Case 114: Mad About DC #1
Dial Holders: Who knows?
Dial Type: Watch/Pendant Dial
Dialing: The Dial seems to have an awareness - also, a funny face - and knows it screwed up on these.
Costume: Inspired by a red Coke can, the chrome top represented on both the cowl and the epaulets, it has a nasty looking trap door on the chest that reveals the nips, and air vents at the armpits. I suspect the holster has a soda pop can in it. Silly, but red is a great color.
Powers: His nipples are engorged with cola, which shoots out, well, not exactly at will. When the trap door is opened?
Sighted: Shocked at his own powers.
Possibilities: Remember that team of drunk heroes that sometimes helped Hitman? Vaguely? Yeah, me too. Soda Nips feels like he could be on the team, still visiting the bar in between AA meetings, wondering if he could become Rum and Coke Man if he cashed in his ten-year chip.
Integration Quotient: 25% (would have had a chance, but we don't see much of Hitman anymore)
Costume: Just a green robe and pointy hat and fancy facial hair. Boring, but it's a nice shade of green.
Powers: Can summon lizards, but only small lizards. Not, like, alligators or anything. Certainly not dinosaurs. Not even a snapping turtle. Stop putting every reptile in this category!
Sighted: Summoning a third lizard (could be a gecko - the others could be a chameleon and an iguana).
Possibilities: Zatanna sometimes might need to go talk to a specialist, and his little wizard's tower is full of fun lizards to draw. He's not the kind of guy you send into battle.
Integration Quotient: 10% (the name is dumber than the power, honestly)
Costume: None, but he looks like a skeleton coalescing out of smoke.
Powers: Unclear. We don't know if C.S. is always intangible or if it can solidify, nor if it's actually huge, like a cloud.
Sighted: Appearing in clouds.
Possibilities: If such a creature appeared in the sky, perhaps as some kind of ghostly/undead manifestation, an aggregate of people who drowned and are coming back to take revenge on the living, I think we'd have something. As a HERO, well, I guess that could still happen, but what would Spectre-Lite have to do?
Integration Quotient: 10% (as a monster, the quotient rises to 50%)
Costume: None. The persona is essentially just an inverted box of noodles, but two egg slices make up its eyes, so there may be life there.
Powers: Nutritious, but you gotta follow the 5-second rule.
Sighted: On the floor, as advertised.
Possibilities: It really looks like this Dial H "fail" has made the Dial Holder just turn into an inanimate object for an hour.
Integration Quotient: 100% (huh?! well, yes, there's EVERY opportunity in MOST comics to have an upturned box of ramen on panel during any given disaster or super battle)
Costume: Just a guy in a business suit, but his head is a steam locomotive.
Powers: He chugs black smoke, and by pulling on an imaginary handle, he can sound a train whistle.
Sighted: Tooting.
Possibilities: His powers aren't entirely useless - a smokescreen and a possible distraction - the fact that he dresses for business puts him squarely away from superhero battles. He's villain-coded, really, but so is Mr. Bones. Could he be a weird cyborg (or helmeted guy) who runs some kind of superhero train service? Perhaps a connection to Billy Batson's famous ride?
Integration Quotient: 15% (while you could have imagined such a character in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, or even China Miéville's Dial H - I guess that's cheating - there are fewer opportunities today)
Next: More of this crap.
Comments
SODA NIPS:
The "drunk heroes that sometimes helped Hitman" were Section 8, lead by Sixpack and featuring tasteful characters like Dogwelder (who welds dead dogs to bad guys) and Bueno Excellente (who uses the power of sexual assault on his foes). Most of them were canonically dead since fighting the pretentiously-named Many-Angled Ones near the end of the Hitman run, although they've been inexplicably brought back several times since.
Soda Nips really doesn't seem to be quite in their league, but with that cola-can theme he sure does remind me of the Darrow artwork on the cover of Mayfair's old Underground TTRPG. You know, the character with the twin bandoliers of soda cans that power his caffeine-powered abilities?
Lizard Wizard is way too close to a number of other similarly-named things for the DC legal department to be comfortable with beyond a token cameo in an obscure one-shot. Among other things, there a Lizard Wizards board game and a 2010s Austalian band called King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. The oldest example I can think of is from the Tooter Turtle cartoon from 1960. When that obnoxious testudine inevitably calls for "Mister Wizard" to bring him home from his latest bad trip, he's referring to Mister Wizard the Lizard. "Drizzle, Drazzle, Druzzle, Drone, Time for this one to come home" and all that.
As for the Lizard Wizard's powers, there are somewhere around 7000 known species of lizards, and even if he can't manage to whip up a monitor lizard (like the komodo dragon, for Jonny Quest fans) quite a few of them are venomous or poisonous enough to endanger humans. I wouldn't bet on some random mugger doing well against this guy.
Do have to wonder if he can summon Curt Connors at will if he visits a Marvel comic.
Potentially useful for distracting cockroaches or similarly vermin-themed villains and their minions? Also stains carpeting, and perhaps its powers make it literally impossible to clean up or otherwise remove from the floor until the effect wears off.
The potential for food poisoning if ingested by a baddie also seems like a power, although making people ill didn't get poor Infectious Lass into the Legion.
I'm puzzled by why you think this one might the aggregate spirits of the drowned when it's very clearly got an aviation theme going on, which fits with the cloud thing too. Look just below its chin, that's the hub of a three-bladed airplane propeller there. So more likely the ghostly spirit of a lost aviator? As a HERO, maybe dedicated to preventing plane crashes and the like? Something like Deadman, but the people CS possesses can use supernatural piloting skills instead of becoming circus acrobats? Could be a Weird War Two thing, or just afterward - perhaps the pilot of that B-25 that famously slammed into the Empire State Building back in 1945? Or hey, maybe it's farther back, and that's the ghost of Amelia Earhart?
The railroad enthusiast in me insists he should be Mister Locomotve Head, since all he's got is the engine itself, no carriages or even a steam tender. You could probably add "provides bright light at will" to his power set, since locomotives have strong lights up from to illuminate the track and warn people they're coming at night or in bad weather - it's not all just tooting. Steam engines started out with oil-fed lanterns, but transitioned to electric lights well before they were replaced by diesel and electric locomotives.
He might also be much stronger than a mere human, although not up to the top tiers of the supers community. DC has that whole "More powerful than a locomotive!" thing going, after all.
While he might be the result of someone like the Spectre deciding to punish a greedy railroad tycoon or murderous trainspotter (believe me, some of them are a little touched), rather prefer him as a denizen of Dream's Endless realm who's gone off for a stroll. Ceratinly plenty of people worldwide spent generations dreaming (or having nightmares) about steam trains, so he fits as an iconic entity at least as much as some dork with teeth in his eye sockets.
Might even have been a hero of sorts at some point. These days we tend to think of railroads as loud, dirty things you don't want in your back yard, or as symbols of colonial expansion across North America at the expense of the people who actually lived there before the Europeans arrived, but that wasn't always the case. For better or worse, railroads tied the East and West Coasts together and without them many settlements across center of the US would likely have never prospered. Having your small town in the middle of the Great Plains connected to the rail network meant a lot - and missing out when when the neighboring town got their connection doomed more than a few places to obscurity.
Mister Trainhead as a semi-legendary figure who brought the benefits of the rails to a settlement (kind of like an industrialized version of Johnny Appleseed) would let you tell some interesting (and conflicting) stories over a broad span of time. Or he could just be another weird thing that winds up crossing Jonah Hex's path and getting shot to pieces form riling him up.
Keep 'em coming, I can do this as long as you can. :)