Take it from Snee: Justice has a new s##tface

So, it turns out that there are costumed heroes roving the streets of Cincinnati. (Seriously, watch the video.)

Yeah, I was surprised, too. I thought Cincinnati burned down shortly after WKRP was canceled. But, no: Shadowhare, your friendly neighborhood guy-who’s-obsessed-with-Donnie-Darko-and-Watchmen, patrols the streets with his band of presumably twenty-something-year-old friends, talking to homeless people, annoying (yet, entertaining) cops and even communicating with other likeminded individuals online.

The first thing that came to mind was, “Where did I go after The Guys’ last get-together: The Absinthe-Minded Professors.” (We watched both versions while drinking absinthe and, after running out, then concocted our own “flubber.”)

No, I’m not Nightbunny. But The Guys fit the profile so much that perhaps we should fight crime, fueled by liquid courage. But, what would we look like?

Demon Rum

When Chugs Taylor was blinded by a combination of bad moonshine and wanton masturbation, he thought his life was over. Angry, he turned to was directed towards the bottle and drank himself into a coma.

In his coma, he was approached by the ghost of Blackbeard the Pirate, now a demon in Satan’s service. While he could not restore Chugs’ sight, he did give him a otherworldly rum bottle that, when he drinks from it, gives Chugs fantastic buccaneer powers:

• Sword Sight: The ability to find people, things and places by stabbing them blindly with his sword.
• Sea-leg Stagger: A method of walking blindly while closely avoiding danger.
• Parrotry: No, he doesn’t hunt with a parrot. But, he can impersonate any voice heard merely once.

The Rambler

Bryan McBournie was a young newspaper reporter, struggling to make it big. While covering a NASCAR event, he was caught in collision between Willie Barstow*, the world’s worst stock car driver, and the Keystone Light “refill” truck mid-field.

The resulting explosion bombarded McBournie’s body with Keystone’s secret ingredient, gamma radiation, which left him dazed but mysteriously unharmed.

The next day, he discovered that he could not stop talking. At first, he thought it was gibberish until he stunned onlookers with eerie accounts of their lives. Unable to stop the voice, he traveled the globe, rambling his discoveries to anyone with a camera, becoming YouTube’s first respected news anchor.

One fateful day, he brushed past a government agent in a sports bar and unearthed the world’s largest conspiracy: that everyone was trying to control his life.

McBournie now travels the world as The Rambler, trying to expose this conspiracy to anyone who will buy him a drink.

Karaoke Machine

Bryan Schools is your normal, everyday bartender by night. But, by other nights, he is legendary bar singing star Karaoke Machine!

Tired of listening to drunks butcher songs while not being drunk enough himself, Schools discovered a bricked-off room in his bar. Inside, he found empty kegs and old pinball machines. He jury-rigged these components into the Mark I Karaoke Machine and stunned the crowd with his rendition of “Save Tonight (And Buy Me A ####ing Drink).”

While he was cut off — from the microphone and any further drinks — he realized he had stumbled upon his true calling: building more advanced robot suits until he could win free drinks at karaoke events.**

BelligerANT

Rick Snee was an ordinary ant in Cape Canaveral, Florida, when his colony was harvested by a NASA scientist. He was sent to the space station Mir to test how ants tunnel in zero gravity while drunk.

Unbeknownst to the astronauts, a space-mad cosmonaut added his special blend of vodka and sunscreen to Astronant Snee’s feed mixture. Snee developed a resilience to high heat, which allowed him to survive when his module was jetisoned, burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. His 23 brothers and sisters perished.

The combination of high heat, vodka and Russian tobacco mutated him into a half-ant, half-belligerent drunk. By the time he landed in the Arizona desert, his heated molecules expanded, rendering him an entire three times his original size.

While he pines to return to space as a cosmonaut, he angrily spends his time in Alabama drinking, berating everyone and beating up anyone he considers a criminal.

The Drunk Tank

The mobile headquarters of The SuperGuys, they mostly drive it into buildings … to find evildoers …. That’s the ticket.

*Willie Barstow also emerged from that wreckage with marginally better hand-eye coordination. He blamed McBournie for the accident and used his abilities, and a later unrelated shark mutation, to become Pool Shark, nemesis to The Rambler.

**This was the original origin to Iron Man, but Marvel decided it would be better to not celebrate Tony Stark’s alcoholism.