The Objects of My Goofy Affections
The people at Wizkids have begun to unveil the specifics of the first of their new Collectors' Sets: DC Giants. These Collectors' Sets will be offered shortly after each new expansion comes out as an added enticement for buying a brick (a shrink-wrapped unit of 12 boosters) of that most recent set from a brick and mortar (as opposed to online) retailer. In this case the bricks will be for Collateral Damage, the mail-away LE (limited edition) piece will be Krypto, and once one's done all that, he'll have a first come, first served priviledge to buy that set of giants.
They'd already shown us pics and the names of each of the seven in the set back on December 30th, but today they showed us the dial specifics for the first of them: the decidedly non-human, not-even-sure-we-can-call-it-alive being called Chemo.
I remember, back in the day, that we latched onto a mispronunciation of his name, saying it "KEH-mo" instead of the proper "KEE-mo." We did the same thing with Magneto, calling him "mag-NET-oh" instead of "mag-NEE-toh." Snot-nosed, know-it-all kids. Okay, I admit it. I was saying "mag-NET-oh" for years after that. Habit. Still, I didn't want to refer to one as a medical treatment and the other as an automobile component. At least the pronunciations we latched onto originally made the words sound unique.
In the '60s and early '70s I was never much of a fan of the DC mainstream of characters, but one of the series that eventually caught my attention via some very early 1970s reprints were a group of androids called The Metal Men. They were goofy, but they were conceptually goofy, so to some degree it worked. I'm not going to get into explaining them other than to say that they were all humanoid (hence my calling them androids) robots, each was rather strangely made of a specific metal (Platinum, Gold, Lead, Iron, Mercury and Tin)... and I'm not going to spend time justifying or otherwise defending their existence. There they were.
Anyway, this group quickly accumulated a strange gallery of rogues and bizarre menaces, and among the strangest was Chemo.
Chemo's origin is one that stuck with me probably because it was so goofy. (I promise, I won't write "goofy" again today.) It's one of those things one can only get away with only in a comic book (okay, probably a cartoon, too) of a byegone era. The short version: A scientist creates a huge, man-shaped, transparent, plastic vessel with a pop-top skull. Why, you ask? To pour his failed experiments into.
The idea was that there would be this giant physical reminder of every failed experiment to spur him on. If he used it for anything else they kept that stuff out of sight, without so much as a word balloon coming from off-panel in a darkened lab, declaring "I've been a bad, bad scientist! Yes! Yes! Oh, so very baaaaaaAAAHd! ::huff-huff::."
They were much more discrete in those days.
Never mind how toxic and potentially reactive the mix might become with each new addition. As was said on The Tick once, "Science painted in broader strokes in those days, Arthur."
Also, never mind that this corrupts the very idea of science, as if only experiments where the results are what was anticipated are deemed a success. Apparently someone confused chemistry with particularly well-trod culinary arts. Who knew? It was a 1960s-era comic book, and moreover it was one from DC. Fun first, Logic & Reason... third or fourth. (Unlike at Marvel, of course, where we learned that high doses of radiation were the best thing in the world for a person.) To be fair, he was a rather parochially-minded "scientist" who was looking for results, not discovery, and was attempting to create a formula for improving agricultural yields. It chafes me slightly that the scientist responsible for this was something of a namesake for me, Dr. Ramsey Norton.
No wonder I don't go to family reunions.
When the time came that the last failed experiment was poured in and, one supposes, he had to leave to figure out where and how to dump the damned thing. (Lucky for him, the formation of the EPA was years off.) Some gurgling and bubbling occured, persumably with an ominous, building score in the background, and Chemo came to some semblance of life.
What? You mean you saw that coming? I always said you were smart. Or tetched.
A plodding, to all appearances brainless. giant, he had a natural flair for chemistry. One might say he had it in his blood, but whoever said it would earn an extra century in Purgatory. Chemo had marvelous control over the mixtures he'd essentially spit out - to all appearances he was a much better chemist than that Norton dipshit. The Visible Monster would melt things with an acid stream, etc. He even hit his unwitting creator with a chemical bath that caused him to become giant, and not in a good, Internet pharmaceutical way.
The Metal Men had to take Chemo down at least a couple times, and he even made an appearance years later in Crisis On Infinite Earths. He was a star, baby! A star! As full of chemicals as Robert Downey Jr. and at least three times as big!
Now he's back, and somewhere around my birthday he'll be distributed in clix form. No, that's not a hint. I'll be buying this myself. (Though I am a little concerned how much this Collector's Set will cost. They haven't given us a clue.)
The dial Seth Johnson came up for this 144 pt. piece is a fun piece of work. Being a giant he moves largely where he wants and can hit someone someone with his hands, if he wants, from two spaces away. That becomes more significant when he's on his fourth and fifth clicks and has that bit of lavender down in the Damage slot, giving him Close Combat Expert, which simply means he can do 4 Damage on those clicks rather than the usual 2.
That bronze in the first five clicks of his Attack are Poison, causing a click of damage to any opponent next to him at the beginning of their turn if they don't have special powers to protect them. (Put a 10 pt. Armor Piercing on him and he'll harm them even if they are protected.) It's not yet clear if the official rule will be that a Poison giant poisons those up to two spaces away from him or not. Rule of thumb with respect to Wizkids rulings: If something makes sense, don't count on it.
Some Impervious, then Invulnerability, Toughness and finally a couple clicks of Regeneration make him difficult to kill. The Suicide Squad Team Ability - believe it or not - gives him even more of a chance to bounce back from damage. Any teammate buys the farm next to him, and Chemo will be healed for between 1 and 4 clicks of damage, depending on a throw of the dice.
Some Force Blast to push foes away is followed some Plasticity to keep them from getting away. It was the '60s, and no one was experimenting on pharmaceuticals for bipolar disorder. All these years and he was just misunderstood. ::sniff::
There's even more combative goodness in there, but if you're a player you can see it on the dial, and if you're not then why are you still reading this?
Damn. See? I always said you were tetched.
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