60's Supervillain Experiment

(Originally published 13 July 2012)

Some friends of mine were doing a series of long-form improvised stage plays called 'The Fist of the Fury' in which the audience were invited to suggest a villain for the evening's entertainment. While helping people who couldn't come up with an idea for a villain, I suggested the following, "Take anything, any concept, idea or object, and try and imagine how it could be used for evil." After several nights of this, I began to suspect that I had a superpower. However, it would require testing... the following is that test.

The experiment is this. I am given a word, thing or concept and have to transform that into a daft 1960's Supervillain. Here, for the benefit of posterity, are the results of this experiment SO FAR.    #1. "The embarrassment you feel when you spy someone in the street you know, and call out to them, only to have them turn and you realise its not them after all." - Drew Triebe.   DEJA WHO is a subtle and insidious criminal, sometimes working as a spy for hire, and sometimes as a simple bank robber. He possesses the psychic ability to make it appear as those he is supposed to be where he is. For instance, he could sneak into a military base to steal the plans for a new type of A-Bomb for the Russians. Unfortunately, he cannot duplicate knowledge, so he wouldn't know the password for the day. He gets around this by projecting the feeling of making the viewer certain that he knows him, but can't remember his name, and so they just let him through without challenging him. When he robs banks, witness descriptions vary widely, but inevitably, witnesses are certain that he resembles someone they know... but just can't quite place where they've met him.     #2."Lamingtons" - Rogers Cassan.   THE LAMINGTON began life as a humble baker, however, after being kicked out of the city's most exclusive baking academy for his unorthodox experiments in cake technology, he crafted a battlesuit using his methods. They all thought they were so clever with their hoity-toity torts and profiteroles... well he would humble them all... as the humblest cake of all. His costume is padded with a layer of sponge-like material to absorb impact, and this is coated with a thin layer of a chocolate-like material which makes it difficult for opponents to grab him. This is then sprinkled with a light dusting of material which puffs up if he is struck, choking his would-be assailant. He is armed with a wrist-blaster connected to a backpack tank capable of dispensing sticky jam, slippery cream or scalding tea at his opponents, and he carries grenades which explode in clouds of vaguely coconut-scented particles in order to discourage pursuit. Of late, he has been seen in the company of the notorious TEA-SET, a team of criminals dedicated to plundering high society affairs and consisting of The GREY EARL, The SAUCERER and The STONE SCONE.

  #3. "Hair oil!" - Linda Phoebe Fitzboodle Syvret.   Jimmy 'Jailbird' Jenkins was a bad egg, and he didn't care who knew it. In and out of juvie all his life, he probably wouldn't have amounted to anything unless he'd accidentally used a hair oil that had been contaminated with an experimental chemical. The hair oil reacted with Jimmy's body chemistry, turning him into a human oil slick... capable of sliding faster than a police car, slipping through the bars of any prison cell and out of any handcuffs. Now, with his gang of leather jacketed hoodlums, the ROCKABILLY ROUGHNECKS, 'Jailbird' Jenkins is better known as THE GREASER!     #4. "Toenail clippings." - Monk De Scyber.   Clint Greegan was a mercenary working in the worst hell-holes in the world. Renowned for his brutality, he was despised even by his own comrades for his hair-trigger temper, cruel pranks and foul personal habits. Most notably, he was renowned for never washing his feet or clipping his toenails. He found the discomfort this engendered hilarious. However, this hatred was nothing compared to that of the local villagers, who sought revenge on him. A local witch-doctor stole some of his discarded toenail clipping to cast a spell on him... however the spell backfired, and Greegan's feet became terrible, iron-hard talons, capable of shredding steel. Seeing the opportunity of his new condition, he immediately went AWOL, and became a nefarious criminal-for-hire using his military training and terrible claws as the felonious FOOT-SOLDIER!   

#5. "That moment when you've just finished striding purposefully into a room, and then suddenly realise you've no memory whatsoever of what it was you were going there to do/find." - Will X Kemp.   Trapped in a low-rent life as a second-rate magician's assistant on the Las Vegas strip, Holly Harper supplemented her meagre income by pilfering from various marks who she dazzled with her good looks. One day, however, she 'accidentally' came into possession of The Ruby of Rashnukar, an ancient gemstone which gives the wielder mystical powers to entrance people... for a month or so, she used this power to make minor scores and live the high-life as the duplicitous HOLLY DAZE, but eventually, the stone's previous owner came looking for it, an infamous con-artist and sneak thief masquerading as a stage magician with an Arabian Nights gimmick! He took one look at Holly's work and decided they could do much more as a double act... and now they operate as a duo as SHIMMER AND SHEIK!     #6. "That moment when you wake up drunk the wrong way around in bed and you think you're somewhere else for a fleeting second." - Caid Rhymes.   Michael (Mickey) Finnegan was a lowlife drunkard and small-time criminal who dreamed of the big score. One night, while he was trying to rob the house of an old scientist, he stumbled across his laboratory. Mistaking the scientist's equipment for a still, he quaffed several beakers of mysterious liquid. When he woke up, he was staring at his own dead body... his last drink had actually killed him... instead of being full of spirits, he was one! Soon, he discovered that he could inhabit other people, but he was a helpless passenger... unless that person was drunk, in which case, he could take over their body and do whatever he wanted! Robbing, stealing, living the high life, and as long as he could keep his host body loaded, it could go on and on... he had become THE HAUNTED HANGOVER!!!     #7. "the liminal moment after you have made your wish but before you blow out your birthday candles" - London Elliot.   That horrendous hijacker of hope known as the Diabolical DREAM THIEF started out as a sour and curmudgeonly scientist, Doctor Gus Grumpington. His experiments were being forever interrupted by the noise of neighbourhood children playing. How pointless, he thought, here he was, struggling to come up with any idea for an invention, and there they were wasting their limitless imagination on 'games' and 'playing'. With that in mind, he came up with his most terrible invention yet, the dastardly 'Dream-Drain Device'! With this, he could draw the vitality, energy and imagination away from children, and funnel it into himself! As a side-effect, he found that his invigourated brain could now conjure up shadowy dream monsters to act as his hideous henchmen!     #8. "that sudden jerk feeling you get awakening from a deep sleep" - Jerimiah Hootman.   Franklin 'Forty' Winks was a coffee house beatnik whose 30 espresso a day had resulted in a bad case of insomnia. He was hopped up, run down and wigged out, baby! He was riding the red-eye night train express to all stations with no stops, man! Finally, he sought out a friend of a friend, a disreputable hypnotist who claimed to be able to help him out. In desperation, he agreed to take part. The experiment gave him the ability to enter the dreams of others, and what's more, he could bring elements of the dream world back into our own! Being the selfish and unpleasant cat he was, he gave no thought to using his abilities to help his fellow man. He was more interested in getting back at everyone for imagined slights against him! Soon, he was causing all sorts of mayhem, from stopping traffic with giant toy building blocks, ruining a parade with a swarm of half-dog, half bees, or committing all kinds of crimes with help from cotton candy cowboys with licorice lariats, only to escape with the help of flying pink elephants! The only way to tell if he's stolen something from your mind is a strange twitch, just as you awaken, as though something is missing! That's how you can tell you've been the victim of The HIPNIK JERK!     #9. "The feeling that you are being eavesdropped on but can't catch anyone listening" - Scott Driscoll.   As part of an evil Red plot to create the perfect super-spy, many volunteers were tested, however, the most promising potential subject was a ruthless and conniving East German border patrol guard, Fleishmann Waldheim. As a result of the experiment, Waldheim's genetic code was combined with that of a common housefly. The process was painful, and Waldheim had become a strange, hideous figure with bulging eyes and membranous wings. However, never one to wallow in his misery, he has taken his advantages and made a name for himself as the Eastern Bloc's most feared spy - able to shrink down to tiny size and sneak into almost anywhere, to eavesdrop on almost any conversation... he had become, THE FLY ON THE (BERLIN) WALL!     #10. "Muppets :)" - James Svartsalfar.   (Gonna go 70's with this one, and definitely taking a slightly different tack...) Lonnie 'Lucky' Lincoln was a low-down street hustler, a pusher, loan shark and all around bad dude. He would have stayed small-time, if he hadn't stumbled across a tiny man stumbling around drunk in the aftermath of the annual New York St.Patrick's Day Parade. Seeing an easy mark, he cornered him in an alleyway and pulled out his switchblade, when the little man slurred, "Okay, y'caught me, now what are you wishin' for? Gold?" Lonnie looked at the rings on his fingers and the chains around his neck and said, "Damn, do I look like I NEED more Gold, Sucker?! What I need is for my damn distributors to stop cutting me off! I need product, and I need it like now, man!" With that, the little man clicked his fingers and vanished. Lonnie looked down and saw a briefcase, and when he opened it, it was full of pills, powders and bottles, of all the colours of the rainbow! And soon he realized that the briefcase never ran out! This was a goldmine...    When Lonnie reappeared, he was dressed in the gaudiest attire Harlem had ever seen. He was a major player and was running most of the drug traffic in New York City. What's more, it was said that he could get hold of stuff the likes nobody had ever seen before! Red Pills to make you a Berserker Warrior! Blue Pills to transform you into a human rain cloud! Yellow Pills made you shine like the sun! Between the money from his many illicit operations, and the muscle provided by his chemically enhanced henchmen, Lonnie Lincoln had become THE RAINBOW CONNECTION!   (Plus, for all those worried about the poor leprechaun who got mugged... well, it's not easy being green...)     #11. "Calligraphy" - Martin Studer.   Lester 'Fingers' Fenton was a counterfeiter, the son of a master forger, however, advances in printing technology had rendered his skills obsolete. Desperate, he begged a local mobster for a chance to prove his skills as part of a counterfeiting ring. Unfortunately, Fenton's dedication to craftsmanship failed him. He was compelled to include a tiny, barely noticeable flaw as a kind of 'signature' and as a result, the ring was busted by the Feds. Fenton managed to escape, but the mob boss took his revenge on him, crushing his hands in his own printing presses. Fenton vanished into the criminal underworld, spending years designing and commissioning a pair of replacement hands made from copper, combining the finest mechanical craftsmanship with all the precision of a machine. In addition, he assembled an arsenal of weaponry, from blinding ink grenades to throwable 'poison pens'. When he reappeared, he had translated the precision of his forgery into precise planning and execution of robberies, and woe betide any of his henchmen who blot their copybook by daring to deviate from the perfect strategies of that criminal caliph of calligraphy, COPPERPLATE!     #12. "The smell of fresh bread baking in the oven" - Al Batson   Early morning in the city, and a container truck full of radioactive material has a catastrophic brake failure and crashes into a bakery, exposing the early morning workers to strange energies which transform them into the city's newest menaces... no longer content to be underpaid workers, they're preparing to rob and steal their way to the top as... THE UPPER CRUST! The crew is led by SIMON THE PIEMAN, whose unerring aim allows him to deliver perfidious pastries at high speeds, with a variety of felonious fillings - from acidic apple and gas-filled gooseberry to blinding blueberry and concussive coconut cream. His strong right arm is the unfailingly loyal brute, the DOUGHBOY, who hits like a truck, but whose body is a sticky, gelatinous mass capable of trapping any opponent foolish enough to enter hand to hand combat with him. A sinister, ghostly figure, FLOUR POWER is able to turn himself into a cloud of flour, blinding and choking his enemies. Simon's girlfriend, Sugar, gained the ability to craft weird sculptures out of colourful spun confectionary, becoming ICING SUGAR. (as an addendum to yours, and because, my brane yells stuff at me at 2 a.m. like "HEY! WOULDN'T IT BE AWESOME IF THIS HAPPENED! NO, DON'T GO TO SLEEP! THIS IS COOOOOOL!!!")   Briefly, while the rest of the UPPER CRUST were in prison, SIMON THE PIEMAN hooked up with two other supercriminals to perform a series of capers without his regular crew.'Bull' Benardi was a bodybuilding enthusiast and sometime mob leg-breaker who was transformed into a hideous human/cow hybird, and now strikes out at society as the brutish BEEFCAKE! Howard Waxman was the curator of a Wax Museum whose corner cutting when it came to fire safety came back to haunt him when a terrible blaze broke out, now, hideously scarred both physically and mentally, he uses a variety of wax masks and disguises to go wherever he wants as the arsonist known by police as THE CANDLE!   Together, they are THE BUTCHER, THE BAKER AND THE CANDLESTICK MAKER!!!     #13. "Compulsive collecting of Pulp Magazines" - Dm Holley   An obsessive collector of pulp magazines, F.Wordham Smith would have lived his life contented if not for an accidental blow to the head which gave him a second, more dangerous personality. This new personality saw comic books as the route of all evil, replacing the adventure stories of the past with glorified picture books about ludicrously costumed clowns. Assuming a number of disguises, from Pinstripe-Suited Mobsters and Gunslinging Cowboys to Raygun-wielding Space Adventurers and Pith Helmeted Big Game Hunters, he became THE WORDSMITH, formulated a city-wide crime-wave, stealing plots and plans from his beloved magazines, and making off with valuable manuscripts and such artefacts as a collection of Walter B. Gibson's magical apparatus and even a treasure-hunting boat once owned by Lester Dent... all the while, painting the city's heroes as bumbling thugs and half-wits. It wasn't until a number of the city's mystery men of the 20's and 30's came out of retirement to help the present-day heroes track him down that he was caught. As he was being led away, he seemed almost glad. The fact that he had been captured, not by gaudy superheroes, but the pulp crimefighters of his youth only confirmed his beliefs. But he'd be back. The power of imagination, he insisted, could not be caged by prison walls or padded cells...     #14. "tea leaves in the butter" - Claire Stasse   The ARTFUL DODGER is London's most notorious thief, trained by The MAGPIE, second in charge of The PEARLY KING's Cockney Court of Crime, he is capable of defeating almost any security and evading almost any guard. His one weakness is leaving cryptic clues for the police and local superheroes, taunting them and challenging them to figure out his clues and stop him. His most recent crime spree was halted by fashion conscious crimefighter JIM DANDY and the High-Flying ISLINGTON ANGEL when they managed to work out his latest clue - a sock filled with butter, which had tea leaves sprinkled through it. It meant that there would be an attempt to steal (tea leaves = thieves) the family diamonds (diamond rocks = socks) of Lady Augusta Goode (Bread and Butter Pud = Good). Unfortunately, while the robbery was halted and the diamonds secured, the DODGER managed to escape custody, and is almost certainly even now planning his newest caper.     #15. "Nerf" - Thomas Wong   My brain went in two directions here... so you get two, ya lucky duck!   A Russian Satellite plummeting to Earth takes out a lonely hunting cabin in which Seymour P. Unger was taking a relaxing bath... the radioactive core of the satellite and the chemicals in Seymour's bathwater combined to transform him into something more than human, and yet also, less... the creature which dragged itself out of that woodland crater was no longer Seymour Unger, but a shambling man-mountain which grows larger the more water it absorbs, and seemingly cannot be harmed by conventional weaponry... the creature known as SPUNGE!!!   Percy Playfield had never been allowed toys as a child, even though his father was the head of the Playfield Toys empire, and so, when his father died, he finally had all the toys he could ever want... unfortunately, his father had left him with another legacy... a massive lawsuit brought on by the revelation that the Soda Pop and Candy his father manufactured (which his son was also not permitted) were laced with a mind control drug which he had used to shape the minds of his young customers. The lawsuit bankrupted him, and Percy, swearing revenge, stole a large quantity of the chemical. All he had to do was touch a potential target and the chemical would do its work. Because he had been denied toys for so long, he chose toys as his weapons, applying the chemical to the tips of plastic darts, to yo-yos, frisbees... denied his legacy, he would take what he needed and make crime his ultimate game as... TAG!     #16. "an appreciation for fuzzy wittle ducklings and stealing nuclear warheads" - Debra Jane Shelly.   Henry J. Gottbucks III is the world's richest man; rich enough to buy his own private island and, after shipping his family's ancestral castle stone-by-stone from Europe, declaring himself King of Gottbucks Island. What the world doesn't know is that he owes much of his success to the scientific genius of his daughter, Precious Gottbucks, the world's most spoiled little girl!  Recently, at a high society party, she overheard people laughing at her and her daddy. "Not a real country," they said, "No army! No navy! And they don't have the bomb yet!" Of course, this made Precious hopping mad, so she raced down to her laboratory and came up with her diabolical plan! She would build her OWN army! And her own Navy! An army of clockwork toy soldiers and giant robot kitten cavalry! A navy of squeaky rubber duckies! She only needs one thing now, the A-Bomb! And she's prepared to dedicate an army of the most adorable menaces the world has ever seen to getting it... or her name's not PRINCESS PRECIOUS!!!     #17. "Secret sauce" - Scott C. Butler.    Sinister Chemists from behind the Iron Curtain discover a powerful form of perfume which renders its wearer irresistible, as well as enhancing their physical strength. A ruthless KGB Agent, Natasha Badovich, specializing in seduction and infiltration, and a former member of the Russian Olympic Wrestling team (as Natasha the Smasher) was selected to be its first subject. Using her combination of physical power and feminine wiles, she plots to bring down the free world as the deadly, but alluring, spy and assassin code-named 'SECRET SAUCE'! Some years later, she was paired with a similarly enhanced male operative, Nikolai Musselbund, a.k.a 'MYSTERY MEAT'.