Saturday, June 6, 2015
(New) A Short 3D Animation I made. No sound though. at ImagineNation (http://johnpirilloauthor.blogspot.com/)
I created this as a test of caustics and flexibility for my water and fish. I call the piece "Whoopee," well, jut because that's how I felt when I completed it. Whoopee, it worked!
(New) World War Two Hero: Golden Age Movie Serial: Spy Smasher, Chapter One at ImagineNation (http://johnpirilloauthor.blogspot.com/)
From Wikipedia --
Spy Smasher is the name of two fictional characters appearing in comics published by DC Comics. The first is a superhero that was formerly owned and published by Fawcett Comics. The second is a female anti-terrorism government agent.
Fictional character biography[edit]
Alan Armstrong[edit]
Similar to Batman and the Blue Beetle (Ted Kord), Spy Smasher (real name Alan Armstrong) is a master detective, equipped with a number of gadgets and a specialized vehicle, the "Gyrosub", which was a combination of an airplane, an automobile, and a submarine. Created by Bill Parker and C. C. Beck, Spy Smasher was introduced in Whiz Comics #2 (February 1940). Alongside Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher became one of the magazine's most popular characters. In Whiz Comics #16-18, he was briefly an opponent of Captain Marvel, as a Nazi Scientist and old enemy of his, the Mask, used a device to brainwash him, but finally Captain Marvel was able to restore his mind.
His name was changed to Crime Smasher after World War II ended, and the first issue of Crime Smasher was published in 1948. In 1953, Fawcett ceased publication of all superhero comics, after settling a lawsuit against DC Comics over Captain Marvel being aninfringement on the copyright of Superman, agreeing to cease publishing Captain Marvel.
After DC Comics obtained the rights to the Fawcett characters in 1972, Spy Smasher began appearing irregularly in DC Comics, presented as one of the heroes of Earth-S prior to Crisis on Infinite Earths. He first appeared in Crisis in Eternity, as a member of theSquadron of Justice when King Kull had captured Shazam and the Elders, and teamed up with other villains to wipe out life on all three Earths, and defeated Ibac on Earth-Two as he attacked Atlantis by tricking him into saying 'I back down from no-one,' defeating him as saying his name causes him to turn into a normal man and vice versa. The character was used prominently in the 1990s series The Power of Shazam!, in which aged Alan Armstrong often recounts his adventures as Spy Smasher. Power of Shazam! #24 was dedicated to Armstrong's recounting of a Cold War-era mission he undertook with an archaeologist named C.C. Batson to Batson's children, Billy (alter-ego of Captain Marvel) and Mary (alter-ego of Mary Marvel).
While Alan was still Spy Smasher in that story, a crossover between Power of Shazam and Starman in 1997 included Jack Knightrunning over the history of the Fawcett City heroes, and mentioning that he thought Spy Smasher became Crime Smasher after the war but was unsure.
AC Comics has published reprints of some Golden Age Spy Smasher stories that have lapsed into the public domain. The character also made a cameo appearance the inaugural issue of Image Comics' Next Issue Project.
Powers and abilities[edit]
Spy Smasher is an intelligent scientist and inventor, a master detective and a skilled hand to hand combatant. He also possessed a number of gadgets and a specialized vehicle.
Katarina Armstrong[edit]
A new Spy Smasher, government agent Katarina Armstrong, created by Gail Simone, first appears in Birds of Prey #100 (January 2007). She is a high-ranking anti-terrorism agent who is affiliated with several American, Commonwealth, and United Nations agencies (see table). Her relation to Alan Armstrong has not been revealed, though her secret identity and costume seem clearly inspired by him. She is depicted in her first appearances as having a domineering demeanor, and is not hesitant to kill or order deaths in order to complete a mission. Having forced Oracle to work for her, she plans to take over the Birds of Prey organization and usurp Oracle's position. Issue #103 indicates that Katarina and Oracle were friends in college. At some point prior to Katarina's debut, they became rivals. That issue shows a flashback of both women competing in a race, with Katarina beating Barbara by cheating but immediately confessing to the judges after she had won.
Katarina accompanies the Birds on a mission in Russia, and in a conflict with the Secret Six, Katarina finds her equal marksman inDeadshot. Katarina assumes leadership of the Birds from Oracle and fires Lady Blackhawk for dissent.[1] Back at Oracle's base, she is challenged to a fight by Oracle, who then manages to give Katarina a proper beating. She is humiliated when she faces the united front of every single one of Barbara's living former agents. Spy Smasher leaves disgraced after being threatened by Black Canary, but before doing so also gives Oracle information on Misfit's background.
It was later mentioned in Checkmate #16 by Sasha Bordeaux that Josephine Tautin had "drop-kicked her down a deep, dark hole. Something she quite enjoyed doing, incidentally."Checkmate #18 has Sasha personally apologising to Barbara for Katarina's actions.
In the aftermath of Final Crisis, Katarina is seen being held prisoner by the Global Peace Agency. The GPA agents apparently erase all of her memories by "resetting" her brain, tellingCameron Chase that Katarina can hear their conversations but can no longer process what the sounds mean. Her current fate is unknown,[2] though it is implied that she was returned to normal, as with many other characters in the story, after Nemesis and Chase use the cosmic treadmill.
During the events of Brightest Day, an unknown villain begins targeting the members of the Birds of Prey. Oracle initially muses that it could be Katarina's doing, as she has the means and motive to harm the Birds, but it is eventually revealed to be the work of the White Canary.[3]
Spy Smasher is eventually revealed to be alive and well when she recruits Bane and his new team of mercenaries (consisting of himself, Jeannette, Lady Vic, King Shark, Dwarfstar andGiganta) to invade and claim Skartaris in the name of the U.S.[4]
Characterization[edit]
Creator Gail Simone said on Katarina, "I felt the DCU needed a Jack Bauer. In these early issues, she looks like a pointed allegory to the abuse of powers by the government, but she doesn’t see it that way, and she’s a lot more complex than that. It’d be a cheat to simply make her evil and completely hate-able, I think. She’s got some levels. And she knows Babs’ weaknesses. I like her. She’s very very dark... Even above [Barbara and Katarina's] competitive natures, there is a perfectly valid and honest ideological difference of opinion there. Babs believes what she’s doing is necessary, Katarina believes what Babs is doing is treason. They actually like each other, but like brothers fighting on opposite sides of the Civil War, the distance between them is so vast and clearly drawn that they can’t even hope to reconcile. They were friends; their ideals make them bitter enemies."[5]
Powers and abilities[edit]
Spy Smasher is an expert markswoman and a skilled hand to hand combatant on a similar level to Deadshot. She claims to be of higher political authority than anyone in the United States, even the President, but is later outranked in an issue of Checkmate by Sasha Bordeaux. Although she explicitly states that her job is to kill people, specifically terrorists and those who aim to harm the United States, she has yet to be directly depicted as taking a life.
In other media[edit]
Television[edit]
- Spy Smasher made a brief appearance in Justice League Unlimited episode "Patriot Act" voiced by Nathan Fillion who remained uncredited. He is seen in a flashback sequence where he prevented the creation of Captain Nazi and confiscating the unstable serum that would be used later in the episode.
Film[edit]
- In 1942, Spy Smasher was adapted into a popular 12-part film serial directed by William Witney for Republic Pictures. Spy Smasher featured actor Kane Richmond in a dual role, as both the title character (an American freelance agent in Nazi-occupied France who was originally believed to have been killed in a plane crash) and his identical twin brother, andMarguerite Chapman as the brother's imperiled fiancée, Eve Corby. Edited down to 100 minutes in 1966 the serial was re-released for television under the title Spy Smasher Returns.
Video game[edit]
- Spy Smasher will appear in the video game DC Universe Online.
References[edit]
(New) Cool video: Amateur rocket men attempt to launch a rocket into space at ImagineNation (http://johnpirilloauthor.blogspot.com/)
How Hard Can It Be? Episode 02 -- Homemade Rocket
Paul and Eric attempt to send a rocket into space using materials and know ho that anyone could acquire.
(New) Death and Destruction, "A Rocketman Story," fractals, videos and stories at ImagineNation (http://johnpirilloauthor.blogspot.com/)
"A Rocketman Story"
By John Pirillo
He was taking a pounding that's for sure. The swashes were beating the hell out of him and he wasn't able to do a thing about it as long as his power pack was recharging. A couple dozen more charges of their hammer guns and it was all over.
How in God's name had he gotten stuck in the missionary position to the merciless bastards pounding his suit into atoms?
=======================================================
"A swash is a slang term for Nazi foot soldiers." Einstein told him as he sat at the edge of the cliff overlooking Lake Lucerne.
"Beautiful view, pops."
Al ignored his tease and went on. "The tropes are the super swash, genetically enhanced super soldiers capable of pounding you into the ground with one fist behind their back."
"I wonder if they still sell raspberry chocolate down there."
Al ignored this comment as well. "The zoms are civilians who have had their minds wired to remove all sense of self. They are still whole beings, but no longer in control of their senses. That is why we try not to kill them whenever possible. Instead we try to turn them."
"Zoms?"
Harry turned to eye Al, who was tamping his pipe onto the rock beside him, and reloading from a pack he pried from his jacket.
"Zoms are nominally still human people, just altered so that they have no control over their own body."
"That sucks!"
"Sucks?"
"A term I picked up..." Harry paused, trying to remember where he had heard it, and then shrugged. "From somewhere...somewhen."
Al nodded in a kind of fatherly way, and then scooted closer to Harry, examining his eyes. "The time dilation still hasn't worn off."
"Tell me about it. I feel like a taco turned inside out."
"Taco?"
Harry turned to Al. "You really need to get out more."
Al laughed, and then tapped Harry on his right knee with his pipe stem. "Your next mission is critical. You must not harm the Zoms, even if they block your way to completing the mission. If it comes to it, you have to turn back."
"What if they're about to kill me?"
Al was silent.
Harry sighed and took a deep breath. "Life sure sucks sometimes, doesn't it?"
"Now that..." Al smiled. "That I understand."
=======================================================
Harry sighted the landing position in the cross hairs of his scope and began banking his rocket suit in that direction. He hadn't seen a single Swash jet since he had entered lower Lithuania, which could be a good or bad thing, depending on your sensibilities. He took a quick suck off his water stem, then clicked it shut and eyed the landing trigger. It was square on. He initiated thrusters and his suit slowed, then turned in a quick arc and landed him on his feet. He bent somewhat to absorb the impact, leaving a deep groove in the pavement he had landed on.
"Glad that was you and not me." He told the pavement, and then headed for the rendezvous point. He was meeting with a resistance leader, a pretend Zom, who was known to be faulty by the Swash, but ignored as long as he continued to do his job, which was loading and unloading weapons.
Harry's job. Rocketman's job was to make sure that loading and unloading came to a quick and timely end. The Allieds were mounting a quick thrust into the region in an effort to sweep out all the Zoms and return them to their own control, so they could join the resistance, which was spreading across Europe, however slowly.
Harry dreaded sometimes the work he did, because it kept him from returning to America, where the brain of Hitler ran everything. New Nazi New York it was called. The skyscrapers, the Empire State Building and the Monarch Building were now the headquarters for the Nazi party in America, which now led the war on the rest of the world.
When America fell during the last days of World War Two, it had ushered in a long period of subjugation and experimentation by the Fourth Reich, the reborn Nazis, led by a brain only Hitler, who lived through a robotic counterpart. It was Harry's determination to end that body that drove him on every mission in this alternate timeline.
Sometimes he missed the real timeline, but these days he wasn't so sure any timeline was real anymore than the other. No matter which one he lived in, he was getting shot at, battered and bruised, and the love of his life was dead.
But funny enough, the person he missed the most, was Jet, who had survived in the first timeline to be his best buddy and helper, but in this one, somehow didn't exist.
Harry parked his rocket suit inside the designated building, and then headed for the meeting place.
"Raspberry." Harry whispered in the ruins of what was once a beautiful church, its gothic spires marred by bullets and bombs, its beautiful stained glass windows shattered, its pews broken and scattered across the interior of the once magnificent structure.
"Chocolate." Came the counter answer.
Harry grinned, and stepped forward, and then as he lifted his hand to shake with the other person, he almost had a heart attack. It was Jet!
"Jet!"
The person facing him gave him a blank look. "Who is that man?" He turned to see if he had been betrayed by Harry, someone hiding in the shadows perhaps.
Harry's emotions battered him. "Don't you know who I am? Your best friend. Your battering ram. Your personal line of envy."
Jet, a tall and well muscled black man, with deep brown eyes and a face marred by a slight scar on the left side of his neck frowned. "I've never seen you before in my life."
Harry didn't see the scar at first, but when Jet turned to look to his right, he did. Harry tensed. A Zom! Then he relaxed. Of course he was. He was an underground Zom, one who the rewiring had failed in.
"Where's your suit, Captain?"
Harry ignored the question and came closer, looked into Jet's eyes. The man stood stock still, as if frozen in place for a moment, and then he backed up. "I need to see the suit."
"Why would you need to do that?" Harry asked, his worry radar going full blast now. Something didn't pickle right in his brain. He gave Jet a closer examination. "The man I met was supposed to have a scar on the left side of his neck. Yours is on the right."
"Miscommunication."
Harry ran for the exit of thee building, just as ten Swash entered, carrying their hammer guns ready to fire. Harry dove out a stained glass window that had been shattered to his right, and landed on his back, rolling to his feet. In seconds he launched himself swiftly towards the hiding place of his suit.
He felt, rather than heard the hammer guns fire. Their weaponry was so powerful that it fused the air about him, causing the skin closest to the blasts to blister from the intensity of the heat caused by their searing beams of energy.
He dove to his right, then threw himself into a cellar, crawled swiftly across it as quietly as possible, then levered himself to another window, and crawled out. He looked round, listened a moment, hearing nothing, he ran towards his hiding place. He reached it, just as the sound of alarms rang out and Swash lanced the air about him with their hammer guns. He landed inside the hiding place in a ball, rolled to a stop at the foot of his suit, then climbed inside of it. He clamped it shut, sealing it against the outside, then turned it around to exit.
That was when a trope stormed into the building and landed a hammer like punch to Harry's helmet. Harry stumbled backward and with the weight of the suit so great, he couldn't maintain his balance. He fell onto his back, just as the swash burst inside.
"The Fuehrer wants the Rocketman alive." The trope ordered, and then grinned. "But he didn't say in what condition...alive."
Stunned by the blow still, Harry shook his fog away and launched a mini-rocket into the midst of the swash, blowing up half of them, but the rest plowed through the death and destruction, trailing guts and blood, then dove on him and began pummeling him.
He could no longer move, or resist. Several of them had placed some kind of magnetic clamp to his arms, causing them to seal together. He was helpless as a baby. He couldn't fire rockets, couldn't get out. In other words his ass was cooked!
Harry looked at his charge. Not enough to launch horizontally without frying every circuit. And no way to know if the magnetic clamps did anything else than hold his arms together. He might become a flying torpedo and hammer himself to death against a wall, his stabilizers and softeners running at low ebb.
He watched his charger begin to renew his power supply. It was a new one altered from the last by Tesla, who had used a new form of energy to power it.
"It will make you nearly invincible." He had promised.
"Yeah." Harry quipped to himself, unheard by the swash or the trope. "At least my suit. Meanwhile, I'll be turned into soup inside this bell!"
The Trope shoved the remaining swash aside and grinned into Harry's face. In a very bad imitation of German...even though he was German...he said, "And now I shall smash your face into atoms."
"I thought you needed me alive!" Harry joked.
"Not you. Just your brain."
"Then you better aim a bit lower, as now you're aiming right at my brain pan."
The trope gave him a confused look.
Harry's suspicions were confirmed. The trope couldn't see through the helmet plate glass. It was too dark inside the room. Harry glanced at his charger. Almost full. "I bet you're so strong you could handle me all by yourself, even if I had my arms free."
The trope grinned. "Yes. And still take your brain."
The trope laughed, and then smashed Harry's midsection, breaking the clamps.
The suit rang like a bell, even more so than when the swash had been pounding him.
The trope yanked Harry to his feet as effortlessly as if the Rocket suit was just a suit of clothing, instead of armor and stuck his face into the Helmet's glass, peering inside.
Harry's eyes went round with horror.
The trope had no pupils.
The trope swung its fist back, preparing to complete its death stroke.
Harry smiled, and then flicked a switch with his tongue.
A horrible screeching sound rang throughout the building. He had planted the resounders shortly after he landed, just in case. It was the just in cases you had to be the most cautious about, not what might be's.
The trope clamped its ham sized fists over its ears and screamed, joining the screams of the swash.
Harry saluted the soldiers. "Say bye-bye."
The trope gave him a blank look. "Bye-bye?"
"Okay!"
Harry launched a mini-rocket into the trope and the swash, launching straight up and through the ceiling of the church. He wasn't there long enough to see them explode, or hear them scream. As he raced from the building's roof, he turned to the south and there below him stood the zom Jet.
The zom stood there watching him fly off, making no move to fire the hammer it held in its hands. Just watching, a hand over its eyes to watch him as he blasted into the skies.
Harry's heart pounded in his chest.
"I'll be back, Jet. I swear it!" He promised, his eyes watering from the pain of leaving the only real friend he had ever had. He blinked the tears away, and then accelerated across the skies, towards Switzerland and home base. Away from death and destruction. And away from a friend who meant more to him than life itself.
"I will return." He swore to himself, as he fired the rockets that steered him north towards the Alps.
"I will, Jet. I swear it by everything I hold Holy. I will return for you. Or die trying." He said, his eyes misting even more as he shot up above the clouds and became a speck of light to those below.
The zom, who might be Jet, dropped his weapon and put fingers to his eyes. They were wet.
"Why?" He asked no one, and then leaving his weapon behind, he marched away, a lone figure in a land of war and destruction.
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