Batman Lashes Out at the Other Members of the Justice League of America After Spending the Weekend at the Jack Nicholson Film Festival

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Mark A. Rayner

Batman loses it

You know, I’m getting a little tired of all the snide remarks about the way I fight crime.

We live in a world that has villains, and those villains have to be defeated by men with Batarangs. Or superpowers, if you’ve got them. (Yeah, and females too, don’t get your star-spangled knickers in a knot, Wonder Women.) I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for the psychotic killer that I sent to the hospital last night, and you curse my “methods”. You have that luxury.

Green Lantern, you can always capture crooks with that weird glowing shit from your alien ring. And you Wonder Woman, I wonder if that golden truth-telling lasso is as innocuous as it looks? You have easy options.

You know that when I beat that punk to within an inch of his life, while tragic for him, I saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. I find it particularly ironic that you, Martian Manhunter find me grotesque, but you do, don’t you, you green uni-browed freak!

I’ll grant my methods are extreme, but they work. You people with your superpowers don’t dare admit it. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me cruising the streets of Gotham in my Batmobile, you need me in my Batmobile! Who else is going to clean up that bat-hole?

I use words like discipline and detective work and a lot of made-up words starting with “Bat”. I use these words as the backbone of a life spent intimidating the criminal classes. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to you, who succeed because of the detective work that I provide, and then question the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a Batarang and solve a few crimes without your superpowers.

Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think is “excessive” or “brutal” or “verging on insane”. Continue reading →

Ask General Kang: What do you do when your planet runs out of resources?

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Mark A. Rayner

Ask General Kang What do I do? Shouldn’t you be asking what will you do?

What I do is charge up the power cells in my Interstellar Ape-arda, fill the ships with hordes of über-chimps hungry for adventure and loot, and set course for the nearest planet that hasn’t used up all its resources.

From there, it’s a simple matter of subduing the local sapient population (if there is one), and then setting up shop. Literally. The second major phase of any decent conquest is building the consumer infrastructure you need to plunder a planet. You’d be amazed how many societies are content to live within their means. Sustainable development is no good if you’re in the pillaging business!

Once you have them selling things bought or processed, or buying things sold or processed, or processing things sold or bought, then you’ve got an economy you can sack.

But that’s what I’d do (if I still had a fleet of space ships capable of faster-than-light travel and crammed full of bonobos with a jones for gold-plated walking sticks).

You can barely reach your own planet’s orbit, so you’re going to have to come up with a more creative solution.

Next time: What’s the etiquette when an alien bursts out of your dining companion’s chest? Do you wait for them to excuse themselves, or do you say “God Bless”?

More inexcusable horrors are available at alltop. Originally published in September, 2008.

Nosferadude

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Mark A. Rayner

Graffito of a cartoon vampire looking at garlic

Vampire fiction was my education. It was all I was allowed to sink my teeth into when I was young.

And when I was just a little boy, I loved it. My mom introduced me to the vampire Lestat, and all his cronies, and I caught the hunger for bloodsucking then. We read Stephen King’s book, Salem’s Lot. We went back to the original, by Bram Stoker. And read other Victoriana.

But then something bad happened, at least for me and all the others who once found a thrill in the vampire myth – the vampires became the heroes of the stories. They became the ideal. And then they got sparkly.

It was at that point that I lost all interest. Mom found other things to occupy our time, and we moved on. Sure we were annoyed by the proliferation of teenie-bopper nosferatu, but we took it in stride.

And then humanity discovered that vampires were real.

People disappeared every year. Everybody knew that. The authorities assumed the people who disappeared were runaways, or homeless, or had nobody looking out for them, so they just kind of fell off the radar.

But then in 2021 the first conscious AI came online, and the fellow who invented it had lost a sister under similar circumstances. He instructed iT (short for intelligent Technology) to look for clues to her fate, and you know what iT found? Lots of people “disappeared” because the vampires were eating them, and then disposing of their bodies.

It was horrible. No doubt about it, but at the same time, it seemed like a pretty minor problem, given all our other issues – massive climate change, population migration, genocide. But at this point, we’d had TruBlood, Twilight, a host of other similar stories, and a generation of women had fallen in love with the idea of sparkly, sexy vampires. They sought out the hidden nests of the undead. Most never returned, and those that did make it home again usually ate all of their former family.

It was clear that something had to be done. Once and for all, many of us decided, we must eradicate the menace of vampires from the Earth. This rag-tag assemblage of people were probably the last group that you’d expect to tackle such dangerous quest – we were nerds, geeks, obsessive fanboys. But we were able to convince a few geneticists and nanotechnologists to work on technologies that could turn these evil bloodsuckers into productive members of society. And they did it!

All we had to do to turn a vampire back into a quasi-human was an injection of the nanotech in the heart.

iT helped us figure out the vectors — where did the vampires live during the day, and what did they do at night?

So we had a solution, and we had the information on how to find them, but there was still that pesky problem of delivering one injection into an extremely pissed-off vampire. Hardly the most promising of theraputic settings.

And that’s when we stepped up. Those of us who had once loved the vampire myth, but could no longer take the insipid literature of the new, sexy version of vampire. We looked at the problem and said, “We will do this terrible job.”

The called us Nosfaradudes.

While the vampires had practical invulnerability to regular weapons, superhuman strength, speed and senses, we had science. We were outfitted with full-body, full-spectrum light emitting suits. It was tight to the skin, but you couldn’t really tell because of the full-spectrum nodules covering every inch of it. Even a starving vampire would find it impossible to approach, because daylight would shine from us like miniature, rotund suns.

Many of the Nosfardudes were in it for the adventure. The violence. For me, it was all aesthetics. I needed to make the vampires pay, and not only for the pain they’d physically inflicted on generations of human beings.

For all those sparkly vampires, I would have my revenge.

The End

My longer fiction has %0 vampires that twinkle, though there are artifcial intelligences. Right now you can get the paperback of The Fridgularity for $3 off, if you buy it direct from Monkeyjoy Press. Use coupon code: YGMVFZZY. Available in all formats in all the usual online places:

Paperback ($15.99)
Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Amazon.ca

Ebooks ($4.95)
Kindle | Smashwords | Kobo | Nook | iTunes

Alltop has humor that doesn’t suck. Great photo by Ross Harmes.

A Reluctant Emcee

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Mark A. Rayner

The stun bolt struck near me, and I was flying through the air. My hair crackled with static electricity. My vision went red. Quite possibly I soiled my expensive trousers. Did any of that worry me? No, I had much bigger problems. My brothers were coming back to town for the wedding.

I’d been dreading both events. Their inevitable return, and the marriage of Josh and Mary. Just as inevitable: the lovebirds’ request to have me, the Right Honorable Member of Parliament for Middlesex County, Ab Durer, as master of ceremonies.

I loathe the role of emcee. And my friends always ask me to do it.

Earlier that week, I’d foolishly complained to my brother Warren about emceeing again; he’d looked particularly scary in a suit of plate mail he always “wore” in the datasphere. An affectation, but it had plenty of impact.

“Well, why don’t me and the other brothers come?” he’d said.

“Uh. I’m not sure how good an idea that is,” I had said.

“Sure! It’s been ages since we saw you. Fabian and Petrovich have been pretty busy in Central America, but me and Deeter can convince them to come up.”

“No, I really don’t think you should. You’re not invited.”

“Hey!” shouted Warren, “we’re never invited. Just suck it up. We’re going to be there. Besides, Albrecht,” he said — emphasizing the “brecht”, just the way I’ve always hated it —”we have something to tell you.”

It had taken me a while to work up the courage to let Josh and Mary know that all four were planning to attend. Mary had burst into tears, and Josh confided, “You know, I thought this relationship was just going to be the end of my bachelorhood, not the end of everything.”

I’d laughed and mumbled something about the boys being much more mellow since they’d left high school. You had to admire the couple’s pluck. They made contingency plans, booking a full riot squad for the reception, buying doses of the best nanobiotics money could buy, and hiring Freeze-A-Head, “in case” of fatalities.

I felt so bad that I actually gave them my speech to vet, though I figured we would never get through the wedding, let alone the speeches. I was kind of torn on that. I hate emceeing — blathering into a holo-mic so that the relatives and friends attending remotely can enjoy the syrupy sentiments. And while everyone else whiffs up jazzy nanocaines and quaffs copious amounts of Old Nurberg’s Pink Ale (those who like it like it enough to go blind), I have to abstain.

On the other hand, did I really want to see my brothers back in town, just to avoid sobriety?

But I should get back to the stun bolts, and my electric fandango as I flew through the air, shouldn’t I?

°°°
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