I had intended to do a more extensive write-up to celebrate the month of May, but work and family commitments have prevented me putting out anything. Instead, I present for your consideration this very brief offering.
In Spider-Girl #15 we first meet Mister Abnormal, a silly villain with a malleable body able to stretch and shift in comedic fashion much like the DC Comics character Patrick O’Brian aka Plastic Man. Mister Abnormal’s origin even bears some similarities with Plastic Man’s, with both comedy characters gaining their abilities after been doused with unknown chemicals during acts of theft.
It gets better: Mister Abnormal encounters the veteran super hero Speedball (and later Spider-Girl) following an attempted robbery of a comic book shop. We learn that Mr. Abnormal is an obsessive collector who has been stealing action figures, rare toys, trading cards, beanie babies and, of course, comics. What comic collection was he attempting to complete before being so rudely interrupted by Speedball? Police Comics.
If you didn’t know, Police Comics was a comic anthology series published by Quality Comics between 1941 and 1953. Police Comics #1 saw the first appearance of none other than Plastic Man, who became one of Quality Comics most popular characters. Eventually, Quality Comics’ characters and trademarks would be bought by National Comics Publications, now known as DC Comics, who publish comics featuring Plastic Man alongside other DC heroes such as Batman and Superman to this day.
So now the mind-bending question: Does this mean that within the MC2 Universe the entirety of the DC Comics’ pantheon is merely a collection of fictional characters published in comic books?!
Until I stop stretching jokes to illogical extremes to raise existential questions about a fictional universe within another fictional universe, I remain
frogoat