Monday, March 2, 2009

The Nightwing Doctrine in what regard, Charlie?

So--Outsiders, yeah? Borrowed a couple of the trades and so far it's a mildly horrible book. Thoroughly approve of gorillas and the disembodied brains that love them, or vice versa, but the book conveys less of an edgy-superheroes-doing-edgy-things-that-regular-superheroes-can't-do-because-they're-not-edgy feel, more of a I-watch-Fox-TV-shows-while-high-on-Percocet feel. As amusing as it is to watch superheroes go 24 on, er, regular human beings. (See Judd Winick et al., Outsiders: The Good Fight 30-36 (2006).) But he knows where the nukes sarin canisters are, guys! And there's only five minutes an indeterminate amount of time left until they blow somebody maybe decides they should do something putting the plan into place to use them! Ooh, ooh! Can Metamorpho turn into a waterboard?

Here's the thing--say you have superpowers. Heck, say you have an entire team of superpower types, and a high tech flying ship that can do all kinds of neat computery things, and so on, and so forth--if your first and only answer to the question "Where would someone put a not-insignificant storage facility containing a crapload of sarin, somewhere in an African nation of modest size?" is "Let's grab an assistant in the office of political affairs, put on our best camo and gimp hoods, then systematically start breaking his hands and other assorted parts of his anatomy until he cracks," you are a) a fucking lazy moron, and b) in the wrong business entirely.

Let's rehash, shall we?
You: superpowers, magic soul-eating sword, giant flying ship full of fancy computers and stuff. Also, kryptonite in a box. Just in case.
Them: desktop PCs and paper. Snazzy berets.
Something about that match-up suggests that it is not, in fact, terribly hard to find out where the sarin is, as long as you don't mind having Metamorpho breeze in through a window or something and maybe pry open a file cabinet. Or, y'know, maybe you have to hack into some government files by punching in the president's birthday as a password. Maybe you might even try, um, scanning any large semi-demi-military-looking bases that happen to be sitting around in the open. Because that's where the sarin is, you know. Inside a large military-looking base. Which is sitting out in the open.

The best part is that Thunder is like, hey, um, isn't this kind of torture and kind of wrong? but Nightwing slaps her upside the head with his Jack Bauer logic (Big picture! It's all your fault! Big picture!) and then they find the sarin, sitting around, not being used, not being about to be used, and Thunder sadly admits Nightwing was right after all big picture. Terrible.

(And the less said about the Outsiders' concept of regime change, the better:
Step 1: put the current president on a desert island.
Step 2: tell the deputy minister he's in charge and he should be really nice to people. Because generally, that's all it ever takes to assert control of a destabilized nation dominated by the military and plagued by an army of rogue child soldiers.)