Spinnerette/Headscratchers

• If Superheroes identity is secret then how can a Company, a comic company for that matter, can sue for copyright infringement? I mean, even with the true incorporation of Superheroes in society (which mean there must be some sort of regulation, a form of police or control, specialized insurance agencies, a professional line of Superheroes in government, in military, international associations, an amend of laws (which opens another can of Fridge Logic) which so far had not shown or hinted) how can you demand a person who, by its very profession must mantain secrecy, for copying a look? And if it not secret, how can they defend themselves from criminal or supervillian counterattack? Like Supervenus, who was sued and lost, by DC for copyright infrigment for Supergirl costume and became Supermilf? How does that even work. And if its so useless, why go with the superhero secret identity/alter ego charade?
  • It's obvious: they sue the "Hero" but not the "Secret Identity". It's much the same way how a company can be sued, rather than its majority shareholder(s), in real life; a company, in the eyes of the law, is seen as separate to the people who own it.
  • Hell, just ask Ultimate Marvel for the answers. Giant Man couldn't use his powers while he was with the Defenders because it would be considered as giving away a trade secret (the Giant Man serum).
  • Yeah, there are some examples in another story but the thing is... How? How do you sue to the point of losing a house a person whose very identity is secret? A vaporware who by very definition is A) False-B) A misdirection. To whom you sue? how you force the person to present and managed to remove money and propriety? They are 'vigilantes A.K.A: people who's very identity and whereabouts are hidden to all others for obvious reason. And sue the super heroe?... Okay, you sued the hero, then what? Force the person to reveal their secret identity and then you get the money? And if it so easy, why had a secret Identity in the first place? It's obvious it can’t stop a comic company, what hope it had against the mob? The Villains? The cabals and all your enemies? Why bother with the secret Identity/vigilantism when you can be brought down so easy as a copyright infringement? How can be a comparison in Real life that could validate that?
    • Same way as mentioned above how one can sue a company separately from the actual people involved. In the eyes of the law, a company is a legal entity. Same for super heroes; the superheroic identity is treated differently and distinctly from the civil identity. As for how things can get paid, it may very well be paid through some sort of private escrow service or through other indirect means. Heck, one could have another superhero act as a sort of custodian - handling and being responsible for such dues. More than likely, it's part of the system that allows for such vigilante's to have civil rights and duties (such as testifying in court). And yes, a superhero could probably 'skip bail' effectively and not pay any fines (and it probably does happen), and as in real life, companies probably have budgeted money for non-paying suits (ie company knows that they will get sued, rightly or not, during the year and so put aside money specifically to handle or cover these costs).
  • It's possible that they have no real way of enforcing it. Superheroes are notoriously just. They'd most likely obey a law even if it is unenforceable.

• If Heather posesses Superstrength, enough agility and the mental dexterity to control perfectly six arms doing different actions simultaneously it should have beaten the mook straight down, fight knowledge or not fight knowledge. One fact that seems to be forgotten about Superstrength is that it need equal amount of toughness to work or it would be like hitting with enough force to destroy a wall with a bat made of crystal. And this is not only in its hand, for if she can hold with her Superstrength obscene amount weight it mean toughness in shoulder, neck, stomach, thighs, knees etc... making her literally a "walking tank" (which is why Superstrength by robotic extremities is plain impossible in real life - read Cracked.com's "8 Fictional Weapons That Are Too Dangerous to Actually Use" for more) meaning that the Mook attacks should have been completely useless. A bear for example know nothing about fighting style, combat pose, economic of movement or energy but nobody would argue that 9 out of 10 times it would rip apart a Martial Master in real life or like trying to dislocate the Terminator shoulder Which is why the fight of Nick Fury vs Stonewall is just pure bullshit
  • You can give a baby the strength to crush a planet, but it would still have the mind of a baby. Being it her first time actually fighting, especially a mugger who fights back would scare her. She only had her powers for what, a couple days max? While she's been "herself" all her life. At the time, she still has her meek, geeky girl mindset. Besides, you can toughen a person to physical peaks, it doesn't mean the person can't be bruised or cut or scraped. Where do you think injuries from professional fighting matches come from?
    • Let's go with the mentality solution, which leave behind the fact that she had in the moment the mentality of a Superhero, in other words the confidence to win and to "fight the bad guys" and with her super reflexes and agility would make a huge difference (also if you give a baby the strenght of a planet it would be easier for him/her to kill people/things for lack of control and collateral damage) but the toughen part is just plain wrong. Yes, if you put a professional fighting another professional of course its gonna get hurt, in example like mecha maid against spinnerette, but in this case was a Mugger. A normal Mugger. Going with your analogy it would be like a baby (or a five year old) hitting a person with the complexion of Bruce Lee or more likely, a statue. If you are strong enough to break concrete, bend reinforced metal or use your body to pulverize walls a kinfe or a bullet would not hurt you alot or even considerable. Probably barely scratching you. This is a form of Reality Is Unrealistic in tends of resistance to damage and pounds/inch in effect. Hell, she could have just slapped the idiot and would have been strong and fast enough to take him down (and probably destroy his jaw or more likely break his neck).
    • She'd been a "superhero" for all of about 20 minutes. That's not really enough time to gain confidence in your abilities. You're being way to presumptive about what someone is capable of the first time they're in a fight. The vast, vast majority of people will just freeze up when they first get into a fight, even if they're huge and can bench press a truck.
      At this point, she's not a superhero. She's a ditzy blonde in a costume that thinks she's a superhero, the same way a 9-year-old thinks he's a ninja turtle on Halloween.
  • That is a very logical and well thought argument... the thing is, she has shown advanced reflexes, increased strength and above human agility and coordination. And the enemy was a normal mook. I would have understood if it was some kind of warrior, a dangerous criminal or Grand Martial Artist; but it was a run of the mill arsonist and while the 9 year old girl comparison ring true, even an unarmed, untrained person will retaliate with violence when confronted with danger. What, the guy was 6 Dan in Tae-kwan-do and the comic forgot to mention it? Again, a single slap of her (equal to a right hook of a world championship boxer) would have enough to send the guy to the ground and leave him there. Hell, half of the joke was that spinnerette was brought low by the weakest of the Villains.
  • This is just a thought, but does she really have super-strength? I mean, I know she has increased strength, but it doesn't necessarily mean Super-strength. It's like the difference in strength between Batman and Superman. Of course the advantage she has is she has three sets of arms, so she could lift three times the weight, but by using all the arms at once, not two arms individually, so each arm is still humanly vulnerable. Besides, by your line of logic, then Heather should have literally KILLED her roommate when she hugged her.
    • She totally has super-strength, she stated recently she had ten times the strength of a normal human.
  • Really though, six arms would completely re-write the entire rulebook of armed combat. If it's true her other four arms react subconsciously, if she trained enough, she'd be pretty much unstoppable in a one on one fight.
  • She has super strength and is aware of it so she isn't going to use her full strength if she can help it (she isn't supposed to just off people). She also got batted out of the air mid flight and was probably beat about the face and body with a few hard objects she wasn't expecting (thus only the bruises). It isn't that she COULDN'T have won the fight with her abilities, she just didn't prepare properly do so......
• Maybe I'm just overthinking this, but since when were driving a Subaru or drinking from a Nalgene bottle "lesbian stereotypes"? Why are they sterotypes?
  • Subaru, definitely, since even their marketing reflects this. Not entirely sure how that started, though. Nalgene I've never heard.
    • I think the nalgene bottle thing has something to do with it's chemical composition and the effects it could have on hormones. That's what I remember hearing anyway.
    • Actually, nalgene was discovered by accident while trying to create synthetical hormones.
  • Who knows where Sahira gets her ideas?
    • Well, that is pretty much the point of the question.
• I'm still waiting for Heather's acquaintances to comment on her sudden weight gain.
  • This, seriously. She didn't just gain weight very fast, she gained it literally overnight. A lot of weight.
• Is it just me or do the manga-style faces really not suit the bodies? Well, not just that they're "manga" but that they're done in a simplified way while the bodies are more detailed and realistic (eh, superhero comic-real, not real-real). Like, I see a simplified bishie face, I expect to see simplified bishie body. Somehow they just don't match up. :S
• In Buzz's first appearance, he has light hair and tan (greytoned) skin. In his second appearance, his hair is darker and Buzz has magically become white. He barely looks the same.
  • Fixed in the print, it actually looks like the hair and skin had their tones swapped somehow.
• So spinnerette was thrown out of the window by her infurated roomate (who pop 4 more arms from night to day and blamed her). What I don't get is why the car ended nearly broken in half. I mean, is spinnerette really that heavy? Does her powers make her mass to increase (she looks like she would weight around 173.4 lb) to such level?
  • Well she has 4 extra arms and is mostly muscle I should imagine that she weighs a fair bit more than most people her size (well besides the arms) also it looks like she had quite the drop.
  • Increased density of muscles and bones tissues would go a long toward explaining her super strength. It would also explain why she created craters in the pavement when Greta multiplied her weight by a mere 2.5 times. Maybe she is like Alex Mercer, whose density is so high he might as well be made of lead.
• Greta Gravity's style of fighting (throwing objects at people or adjusting their gravity as a whole) seems rather impractical when she could readily, say, break bones by pulling them apart. I suppose the main reason is that it doesn't make an interesting narrative, but it's still kind of jarring.
  • Technically, she doesn't have telekinesis, but rather can create localized gravity fields of various intensity, and presumably re-orient them on the fly. She could theorically, say, rip a person in two, but that would require two very strong gravity fields pulling in opposite directions, so maybe she is just not capable of such finely tuned control over her powers.
    • Technically, two very strong gravity fields pulling in opposite directions would just nullify each other.
    • I'm not suggesting she rip somebody in two; my assumption was that she didn't want to callously murder everybody (she could just pinch brains if she wanted to do that). But if she's going to spend the energy to throw multiple cinderblocks or cars at high speeds, it's definitely within her reach just to snap bones by by shoving somebody around.
  • Also, how her gravity work? Shouldn't just the increse of one time gravity being enough to pulverize... well anything? By increasing the weight of all the objects in a radious, its putting all its part far beyond their limit of resistance (imagine a person whose brain suddendly weights twice, then you get each of their bones, muscles, nerves, eyes, blood and so on), but instead is like she is putting invisible training weights in the back of her enemies. Its seems more like pushing instead of gravity, that's all.
    • Well, Gravity sorta is just pulling. Making something weigh twice as much isn't going to instantly make it plummet to the ground--it's going to need time to accelerate just like anything else. Someone whose brain suddenly weighed twice as much would certainly be uncomfortable, and probably have a lot of trouble holding their head up straight, but it's not like the brain would go shooting out of their head. As for doubling everything else? Well, depending on the person, they could handle more than twice their own weight on their legs.
      ** She has only been shown to generate 1.5g under normal circumstances (going from one g to 2.5). This is not nearly enough to break bones. She has also not been shown to be precise enough, but that may just be because it was never useful.

For a personal example, back in high school, I weighed a little under 200 lbs, and was on the wrestling and football teams, which included weightlifting. As part of that, I did squats, and was able to do multiple sets of reps with as much as 400 or 500 lbs on my back--the most I ever did was 800 lbs, and I could've done more. For superheroes, who would have to work out and who also have super strength, double or triple gravity would make it harder to move, but not to the extent of instant incapacitation.

• In the most recent strip--July 8, 2011--is it just me, or does Katt actually have ten tails in that first panel? The only reason I'm bringing this up here is that Katt's normal number of tails is specifically brought up later down the page, which makes me think that Krazy Krow wouldn't have made a blooper like that without being deliberate.
  • Maybe one of them is looping back around under her?
    • Confirmed by Word of God.
• Mr Time Traveller went back in time to assassinate Hitler but was foiled by Benjamin Franklin who accidentally warped to the same time period as well. The two then disappeared somewhere else where the traveller tried to kill Franklin but missed upon discovering his identity and talking about how he cannot come to harm due to a Time Paradox Law that keeps him safe seeing how his existence results in the creation of a time travelling device. That's all well and understandable, but then that just completely tears apart everything the time traveller hoped to accomplish. He goes on about how killing Franklin will result in the non-existence of the time travelling device thus creating a paradox so he is able to avoid being hurt in any form and yet doesn't acknowledge that killing Hitler or King George or whoever else he intended to would create a paradox in itself, that if they never existed then he wouldn't go back to kill them so they'd still be alive (and etc etc).
  • I think the reasoning was that Franklin specifically couldn't die yet because he was involved in the creation of time travel itself.
    • That's just as much a paradox as why Hitler (amongst others) can't die before their intended time because then the assassin wouldn't go back in time to kill him which would result in him still being alive, sending it into a paradox loop.
      • How do you figure? Killing Hitler would only cause a paradox if you solely invented the time machine to kill Hitler... and even then it might work as long as you actually killed Hitler with it. Also, y'know, if the history books recorded that Hitler was killed by a time traveler, once they invented time travel I'm pretty sure someone would go "Oh heeeey." Franklin's probably got paradox powers because he was not only a contributor to the eventual creation of time travel, but also the intended time travel had nothing to do with him.
    • I know that, and you know that, but Time Travel Man seems to think that it's Franklin's involvement with time travel specifically that protects him, and other people are vulnerable.
    • It also might have something to do with the fact that Franklin is traveling forward in time, and everyone knows who he already is, hence they have a percieved image of Benjamin Franklin that means any action taken against him is influenced by the time traveler's future, if they prevent him from having that future, they'll cause a paradox that loops back and prevents their action from happening. Whereas someone travelling back in time would most likely just cease to exist. Atleast that's the only way it makes sense. Might also be that all time travelers are protected this way.
    • Or the Time Travel Man may not have known before he tried killing Hitler, not like he had actually done it before.
  • My guess as to how it worked is this: Being able to change the past at all (as opposed to a Stable Time Loop, which is the opposite of everything I'm about to say) by definition requires some form of branching timeline; you have a timeline A that goes at least up to when the time traveler leaves, and a timeline B which becomes visibly different at the point he arrives. This is true regardless of which timeline he'll return to and what happens to timeline A afterward. There's still a causal chain; the events in timeline A caused the time traveler to go to timeline B and make his changes. So killing Hitler would branch the timeline. But since Ben Franklin was going forward in time, he was timeline A's Benjamin Franklin. Since he time-traveled long before the intentional time traveler interfered with anything, there has to be a timeline in which he traveled forward, then found a way back and then did what the guy said he did. It seems like he may've done this before and thus already had a way back, but he would've had to survive his naked arrival in Hitler's office at the least. Thus it's not so much that he's immune but Hitler's not as that Ben Franklin's life story demanded a time traveler, so the other time traveler wound up stuck assisting in timeline A (You Already Changed the Past, Stable Time Loop) with Ben A and Hitler A. Even if he had reason to expect to arrive timeline B. And now that the possible branch point is behind him, it's much cleaner--he HAS to be from the same timeline as the future he's interacting with, so it has no causal source unless he survives to do anything and everything that the history books tell him he's going to do. It's not the most logically consistent of time-travel shenanigans but it's above-average I guess.
    • Thinking further, this does NOT in and of itself stop him from stopping the subprime mortgage crisis--if he did so successfully it'd mean he was in timeline B right now instead of A, but would return to his spot in timeline A, while timeline A marches on as if he'd never arrived in the future until the point where the time traveler leaves from. Actually from that it's possible that he WAS in timeline B when he met Hitler, and so was the time traveler; however he was still Ben Franklin A. The fact that he failed to stop the crisis doesn't actually mean that he physically couldn't. If anything, that makes more sense since the other time traveler had to figure out how the rules worked with him, possibly implying he came from a timeline without Superhero-Ben.
• I'm confused - how in the world did Heather figure out what Mecha Maid's civilian identity was with just one run in?
  • My spidey-sense is tingling that Heather just took a shot in the dark. If you want a less half-assed answer: How many girls in (this universe's) Columbus, Ohio do you think have chin-length purple hair?
  • Voice?
• How could Ben Franklin hold onto his slaves for seven years after his excursion to the 21st century? And for that matter, how old must he have been upon returning, to live another twelve years?
  • Freeing slaves right was a lot harder than just saying "Okay, you're free." Technically, blacks were not allowed to be free legally speaking, so if you didn't find the right loopholes, they'd just end up enslaved to someone else, who would probably try to whip out any thoughts of freedom they might have entertained under their old mast. That's what happened with Washington's slaves when he freed them in his will (the fact that they were technically his wife's slaves didn't help).
• How come none of the characters seemed to mind helping bring souls to hell? They were evil, but we don't torture criminals beyond prison. It's entirely likely that the rumors we hear about hell are completely wrong, but they didn't do so much as to ask the guard.
  • It's not really the heroes place to question it though is it?
• How did they not realize the significance of the cerberus's costume? The explanation they gave would be suspect even if she wasn't wearing a collar on each head.
  • Given that Minerva looks nothing like a classical cerberus I don't think it would have occure to them she was the real deal until she told them.