Blogotional: Comic Art

Saturday, January 08, 2011

Comic Art

Okay, imagine with me for a minute that you are a maniacal evil genius bent on world domination. Where do you start? Laboratory? Search for super-powers? A Plan? No,no,no,no,no...

...You need henchmen! Lots of henchmen - I mean by the hundreds, if not thousands. Now bear in mind, you have not yet raised the capital to pay them, but we are talking world dominating crime here - who needs capital - they'll get it out of the back end of the deal.

When it comes to henchmen, you not only need lots of them, but you need them smart, I mean really smart. SO, you go out and hire yourself Advanced Idea Mechanics - A.I.M because basically that is what the group is - really smart henchmen for hire.

Now, then henchman business is very competitive, so you have to do something to make yourself standout. AIM, being mechanics have been, for decades now, trying to develop the ultimate weapon. That's going to set them apart from all those other hench-operations out there. Why mess with Hydra when you can come to AIM and get the ultimate weapon? Besides, AIM has those really cool bright yellow funnel hats - perfect for clandestine ops.

One problem though - the ultimate weapon you develop, well it's not an it, it's a he. (Hey you started this experiment before computers got really smart so you went biological for your control and intelligence functions.) And he, being a superbrain and all is just smart enough to take over your hench operation and try to turn it into just another world conquering group, ala the Nazis. Sounds like the perfect foil for the Nazi fighting Captain America in the post WWII age does it not? I thought so.

After decades in hiding AIM is making a bit of a comic come back now and I for one am glad to see it. Hoards of faceless minions are absolutely necessary for fine comic writing. I have no idea how they recruit or pay all these people, let alone how they find that many engineers interested in anything other than video games, let alone evil. And what self-respecting engineer wants to be evil anyway? (Well, in this economy I suppose it is a paycheck) But they do, and it's fun.