Category Archives: JokerFish

JokerFish #06: Time-Travelling Robotic Nano-Flea By Lantern Savage

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Imagine for a moment that you were bitten by a time-travelling robotic nano-flea that embued you with extraordinary abilities. I’ll give you a moment.

…got it? Okay.

So, given your strange new powers, would you step out on the streets to uphold the tenets of truth and justice? Would you cross swords with authority and concern yourself only with number one? Would you eat a bowl of cereal and go back to bed?

Ever since Sony Online Entertainment started releasing video footage of DC Universe Online in action, I’d been itching to start creating characters. The game could have played like a big flea-ravaged dog, and I still would have bought it just so I could mess with the character creator for 30 days.

See, the way I look at it is this: creating and playing a character on DC Universe Online is the closest you can possibly come to creating a character for the DC Universe proper (outside of writing and drawing your own fan fiction or, you know, actually working for DC Comics). Making my own little doppelganger and having him do battle with The Joker is the kind of thing I’d have dreamt about doing as a kid, except back in the 80’s the only choice I had was “Beast Man versus Bobby The Henchman” (10 points to anyone who recognizes those names).

However, this time around I knew I wouldn’t be making a virtual Lantern Savage straight away. If Lex Luthor sent an exobyte from the future to bite me on the butt so I could save the world from an impending Braniac invasion, I’d probably still try to get one more hour’s sleep in before getting up to trudge through waves of HIVE drones and Trigon’s minions. For me, creating a character for DCUO meant I would need to forge something new, something fresh, something original.

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JokerFish #05: The PhD And The Shiny Helmet

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Hi there Raging Bulleteers, and welcome back to a new edition of JokerFish.

“What’s JokerFish?” I hear you ask. I don’t blame you. Even if you’ve been around these parts for a while you may not remember what JokerFish was. I started this little blog about a year ago when I won a box of comics from DC colorist and friend of the show David Baron. My original intention was to review every book in the box, all dated about November ’09. Well… I reviewed about four books. I was really looking forward to taking a literary stroll across the DC universe, as I was following most of the books at the time, and I was keen to dip a toe into those titles that I’d neglected.

“Bwahaha! So you like to make plans, do you?” laughed Fate (the metaphorical kind, not the one with the PhD and the shiny helmet), as life proceeded to jump up and down all over my intentions. Without giving you a complete dissertation on the Lantern Savage Chronicles, I can tell you that basically my girlfriend moved to New Zealand from Las Vegas last November to live with me, and we’ve since been quite busy with the working and the living together and the blah blah blah. So now you know why there hasn’t been a JokerFish entry on this site since, oh, June 2009, whether that interests you in the slightest or not. Apologies to Sean and Jim and the three other people who were reading!

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JokerFish #04: Say “Kalamazoo” To Save The World

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I have a strange relationship with the supernatural side of the DC universe.

When I first ventured confidently into the world of comics half a decade ago, I probably would have told you that my favorite DC characters were Batman, Green Arrow, The Joker, Deathstroke, the Bat Family… the street-level characters. For me, there was something much more interesting about the idea of superheroes with semi-realistic and theoretically attainable powers. Overpowered characters like Superman or The Hulk never held much resonance with me; they could win any battle by smashing things, or solve mysteries just by looking through walls. Batman had to think, strategize, plot, discover and analyze. Bruce Wayne was human, and when I was a kid, the unwritten promise was that I could be Batman one day too if only I tried hard enough.

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JokerFish #03: Superpants And Batface

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I was listening to Episode 205, in which Sean and Jim had a lengthy discussion (Raging Bullets? Lengthy? Never!) about the upcoming limited issue, company-wide, epic crossover crisis event – Last Action Of The Supermen In The New Krypton War. Superman-related discussions on Raging Bullets are always interesting to me because I don’t pick up any Super books.

Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. I’ve been picking up Power Girl and Adventure Comics which are in the Super Family, but you won’t find any Man, Girl or Action in my comics pile. Nothing against the Boy In Blue – it’s not that I don’t like him, it’s just that I don’t like him as much as I like all these other great books I’m picking up. Some readers are Bat-People, and some are Super-People – I’m a Bat-Guy. It might have something to do with growing up in the late 80s and 90s with the Batman movies and shows, just as growing up in the 70s and early 80s must have influenced a lot of Superman fans. Even if you like both, I think even Sean and Jim could tell you whether they’d ultimately root for Bruce or Clark in a fight (though I’d argue that in a Batman vs. Superman battle situation, the smart choice for an onlooker is “to run like hell”).
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JokerFish: Plotlines, Story Twists and Whatnot

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Hey there, fellow Bulleteers… okay, I’m never calling us Bulleteers again. This is Richard, aka. Lantern Savage from the forums, aka. That Jerk Who Won The Character Impression Contest.

So I’m looking at this box of comics David Baron sent all the way here to New Zealand, and I’m feeling kinda guilty. There’s a lot of books here that I haven’t read, or hadn’t even thought about reading. One or two I didn’t even know existed. So hey, I thought, why not at least give back to the rest of the Bullets community by reviewing some of these books (while simultaneously hoping that no one thinks I’m trying to gloat about the awesomeness of this box!).

With that in mind… welcome to JokerFish™!

A quick look at my history in comics might help to explain any ridiculous/misguided/awesome opinions I express in the following reviews, so here goes…I’ve been a Batmaniac ever since I was about 5 or 6 (read: 1989), and I saw the first Tim Burton Batman movie. It didn’t, however, spur me on to a childhood of comic book reading. As a late-eighties kid in a mid-sized city in New Zealand, there weren’t a lot of comic book stores around. Even now, most magazine stores where I live will have maybe a handful of titles, but are usually happy to order whatever you’re looking for (for a price). There wasn’t a huge comic culture at school, though I remember X-Men and Wolverine being popular when I was at primary/grade school. Even so, my comic book knowledge initially came from cartoons, movies, video games and trading cards.

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