Could this be the dumbest comic book EVER?

THE WORLD'S DUMBEST COMIC BOOK
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Could this be the dumbest comic book EVER?

Quite possibly... in fact, I'm almost sure of it.

Well, as I sit here at my friend's house in his bathroom desperately looking for some reading material, what do I find but a comic book on the shelf by the toilet. And not just ANY comic book, oh no! This could actually be considered to be the world's dumbest concept for a comic book or a super hero. Yes, here I have in my hands a copy of MARVEL COMICS "SUPERPRO", Issue #1, circa 1991, and as I flip through it, I'm wondering... WTF?! were these people thinking (or smoking or drinking) to come up with a superpower endowed crime fighting NFL football player? I mean, it sounds pretty damn pathetic, doesn't it?

It gets worse.

Much, much worse...

SUPERPRO goes by the name of Phil Kenneth Grayfield. Well, at least it sounds ordinary if not a bit, well, dull. Phil hurts his knee and is out for a season which only sets up the story for a later crippling knee injury and to move our character to the city where the story will take place. Later, he goes out to tryouts with the Chicago Bears, ends up rescuing a small token black boy from falling off the bleachers, and tears his knee again for the last time. After a long bitter recovery, he is approached by some famous announcers who have heard how he saved the token black child from certain death and as such, they think he'll make a pretty good sports announcer.

Now the logic of doing one thing and then being considered to be an excellent announcer eludes me, but I guess the logic has to work for this comic to work. The best line here is from his friend (who looks like a black version of Peter Parker's (Spiderman) boss, Jonah Jameson, now doesn't he?) who asks probably the one question that would sink this plot quicker than the Lusitania:

"Wait, I don't get it -- " (and sadly the reader doesn't either) "--you messed up your knee so bad that you couldn't play ball again -- but it's okay for you to put on a super suit and fight crime?"

Exactly the question I wanted to ask and which, if you had the IQ of the average rectum bound hamster, is the exact same question you would be asking the writers of this wretched piece of garbage.

Phil becomes a sports commentator since he can't ever play football again due to his knee (but, as we'll see, that won't stop him from fighting crime in much rougher ordeals than the NFL could ever throw at him...). Then Phil gets 'THE' break of his sports reporting career (he has to otherwise this story wouldn't go anywhere, see...?). Phil gets a chance to interview Rudy Custer who is the "Howard Hughes of NFL memorabilia". That is pretty damn scary to think that someone has the world's largest collection of NFL crap and is hiding in seculusion where no one else will find them. Like someone would want to find them and steal their NFL crap... but, wait, I'm giving away part of this gripping plot, so I'll just slow down a bit.

No one has ever done an interview with Custer, no one knows where he lives, etc. (mighty convenient...). While Phil and Custer are doing the interview, Custer shows Phil the 'future football suit' which he calls the "SUPERPRO Uniform". The SUPERPRO Uniform is made out of

"... fiberglass and plastic alloys. Would've been the safest and most durable uniform ever made. Bullets bounce off the sucker, fer cryin' out loud!"

Well, fer cryin' out loud. You don't say! Can you imagine someone inventing a bullet proof football uniform? What possibly could be the reason behind such an invention? And if the inventor produced this uniform just for protection from other large men beating the crap out of you over a ball, then why would he test it out by firing bullets at it? Are bullets part of the NFL plays? I don't think so but maybe if machineguns and handgrenades were added to pro-football, it might be just interesting enough to watch, at least for a little while. That, folks, is really, really lame scripting. And the fact that the SUPERPRO suit was invented back in the '70s and has to be 'individually molded' to each player is also really, really far fetched.

Remember these important facts about the SUPERPRO Uniform; there is only one suit in existence and that EACH suit has to be INDIVIDUALLY MOLDED to the player. That means that, according to logic, not just anyone can wear the SUPERPRO Uniform, but only the person who the uniform was originally molded for. This means that if Brett Favre had one of these, that Jerry Rice couldn't walk in to the locker room and put Favre's uniform on because it wouldn't fit him. This logic becomes important later on, trust me...

Well, get this. The formula to make the uniform is VERY expensive, so each uniform would cost like $5,000,000 (or about a quarter of one of today's football player's typical salary).

"Phew! So each team would have ended up spending a fortune on uniforms alone, right? What a shame..."

Yeah. A real frigging tragedy there, Phil. If the NFL had bought each player one of these uniforms, then they would never have been able to spend the millions that they do on player salaries. What a shame... A bunch of grown guys in million dollar uniforms playing a childhood game for a living and getting paid a couple of thousand dollars a year. We share your tears, Phil.

And you would have to think, that a suit like this might not be worth much to the NFL (which is all about money anyway), but don't you think that the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT or UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES would be interested in this type of material and suit? I think so. Hell, if the NFL won't buy it, Uncle Sam will! I guess though that if you spend your fortune making 'the ultimate football uniform' and your life collecting NFL crap and hiding it away, you aren't the sharpest tool in the shed, now are you?

Shiii...

Well, about this time some token goons bust into Custer's warehouse intent on ... what? You guessed it! Stealing the priceless NFL memorabilia! And Phil led these goons right to Custer's secret warehouse... What was Phil thinking? Oh, Phil! You're such an idiot! You get an interview with the 'Howard Hughes of NFL crap' who no one has seen in years and owns all the really good NFL crap that is worth a lot of money and you don't check to see if you were followed or not? Oh, wait, he's an ex-football player. He doesn't have much to think with anyway, so... And if this guy has all of this money and time, and wants to live alone, why doesn't he have elaborate security systems and his own token hired guards?

It makes zero sense.

So the token goons (who are here ONLY to advance the super weak plot along at a halfway marginal pace) tie Phil up with old NFL movie reel tape (not kidding), take Custer with them, load up a bunch of the pricey NFL collection (which is only worth something I suppose to Wafflehouse waitresses, truck drivers, or off shore workers, which aren't, by their very nature, going to have the money it would take to buy this stuff from these goons). And folks, really... since when did NFL memorabilia become 'rare' and a 'valuable art treasure'? The plot stretches pretty thin in places. Oh! Back to Phil's predicament!

Phil (our hero, remember) is now tied up on the floor with old reel to reel movie film as his bindings. The goons throw gas all over the place and set it on fire. Phil is being burned alive, he struggles mightily, kicks down the container of the last of the experimental plastic which is burning hot and flows over him. Then the overhead sprinkler system kicks on, and

" ... I was drenched in chemical foam, gasoline, plastics, and chemicals from the old films..."

Now that is pretty far fetched. Figure this out for me folks. These token goons break in, take Custer (the owner of all of the NFL crap) but leave his crap behind. Then they set fire to all of his crap, they leave behind a $5,000,000 prototype one of a kind suit of football armor, and ... It just gets all too much and too re-damn-diculous. If you are a thief, and you break into a place, you are going to steal stuff, not torch up the valuable stuff! But these goons take the owner, set fire to all of the NFL crap, and then set fire to Phil because they don't want any witnesses. Hello? What do you call Custer, the super collector and inventor of the SUPERPRO Uniform? He's a witness! And if you burn his stuff and kidnap him, what are you going to do? Demand a ransom? You just burned up his collection and all his valuable stuff! Logic would say that you stole the merchandise or at least the suit and then DEMAND a RANSOM for the return of the material FROM CUSTER. This just goes to show that these really are token goons and simply there merely to advance this abysmal plot along. Meanwhile, back to all the valuable burning NFL merchandise and our hero stuck in the middle...

So, our hero discovers that when you mix fire retardant chemicals with special plastics with chemicals from the old films and then you set it all on fire and sit inside the fire, you turn into a NFL superhero. Right?

Right...

Please don't try this at home kids because if you do, you'll only end up in a Shriner's Burn Center for Children for most of the formative years of your life getting skin grafts and being visited by old men dressed up in clown suits with really big shoes.

Passing to the outside, we see that Custer had a WHOLE house worth of stuff, several levels, and what appeared to be some kind of amateur science lab where he cooked up experimental plastics of which he holds several patents, etc. So, the house blows up as the van speeds away. A mini-van? They goons brought a mini-van to load up a bunch of priceless NFL merchandise from a multi-story house? Right. Four to six people and a victim in a mini-van leaves plenty of room to haul loot. They don't even have a U-Haul trailer attached!

So what did these token goons steal? Nothing that I can tell, and we don't have any scene of Custer and Phil unloading the plunder and returning it to its rightful place in the halls of NFL glory or helping to put out the fires. Maybe they could still salvage some of the stuff back in there! Token characters. There is simply no excuse for using token characters in a story unless you don't have any writing skills to speak of and your plot is worthless.

Now, here I have to point out two major things that make this a dumb story (besides the obvious idea of using a NFL player as a 'superhero', a rather limited genre for adventure if ever there was one...).

1) Custer says that the SUPERPRO Uniform "... has to be individually molded on a per-player basis." Says so right there in the story, look at the captioning above, with the heavy emphasis on the word "individually". What this means is that even if Phil survives the fire ("caught up in the history of the game." Bwahahahaha! Such irony! It drippeth in this plot, verily it doth!), there is NO way he can use the SUPERPRO Uniform because it would have to be custom fitted to him (a new uniform at that) and he's just had the last of the experimental chemicals splashed all over him. Logic says this is just not going to pan out. "Has to be individually (note that this word is in heavy bold) molded on a per player basis." as stated by Custer himself. What this means is that the odds that Phil could just take this prototype suit, put it on, and that it would FIT are pretty low. But then, that would stop this plot in its tracks and we can't have that. Oh no! This out of control brain robbing literary tumor has to keep rolling along, and it will simply ignore any and all logic speed bumps along the way to its excruciating ending.

Well, Phil goes over to the still intact SUPERPRO UNIFORM(tm) that is in the glass case and amazingly, it FITS HIM! Now, didn't Custer, the inventor, say that every uniform had to be custom fit to the player? And he had a machine that would 'spray' on the uniform to each player, well, guess what? That's right! Phil just puts on the prototype uniform and it fits perfectly (see illustration above).

2) Custer says that the SUPERPRO Uniform cost him $5 million dollars to make. Now don't you think that something as lightweight as a uniform that was worth at minimum $5 million dollars would be the FIRST thing that the goons break the glass and take?! NO! They don't even take rare footage on reel (using it to tie up our hero). So what do they take? Darn if I can tell. You never really see them loading anything up, giving further proof that these guys are just token goons used to advance the story. If they were smart goons, and had taken the SUPERPRO Uniform, then our hero would have had to run down the hill naked with only a football helmet on and that would have made a very poor beginning to an epic superhero tale, now wouldn't it. A humorous beginning, but a poor one nonetheless. Logic would say that since Phil was drenched in the last of the experimental plastics, that there was no more material for a uniform, and that since each uniform had to be individually molded to each player, that Phil couldn't just grab up any uniform and wear it. But remember, this Marvel masterpiece must roll along at all costs, damn the logic! Full speed ahead!

So Phil dons the helmet and proceeds to be able to outrun a speeding van full of token goons down a mountain and kick all of their asses all the while regretting how he's acting. And notice that he now has superpowers of incredible strength and speed! Man, those chemicals work fast when mixed in conjunction with each other! That is just the good old Marvel cheese-whiz working overtime. Phil starts kicking asses and taking names and saying that he's sorry about how he's acting towards these cretins... What, is there some guy in a white and black striped shirt that is going to blow a whistle or throw a yellow flag on the play? I think not... but if there was, it would have happened about page two of this awful book and the game would have been called off due to technical ignorance.

And after Phil rescues Custer, why doesn't Custer ask him to take his damn prototype suit off and give it back to its rightful owner? I mean, it cost Custer $5,000,000, and is probably the last piece of NFL crap left from his collection. What does Phil do? He steals the suit! That's right, Mr. Crimefighter never gives the suit back to Custer! He just takes it and starts off on his crime fighting crusade. Some hero. Thief! And we never see Custer again, who, in reality, was what we would call a 'token inventor', yet another plot moving device.

Well, at least Phil didn't obtain his super powers by being bit by a irradiated spider who had made a home in a NFL regulation football that had been itself subjected to massive doses of what would normally be lethal radiation from a toxic waste spill that seeped from the underground storage containment facility, through the ground, and into the locker room through cracks in the foundation of the stadium. Wait! My God, I've just given Marvel the basis for a super-nemesis to face SUPERPRO. I better shut up before those guys at Marvel Comics take me seriously and pen out another piece of inexcusable excrement like this one.

Sigh.

The rest of the comic book is a ultra-right wing do-goody tale of 'don't take drugs, kids' heavy handed moralistic load of crap served up under the disguise of SUPERPRO having to use his investigative reporter instincts (remember, he's both an ex-football player AND a famous reporter) to track down... are you ready for this, can you see this coming?

Illegal steroid manufacturers.

That's right! Illegal and dangerous steroid manufacturing rings. Who would have ever suspected that a sports superhero would do battle with steroid manufacturers? Man, the creators of this book just really threw away all the stereotypes and started with a fresh piece of paper on this one, didn't they folks?

Well, these steroids are bad news. Seriously bad news, and these experimental drugs are the kind that make you really buff up, like about 5x the regular size of any normal human. Not like anyone would look at someone with two foot around arm muscles and go "I wonder if that's normal..." Well, one scene has SUPERPRO going after a guy who's been abusing these steroids pretty heavily, Carl, and he looks like a cross between a flesh colored Incredible Hulk and Buzzcut from Beavis and Butthead. He's just popped some pills and shot up with a injection in the hotel room and then he starts foaming at the mouth, making unintelligible sounds, and his muscles get so big so fast that all of his clothes rip off except for part of his pants which are reduced to a near perfect loin cloth in that ever so believable Marvel superhero magical cheesy kind of way.

Oh, yeah, and SUPERPRO goes and saves a token white boy from ... (again) falling to his death. What is it with all of these kids falling off of high places and SUPERPRO just being around in the nick of time to catch them? I think someone is really pushing these kids from behind and then filming the rescue for some crucial PR boost to SUPERPRO's rep. If this comic had a play book, it would be a one-pager that's for sure.

This is a guy who took too much steroids. Let that be a lesson to you kids out there!

DON'T DO DRUGS !
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If you do steroids, you'll end up twenty feet tall weighing 2000 pounds and
slobbering all over yourself and your tee-tee thingy will get very, very tiny.

And SUPERPRO has some witty crime fighting repertoire! He calls every enemy he goes after "Rookie" like it is some great and hard insult. Listen to how he fights crime and uses football based anecdotes to spice up his action.

Question: "Who does this guy think he is, "Super Football Man"? - Token Goon #1

Most logical reader answer: "YES!!!!"

Well, OK. No. I guess that would have been too obvious of a title for this piece of bathroom only cheese reading. But that does pretty much describe the plot perfectly. "Super Football Man." Listen to the banter that SUPERPRO uses:

"Close, "Einstein", but you missed the first-down marker by the length of a chain..."

... but you missed the first-down marker by the length of a chain...?! WTF? Like we measure life in football field marking equipment. What kind of crime fighting talk is THAT? I guess this is just the NFL / SUPERPRO crime fighting way of really saying "Close, but no cigar, Mr. criminal smarty britches." I guess only a NFL fanatic would really talk like that... or enjoy this kind of comic book. Maybe the surplus books were handed out as part of a program somewhere. Buy a program, find SUPERPRO issue #1 in the middle. Something to keep the kids from asking dumb questions like "Why are grown men acting like that, daddy?"

"You can call this book SUPERLAME!" Sorry. Uh... Oh, look! He tackled a pair of goons! What an incredible super power he possesses! The ability to tackle bad guys. Who would have thought that from a super hero who used to be a football player? Really, we didn't see THAT coming at all. Fooled us, yes, you guys really did. Not.

I love it when the cop says "In English, please..." meaning "What the HELL are you talking about, moron!?"

Notice SUPERPRO's parting witty comment of

"...but this little play from scrimmage didn't gain me much yardage so ... arrivederci!"

Which really means that "my plan didn't go exactly like I wanted it to and I'm really just a rookie at this crime fighting stuff so I'm outta here." I thought I would translate that for you non-NFL sheep out there who might not understand NFLese or speak the language of football, which generally is little more than grunts and growls and some numbers being shouted out; like "Huunh! Hunh! Uhnnh! Forty two! Sixty-Nine! Hut! Hut! Hut! Huuuhh! Nice ass there, Jones. Have you been working out. Those pads and pants really accenuate the curves of your manly buttocks. Now pass me the ball, you big steroid riddled stud you, and let's win one for the coach! Hut! Hut! Hut!"

"...but this little play from scrimmage didn't gain me much yardage so ... arrivederci!"

Now, folks, that is wit under pressure! Dim wit under pressure, but wit nonetheless and with that, I have to throw one of those little yellow flags on the whole play that is this wretched waste of paper and I assign SUPERPRO a fifteen yard penalty for being lame. The only thing missing is that SUPERPRO doesn't drive a crime fighting vehicle shaped like a NFL regulation football... or that he throws some sort of football like Batman uses his batarang ... or that his secret crime fighting headquarters looks like a locker room and is located under the bleachers in some famous football park with lockers that fold out into computer consoles, etc. Hell, why doesn't he just put a big rubber band between the goal posts and use it to launch himself like a big slingshot across town at wherever a crime is being committed?

Speaking of crime fighting vehicles... It looks like he drives a mid-'80's Plymouth Duster! Bwahahahahaha! Now THERE'S a crime fighting vehicle if ever there was one! Don't people look at him weird when he's driving a subcompact MOPAR wearing that getup? And if you notice, he's not actually a member or player of the NFL, he's just wearing a NFL logo'ed suit! He's not on any team at all! He's a private crime fighter, a sports reporter wearing an NFL suit and going around tackling bad guys while wearing a NFL logo'ed suit and calling himself "SUPERPRO". I guess "Super Football Man" would have been a lame name, a humorous, truthful name, but a lame one nonetheless. So that means that he's not really acting on behalf of the NFL. He's just like all those other posers who wear team colors and numbers and walk around trying to pretend they are something that they are not, only this guy has super powers, like the power to tackle really hard.

Man! Even for bathroom reading, this is probably more likely to cause constipation (mental and intestinal) than to work to pass the time and other stuff as well. A football superhero? An ex-football player with superhero powers that he got because he was exposed to burning NFL memorabilia? That is so frigging lame. I'm actually dumber for having ever read this...

However, all is not lost. I did find a good use for the paper that this book was printed on. At least no one else will be reading this copy... If you wad up each page and work it for a little while, it actually becomes somewhat soft to the touch.

About the best advice this book can convey to the young reader.

Remember: DON'T DO DRUGS!

If you do drugs, then people like Marvel will just put out
more touchy-feely do-goody crap like this
which is the real crime here, folks.

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