can take your combined-arms approaches, pre-conflict intelligence gathering, decentralized command structures and what-not and keep 'em. I got no use for 'em.

 

Great point and rep... while it is nive to think about how this affects the real world lets be honest, we don't want the real world in our gaming, we want a fun version of the real world, and the needs of the story should take presedence over any idea of this is the way the real world is.

[megaplayboy]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

d'oh! Shapeshift--another murderously effective meta-ability when intelligently deployed against military forces...and political leaders. Almost forgot that one.

[kahuna's bro]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

Great point and rep... while it is nive to think about how this affects the real world lets be honest' date=' we don't want the real world in our gaming, we want a fun version of the real world, and the needs of the story should take presedence over any idea of this is the way the real world is.[/quote']

 

amen to that

can somebody rep jimoz for me thanks

[Clonus]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

So lure him/her/them to one of your training grounds.

 

With what? In some cases you could kidnap the character's spunky reporter girlfriend, but even then you'd be better off going with cruise missiles and high-altitude bombing because both of those things are faster to deploy and can more easily catch a character off-guard. Not to mention the few characters you could catch flat-footed with an artillery barrage are precisely the characters who could walk through the blast-radii without taking more than a bit of stun. Leave artillery for the set piece battles and fortification reduction missions it was intended for.

[wick]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

With what? In some cases you could kidnap the character's spunky reporter girlfriend' date=' but even then you'd be better off going with cruise missiles and high-altitude bombing because both of those things are faster to deploy and can more easily catch a character off-guard. Not to mention the few characters you could catch flat-footed with an artillery barrage are precisely the characters who could walk through the blast-radii without taking more than a bit of stun. Leave artillery for the set piece battles and fortification reduction missions it was intended for.[/quote']

 

Actually Artillery can be used to take out moving vehicles, therfore it should work against most non fliers. Modern artillery is not as slow, inaccurate, and ponderous as the previous post lead one to believe. Artillery can and is used to hit moving vehicles.

 

I think that I saw the stats for a modern artillery piece on TV where one shell had a blast radius of 150 meters, so it is not like they have to hit exactly.

 

With enough artilley pieces you could blanket a large area so that even a speedster will have difficultly getting out of the AOE.

 

Against artillery the infantry have just a few seconds to dive for cover and sometimes that will only do so much.

 

There are also secondary effects like Hydrostatic shock not just shrapnel or the fireball. you could actually suffer no aparent damage and still have your kill switch flipped.

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

All this talk of competent military and whatnot just isn't Silver/Bronze agey enough for me. In a supers setting I want military leadership like General "Thunderbolt" Ross. You know' date=' career military with all the tactical and strategic acumen of a comic book author or Hollywood scriptwriter. Same goes for most any other setting where the heroes [b']aren't[/b] the military and especially for settings where the military is the opposition.

 

So, you can take your combined-arms approaches, pre-conflict intelligence gathering, decentralized command structures and what-not and keep 'em. I got no use for 'em.

 

W-e-l-l. if you're really worried about your supergroup taking a few lumps, you can always have them battle the Muppets instead.

[Netzilla]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

W-e-l-l. if you're really worried about your supergroup taking a few lumps' date=' you can always have them battle the Muppets instead.[/quote']

 

Hey, with the amount of damage I've seen Gonzo inflict on himself, Miss Piggy's ability to take out individuals 3 to 4 times her size and Animal's sheer ferocity, that may be a taller order than you expect.

 

Geeze, now I have the urge to start writing up the Muppets and submit them to Surbrook's site. I blame you, Mr. Mackinder!

[BLHarrison]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

With what?

 

Depends on the group/individual some are so egotistical a minor insult would do.

 

 

In some cases you could kidnap the character's spunky reporter girlfriend' date=' but even then you'd be better off going with cruise missiles and high-altitude bombing because both of those things are faster to deploy and can more easily catch a character off-guard. [/quote']

 

Bombers still take time to deploy from thier bases and cruise missles do have to be targeted plus the travel time from thier lauch point.

 

Not to mention the few characters you could catch flat-footed with an artillery barrage are precisely the characters who could walk through the blast-radii without taking more than a bit of stun. Leave artillery for the set piece battles and fortification reduction missions it was intended for.

 

While you might have some ligitimate points for someone like Dr Destroyer or Mechinon the amount of damage a 105mm or 155mm most characters are not in that class. Also remember the various types of shells that are availiable. Example Speedsters don't normally have as much rPD as bricks, simply because of where they spend thier points. I mentioned shells that contain mines, speedsteer doesn't see mines =BOOOM=. Simular effect with cluster bomblets. Ice/cold based super? Drop a few spotting rounds why? Willy-Pete aka White Phosporese

[Roy_The_Ruthles]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

so I think the point of this thread is to talk about metahumans who can go up against a "realistic" (by which I mean competent and real world) military, especially 60's era metahuans. If that's not the point, then disregard everything else.

 

I don't actually know so much about these characters in the 60s, so take everything with a truckload of salt, but: Modern Wolverine can regenerate from anything as long as he is popular enough, so he can probably just die, respawn, and corps drag his way through a wall of artillery fire. I'm not sure if he's taken a nuke, but he's probably popular enough to do so.

 

Prof X & Dr. Strange both have vast amounts of "plot based" powers (mentalism and magic). Both of those can mess up a modern military simply by issuing a few commands at the righ time. It's a slow process but they will eventually kill everyone in the millitary.

 

Those are the ones that come off the top of my head, and beyond this it's mostly "how much damage can insurgent metahumans do to an army?". Most of them tend to live in cities and can probably do a decent amount of urban warfare. OTOH most of them would in fact die if they nuked the city then hit it with artillery to make sure (except Kitty Pride, I'm not sure if she could survive by phasing through the ground?)

[Squall]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

Why would Kitty have to phase through the ground, when she can just phase through the explosion?

 

And don't forget, the (recent) X-Men are one of the most mobile teams in comics. They've got a plethora of teleporters, capable of moving the bulk of the team at pretty long ranges in a single jump. They'd be a tough nut to crack.

[DusterBoy]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

If you want super high rates of fire and AoE, then a 40/80mm metalstorm launcher on a traversable mount, with radar detection and tracking is your thing.

[lapsedgamer]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

Prof X & Dr. Strange both have vast amounts of "plot based" powers (mentalism and magic). Both of those can mess up a modern military simply by issuing a few commands at the right time. It's a slow process but they will eventually kill everyone in the military

 

Somewhere on this board in the past I have said that Professor X never really needed the X-Men to effect the changes he wanted in the world. With the level of power that the writers ascribed to him at certain times, he could have handled almost any problem the X-Men encountered by himself. He was just never ruthless enough to do it. Which I guess was the point of the book. He and Magneto preferred to engage in this sort of proxy warfare. A very Cold War way of thinking from the original writers that was just carried over into the 1990s and beyond.

[Markdoc]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

Somewhere on this board in the past I have said that Professor X never really needed the X-Men to effect the changes he wanted in the world. With the level of power that the writers ascribed to him at certain times' date=' he could have handled almost any problem the X-Men encountered by himself. He was just never ruthless enough to do it. Which I guess was the point of the book. He and Magneto preferred to engage in this sort of proxy warfare. A very Cold War way of thinking from the original writers that was just carried over into the 1990s and beyond.[/quote']

 

Yeah, the kind of supers vs military we are talking about are silver age heroes like Namor and early Iron Man, who could go toe to toe with military forces, but for whom it's still a fight. Real heavy hitters (Dark Phoenix, Legion, Superman, etc) are far beyond any earthly military intervention. In X-men, Legion sets up a base in the Negev - when the Israeli military attacks not only does he crush them like bugs, he doesn't actually stop working on his project, merely destroying their attacks without really paying much attention.

 

Fortunately, those kinds of characters don't pop up much in Champions games either, though there are a few (Tyrranon springs to mind) who do.

 

As an amusing aside, in an old X-men I read recently Professor X about how he can't force his views on Creed by simple mental power and Angel comments acidly "Professor, I was one of your first X-men. You used to wipe the memories of whole towns, just so they wouldn't remember us fighting sentinels on main street" to which the professor testily replies that well, he doesn't do that sort of thing anymore

 

cheers, Mark

[megaplayboy]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

Yeah, the kind of supers vs military we are talking about are silver age heroes like Namor and early Iron Man, who could go toe to toe with military forces, but for whom it's still a fight. Real heavy hitters (Dark Phoenix, Legion, Superman, etc) are far beyond any earthly military intervention. In X-men, Legion sets up a base in the Negev - when the Israeli military attacks not only does he crush them like bugs, he doesn't actually stop working on his project, merely destroying their attacks without really paying much attention.

 

Fortunately, those kinds of characters don't pop up much in Champions games either, though there are a few (Tyrranon springs to mind) who do.

 

As an amusing aside, in an old X-men I read recently Professor X about how he can't force his views on Creed by simple mental power and Angel comments acidly "Professor, I was one of your first X-men. You used to wipe the memories of whole towns, just so they wouldn't remember us fighting sentinels on main street" to which the professor testily replies that well, he doesn't do that sort of thing anymore

 

cheers, Mark

 

Dr. Strange did something similar during his first decade, except it involved memory-wiping the entire planet. Actually, it might be kinda fun to play around with that conceit, where you have a campaign setting with a long back story, and there were a number of instances where reality was altered/Dr. Destroyer temporarily mind-controlled the whole planet for, oh, weeks(this one is actually "canon" in the CU, at least the 5th ed. version)/etc. What sort of odd side-effects might all that mind-frackery lead to?

[Markdoc]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

It'd actually be pretty freaky living in a world with supers - in that regard, the closest to realistic is probably Marshall Law

 

It's not just villains rampaging about and being at least partly reliant on forces entirely out of your control, but think about it-

 

All that stuff you tell your kids about "monsters aren't real?" Well, they are real. Not just individual freakazoids like (say) Sabretooth, but actual monsters - all over the place. Also ghosts, multiple races of malevolent aliens, actual evil gods from the dawn of time, beings from other dimensions who'll cut you up and stick things in you just for lols, etc. That'd make anyone kind of paranoid. Add to that, imagine reading newspaper articles about that giant glowy thing in the sky. According to the avengers it was a portal which almost consumed the entire earth - but it's OK, they fixed it .... this time. According to your buddy who knows this guy who knows this guy, that's the third time the earth was almost destroyed this year. Maybe he's full of it ... maybe he isn't. Who can tell?

 

And then add to that exactly the kind of mind control and mindwiping you talk about here. Like: "You member Johnson in Accounting? Turns out he went on a homicidal rampage last week and killed 30 people. He claims he was possesed. Who knows? Could be true." Or even simpler you wake up one day and find that you can't remember anything about the last 3 weeks. Neither can anyone else in the entire city. Even if it doesn't happen to you, there'll be stories about it.

 

It would mean that ordinary citizens could be sure of nothing. You couldn't be sure that you and our whole family - or even your whole world - might not suddenly be wiped out, without warning, at any time. Even more extreme, you couldn't trust your memories, or even your self identity. You might be you - or you might actually be a construct. Or your memories might all be false. Your wife might actually be a mutant. You might be a mutant or an unwitting host for an alien parasite, yourself, without knowing it!

 

I honestly doubt anything like today's civilizations would - or could - exist in the Marvel universe - which is why, like the writers, I prefer not to go into these issues

 

cheers, Mark

[Clonus]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

It's not just villains rampaging about and being at least partly reliant on forces entirely out of your control, but think about it-

 

All that stuff you tell your kids about "monsters aren't real?" Well, they are real. Not just individual freakazoids like (say) Sabretooth, but actual monsters - all over the place. Also ghosts, multiple races of malevolent aliens, actual evil gods from the dawn of time, beings from other dimensions who'll cut you up and stick things in you just for lols, etc. That'd make anyone kind of paranoid.

 

Well of course that's exactly why Doctor Strange kept erasing the memories of the muggles.

 

 

Add to that, imagine reading newspaper articles about that giant glowy thing in the sky. According to the avengers it was a portal which almost consumed the entire earth - but it's OK, they fixed it ....

Swamp gas. It was totally swamp gas.

 

 

 

 

 

I honestly doubt anything like today's civilizations would - or could - exist in the Marvel universe - which is why, like the writers, I prefer not to go into these issues

Except in Astro City.

 

The thing is, though, nobody in the Marvel Universe feels any great need to keep the public fully informed. In fact there are some very powerful people who go to great lengths to ensure that they don't know what's going on. No member of the public at large remembers the time Doctor Doom took over the world for a weekend, or the times most of the population of New York became demons or Hyborians or the time that most of the nearby stars disappeared. Almost nobody ever knew about the N'Garai, or the Celestials, or that Dire Wraiths even exist. They think Dracula is a fictional vampire. And I suspect they're probably more than a little foggy on just what that big purple guy was after.

 

Still they know enough that by rights they should be rather more paranoid then the real world. But then again...they are. A lot of people complain about how cranky and ungrateful the Marvel universe public are. Now that I think about it, they have reasons.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Supers vs. Military

 

It'd actually be pretty freaky living in a world with supers - in that regard, the closest to realistic is probably Marshall Law

 

It's not just villains rampaging about and being at least partly reliant on forces entirely out of your control, but think about it-

 

All that stuff you tell your kids about "monsters aren't real?" Well, they are real. Not just individual freakazoids like (say) Sabretooth, but actual monsters - all over the place. Also ghosts, multiple races of malevolent aliens, actual evil gods from the dawn of time, beings from other dimensions who'll cut you up and stick things in you just for lols, etc. That'd make anyone kind of paranoid. Add to that, imagine reading newspaper articles about that giant glowy thing in the sky. According to the avengers it was a portal which almost consumed the entire earth - but it's OK, they fixed it .... this time. According to your buddy who knows this guy who knows this guy, that's the third time the earth was almost destroyed this year. Maybe he's full of it ... maybe he isn't. Who can tell?

 

And then add to that exactly the kind of mind control and mindwiping you talk about here. Like: "You member Johnson in Accounting? Turns out he went on a homicidal rampage last week and killed 30 people. He claims he was possesed. Who knows? Could be true." Or even simpler you wake up one day and find that you can't remember anything about the last 3 weeks. Neither can anyone else in the entire city. Even if it doesn't happen to you, there'll be stories about it.

 

It would mean that ordinary citizens could be sure of nothing. You couldn't be sure that you and our whole family - or even your whole world - might not suddenly be wiped out, without warning, at any time. Even more extreme, you couldn't trust your memories, or even your self identity. You might be you - or you might actually be a construct. Or your memories might all be false. Your wife might actually be a mutant. You might be a mutant or an unwitting host for an alien parasite, yourself, without knowing it!

 

I honestly doubt anything like today's civilizations would - or could - exist in the Marvel universe - which is why, like the writers, I prefer not to go into these issues

 

cheers, Mark

 

It's also worth bearing in mind that there's a whole other axis along which the Marvel Universe is unrealistic: everything happens in New York. In a "real" Marvel Universe, there would be counterparts to the Avengers or FF in Manchester, Munich, Milan, Cairo... And if the pace of events is equally frenetic, there would be a world-shattering crossover event every week, never mind every summer, and your gossipy friend would tell you that the world almost ended three times yesterday.

At this point, I almost begin to think that the whole world would break, and you'd go through the looking glass to one just like here.

"Oh my God, it's the Flying Raid of Doctor All-The-Good-Names-Are-Taken. He's going to take over our city again!"

"Oh, wait, no. Here comes his arch-nemesis, whatsisname, that guy from Kingston."

"Reggae-Man?"

"Don't be an idiot, Billy."

"It would be cooler than his real name. Whatever it is."

"The point is, he's going to save us, Billy. So don't let this be an excuse for not completing your TPS report, they're a day overdue, and the boss isn't buying 'Headless Invaders From M81 Ate My Homework.' Even if it is true."