April Fool's Day Quiz

1. What world does Mr. Mxyzptlk come from?
A. Shrdlu.
B. Bgztl.
C. Gsptlnz.
D. Zrfff.

2. Cheeks the Toy Wonder was whose inanimate sidekick?
A. Ambush Bug.
B. Brother Power the Geek.
C. Ragman.
D. Scribbly.

3. Which of the following did Jimmy Olsen not become?
A. A stretchable superhero.
B. A giant half-man, half-turtle abomination.
C. A porcupine man.
D. A Kryptonian cyclops.

4. Who was the leader of the Inferior Five?
A. Tharok.
B. Dr. Light.
C. Plaid Lad.
D. Merryman.

5. What happens when Mr. Nebula comes to town?
A. He uses his awesome powers to terraform the planet into a garish wasteland reminiscent of Las Vegas covered with pink flamingoes.
B. He unleashes the inner clown of everyone in an one mile radius, except for those with superhuman willpower such as Batman and The Martian Manhunter, causing all sorts of humorous hijinks.
C. The laws of physics become optional.
D. He tries to eat the planet, but requires that the planet be covered in ketchup. The Justice League was often reduced to finding a way to destroy his extra-dimensional ketchup bottle.

6. What Superteam came from Earth C Minus?
A. The Zoo Crew.
B. Justa Lotta Animals.
C. The Inferior Five.
D. The Y Men.

7. How did Prez Rickard start his political career?
A. He was a teen pop star who decided to go into politics.
B. He fixed all of the thousands of public clocks in his hometown.
C. He ran on a platform of releasing one's inner bozo.
D. He baked the world's largest cake in honor of the Bicentennial.

8. How did Big Sir get his powered armor?
A. He invented it during one of his rare genius periods.
B. He was a janitor at Lexcorp who found the suit.
C. The Monitor sold a suit of armor to the Flash's Rogues Gallery who were trying to defeat a half-mad Flash with a totally mad villain.
D. He was Magnificus Sivana's college roommate. He was a very intelligent football star. Dr. Sivana was ashamed of his son's nobility and sent him a box full of nanotech items that would form an armored suit around the first person to open the package. The suit was designed to brainwash the wearer into hunting down and killing Captain Marvel. Magnificus angrily threw the present from his estranged father into the garbag, causing the package to rip. The nanotechs got loose and created a suit around the closest person, Joe Nelson, the future Big Sir. Because the suit was calibrated to Magnificus's brainwaves, Nelson lost his intelligence and is not totally fixated on evil and killing Captain Marvel.

9. How did G'Nort get a Green Lantern ring?
A. With great difficulty.
B. He was a Green Lantern from Captain Carrot's Universe who was pulled into the conventional DC Universe through one of the Scarlet Skier's space warps.
C. Guy Gardner hyper-evolved his pet dog into a semi-human and gifted him with a Green Lantern ring that draws power from his own both as a cruel parody of Green Lantern's giving a similar ring to Tom Kalamaku, and to prove that he had the sheer power to do it.
D. The Qwardians gave him a replica of a Green Lantern ring in an attempt to embarrass the Green Lantern Corps.

10. What was the initial reason for Tenzil Kem's bizarre behavior?
A. He never fully recovered from eating the Miracle Machine.
B. He was trying to convince his constituents who drafted him senator that he was unfit for office.
C. Complete terror. Tenzil soon discovered that he was out of his league teaming up with Mon El and Ultraboy and fighting such menaces as Pulsar Stargrave and Omega. His absurd behavior was his way of dealing with the stress. He protected the universe despite his fear and bit Pulsar Stargrave's nose off.
D. It was revealed in Legion of Superheroes Volume 4 Issue 29, that what seemed to be a minor incident, his eating something that disagreed with him, Dr. Gym'll's homemade chili in Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes Issue 219, actually killed him, and that a nearby Protean, a race of telepathic shapeshifters was so disturbed by Tenzil's psychic death scream that his mind became trapped in Tenzil's body. The Protean believed itself to be Tenzil Kem, but his subconscious knowledge of his true nature caused him to first resign from the Legion and later to rebel against his assumed role through increasingly absurd acts. Saturn Girl cured him of his problems in Volume 4, Issue 29 and Tenzil Proty ate a significant portion of Dr. Gym'll's comic collection.

11. What never failed to foil the villains' plots in the Bronze Age?
A. Hostess products.
B. Willy Wonka Candy.
C. Scooter's songs.
D. Angel O'Day in a bikini.

12. Who hosted the first issue of Plop?

A. Alfred E. Neuman.
B. Sergio Aragones.
C. Cain, Abel and Eve.
D. Captain Greedle and Boo-Ga!

Answers:

1. D. Shrdlu is the last name of Walt Kelly's Pogo character Etaion Shrdlu. By the way, etaion shrdlu are the ten most frequently used letters in the English language in their order of appearance. The next 16 are cmfgyp wbvkxj qz. Bgztl is the home dimension of the Legionnaire Apparition. Gsptlnz used to be Mr. Mxyzptlk's (my spell check is going to explode) girl-friend, but now, according to Morrison she's his quinto-partner. (I don't wanna know.)

2. A. Ambush Bug was the star of a post-modern humorous comic book from the '80's. He had a green costume, antennae and had the power to teleport. Cheeks was an inanimate doll that he declared his sidekick. Brother Power was another inanimate object, this one a mannequin who somehow came to life became a hippie and had adventures. In the '90's he became a nazi. Darn Vertigo. Scribbly is Sheldon Meyer's humorous boy reporter from the 40's.

3. D. This is what happens when Jimmy Olsen gets his own title.

4. D. Tharok was the leader of the Fatal Five. Dr. Light lead the Fearsome Five, which oddly enough has seven members in my copy of Who's Who in the DC Universe. So much confusion developed among the three groups that Tharok had to be banned from comics conventions because he kept snapping the necks of fans who wanted him to send a message to Awkwardman. Dr. Light just wept when people said that White Feather would make a better leader. The Salem Seven were enemies of the Fantastic Four, the Seven became Six when one was to be executed for refusing to kill her grandmother. They didn't have time to change their name because they all got killed in a battle with the Vision and Scarlet Witch later in the issue. The Scarlet Witch seemed to use the energy released by the deaths of the Salem's Seven and their allies to make herself pregnant. Her android husband, the Vision, was holding her very closely at the time. It turned out that the Scarlet Witch's children were really pieces of Mephisto's soul. If you think this is bad, wait until I explain the Matter Eater Lad question. Still with me? Good. Plaid Lad was an unsuccessful Legion applicant who had the power to change solid colors to plaids.

5. A. Yeah, like an extra-dimensional ketchup bottle is any sillier than a berserk cosmic interior decorator.

6. B. Trick question! The Zoo Crew comes from Earth C. Captain Carrot draws the comic book Justa Lotta Animals in his secret identity R. Rodney Rabbit. However, just as The Justice Society were comic book characters on Earth 1, Captain Carrot discovered that his creations were living beings in a dimension of their own, dubbed Earth C-. By the way, Captain Carrot was the leader of the Zoo Crew, a band of cartoonish anthropomorphic animals, who had their own comic book in the mid-80's. The Inferior Five was a parody super team from Earth 12.

7. B. Marvel's Nebulon was an alien who created a religion that unleashed one's inner bozo. He almost had the entire planet under his control when Dr. Strange reawakened the wills of everyone on earth. The Defenders were a bit on the strange side in the '70's.

8. C. The pre-Crisis Dr. Sivana had four children. The oldest ones, Magnificus and Beautia, were attractive and noble. His two younger children, Sivana Jr. and Georgia resembled their father physically and morally except they had hair. I don't know if any of them exist in current continuity, although one of his children became an astronaut.

9. D. The Silver Age Green Lantern gave a duplicate ring to Tom Kalamaku so he could serve as a decoy during Green Lantern's first encounter with Hector Hammond. Hector Hammond stole Tom's ring and used it to devolve him into a chimpanzee. Hal also gave Wally West a duplicate ring in Mark Waid's Brave and the Bold miniseries.

10. B. The Miracle Machine was a gift from the Controllers. It allowed one's thoughts to become reality. After Brainiac 5 suffered a nervous breakdown he used it to create the insanely powerful Omega. Matter Eater Lad saved the universe by eating Omega's powersource, the Miracle Machine. He was driven so insane by the experience that his eyes were replaced by fields of stars. Now that's insane.

D is a parody of what happened to Garth Ranz. Lightning Lad was killed by Zaryon the Conqueror sometime in the 60's. His traumatized teammates searched the universe for a means of discovering how to bring him back to life. They discovered channeling the energy of a lightning bolt through their body into him would do the job. This process would kill, or for the invulnerable Legionaires, render permanently comatose, the person who served as a channel. All of the Legionaires present stood around Lightning Lad's transparent coffin (creepy) holding lightning rods that were attached by wires to Lightning Lad. I'm no electrician, but this set up should have fried all of the Legionaires in attendance. Fortunately only Saturn Girl got blasted. Even more fortunately Saturn Girl was impersonated by Chameleon Boy's semi-sentient telepathic shape changing pet Proty. Most fortunately of all, Chameleon Boy later got a new Protean as pet who served with distinction in the Legion of Super Pets and later as the Legion's official photographer. Fast forward about 25 years. It was revealed that the semi-sentient telepathic shape changer's mind had been living inside Garth Ranz's body all that time. ( Super creepy.) He had the presence of mind when he first transferred into his master's friend's cold corpse (Garth had been hit by a freeze ray) to pretend that he was Garth, and even faked sorrow for Saturn Girl's apparent death. My reaction would be "Help I'm trapped inside a zombie! " (Fortunately, a search on Hotbot indicates that I'm the only person to ever post that phrase onto the Internet, which shows that our society hasn't gone completely over the edge.) He continued the charade in front of his teammates, including his telepathic wife who performed at least one deep mindscan on him, for years, until he admitted the truth to his sister, Ayla, who deep down had always really known. And you thought the Spiderclone was a scandal.

11. A. Sing Along with Scooter was a DC book that concerned a very popular young singing sensation. Angel O'Day was half of the detective team Angel and the Ape.

12. C. Plop was DC's first humor comic which is why DC reprinted Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad, a humor comic first printed 21 years before Plop ever appeared. Raargh! Head hurt. Cain Abel and Eve were all hosts of DC's horror comics. They later appeared in the second issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman "Imperfect Hosts. " Sergio Aragones provided much of the artwork for the book and he has appeared in some of his books such as Sergio Aragones destroys the DC Universe and the first issue of Groo the Wanderer published by Pacific Comics. Captain Greedle and Booga appeared in "What's New" a comic strip by Phil Foglio that appeared in Dragon Magazine #75. (Gee a comics geek and a Dungeons and Dragons player. No wonder why I'm single.) That particular comic was a parody of superheroes. The duo appeared in one panel. Captain Greedle is a giant brown eye with arms, legs and a green cape who proudly declares that his mission is to fight evil. Boo-Ga! Is a plucked headless chicken holding a sword aloft and proudly proclaiming Boo-Ga! (By the way, I performed a search on Hotbot for the phrase boo-ga and found over 200 matches. I take back my optimism concerning the state of the republic).

Speaking of websearches I would like to thank the tongue in cheek comics fan page Gone and Forgotten for information concerning Prez Rickard, and Jeanne Burch's Marvel Fansite Bring on the Bad Guys page for information concerning Nebulon. Sean McQuaid wrote the text for that particular article. I would also like to thank Kent Orlando for many hours of enjoyment spent reading about the absurdities of the comics of the Silver Age on his Cheeks the Toy Wonder site. Sadly, that site has gone the way of the 40 cent comic.

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