Happy Leap Day! Watch out for men with gills in blue suits and boater hats!

Poor Sydney. I would probably cry too if someone made me exercise in the morning. It’s a rough way to start the day, especially for someone who usually stays up late at night reading comics, refreshing reddit, or playing an MMO slash chatting with guildies online. Oh, and despite asking around on twitter, “bootie” is apparently not real military slang. I guess pre-privates are usually just called recruits, but given the amount of slang deployed by the military in most cases, I was surprised “bootie” wasn’t already in their arsenal. So that’s 2 differences between our world and the Grrl-verse. Super powers, and calling people going through boot camp booties. Oh, and apparently aliens living on Earth. Three things. Super power, booties, aliens, fear and surprise…

I was going to have Peggy say (in panel 3) “It doesn’t do anyone any good to have you laid out for 6 weeks with a torn hammy.” but then there’s the team doctor that can heal trauma. I put her in the comic for a few reasons. One, I’ve joked in the past about how often superheroes get knocked out, and how they’d all have boxer palsy by issue 120, (or NFL-itis) well, the doc lets me get away with that stuff, cause she can fix concussions. (Within reason, not if someone gets their head caved in with a hammer) Two, I want there to be a risk of characters actually getting hurt in fights in other ways, like broken bones or stabs or burns or whatever, and let be back on duty within a few days without everyone needing healing factors, like the way nearly every character in a video game does these days. I mean, in Call of Duty if you take a shotgun to the face from 10 feet away, just hide for 4 seconds and you’re back at 100%. Wolverine doesn’t heal that fast barring bad writing. (One time in the Civil War arc, some guy blew him up so hard he was just a few chunks of meat on an adamantium skeleton, and he healed back to his full self in just a few panels. That’s just hilariously bad writing. Another time he basically reincarnated himself from just a drop of blood, skeleton and all, which sounds like bad writing, until you know that his blood splashed onto an Infinity Stone level artifact. That’s better writing.)

But I digress. My point is the doctor is mostly in the story so I can beat up on the characters without the refrigerator logic of “hey why aren’t they covered in scars” (Old timers like Cyclops and Spider-Man should look like badly stitched quilts by now) or “he got shot in the shoulder a week ago and now he’s holding a guy over a ledge with that same arm, I call BS” (Something that is impossible for someone without super strength to do anyway no matter what condition their bodies are in, but that’s a rant for another time… No, actually I’ll rant about it now)

Ok, so the classic “hold a guy over a ledge for info/terror” pose, or for that matter just lifting someone up by one arm is totally impossible. I’m talking straight armed. If your arm was right in front of you like you grabbed their collar and pulled them in for a scowl, a strong person could probably one arm someone off the ground like that. I know, Batman and guys like that are the peak of human capability, but still, nuh uh. For those of you who don’t know (probably most of you, come to think of it) I was into amateur bodybuilding for about a decade. Not competitively, nothing like that, but when I went to the gym, I went with the purpose of building muscle. I had a day dedicated just to shoulders, cause… I don’t know, I wanted big shoulders, I don’t need a reason. My military barbell press got up to about 200-210 (pounds), or 80-85 with dumbells, but for lateral and front raises, I topped out at 35-40 lbs. I could hold that weight out for a second, maybe 2 if I had to, but that’s it, 40 lbs. Now, I didn’t get into bodbuilding till I was 30, so there are plenty of guys bigger and stronger than me, so maaaybe there are guys out there who could do twice that. Maybe. But that’s still not cracking 100 lbs. Even if someone could do 3x that, it’s still not “adult male thug” weight. I saw a cover where Catwoman was doing it once. I’m sorry, but just… no. Try holding a gallon of milk straight out in front of you, see how long you can keep it up. Now do that with 20 gallons, and you’re approaching the low end of thug weight.

Anyway. They have a super doc on the team so it wouldn’t really matter if Sydney blew a hamstring, so I cut that line. Jesus, I need to up my ADD meds or something.

Edit: Due to several comments, I have added a mini comic to include Bill Finger in the Bat-genesis fold. :)

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