The Eternal Warrior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Warrior) is an immortal and DC has its version of an immortal warrior called appropriately the Immortal Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_Man). The problem is that Immortal Man was a third rate super hero that even die hard DC fans often forget. You don’t pit third raters against Olympians.
The Eternal Warrior is an immortal but above all else is the foremost martial arts hero of the Valiant Universe. The foremost martial arts hero of the DC universe is Batman. After having kicked his brother’s butt (https://foxhugh.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/dc-vs-valiant-universe-1-archer-armstrong-vs-batman-robin/), the Eternal Warrior is ready for a fight with Batman. Also, Batman and the Eternal Warrior are both strategic fighters so expect a lot of attacks and retreats and counter attacks. Traps using the local terrain can be expected from both sides.
Batman has his utility belt and a lot more toys. The Eternal Warrior has just one toy and that is a leather jacket that has studs on one side for offense and metal plates on the other side for defense. I like the jacket so much I got an imitation made in Thailand. Let’s hope I never have to use it. The Eternal Warrior is a master of every weapon and martial art of the last three thousand plus years. He does not carry toys because he has outgrown the need for them as would Batman if he was thousands of years old. Batman once turned down a Green Lantern power ring in the Justice League International because he said it would slow him down. The Eternal Warrior has carried this minimalism to the next level.
Batman throws a batarang at the Eternal Warrior. The Eternal warrior grabs a book from the pocket of his jacket and uses the book as a shield. The Eternal Warrior then moves in on Batman and hits him repeatedly with the book until Batman is knocked out. The Eternal Warrior had seen the Bourne Supremacy at a movie theater last week and like what he saw and has been itching for a chance to use those moves. The Eternal Warrior is an old dog who can learn new tricks. The Eternal Warrior wins because he knows what Batman is thinking and then some.
Clash of the weirdo energy super heroes! Dr. Mirage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life_of_Dr._Mirage) is made up of necromantic energy. As I have stated in prior posts, the Valiant universe is more positivistic than the DC universe and basically Dr. Mirage is a ghost with a pseudo science explanation that is a little better than the one provided by Ghostbusters but not by much.
In this version of science, Ghosts are made up of type of energy and all the energy logic we have in natural science applies to ghost energy variously called etheric, psychic or astral energy. For the record, most traditional physicists hate this kind of New Age energy logic but what do they know?
Wildstorm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_(comics)) is made up of antimatter energy, technically an exotic rather than weirdo energy. DC has a plethora of beings made up of pure energy but most of them are made up of electricity which is a pretty mundane energy than an exotic/weirdo energy like antimatter. How many electrical devices do you have in your house? Plenty but unless you are an alien I doubt you have any devices powered by antimatter much less necromantic energy. Even Superman went the electrical energy being route briefly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_Red).
There are also beings made up of nuclear energy such as Firestorm and Valiant’s own Dr. Solar. Nuclear energy beings are not as common as electrical energy beings but still more common than beings of stuff like necromantic energy or antimatter energy. Anyway, the electricity in your house may ultimately be from nuclear energy making this type of energy mundane.
Wildstorm isn’t the only DC weirdo energy being. Negative Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_Man) has a negative energy being inside of his regular body, host body, technically. Negative energy fills the weirdo energy part since like necromantic energy I have no idea what negative energy really is but he isn’t a being of pure energy like Dr. Mirage and the Negative energy being can only exist for 60 seconds making him no match for Dr. Mirage.
Being made of pure energy has many advantages regardless of if the energy is mundane, exotic or weird. You don’t need to go to the bathroom, eat, sleep or even need oxygen and you are probably immortal but generally you don’t have a sex life either and that bother’s the like of Wildstorm. The best of both worlds is being able to switch back and forth from having a regular body to having an energy body so you can have sex at home but turn into pure energy when needed as a crime fighter and some lucky DC beings can do this.
Dr. Mirage blasts Wildstorm with necromantic energy and nothing happens. Wildstorm blasts Dr. Mirage with anti-matter energy and nothing happens. Turns out the two weirdo energies have no affect on each other whatsoever. This is clearly explained in chapter 13 of the weirdo physics book but I guess these guys dont have that book. Go ahead and ask your local high school teacher “what happens when you mix antimatter energy with necromantic energy?” and see what sort of answer you get. This blog is becoming more and more popular so this situation may very well happen and I apologize to high school physics teachers all over the world ahead of time. After an hour of this they get bored and decide to call it a draw and discuss what it’s like to be a being of pure energy or not.
Bloodshot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodshot_%28comics%29) has nanites in his blood stream that give him enhanced strength, speed, healing and technopathy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_comic_book_superpowers#Technopathy). Bloodshot is a cyborg. A cyborg is generally a human who has been enhanced through the addition of technology. Some would argue that a person with heart pacer is a cyborg but no someone wearing glasses because the enhancement must be fairly permanent in nature. Bloodshot does not look like a cyborg but like a vampire. He has white skin, giant red circle in his chest and eyes lacking pupils. Compared to his opponent, Bloodshot is a cyborg beauty queen. Bloodshot also has some hard wired programming that allows him to fight in a super efficient manner. Bloodshot does not have any built in weapons but generally carries firearms.
Cyborg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyborg_(comics)) is also a cyborg but a more traditional cyborg. Cyborg has big pieces of shiny metal stuck all over his body. One of his eyes looks like a camera and kind of is a camera. Cyborg looks like a cyborg and he does not like the way he looks. Dad made Cyborg into a cyborg to save his son’s life. Dad had never watched the Six Million Dollar man, yet another cyborg and had thought of making the prosthetics more cosmetically appealing by coating them with flesh colored plastic and using thinner pieces of metal. This never occurs to Cyborg either and mostly he sulks about looking like a monster. Cyborg has super strength as opposed to enhanced strength i.e. he is stronger than Blood Shot but not as fast and agile and all those big pieces of metal probably even slow him down a bit. Cyborg has any number of built in weapons and gadgets unlike Bloodshot. One of his many gadgets is a device that enables him to control most computer systems. An old fashioned version of technopathy compared to Bloodshot’s. Most of Cyborg is covered with promethium, an exotic metal. Promethum is pretty much indestructible but Cyborgs human innards are still vulnerable.
Bloodshot and Cyborg are both shopping at Cyborg R US the trendy new chain of clothing stores for the burgeoning cyborg population. Both spot a really cool limited edition T-Shirt by Polo. The T-Shirt has “Cyborgs Make Better Lovers” as its motto. This is the T-Shirt every upscale cyborg must have but there is only one left! This is a limited edition T-Shirt and both parties realize there probably isn’t another one on sale anywhere. Cyborg needs every fashion break he can get and really hates how the fact that Bloodshot is a cyborg and actually looks pretty cool rather than looking like a monster. Bloodshot is actually a better lover since becoming a cyborg since the nanites give him enhanced stamina and control of every part of his body. Cyborg hasn’t had any good loving since becoming a cyborg despite having a gadget just for such a purpose. Bloodshot does not care for Cyborg’s hostile attitude. After some arguing and attempts to use their technopathy on each other, which fails, they square off to fight for the T-Shirt.
Bloodshot is more agile than Cyborg and gets the first shot. Blooshot shoots Cyborg with a machine gun but the bullets just bounce off Cyborg’s promethium. Cyborg then aims his sonic scrambler at Bloodshot and stuns Bloodshot. A normal person would have been knocked out but Bloodshot has enhanced regeneration. The sonic scrambler affects everything in front of it so there is not much in the way of aiming or much possibility of dodging the beam.
Bloodshot could have leapt over Cyborg and hit Cyborg from behind but Bloodshot is not that sort of fighter. This is despite probably having the ability to pull of this move. If I had enhanced strength and agility this would be my standard move since it routinely gets you out of the way of whatever they can toss at you and gets you behind them. Basically apply dog fight logic to hand to hand combat.
Cyborg closes in a punches Bloodshot. In theory a punch from the likes of someone with super strength should take the head right off of someone lacking Superman style invulnerablity as is the case with Bloodshot but this never happens in comic books since this would upset the six children that still read comic books. Bloodshot is conked out and Cyborg wins!
The Armorines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armorines) are a group of U.S. Marines that wear armor based on bits and pieces of alien technology that has fallen into the hands of the US government. If Iron Man is good then a team of Iron Men should be even better. The armor is not as good as the X-O Manowar armor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-O_Manowar) that is the premiere armor of the aliens but is the best the U.S. government could come up with bits and pieces of alien technology.
Once again, we see a “realistic” POV towards weapons in the Valiant universe that is not present in the DC universe in particular that I mentioned in the overview of this series. Countless aliens have come and gone to Earth on DC yet the US government never tries to appropriate any alien technology and just watches these aliens come and go passively. The Marvel universe is similar but we do see in Armor Wars minseries how governments and super villains alike will try to use Iron Man’s technology.
In the, upcoming, Marvel vs. Valiant series I will have any number of armored teams to choose so but this is not the case in the DC Universe. DC is a magic centered universe with a wealth of magic based characters. Marvel is a technology centered universe were a wealth of technology based characters exist but a whole vein of this technology takes the form of the “power cosmic” that is similar to magic in that the power cosmic that is a super technology that is so fantastic and super to the point of interfering with credibility. Valiant is a logos universe were both technology and magic are rule governed and not as mysterious or unique as in DC or Marvel and the readers and characters in the universe can learn, understand and adapt. The US government can learn how to use alien technology. The Valiant universe is also a more positivistic universe than the DC or Marvel universe.
DC has a very small number of armored superheroes or super villains much less armored teams. One team is the Rocket Red Brigade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Red_Brigade) that was developed by the Soviet Union to defend the motherland from metahumans (DC speak for superhumans). The problem is the Rocket Reds are not a team so much as a brigade. The Rocket Reds never had their own series and the characters of individual Rocket Reds were never fleshed out. There is also nothing “DC” about the Rocket Reds and the Rocket Reds show up after a plethora of such teams at Marvel. The Rocket Reds could exist just as easily in the Marvel universe and in fact the Soviet Union, in the Marvel universe, developed the Crimson Dynamo and the Titanium Man as a direct challenge to Iron Man and made them into a team to defend the motherland years before the Rocket Reds showed up.
The Atomic Knights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Knight) are totally DC! Medieval armor becomes irradiated, in a post WW III world, and instead of killing the wearers due to radiation poisoning, becomes more durable. I remember reading the Atomic Knights as a young man and when you are eight you don’t question such events based on something as boring as science. The problem is that the average age of comic book readers jumped from an average of from something like 12 to 25 between the sixties and eighties and post-18 readers do bring actual science into comic book discussions. Comic books changed from being a type of fantasy with a thin patina of SF to being more SF. Star Wars vs. Star Trek is DC vs. Marvel in terms of fantasy vs. SF.
This change in readership age forced DC to retcon the Atomic Knights. DC explained the Atomic Knights as a giant hallucination! Such is the fate of heroes from a simpler comic book era in modern times. Obviously the Armorines can’t fight a hallucination and this retcon will be totally ignored and replaced by a substitution of my own.
The Atomic Knights are brought out of retirement to fight the Armorines as test in front of the US military brass. Many of the generals in the US military are skeptical of this new fangled alien technology and want to see how the new guys fare against the armored veterans that returned from a recon mission in an alternative future and fought various menaces in the present before retiring.
Hey, my retcon makes at least as much sense as the official hallucination one. The Atomic Knights are a lot older than the Armorines but incredibly the irradiated armor slows down the aging process! Hey if radioactive spider bites are good for you then why can’t irradiated armor be good for you? The Armorines blast the Atomic Knights from the sky. The Atomic Knights don’t have blasters nor can they fly but they do carry swords! In true DC fashion the Atomic Knights don’t carry 45’s since weapons monomania is a trademark of the DC universe as mentioned in the overview to this series. One of the Atomic Knights throws a sword at the energy pack of the Armorines, rather than his chest, since they are on the same side and this is just a test, and brings the Armorine down and then pummels the Armorine since it turns out irradiated medieval armor is pretty tough!
The Atomic Knights once fought Hercules before they became hallucinations and Hercules is about as strong as Superman and Superman is stronger than anything in the Valiant universe. If Herculean blows can’t destroy the Atomic Knight armor then Armorine blows stand no chance at all. One Armorine down!
The other Armorines fly out of the range of thrown swords, about five feet, and come up with a plan. They gang up on one Atomic Knight and fire all the blasters on the one Atomic Knight at the same time. The Atomic Knight goes down. The Atomic Knight armor is not damaged in the least but the person in the armor is hurled against the armor with such force that he or she is knocked out. This is similar to how the kinetic energy of a bullet breaks a rib even when the bullet does not penetrate the vest. Modern super armor would have some sort of shock absorbing layer but this is literally irradiated medieval armor with none of those new fangled systems. Actually no one has figured out how to do this in real life but this is standard pseudo science in comic books.
The Atomic Knights try throwing swords again but once you know what’s up, dodging a sword when you have flight on your side isn’t that hard. Throwing knives is really hard. I can throw a knife at someone’s chest from three to five feet with some degree of accuracy after hours and hours of practice. I tried throwing swords in my backyard a hundred years ago and it’s basically impossible. The sword throws were so wild that I started worrying about killing one of the neighbor kids and gave it up. Braveheart makes it look so easy! Still this is a comic book battle not an actual one. One by one the Atomic Knights go down.
One of the US military Brass watching the conflict wonders how the Atomic Knight armor would do in a battle with the Armorines with an upgrade. After all the Atomic Knight armor is really tough and if you add blasters and flight capability you might have something even tougher than the alien armor. Better still use the Atomic Knight armor as a core and build a layer of Armorine armor around the core. The armor would be less maneuverable than Armorine armor but suitable for environments were durability is more important than maneuverability such as deep space or deep sea missions. This is after all the Valiant universe where such thinking can occur. Stay tuned for the Atomic Armorines! Just kidding!
Dr. Hugh Fox III 