True but unbelievable. Can you beat this?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Genuine, authentic, real things about this wunnerful world we live in which beggar belief. And preferably funny.

Let me start with my best shot. And sit down before you read this. I swear it’s true.

Even if you have zero interest in superhero comic books, stay with this. There’s a comic called Legion of Super Heroes. Basically, a group of teenagers with assorted super powers, set in the far distant future, saving the Earth on a regular basis yada yada yada. In some issues, they have ‘tryouts’ where newcomers demonstrate their special super power and try to join the Legion.

In one such story, a guy comes along called Arm Fall Off Boy. Guess what his super power was? Yep. He could make his arms fall off. That was it.

I am not making this up.

Now, these comic books are put together by grown ups. Hard-working professional men and women who can write stories and draw and ink them, and it’s a serious industry with big bucks at stake. So one morning, someone must have come along and said, ‘Hey guys, I’ve got this idea for a new character. Called Arm Fall Off Boy. He can make his arms fall off’.

And instead of just hurling the stapler at him, or suggesting he take up gardening, the others must have said ‘Yeah, OK, go for it’.

All this is true, but I find it VERY hard to believe.

Anyone else got gems like this to share?

2

I think that television has the same problem as comic books. I think the term they use is “deadlines.” It’s hard to be creative and not produce crap when your boss is standing behind you looking at his watch. I’m not defending them, far from it, but I see the problem they face.

My thought for them, is to stop and think before doing something. Does this show/issue suck so much that it will cause people to possibly not watch/buy the next one? If they have even a little twinge of doubt, they should do what Nancy Reagan told them to, “Just say no.”

Of course, with television, there are millions of mindless viewers who think that Xena was a real person. I think that most comic book readers are smart enough to know what fiction means, mostly because they are proving they can at least read.

On a side note, did his arms falling off help him at all? Could he control them when they fell off? Did he pull one of them off and beat the bad guy senseless with it? If so, at least it’s amusing.

3

Maybe when “Arms fall off Boy” engages his superpowers, it so stuns the villian that the other superteens can then clobber him. It would be funnier if his legs or head fell off,though.

4

How did he get them back on?

5

I believe that is something that people in writers’ circles call a “joke”. It is, after all, a comic book. :stuck_out_tongue:

6

Are we talking about the late 50s to mid 60s, when comic books were expected to be pure drivel?

7

Google yields

http://www.best.com/~blaklion/other.html

SPLITTER (note: entry prepared by Gina)
You see a tallish boy with bright orange skin and mismatched limbs.
Looking at him from the top down, his head is covered by a metallic purple
helmet, sporting a small fin top and center. A cheerful look is on his
orange humanoid features, and his orange ears stick out slightly from the
sides of his helmet. He’s wearing a metallic purple tank top and shorts,
which is formfitting and extends to his upper thighs. From the end of the
shorts to his feet, his coloring vaguely resembles that of a girraffe. His
arms change tone from bright orange to a scaly yellow right below his
shoulders. His feet are bare.

Floyd Belkin: You see a cheerful lad with a bright orange face and a
blond, wavy fro. He’s wearing a pair of tight-ish jeans, reeboks, and a
big T-shirt proclaiming ‘I Survived the ShadowyPlot and All I Got Was This
Stupid T-Shirt’. Underneath the t-shirt he’s wearing a white cotton
longsleeved ‘long johns’ shirt, which covers his arms up to the wrists.
His hands are oddly scaly, and quite yellow.

Affiliiation: Legion of Substitute Heroes, Heroes of Lallor (30th Century)

Background: A native mutant of the mutant-hating world of Lallor, Floyd
Belkin grew up in hiding, reared by sympathetic sympathizers,
aneristic-yet-not-hopeless anarchists, erisian escapists, and motherly
mutants. His friends were all weirdos, like him…Duplicate Boy and Gas
Girl are two examples of other Lallorian mutant-heroes. All his life, he
lived with the fact that he wasn’t -like- everyone else…marked by his
orange skin and detachable limbs. Finally, his chance for escape arrived.
With tears of farewell from his mutant friends and surrogate families,
Floyd stowed away on a freigher headed for Earth. As soon as he arrived,
he knew this was the place for him - there were so many mutants and
metahumans, and the diversity was so amazingly beautiful! Upon his
entrance into Terran society, he succeeded in joining the amazing Legion
of Substitute Heroes, and is currently being taught to lose his limbs with
a purpose…to manifest this power as the focused totality of his
long-opressed yet glorious mutant abilities!

Powers: Floyd’s limbs - that is, ARMS and LEGS only (that’s what limbs
are, not digits like fingers and toes:)) detach right below the shoulder
and right below the torso. They fall off at will, but also (sometimes)
unintentionally.

Skills: Very good at lying on the ground, helpless…can club people with
various limbs, provided he still has an arm or so attached…um, he can
make his limbs fall off in strategic places, so villains trip over
them…umm…:slight_smile:

Special Abilities: You can chop at Splitter with a sword or something,
and if you get him in exactly the right places at the exactly correct
angles, you won’t hurt him and his limbs will detach just like they
normally do. If he’s having a sword swung at him, though, he’s probably
already fallen all to pieces from panic. If you get him with a sword or
whatever in any other places, though, you’ll hurt him pretty badly and the
only way he can fight you is by bleeding on you.

Flaws: No mental flaws, except maybe scarring from the years of trauma
and angst on the mutant-hating world of Lallor.:slight_smile:

Disadvantages: Floyd’s power is rather useless. I mean, his arms and legs
come off, right? Then what? Nothing! End of story. He lies there looking
helpless, while his arms and legs are just kind of lying there doing
nothing. The other Subs always have to rescue him…:slight_smile:

Personality: Floyd is a very cheerful guy, considering his unhappy
origin. However, his current status with the Legion Subs provide him
with just the right environment to flourish.

8

See what you’ve gone and done, you’ve got me thinking about the similar fixation I have with the Bionic Bigfoot from the old Six Million Dollar Man show.

For those of you unfamiliar, Bionic Bigfoot was a reoccuring character on the SMDM show who looked like a seven foot tall Richard Kiel (Jaws from those James Bond movies) in a gorilla suit with a crummy Grizzly Addams beard spirit gummed on his face and yellow contact lenses, mostly because thats all he was.

Heres the logic-loop I keep getting stuck in:

(1) He’s Bigfoot.
(2) He’s Bionic.
(3) He hides from humanity in the woods, making his bieng bionic pretty pointless.
(4) Again, he’s Bionic.
(5) The OSI (Oscar Goldman’s secret agency) made him Bionic for some poorly explained reason.
(5) He short circuited and went berserk in the woods and terrified some campers and loggers and forest rangers and such.
(6) Steve Austin tracked him down, they threw paper mache’ boulders at one another other until Steve manages to subdue him.
(7) They fix his short-circuited Bionic Brain and release him back into the woods.
(8) See item #3.

And don’t even get me started on the Russian Death Probe…

9

i used to work down at archie comics for about a year before i started school, so maybe i can give soem insight into Amrs Fall off boy. We were working on the SOnic the headhog special, and it was about a day beofre the deadline when the art and script for it came in to the office. That was fun…
but when that happens you don;t really have time to change anything, like the art, or placeholder names. Chance are they just didn;t have time to give him a decent name…

or it’s possible that Arms fall off boy is an office joke that got written into a book for a bit.

and it’s really ahrd to thikn of creative super powers these days, i mean what hasn’t been done already. At least limbs falling off hasn;t been done to death as a power.

i am curious as to how he put his arms back on though. It’s like when bender lost his arms on futurama, and he somehow put them back on…

10

“Arms Fall Off Boy”? Sounds like an Adam Sandler character! “I’m Crazy Arms-Fall-Off-Boy! Look at my damn arms, they fall off! Now gimme some candy!”

11

:wipes wildberry tea off of computer monitor:

you read my mind Rilchiam…great reference. :smiley:

12

Arm Fall Off Boy is, indeed, a joke – a satire of earlier, even lamer heroes. The prime is example would be Matter-Eater Lad from the planet Bismoll. (I’m not making this up.) I assume I don’t need to explain his power. The name pretty much spells it out.

I believe another joke character was created to mock a lame-o hero named Color Kid, who could project wild colors. The send-up was Plaid Lad, who could produce some truly lovely tartans.