Bombastic Bagman to Return
In keeping with mainstream comic publishers’ recent move to revitalize the industry by introducing new characters and bringing back old ones (such as the controversial Batwoman) Marvel announced on Monday that it would be resurrecting the long forgotten character, “The Bombastic Bag Man”.
Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, Joe Quesada, had this to say:
“Marvel Comics had great success with Civil War, partially because we filled out the traditional ranks with some old-timers and B-stringers that most readers had forgotten, and DC has done much the same thing with their series 52. Now with The Initiative, we’re creating scads of new characters, and that seems to be going over really well; so what we’re looking at here is an opportunity to do both.”
The Bombastic Bagman first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #258, when Peter Parker’s costume was destroyed, forcing him to don an old Fantastic Four uniform with a paper bag over his head to conceal his identity.
“Plenty of Spider-Man’s alter-egos and costumes have been picked up later by other heroes and, in the case of Venom, villains. Hornet, Prodigy, Ricochet and Dusk all came back as new characters, and became respectable B-string heroes. Why not Bag Man?”
When asked to describe the nature of this new-classic character, Quesada was tightlipped, though he gave a few hints, “As far as the man under the bag, imagine Peter Parker’s self-deprecating humor without the self-confidence that he’s achieved with decades of being a superhero. Expect this guy to be the Rodney Dangerfield of Superheroes.”
Quesada refused to answer questions about the character’s origin story, especially about rumored connections to both the New Warriors and the Runaways, responding simply, “the only hint I’ll give you regarding his origin is this – his reappearance will be marked by his very own one-shot in January’s Mystic Arcana.”
Activists Protest Cruelty of Nature
Protestors rallied on Capitol Hill last Friday to call on the US government to take a stand against the unabashed cruelty of nature.
“I think we’ve made great strides in reducing pollution, protecting endangered species, and slowing deforestation,” activist Gail Kidrickson told journalists at the protests, “but it’s a hollow victory when you realize that you can just walk in to any national park and see the wildlife their subjected to the harsh brutality of exposure and predation.”
Tanya McCalleigh agreed, “We were up in Rocky Mountain National Park a couple weekends ago, and we saw a coyote just run down this sick Ground Squirrel and murder it, right there near the entrance of the park, in full sight of half a dozen Park Rangers, who did nothing.”
The rally’s chief organizer, Peter Corrigan sought to clarify the protest for the gathered reporters, “We’re not here to condemn the predators, the owls, the coyotes, the trout, what-have-you - they’re victims here as well. What we’re protesting is the cruelty of nature itself, the same nature that shaped these poor animals into dedicated killing machines, and put them in a situation where they have to murder their fellow creatures to survive.
“How can these beings have any hope of achieving a higher purpose, a higher calling, if they have to extinguish another life just to spare themselves a slow agonizing death by starvation?”
Kidrickson added that many more die of exposure to the elements, or disease, “I mean, the squirrels up there have the bubonic plague, the Black Death. It’s like the Dark Ages out there in the parks.”
“We as a species have achieved so much,” Corrigan said, “We have electricity to keep us warm in the winter, buildings that keep us dry in storms, cures to thousands of diseases, and alternative food options that allow us to lead healthy lives without meat.
“How can we stand back and selfishly withhold those achievements from those who need them? How can we sit in our comfortable recliners, put the Discovery Channel on our plasma screen TVs, and watch these animals struggle for their survival as if it’s for our entertainment.”
“Really,” McCalleigh said, “I think we can all agree that in retrospect, the Animal Kingdom was a bad move on nature’s part.”
‘Supersaurus’ Discovered in Yucatan
Excavation of the Yucatan Peninsula’s famous Chicxulub Crater by an Arizona State University geology team may have yielded one of the most controversial paleontological discoveries of the decade.
“Our team was there to take deep soil samples of the impact area,” Emil Carson, doctor of geology at ASU said at a Tuesday press conference, “no one ever thought to look for an intact fossil under that hellish planetary scar.”
Dr. Carson’s team was startled when their sampling drill collided with a “high density object”.
“We were intending to take samples of meteor rock in the soil, rock which our team expected to be rich in iron,” said Dr. Carson, “so of course we were startled when our drills encountered an impenetrable object down there.”
The object turned out to be a fully intact dinosaur skeleton.
“None of the bones showed any sign of fracture, and though we haven’t been able to extract a sample from the bone, it appears to be unfossilized as well.”
ASU’s lead paleontologist, Dr. Matthew White, was already on site by the time the skeleton was unearthed, “The first parts extracted were the leg bones, and I looked at their structure and I thought ‘wow, that’s a bird’, maybe from the Phorusrhacidae family, but when I got to examine the tibia I realized it couldn’t be related to Brontornis. I thought “no, it’s a crane” or some much larger prehistoric equivalent anyway. But full excavation determined that it certainly was a theropod dinosaur.”
Examination of the surrounding rock strata provided another startling revelation.
“I don’t believe that the creatures flesh was burned away by the meteorite,” Dr. Carson said, “the area around the skeleton suggests that the flesh decomposed over a long period of time.”
Berkley paleontologist Dr. Jose Pueblos is skeptical of the discovering however, “I think what we have here is an unusual event, but nothing as sensational as they’re claiming. The most logical explanation is that the creature died and decomposed before the meteor’s impact, and was already under several layers of earth by the time the meteor hit.”
Carson and White stand by their version of the discovery though.
“This skeleton marks the boundary between the meteor rock and the terrestrial soil,” Carson explained, “clearly, this creature was somewhere between the meteor and the earth when it died.”
White supported his colleague, “the spalation of the skeleton suggests that the bones were scattered after the flesh decomposed as a result of the soil settling, not as a result of the meteor’s supersonic impact.
“Additionally, I was able to match the creature’s claws to deep marks in the meteor rock above the skeleton.”
“And having studied the oxidization pattern within those claw marks,” Carson continued their statement, “I’m confident in saying that the marks were made while the meteor was in the upper atmosphere.”
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