Thunderstruckcomic

After a hiatus of several years, I've come back to Thunderstruck. I'm now doing this in a new way -- full-page color comics, delivered once a month on the current schedule, and hopefully greater progress in the story with each installment.

This is a turnaround after my big goodbye in '09, but I realized that I had time now to balance my writing efforts and the comic, so long as I stopped trying to do the heavy lifting of a 3-per-week schedule. I'll be posting art and updates here on my Deviant account as well (another thing that has been fallow for a long time).

There is one power that all superheroes seem to possess. Even the ones that profess to have no powers at all, your super-athletes like Green Arrow, Black Widow, and Batman. And that is the power of nigh-indestructible teeth.

There's a reason that football players and pro fighters wear mouthpieces. You take a hard shot to the head and some teeth are gonna get rattled. Some of them will come out. But does this ever happen to superheroes? Pretty much never. I say "pretty much" because I can only remember two instances where it did:

-- In the Daredevil movie, he spits out a molar at one point after a fight.
-- In Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Strikes Again," a captured Batman is being pounded by Lex Luthor and loses teeth in the process.

It should be noted that neither of the examples above is what you would call a shining example of the superhero genre. Of course, I haven't absorbed every superhero comic, show, or movie out there, so it's very likely I would've missed some other instance. The vast majority of the time, however, superheroes have special dental protection from on high.

Oh, and it doesn't count if someone with a healing power loses a tooth. Wolverine (whose teeth are not laced with adamantium, which was assuredly an oversight by the Weapon X program) has probably spat out a few bicuspids along the way, but he grows them back, so it's no biggie. That's the problem with having a healing factor. It suddenly becomes your karma to attract injuries. I remember one particular X-Men crossover where we have about a dozen X-Men, most of them with no particular protective powers, and a building collapses on them to knock them out for a while. Everyone scrapes themselves out of the wreckage at about the same time. Why didn't Wolverine wake up sooner? Because he alone happened to take a falling pylon through the guts and had to heal. Everyone else just got boo-boos on the noggin. That's a healing factor for you.

Come to think of it, immunity to shrapnel is another hidden superpower.

Look, if you don't get frustrated with your species sometimes, then you're either not human or you're a goddamned saint. If it's the latter, then go heal some people or something. If it's the former, then I want to know what you are and how you're reading this (I figure hardly any humans read my journal, so non-humans might be my real audience).

Why am I frustrated with my species? Oh, just don't even ask. Go on the internet and look around. You'll find something that sticks in your craw. It'll either be a big news story that drives you nuts, or it'll be something small and stupid, like someone professing their undying love for a movie that you know is just a big pile of donkey poo. You may think you're the most "live and let live" sort of person in the world, but I guarantee that someone will be able to push your buttons and make you wonder just how clever we really are as a species.

Anyway, it's times like this that it's fun to think about reincarnation. Let's say you get some kind of choice in the matter. What are some good options? Here are mine:

ORCA: Awesome. Apex predator, intelligent, social, and powerful. Plus you get the bonus of having echo-location, which would be a fun change of pace in terms of how you perceive the world. And yes, look, there is the whole endangered species problem, but I'm going to ignore that for the purposes of this exercise (as it is simply another example of why I get fed up with my own species sometimes).

ELEPHANT: African, I think. Okay, so I tend to gravitate towards the critters with the big brains. Also those that do not have to worry that much about being eaten to death by other animals. Once an African elephant hits adulthood, there's not much out there that will threaten it apart from other elephants. Oh, drought and starvation, but then you get to be in this cool family that tours the country looking for watering holes, eating spots, clan grave yards, and stuff like that. I think a female elephant would be better so you could stay in the social group. The guys have it harder.

CAT: Or at least a cat treated like one of ours. They seem to have a pretty good life. Except when they feel we've been sleeping in too long. Then it's "Meow! Meoooow! Get up! We want you to wake up NOW so we can then ignore you and go to sleep where you can see how relaxed we are!" Yeah, that could be fun.

HUMMINGBIRD: I figure this is the incarnational equivalent of snarking down a handful chocolate-covered espresso beans and washing it down with a Red Bull. Might be very entertaining for one life.

JELLYFISH: Opposite of the hummingbird, this if you want to take it off the hook and just float the hell around for a lifetime. Maybe one of those Portuguese Man-O-Wars. They're pretty bad-ass. Or one of those nearly microscopic Box Jellyfish that are so poisonous that their toxin can kill a fat swimming tourist in 1.8 seconds.  

TYRANNOSAURUS REX: Well why can't I reincarnate retrospectively, huh? Who the hell is making the rules around here? Dial up the T-Rex and load me in, spirits. I'm ready to get chomping.

DRAGON: You know, when I was a kid and I first heard of the concept of reincarnation, this was what I wanted. To come back as a dragon. I still think it's the best choice.

I know my last post was in 2008, and that may seem like a long time, but I do have a good reason. No, it's amazing. You'll never believe what happened. See, I'd been hired to help clean out the basement of this old crazy inventor guy who lives down the street. As I was going through his stuff, I found this weird grandfather clock... the counterweights were made of intricately cut crystal and shone with a faint inner luminescence, and there were about 18 hands on the face, which also had a bunch of crazy symbols and runes all over it.

Well, I mean, what would you do? I think I did what anyone would. I fired up that clock to see if it still worked. And I'll be damned if it didn't send me hurtling through space and time.

So the future, I have to say, is not what I expected. The body-swapping fad makes it damned hard to know who you're talking to, and the AI overlords are kind of condescending. Also, I was disappointed to see that the oceans had turned to glass. The whole thing was bumming me out, until I noticed a bizarre discrepancy. I went to a McDonalds… and they tried to sell me a Whopper!

At that point, I knew I was in an alternate dimension, and that there was still hope for my own timeline. I did as much research as I could about where everything went wrong. Had to fight some nanotech-infused zombies, and there was this one really hot chick from the resistance who I think had a thing for me, but with the body-swapping thing I was never sure if it was her or that obnoxious guy from the antigrav night club making a pass at me. I'm married anyway, so it was never going to go anywhere, but it was flattering… unless it was that guy, in which case it was just irritating.

Point being that I isolated a key turning point, and then made a mad dash with a cyclone scooter to the ruins of Hollywood where I'd stashed my grandfather clock. Made it out just in the nick of time, but here's the thing… it's kind of hard to be precise with a grandfather clock. So I ended up coming back in 2011. Bit of a culture shock.

Don't worry. The turning point is in 2018, so I've still got time to prevent the apocalyptic future from happening in our timeline. I think if I can prevent Beyonce from being elected to Congress, we'll be okay.