A fragment of something conjured while waking this morning:
Picture the lair of a Supervillain. It might be a Volcano hideout, with technology integrated into rock face, and big sweeping steel ramps, or perhaps a satellite, orbiting steel and white in space. There, an intrepid Do-Gooder confronts a droll and arch Villian, playing his stereotype up to a campy hilt, cape and all.
"So where did you get all of these," our Hero asked, stalling for time, while gesturing across the room's museum worthy collection of weapons of all shape, size, and era, no two alike. "Arms dealers?"
"No, they're actually all my own designs, thank you very much," our Villain purred, stroking the pliant white cat in his lap.
With an unbelieving smirk, our Hero scoffed. "I find that hard to believe."
"No, it's true," sighed the Evil-Doer, as he slouched and then looked up in resigned annoyance, breaking character to share something personal. "It's just that I had a nephew who wanted to be a Graphic Designer. He thought he could be an Industrial one, too, so everything had to look different. He had a phase with retro-Fifties, and fins on everything. Then a minimalist streak that made half my bombs all look like iPads. Then, he'd fritter a week away on logos and user's manuals and the most nonsensical info graphics you ever saw..." the villain trailed off, looking aside.
"It's a shame, really," he sighed. "We had a surveillance vehicle that he decided to make look like a caterer's van. He used Papyrus all over it and, well, you can imagine. Three different caterers tried suing us for infringing on their 'image'." Here there were fingerquotes and a loud "HA! As if you could tell them apart."
"Another drove off with the damn thing-by honest mistake-and wound up blowing herself up. Tsk. Literal and figurative Ladyfingers everywhere. I wanted a Zeppelin with lasers and a nice, Deco look, but he'd seen something online about disguising products... Anyhow, I had to take poor Jerry and banish him to the Arctic hideout. Poor thing lost his mind from guilt and shame, and now I have him re-doing all my files with a label maker that only prints in Comic Sans... My sister refuses to let it go. Every holiday, the same thing 'You could have had him just do some business cards, but noooo, Mister Big Shot wants to go fancy...'"
Our Hero looked down, shaking his head, genuinely moved by the aesthetic tragedy of it all. A Zeppelin with lasers would've been damned cool to fight it out on, even if it had been done before.
"Anyhow," the Villain said, hoisting up from behind his desk a ridiculously enormous death-ray, clearly embellished to impress after Jerry'd read too many 90's Liefeld comics, "Where were we?"
Ha!!
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