Usually on my Super Sunday post I try to create some superhero that would fill some hole I see in our action heroes of the day, or I just make something up on the spot, probably based around a terrible name. Well this month I am doing something different: Last year, before the Super Sunday even began, I brought you a story about Justice-Man, a hero I made up back in Junior High times. Well the thing is that Justice-Man had a large supporting cast, and have been stuck in my notes for more than a decade. This month we’re going to have four Super Sundays dedicated to the friends of Justice-Man. (Some of them, however, may fill holes in society’s current crop of action heroes of the day, and we’re almost guaranteed some terrible names.)

Justice-Woman

Kimberly Mills was the only daughter of a former superhero, but before she was old enough to realize that, her father adopted a troubled teenage boy. The boy had been born and created to be an assassin and had only recently been freed from the organization that treated him as a weapon. While there was some concern about young Kim being in such close proximity to a former killer, but it turned out that she was a humanizing influence on Alex. They became very close. Eventually Alex Mills would grow up to be the superhero Justice-Man and Kim, who inherited her father’s super-speed powers, became Justice-Girl, hoping to be a sidekick to her brother. While Alex wanted to keep Kim out of danger, her ability to come along and help him out before he even sees her meant that she was hard to stop. Eventually, though, Kim had to leave for university. Her super-speed meant that she could still go to Toronto to visit her brother on occasion, but eventually she decided that it would be easier to just do crimefighting on her own. That continues to this day when, as Justice-Woman, she is one of the world’s foremost superheroes working as the leader of her own superhero team.

So anyway, I wanted to say that Justice-Woman was something of a change of pace from most girl versions of more well-known superheroes. She has her own set of powers, her own career, and doesn’t exist just to work alongside her brother. I wanted to say that, but when I consulted my notes, it turned out that I didn’t even have a first name written down for her. I guess that I can excuse young me for ignoring Justice-Woman’s development, I was obsessed with Justice-Man and not really trying to use him for social commentary, but I have to say I could do a better job of telling stories for her today than I did then.

Metalfist

Hugh Duval has a big suit of armor that gives him superhuman strength and the ability to shoot energy burst from his eye-slot. He uses this to fight crime alongside Justice-Man.

Metalfist is an oddity. I’ve drawn him into pretty much every sketch I ever did of Justice-Man’s friends, he exists on every list I made of that group. I have no information about the guy. If I ever did have an idea about who this guy was beyond being a friend of J-Man, I apparently didn’t write it down. To tell the truth, I feel like maybe I just drew him into my crowd scenes becaus he was easy to draw. And considering that his suit of armor there is, apparently, covering him entirely in metal, I have no idea why his fists are the part he has decided to name himself after.

I almost missed it! I was so used to the new John Swartzwelder book coming out in the Spring that I just assumed we weren’t getting one this year. I was wrong!

“Detective Made Easy” is the a new Frank Burly novel that will be coming out this Summer! Good times! For the 100% of people who haven’t been following my every word for the past few years, John Swartzwelder is a former Simpsons writer who now writes novels, especially novels about Frank Burly, a comically idiotic detective.

I base my online book ordering every year around when I can order the latest Frank Burly adventure, so hopefully, before too long, I’ll be posting about what I’m getting this year.

Okay, today I’m going to do something a little different: I consider the Venture Bros to probably be my favorite thing on television these days, so sometimes I like to read about it on the Internet. Now, I’m getting into a pretty big spoiler for the show here (though, one from the start of the second season and that was like forever ago), but I want to offer my own thoughts on the topic of the titular brothers, Hank and Dean, being clones. The idea is that the boys are so death-prone that their Super Scientist father has clones of them ready to go when needed and the boys’ beds record their minds as they sleep, so that the clones will have their memories. Simple enough. What I want to talk about today is… well, I occasionally see people on the Internet talking as though the fact that the Hank and Dean of today are cloned from the original Hank and Dean, it somehow means that these are not the “real” Hank and Dean, that they are, in fact different people who just happen to have the appearance and memories (in fact, Dean himself is going through a sort of existential crisis about that in the show as of this writing). So, in the interests of amassing evidence to argue against people who will never, ever see this website, here I will present my case:

Point I) In the universe of the Venture Bros, souls and the afterlife are confirmed to exist. Dr. Byron Orpheus, friend of the Venture family, is an accomplished necromancer and all manner of ghosts have been encountered (Abraham Lincoln in Guess Who’s Coming to State Dinner, Major Tom in Ghosts of the Sargasso, and a Native American tribe in Assassinanny 911, for examples). Knowing that the soul, in that world, is an actual thing, we would kind of have to say that who a person is would be defined by their soul.

Point II) The current clones of Hank and Dean have the souls of the previous incarnations. In the episode Powerless in the Face of Death, the episode that reveals the clonal nature of the boys, Orpheus travels to the afterlife in search of the boys’ souls and finds that their souls are not there. Continuing his search for the souls he comes to Dr. Venture’s lab, where he senses the souls within the machinery that Doc uses to record the boy’s memories. While Doc doesn’t believe in using the supernatural designation of “soul” preferring to think of it as just the boy’s “memory synapses,” but Orpheus is the expert in the supernatural and he says the souls are in there. It seems that one’s soul goes where a person’s “memories, hopes, and dreams” goes, and that’s what Doc has on store. Thus, with this information fed into the boys clone slugs every time they die, they are in essence carrying their soul with them.

To further my case, I point to The Family That Slays Together Part One, in which Hank notes that he “I jumped off my roof in a Batman costume. I think. I might have just dreamt it.” That was one of the ways that Hank died. Hank remembers this though it was probably not something that would have been recorded by his bed, and that indicates to me that he has carried a bit of memory from a previous body to his new one. It is especially worth noting that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln was only able to affect the physical world through objects that bore his image (statues, paintings, money, etc.). For the souls of Hank and Dean, their own cloned bodies would be a perfect fit.

To me, it looks like this: When the boys die, their soul goes to those Earthly things that most connect them to the world, their memories in Doc’s machinery, and then on into the clone slugs. That continuity of soul would mean that the clones of Hank and Dean now present are as much Hank and Dean as any Hank and Dean that ever came before. I fully agree that if we took a clone and let it live without downloading the souls into it, it would be a new person (look at D-19, the rejected Dean clone from Perchance to Dean). But the Hank and Dean of Season Four are still the Hank and Dean of Season One (and the dozen Hanks and Deans that died before that).

Here’s this month’s Little Choy

Today’s victim of Little Choy’s insult is a former Drug Store owner, whose business model apparently didn’t work out.

Anything else, we got? How about some Phone Guys:

Cut-Up

Cut-Up is a part time superhero, part time stand up comedian. His career in comedy began before the other one, in fact he was working at a small club in New York when he was one of dozens of people caught in an explosion caused by a supervillains doomsday machine malfunctioning. Some people were killed, some were wounded, but this comedian was instead changed: He found that he could transform any part of his body at will into blades or spikes. His minor celebrity and his newfound powers combined to lead him into the circle of superhuman celebrities (shapeshifting actors, cyborg stunt-men, super-strong wrestlers, etc.) but he found his experiences with them to be hollow or soul-numbing. It wasn’t until he met some actual superheroes and saw how they used their powers that he really understood what he could do with his life. He joined the Strange Squad and has served with them ever since, but not without taking time to do stand-up.

Cut-Up is another one of those superheroes I created as a kid. At some point I wrote down the name and the idea that he was a comedian, then did a little doodle (Cut-Up had hair then, but I figure he is older now). The decision to have him be a member of the Strange Squad was also I have to stress that if I ever made a comic with the Strange Squad, Cut-Up would definitely not be tossing wisecracks and acting wacky in the style of the “funny” members that every superhero team seems to have. Cut-Up would be dry and sarcastic, sure, but no more so than anyone else. I don’t seem to have ever given Cut-Up a real name as a kid, and I still haven’t.

Monstora

Monstora is the child of a monster and a heroic monster hunter who realized that they had more in common than they thought. She doesn’t know that, though, having been raised in an orphanage after her parents realized that they also had a lot that was not in common, then killed each other. Now called Carla Smith, she does not know the origin of her ability to transform parts of herself into monster-forms, but so far she finds it quite fun. Having used her powers to help people in her small town, she is making a name for herself as a superhero, but she has also caught the notice of a family of monsters who recognize the energy signature of the powers, and the notice of an ancient order of monster hunters who investigate such sightings. Now both of those groups are coming to that small town and Monstora will have a lot on her plate.

Monstora is one I made up on the spot. I basically just drew a hero with weird monster limbs and had to come up with something to do with that. Done.