Agent Orange and Agent Black step onto an elevator in the lobby.

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Comic book readers have often wondered what is it about New York City that causes so much bizarreness to happen there.  Superhero Nation finally answers this question by turning to the New York Historical Society.

Which leads us to our quote of the day.

In 1626, either the Shinnecock or Canarsee Indians sold present-day NYC, a spirit-cursed mosquito pit, to the Dutch for $24.  One of the strongest misconceptions in American history is that it was the Indians that got swindled.

— Agent Orange

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
–Diogenes

Sir? I still need to see your passport.

–an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement official

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”

–Aldous Huxley

“More like our sanitarium.”

–Paingod

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

–Ronald Reagan

Ohio and Stanford’s trees play football. About as well as you’d expect, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

–Agent Orange

“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.
E. M. Forster

“If you think ‘the queen died of grief’ is a plot, you wouldn’t last ten seconds in Surf City. The Queen iced her husband to claim control of the underworld. And now she’s got a deathray, probably pointed at a city Americans care about or Paris. That’s a plot.”

–Captain Carnage

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

–Friedrich Nietzsche

I save the day by wasting many, proving reptilian awesomeness. There, I only needed ten words.

–Agent Orange

You’re despicable.

–The Superhero Nation writing staff

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy: giving up on the concept of truth.

–Jacob Mallow

Capital punishment: giving up on the concept of Mallow.

–Agent Orange

Diplomacy, Superhero Nation-style: simultaneously offending the religious, the nonreligious and death penalty opponents.

Catastrophe: I need advice.

Bartender: Don’t take vodka as a chaser.

Catastrophe: More, uhh, substantively…

Bartender: Don’t drink and drive.

Catastrophe: …

Catastrophe: I need a new advisor.

Bartender: That’s the spirit.

Dr. Darpa: Virtually every Office of Special Investigations agent uses a firearm as his primary weapon, but the vast majority of our kills are executed with non-gun weapons.

Captain Carnage: Every one of the criminals we deal with has steel-like skin, dodges bullets like they’ve gone out of style, or both.

Dr. Darpa: Over the past twelve years, I’ve been modifying tank-mounted machine guns to compensate for those unusual characteristics. I have created a handgun so horrifically lethal that Congress has limited its sale to NATO countries.

Captain Carnage: You mean…

Dr. Darpa: The Western Cannon.

Captain Carnage: I thought it was a myth!

Dr. Darpa: Mythically deadly, perhaps. With a full mound of ammo, it weighs roughly half a ton. It has three rates of fire: “full automatic,” “wall of lead,” and “dodge this.”

Captain Carnage: The assassins have bugged your car with a tracking device. Driving it could be highly dangerous, particularly if you believe really strongly in that whole no-killing thing.

Lash: …

Lash: What do you have in mind?

Carnage: If you lend me your keys for the day, I have someone in mind whose skills will discourage anyone from tailing you ever again.

Lash nervously hands over his BMW keys.

The next morning, a smoking and sooty Agent Orange approaches Lash.

Lash: Dear God. You were the driver? Do you even have a license?

Agent Orange: I have good news, bad news and worse news. Which would you like first?

Lash: … there’s bad news besides learning you were the driver?

Lash: …

Agent Orange: You definitely won’t save a bunch on your car insurance.

Lash: The worse news?

Agent Orange: It won’t be an open-casket funeral.

Lash: …

Lash: Dare I ask what the good news is?

Agent Orange: Captain Carnage bet that open-road road tests are so easy that even I could pass one. I sure showed him! Hah. He didn’t even know that alligators are green-red colorblind!

Later, Lash confronts Captain Carnage.

Lash: You handed my BMW over to a goddamn lizard.

Carnage: It proved surprisingly easy to determine who was attempting to follow his… unorthodox driving style. We made four arrests. So his skills proved quite effective.

Lash: Which “skills?” I’ve definitely ruled out anything driving-related.

Carnage: Limb-regeneration and gullibility.

Lash: Gullibility?

Carnage: Did you know license tests occur on country roads in the middle of the night and are graded by SWAT officers in helicopters?

Lash: …

Lash: I hate you.

A commenter asked “what do they teach at the Office of Special Investigation’s Chariots of Fire Driving Academy?” A very good question.

[start scene]

Agent Black is waiting in the CFDA’s front-lobby, which looks like an airport terminal. Beyond the glass walls, cars chase each other on a practice course.

CFDA RECEPTIONIST: I’m sorry, we’re out of spaces for the Defensive Driving course. Can I interest you in Offensive Driving? Just sign these liability disclaimers.

BLACK: What do they teach in Offensive–

A car triple barrel-rolls onto the car it had been chasing.

BLACK: …

BLACK: Do you have a pen?

Agent Orange:  At the Office of Special Investigations, “Chariots of Fire” isn’t just a classic
film.  It’s also the name of our driving school.

Agent Orange: In Canada, keep your friends close and your automatic weaponry closer. The nation is a rabbit’s den of sinister plots and dark secrets.

Agent Black: Canada has dark secrets?

Agent Orange: The darkest!

“Dallas Police, Officials Discourage Random Gunfire.”

Uhh… what were the Dallas police doing before?

On a side-note, I think the Dallas police will find that it’s easier to cut murders by reducing targeted gunfire.

Why are peace talks held at summits?  Because things can only go downhill from there.

Mike: You’re positive you’re not an alien?

Catastrophe: Do aliens frequently speak fluent English?

Mike: Decryption programs applied to radio transmissions can do surprising things.

Catastrophe: I was checking football club rankings when you found me. Unless aliens are frequently interested in football…

Mike: You’d be surprised. You follow football?

Catastrophe: Sometimes. There aren’t any good teams around here.

Mike: Name three.

Catastrophe: Good teams? Arsenal, Man U and Newcastle.

Mike: Please. If you ever need to make up sports teams in the future, I recommend going with animal names, not randomly selected adjectives and nouns. “New castle?” “Man you?” That doesn’t even make sense!

Catastrophe: …

Catastrophe: You don’t get out much, do you?

This is the final part of a four part series. You can see part 1 here.

“You don’t change the world by whispering.” — NY Governor Eliot Spitzer

“Only a New Yorker could think that volume can change the world.”– Jacob Mallow

“I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.”– Richard Nixon

Sorry, I can’t think of any way to make that any funnier.

“I’m a conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.”– George H.W. Bush

“And that is why you and I are different.”– Dr. Lizard, webmaster of the Lizard Lounge.

“Poor Darrell Hammond. What’s he going to do when I leave office?”– Bill Clinton

“Probably enjoy his internship more.”– Dr. Lizard

Note on the OSI Human Resources Branch Refrigerator

ATTENTION HUMAN RESOURCES TEAM:

Several letters, ‘Special Investi,’ faded off my door placard. Since this sort of event happens passively all the time, there’s no reason to suspect that any of you were involved or spike the office coffee with truth serum. I’m sure the scratch marks are coincidental and entirely unrelated to the cruelly disfigured statue of Albert the Florida Gator that was left as a doorjamb.

–Agent Orange, Human Resources Director and Special Investigator

Postscript: In completely unrelated news, I’m holding an interrogation information session office party today. Everyone with claws or a proficiency with knifes/cutting implements is invited. (RSVP not mandatory but attendance is. These employees can check the attached schedule for their required party time).

Post-postscript: Agent Black, don’t even bother checking. You’re first.

Post-post-postscript: In other completely unrelated news, the OSI is adjusting its service schedules to enhance public safety. We will deploy a number of agents to conduct the esteemed work of bomb-searching every dumpster within a ten mile radius of the University of Florida’s Griffin Stadium before each football game. OSI-HR has not yet decided how many agents to deploy; the investigation roster evaluation is still pending.

Post-post-post-postscript: You—you know who you are (and I do, too)—are considering time-travel. “What if I undrink the truth serum but decapitate Albert anyway?” Please. Unless you’re also interested in Florida baseball, I’d recommend against it.

Post-post-post-post-postscript: Mammals. [Note: this is not a legal statement implying that I know the species of the partyer-of-honor. However, it is a statement that I know it’s Black.]

The following is not based on my work as a journalist… but it could be.

Political scientist: I noticed that your article called me an “imperialist.”

Journalist: Right. You said you were an imperialist.

Political scientist: Empiricist! I’m an empiricist!

Agent Orange: I just had a dream that the villain was the sentient White House.

Captain Carnage: You weren’t dreaming.

Agent Orange …

Agent Orange: I’m going back to sleep.

Journalist: Is it true that the government has systematically tried to conceal the truth so that the American people don’t know how threatened they are?

Mike, the head of the Office of Special Investigation’s RETCON unit:  We usually get accused of playing up the terrorist threat. At least you didn’t throw out the psychic amnesia theory.

Journalist: You didn’t answer my…

Journalist: …

Journalist: What was I saying?

Mike: Damned if I remember.

And you thought “Army of One” was bad…

“We’re not really black-ops assassins or conspiracy bagmen, but encryption and information assurance are sexy too!”– NSA

“Our acronym doesn’t really stand for ‘Systematically Eliminating Troublesome Information.’ Not officially, anyway.” — SETI

Strictly speaking, our mission generally entails tasks like garbage collection/inspection, bomb sweeps and surveillance, but there’s no reason we couldn’t have battle royales in the Oval Office. — Secret Service

“Package delivery anywhere in the world, any time. Special service to China available. What can Blue do for you?” — US Air Force

Striving to keep New York free of supercriminals, starting with the prisons. — NY Department of Corrections

• I thought of a related quote that I didn’t want to list separately. Agent Black: “The only place in NYC that’s free of supercriminals is Rikers.”

“Taking unconventional warfare to the next level.” — USAF-STRATCOM

“Have you ever killed anyone? Do you want to?” — CIA

Captain Carnage: That’s dumb as asking a hog to hootenanny.

Lash: One, we know you aren’t really Texan. Two, no one has a clue what the hell you’re saying.

Captain Carnage, translating: “That’s as dumb as getting advice on napalm from Joann Fabric.”

A note posted on the Office of Special Investigations’ office refrigerator.

At some point in the past six hours, a Gatorade bottle disappeared from this refrigerator. It had blue contents and a label reading “Agent Orange’s: do not take under penalty of death. I MEAN IT.”

I must consult with the unauthorized drinker immediately to discuss his/her/its future with the agency and any appropriate HR paperwork (benefits, next-of-kin notification/estate planning and last rites arrangements).

Possible symptoms include:

• Hemoglobular disassociation (“blood feud”)
• Sore throat and coughing
• Writhing
• Loss of appetite
• Headache, disorientation and/or brain strangulation
• Spontaneous combustion

Thanks!

–OJ

Bartender: New Hegemon movie’s coming out.

Catastrophe: I heard.

Bartender: …

Bartender: How much do they pay you to wear that?

Catastrophe: Not enough.

Agent Orange: Can you hotwire that car?

Lash: No, jackass. I’m a Harvard MBA. And there is no way you would ask a white…

Agent Orange: Just because you attended Harvard doesn’t necessarily mean you’re devoid of useful knowledge. Excuse me for giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Jacob Mallow: I’ve finally perfected the concoction. It will–

Paingod: No.

Jacob Mallow: What?

Paingod: I don’t want to know what it does, how it does it, or your vast and no doubt eminently disruptable deployment strategy. Telling me can only guarantee that your plan does not come to fruition.

Jacob: What? How would that matter?

Paingod: …

Paingod: You’re new here, aren’t you?