A spider will lurk in the shadows, and set traps for the pests that bother you and spread disease around your food. Spiders are your black-ops friend.
"I still wants the giants crab-tank ones day, thoughs."
A spider will lurk in the shadows, and set traps for the pests that bother you and spread disease around your food. Spiders are your black-ops friend.
I’m glad someone adressed that.
That’s the thing about superpowers, videogames will conveniently give you armies of always evil mooks to massacre with them, but in the real word? Even if you only use them “for defense” most people don’t get attacked that often so you are stuck with stuff like… using your super strength to haul a lot of grocceries.
Tom Scott had an interesting video about this.
https://youtu.be/zJt8yzR2aoY
My GOD, that’s amazing insights.
I love most of his work. “Danger: Humans” is another along the same lines.
https://youtu.be/OcPqk-O-fD4
Also, check out his talk/rant about time zones:
https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
And his talk/rant about electronic voting:
https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI
(I hope this gets through…)
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13
How could Superman save the most lives?
Depressing, but probably accurate. The stories where people with superpowers get roped into forced labor by a shadow government always felt more feasible to how things would play out in the real world, to me. Molly Walker from Heroes, for example.
I also can’t help but read that comic you linked, and think you could replace humanity with Sarnoth and Superman with Echos, and it still fits.
I agree on the ‘depressing but probably accurate part’.
I don’t know if you have seen or read ‘The darkest minds’ yet. But it felt pretty strange when they have dozens of kids whose superpower is super intelligence – and they make them polish boots for the army.
PS238 (school for superpowered kids) had a section on the kids whose powers didn’t work well in a combat setting. One who could make food out of rocks. One who could make plants grow. That kind of thing.
It was pretty neat to contemplate all the powers that really don’t fit into combat. Makes me want to play a Pathfinder (tabletop roleplaying) campaign where everybody starts specced for something other than combat.
The idea of making “useless powers” into something effective (like Mystery Men) is something I always find fun from a conceptualizing standpoint. At somepoint in late-high school/early college, I wrote up a superhero team whose theme was “weak or not very useful powers”. Most of them were more utility quirks to augment standard combat techniques. Prepare for some bad/cheesey names ahead.
Three-Sixty could see in all directions at once as far as a mile away at all times, even when his eyes were closed. He primarily served the team as a sniper.
Tristessa (named for a Smashing Pumpkins song I liked) could make portals to an enclosed pocket of sub-space, but no bigger than about the size of her head. She used it as storage to keep personal effects, and stolen goods whenever she could get away with pilfering something. Think Chaotic Good cat burglar. Combat skills were based around throwing knives she used her portals to warp back into her hands, or just pulled right from her storage dimension.
Rosewood could turn himself into a tree. In human form he was just a standard brawler. In tree form he could communicate with and control nearby plants, but only if he could set roots into soil. At an advanced stage of the story this became applicable to dead plant matter as well, so wearing cotton boxers around him wasn’t a good idea.
Triptrigger’s power was pretty much directly stolen from the His Dark Materials book series, if I’m being honest. His power was a crow familiar, Matilda, who could speak and see the future, but only the future as it related to her and Triptrigger. He has that code name because he’s also a demolitionist.
Phoenix was a cocky asshole who came back to life if killed. He had no other combat ability accept to bullet-sponge. He was basically the group’s “Meg”, he’d regularly die horribly for comedic effect.
So, when I was in my early teens, I came up with “The Orange Emumu.”
I have no idea where the name came from.
I would put the mesh bag that had held oranges over my head, and pretend I was the… well, he wasn’t necessarily a hero, but I didn’t really think through his plot or character arc or anything — only his power, and the natural progression:
People were completely incapable of connecting his real-life face with his in-mask persona.
So, he tries to tell his girlfriend about it… but she thinks this stranger has come here out of nowhere and she attacks him.
At some point he tries to tell the media, complete with this big face reveal on live TV. Everybody’s like “Who’s this schmuck and where did the guy we’re trying to interview go?!”
Eventually, he does figure out that he can do just about anything and vanish *instantly* just by pulling his mask off. There might be some edge cases, like being used as a hostage to lure the hero back out, but he’s got foolproof disguise potential. Might even, now that I think about it, be able to invent multiple disguises and shift them at will, entirely by changing his mask.
Spiders are evil.
And Spider-Man is a menace, I read it in the paper.
Fake news!
J.J. Jameson’s editorials are the best!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuL6cJPz3Nk
THE!
BEST!
I keep a dozen as pets… Does that mean I have 12 times evil? XD
So you’ve finally tipped your hand… SPIDER-PERSON!
J’ACCUSE!
Amazing Spider-Man vol 1 #800: Spidey literally takes a bullet for his most dangerous and hated Nemesis because he was helpless and it’s wrong to kill a helpless man.
“Why?”
“Because with Great Power their comes great responsibility–to everyone.”
Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #308. Spider-Man refuses to just go and fight the Sandman when he turns up becuase the Sand Man isn’t doing anything wrong–quite the opposite, he seems to be sick and dying. Upon learning this, Peter goes out of his way to get Flint to his favorite place in the city(the beach he played on as a kid) and stays with him until he passes.
What I’m saying is that I approve of Pohl’s choice of role model.
I’ve always liked Spider-Man as an example of a more down-to-earth superhero. He never stops being the ground-level streetsweeper, even when bigger and flashier adventures come there way. He’ll usually make time for the little guy.
Funnily enough power wise spiderman is easilly towards marvels top, he just doesn’t realize it or holds back due to mostly dealing with low stakes street crime.
At a time strength wise he was only behind the likes of Hulk & Thor, and his speed & reflexes combined with spider sense make him nearly invincible. Amongs some of his feats is taking out the fantastic four, a team of xmen, and almost the avengers too if wanda or someone just didn’t immobilized him with magic.
And yea he’s great, loving Marvel’s take on him in homecoming / infinity war. Toby Marqwhatever was a good Peter Parker and Andrew Garfield nailed spiderman, but Tom Holland captures both aspects best, imo.
When I was a girl we used to get spiders in our bathtub. My two older sisters did not hate spiders, and were not, technically afraid of spiders. But these were enormous meaty, muscular spiders, frequently about the circumference of a Canadian Toonie. Most of them were only the size of a quarter. So it was my job to rescue the spiders from the bathtub when either of my sisters wanted a bath. I did this by coaxing them to climb onto my fingers and then walking them towards the window and shaking them off outside. However spiders will naturally run up when they are nervous and these spiders would rapidly run up my arms. Getting them lost in my t-shirt would have been dangerous indeed. They might have been crushed when I moved. However I discovered that if I stuck my arm up in the air so that my hand was quite a bit higher than my shoulder, the spider would change directions so that it was still going up and would run back to the tips of my fingers, giving me time to reach the window and stick my arm out. I developed an increasing fondness for spiders during this time, even if my sisters sometimes woke me up to stagger groggily into the bathroom to perform my arachnitarian services.
Fun fact: combined, spiders eat double the weight in bugs globally as humans eat meat and fish globally. If it wasn’t for the spider, we would literally be up to our ankles in insects.
Be nice to spiders. If you find one, relocate it outside. More bugs to eat out there.
Spiders are freaking awesome.
Want to get rid of all the spiders? Hope you like malaria, and dengue fever, and West Nile disease, and encephalitis, and Zika.
defend them with extreme prejudice!! All the selkie lasers!
Ugh.. Be more like Deadpool, less like Spider-Man.
Deadpool is not an ideal to aspire to.
Oh, he is – it’s just that most of his louder fans get him completely wrong.
All they see is a guy being an asshole and being funny about it, and they see it as an excuse to let out their own inner asshole.
There’s lengthy rants on tumblr with listed examples, but he gives excellent counselling and advice to a suicide and drives her to someplace she can get help. Of all the on-again-off-again allies of the Avengers, he’s one of the few who remember that Hawkeye is actually deaf and uses sign language to communicate with him, or at least pulls down his mask so Clint can try to lip-read…. The list goes on and on.
The thing about his jokes and taunts? When he uses them he’s punching /up/, not down.
Rens, Deadpool also punches sideways. left right down up. He KNOWS that sometimes the best solution is a bullet to the brain or sword to the gut of whomever happens to need it. He accepts that the world is crappy on occasion and he Rolls with it. HE KNOWS he’s screwed up and sometimes the best way to deal with the screwed up world is to be screwed up. Hes Practical about how he deals with the world.
I’m sure when Selkie goes over for afternoon tea, Mrs. Spider-Man will have a lot of good advice of his own to share.
Nooooo! Pohl has betrayed us and turned our precious Overlady-In-Training to the Light Side! We were so close to having everyone live in Selkie’s New World Order, and now that will never come to pass! I hope you get eaten by eels, Pohl!
*Sigh*. We’ll have to cancel the plans for that giant statue of Selkie riding a cyborg basilisk for the town square. 🙁
*Selkie hears about cyborg basilisk statues*
“Cans we backpedals ons this… “helps and defends” a bit?”
Why do we have to backpedal? Selkie could make a cyborg basilisk specifically TO help and defend! 🙂
He got pretty close to convert her from chaotic evil warlock to good sorceress. But then he killed the moot.
And I guess Selkie would have been pretty disapointed anyway when she found out that ‘helping’ means working in the quarry or building circuits for magic-powered dishwashers.
But maybe she will take a chaotic good or at least chaotic neutral into consideration now.
Nonono… You’re not seeing the long term. See, the BEST Evil Overlords are the ones that create stable, safe societies, and protect their followers rights and freedoms- WITH AN IRON FIST.
You know, like DOOM.
Rips and tears. Untils it is done.
Does anyone recall the “Latverian Express” advert?
“Don’t leave home… just don’t”.
The wisdom of the spider? You mean “Don’t get hit by shoe” ???
If Pohl’s speech is meant to be normal human speech, it’d be “Selkie, let’s–” etc. Comma separating a vocative (generally a person’s name) from the rest is actually useful, and prevents errors such as “Let’s eat Grandma.”
I love Pohl’s focus here. It’s the perfect thing to deflect Selkie’s troubling focus.
And it’s a way of teasing apart assumptions. True masters of wisdom do that.
For example, when a person talks about their aspirations for life, and list things like a good marriage, good kids, a great career, a healthy body, fame and fortune… they’re mostly just listing things that they *think* will achieve the real goal of personal peace and happiness.
They’re all the means to an end. You can be happy single, or childless, or in a dead-end job; you can be happy despite chronic illness, and you certainly don’t need to be well known or rich to be happy and at peace.
The idea that you have to fix your problems before you can enjoy life is actually quite a disturbing one. Some people are happy despite being tetraplegic (see Joni Eareckson Tada), so it’s not impossible to adjust to whatever circumstances life throws at you. Too many people assume that being handicapped must make you miserable, but there are countless people with physical or mental disabilities who nevertheless lead happy and even productive lives.
(Heck, over half the webcomic artists that I follow are dealing with serious mental or emotional issues, and the fact that they can deal with their issues and still put out worthwhile content is part of what inspires me to keep going with my own projects.)
It all comes down to separating the means (physical prosperity, good luck, pleasant circumstances, etc.) from the goal (inner peace, happiness that’s not dependent on circumstances, finding a way to positively affect the lives of those around you, etc.).
Spider Man, Spider man,
Does whatever a spider can,
Hangs around the skirting board
Then makes a dash across the carpet when the lights come on
Is he strong? he ought to be
He survived 50 years of DDT
Can he swing from a thread?
He used to be Toby MacGuire,
Now he’s Tom Holland instead.
Far too young, far too young
The entire cast is far too young
It was bad enough in Kirsten Dunst’s day
Now you’re a dirty old man if you fancy Aunt May.
Because… She’s played by Merissa Tomei- hey hey hey
you are a weird strange little person. I like that..
I shall put that on my calling card. And CV.
Wow, I’m exhausted- I so rarely post this much!
I noticed that Pohl does not have his facial markings in this strip. Is he supposed to have them or do they come and go with his powers?
OH uh, no, thats an oopsie. 😡