LNH: Ultimate Mercenary: The Special Edition #1

[Adrian J. McClure]

28

Apr. '13
Ultimate Mercenary #1

The Ultimate Mercenary miniseries began by thrusting its hero into a dangerous and and unfamiliar situation. What happens when Ultimate Ninja’s ultimate fan finds himself in a strange new world without the Ninja for guidance?

    Written by Adrian J. McClure
    Originally posted June 13, 2003 (Commentary track posted April 28, 2013)


LNH Non-Comics presents
A KnightsBridge production
ULTIMATE MERCENARY
#1 (of ?)
“The Genetically-Engineered Vegetables of Wrath, part 1,” AKA “The End
of History, part -2”
Almost a Flame Wars VI crossover

    It was not exactly a dark and stormy night.  For one thing, it wasn’t even dark, although it was a bit foggy, so naturally it couldn’t be stormy or night either.  In fact, it was about the afternoon.  So it was more of a light and foggy afternoon.  It was still menacing, though.

    “Just get on with the story,” muttered Ultimate Mercenary under his breath.  He was desperately trying to figure out what had happened to him.  One minute, he was involved in an epic and gripping plotline involving a evil extradimensional tyrant who was trying to take over the world with the power of his afro.  The next moment, he was standing here, in the deserted streets of a city that seemed even more ruined and desolate than Gary, Indiana.

     Maybe he had been killed?  That would probably be a good thing, he
couldn’t be considered a really significant net.hero unless he had
undergone an apparent death plotline.  But it couldn’t be just
apparent death, everything was so quiet here that he had to be really
dead.

    As he surveyed the desolate scene around him, he could not help but
think of who he was and how he’d gotten here.  Ultimate Ninja had been
without a doubt the greatest of the Net.Heroes. (Well, Master Blaster
had always insisted that he was the greatest net.hero, but the only
people who believed him were young women who were taken in by his Mac Daddy Vibes.  Why did he have to get all the chicks?  Ultimate Mercenary was every bit as cool as he was, he was a ninja and from an alternate future and everything.)  However, in the timeline in which
Ultimate Mercenary lived, Ultimate Ninja was killed along with most of
Earth’s other net.heroes by the immortal evil known only as Apocalisp.
 Yet he had left a legacy.  One valiant fan of his had been left
alive.  And that fan had a son.  And that son had a clone.  And that
clone had a son, and that son had a clone, and that clone had a clone,
and last of all this clone had a son.  And that son was Ultimate
Mercenary, dedicated to preserving the legacy of Ultimate Ninja during
the dark reign of Apocalisp.

    For years, together with his friend
Anything-You-Can-Do-I-Can-Do-Better Lad, he had waged a guerilla war
against Apocalisp.  Yet victory had always eluded them, because
Apocalips had been so dangerous and wily, and not, as
Anything-You-Can-Do-I-Can-Do-Better Lad had always insisted, because Ultimate Mercenary was a hopeless loser.

    And then, one horrible day, Andy Best had been cut down by the
minions of Apocalisp.  Yet salvation had come in the unlikely form of
the lovely net.heroine Manga Girl.  It was she who helped Ultimate
Ninja finally defeat Apocalips.  She travelled back in time to erase
Apocalips from existance, Ultimate Mercenary accompanying her.  When
they succeeded, he returned to the present with her to begin his own
career as a net.hero.  OK, maybe that hadn’t been exactly how it
happened, but the author would rather not read those issues of Manga
Girl again.  It was #6-8, if he recalls correctly, if you are brave
and/or anal-retentive enough to read yourself and check.

    Bristling over the author’s continual interruptions, Ultimate
Mercenary then remembered what had brought him here.  He had
adventured a few times with Manga Girl and that annoying guy who she
insisted on going out with, Fuzzboy, the man with the
dimension-travelling afro.  What a stupid power!  Why couldn’t Manga
Girl have realized that he was much cooler?

    Anyway, they got involved in a battle with Pope, the evil alternate
universe counterpart of Fuzzboy.  Maybe that was why Manga Girl went
out with him—he was an important enough character to have an evil
twin.  Someday, Ultimate Mercenary knew, he would have an evil twin of
his own.  Anyway, they had begun an epic battle where the LNH faced
the dread Pope, who was aided and abetted by Lord Magenta (or Magneta, as Tom Russell was always calling him) and a traitor within the LNH. (List Lad, or maybe it was Bibliography Boy?  Really, who cares?  I
sure don’t.)  This battle was still going on, and Ultimate Mercenary
had just gone off to aid the LNH, hoping to prove his glory in battle,
and maybe even sacrifice his life.  If that had been the case, though
he hoped he’d come back.  But instead he was here, in Net.tropolis,
with no traffic in sight, which would normally be a good thing, but…

    A clear, British-accented voice rang out from the gloom:  “Don’t you
think it would be considered a good thing if you were pulled out of a
plot where you fought a man with a giant teleporting afro?”

    “Hey, who is that?!” snipped Ultimate Mercenary.  “Who are you?
Where is this?  Did Pope do this?  What happened to the LNH?  What
happened to Manga Girl??”

    A man stepped toward Ultimate Mercenary, seeming to solidify from the mist that hung over everything.   He was wearing distinguished
clothing but seemed not much older than Ultimate Mercenary himself.
In his hand, he held an umbrella.

    The stranger (No, he was not a Stranger) shook his head.  “I can’t
tell you too much now.   I don’t want to give away the plot only a few
pages into the series.  But I will tell you that I am Masterplan Lad
and that you are indeed in Net.tropolis.  And I have a very important
warning to give.”

    A chill of foreboding ran down Ultimate Mercenary’s spine like the
bugs that lived down in the LNH sub-sub-sub-sub-gosub basement, which had never successfully been exterminated and which Doctor Stomper theorized had been around long enough to develop their own complex culture.  “What… what is it?”

    “It is…  actually, it’s not time to tell you yet after all.  I’ll
have to wait until the plot develops more.  I’m sorry, I’m a bit new
to this whole portentous cosmic entity thing.  But I’ll get back to
you as soon as possible.”  With that, he stepped back into the fog
from which he came.

    “Wait!” said Ultimate Mercenary, but with that a huge green oval
object shot towards him, and he narrowly ducked.  A cluster of
bullets, like annoying flies that hover around your food on a picnic,
shot out of the green thing.  He pulled out his dwarf Ninja Bush and
they reflected back at it.  Finally, some action! he thought.  But as
he prepared to fight the floating green thing to the death, a red
laser beam (which actually looked like red tint on a movie screen) hit
the strange green sentinel, and it exploded in a really impressive CGI
sort of way.

    Ultimate Mercenary felt someone grab him from behind.  “Hurry!” it
said.  “Don’t gawk at the special effects!  There are sure to be more
of them coming now!”

    He was still a bit resentful at being denied a chance to show off his
ninja skills, and therefore reluctant to follow them, but when seven
more of the green things started buzzing toward them, he decided that
he couldn’t very well get to be a major hero if he was killed a few
pages into his own series by things that, now that he thought about
it, looked rather like flying watermelons.

    So he followed the small band of humans through the devastated
streets of Net.Tropolis.  Ultimate Mercenary shook his head.  It
reminded him of the things he had seen in his own time, when he had
been a part of its own rebellion movement.  He was particularly struck
as they passed the devastated LNHQ and he wondered, as he had many times in his own time, whether he was capable of handling something that even heroes like Irony Man and Ultimate Ninja could not.  It was a sobering reminder that net.heroes had failed and could fail again.

    At least, part of his mind was taken up by that.  The other part was,
in spite of itself, thinking of the female rebel’s hindquarters.

    The rebels were all very young, wearing clothing that looked grubby
and primitive.  Their hair, however, was perfect, and the women were
wearing makeup.  The woman in front of him was the most impressive,
with long dark hair and a very revealing outfit that, Ultimate
Mercenary reminded himself, would probably not be very useful in
battle.

    “What happened?” he whispered to her, still a little shaken up.  A
smile crossed her face, a smile that reminded him in its vitality and
charm of Manga Girl’s, except that this one took up a normal amount of
her face.  Manga Girl… would she have been dead too?  Now that he
thought about it, this girl was not much older than himself.  He now
realized that she must have been about to laugh at him, but at least
she had tried to conceal it.

    “Who are you anyway, hmm?”

    “My name is Ultimate Mercenary,” he said, trying to make it sound as
impressive as possible.

    “So you’re a mercenary?  I don’t think that there would be very many
people around to hire you these days.”

    “I’m, er, not a mercenary.  I just chose that name because it sounded
kind of cool.  You see, I am the successor and protege of Ultimate
Ninja, and…”

    The girl seemed genuinely surprised by this claim.  “Ultimate Ninja?
*The* Ultimate Ninja?  I doubt it.”

    “No way!  I knew him, alright.  See, he even gave me this dwarf ninja
bush so that I could be a hero like him!”  Actually, some people told
him that Ultimate Ninja had given him that dwarf ninja bush because he
was tired of being pestered by him.  But surely Ultimate Ninja didn’t
hate him!  At least, he hoped not…

    “Then you are telling the truth,” said the girl in awe.  “The ninja
bushes were all exterminated.  You must come from the last age of
heroes!”

    “What do you mean the last age of heroes?  I think I need a bit more
exposition here.”

    “Once there were many net.heroes, even if not all of their authors
wrote their series on time.  They protected the world and saved us
from aliens and from our own folly.  Then, one day, there came the
enemy that even they couldn’t defeat, the ultimate fruit of Man’s
hubris:  Genetically engineered food.  A batch of tomatoes somehow
became sentient and took over their plant.  They genetically altered
the watermelons to be their shock troops and infiltrated the LNHQ by
sending them a load of watermelons.  They massacred the LNH to the
last man.  Within three years, the tomatoes ruled everything.  Yet a
ray of hope existed.  For Kid Precog, one of the last surviving
LNHers, foretold that one day, a Net.Hero would arise from the mists
of time and free mankind from the blood-red conquerors.  And surely
that hero is you.”

    Ultimate Mercenary was overwhelmed.  This was even worse than when Dvandom stopped writing Dvandom Force.  “ALL of them?  Even— How long ago was this?”

    The girl shook her head.  “The last age of heroes was a dark time.
People were losing interest in the LNH, and writers fought frantically
for ways to attract new readers.  Characters with convoluted
backstories—like you—were ignored by the writers.  Probably you were
trapped in character limbo until someone wrote a story about you.”

    “And how long has it been since my last story?”

    “Five hundred years…”

***

    “So that’s supposed to be him, huh?”  the man wondered out loud.  He had watched the whole sequence of events from others’ eyes, as was his Talent.  “He doesn’t look to dangerous.”

    “You should have learned after all this time, T-483, that appearances
are deceiving.  Especially in our line of work.  Would Hitler have
looked dangerous when he was this man’s age?  Trust me, it’s him
alright.”

    “How do you know that it’s him rather than, say, Contraption Man?”

    “You don’t understand.  I’ve read the book of prophecies that we
stole from the Knights Temporal.  This man fits, in every possible
way.”

    “This doesn’t look like too much of a challenge,” said another.  “I
mean, the only hard part should be getting him before the Knights do.”

    “Or the Headhunters,” said their superior.

    “Right,” said the other Talent.  “Killing him shouldn’t be too hard.”

    TO BE CONTINUED!

***

Ultimate Mercenary was created by T(h)om Russell and is currently
reserved by me.  The Headhunters were created by Jesse Willey.
Contraption Man was created by someone else who I can’t remember and
am too lazy at the moment to look up.  Everything else belongs to me.
This story is (c) 2003 Adrian McClure.

****

Commentary Track:

I have left the original issue largely unaltered, apart from fixing some annoying typos.

The initial plot of Ultimate Mercenary, such as it is, was  vaguely inspired by a couple of second-tier X-Men comics from the then-previous generation of X-titles, to play with/parody/lampshade UM’s marginal status and his roots in the then-faded 90s X-boom. Not that it would matter for anyone other than diehard X-fans, which at the time none of us really were, but hey. I did not read any of these books, but I did read Paul O’Brien’s reviews of them—his gradually increasing rage at Mutant X almost justified that title’s existence. UM himself was vaguely inspired by X-Man, the single most useless spinoff character who somehow managed to go on for 75 issues, although he was ahead of that character since even in Manga Girl he had a clearly defined place in his world. The whole “stuck in an alternate world” setup was inspired by Mutant X and Bishop’s solo book, and the time war plot that got grafted on in the last minute came from an issue of Cable. I also threw in some broad B-movie parody elements, which wound up getting more signficant than I’d thought.

I’m rather amazed by how short this issue is. The issues kept getting longer and longer, which issue 7 ballooning into three parts which were at least twice as long as this. The next substantial thing I’m writing in this storyline, the Infinite Leadership Crisis issue, will likely be even longer.

“Almost a Flame Wars VI crossover”—Another change I made at the last minute was tacking this on to a crossover going on at the time. of course, Flame Wars VI turned out to be the single most confusing crossover in the LNH history and probably isn’t even in continuity anymore. Which is a moot point anyway, considering that it was about alternate realities and such. It also wound up outlasting the original crossover by a good ten years. Said crossover also began with issue -3, so the negative issue numbers reflect that. “The End of History” referred at the time to the time war storyline being set up at the end. Later on both the title and the storyline got compeltely dropped. So it goes.

The whole storyline is going to (sort of) conclude as part of Flame Wars Final, thus bringing us full circle.

“It was not exactly a dark and stormy night.” Ah yes, the old cliche that’s been mocked so often it’s become a cliche itself. Although Madeleine L’Engle used it as the opening line for A Wrinkle in Time and made it work. It originates in “Paul Clifford” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton who, while widely considered the patron saint of needlessly convoluted and tone-deaf writing, is a rather more interesting figure than many realize. He wrote widely across many genres, writing early and influential work in mystery novels, and occult fantasy. He is an important figure in literary history, which is not the same as being good. His play “Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes” also gave us the more well-regarded phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

This has nothing at all to do with this issue, of course—the writing isn’t *that* bad.

“an epic and gripping plotline involving an evil extradimensional tyrant who was trying to take over the world with the power of his afro”—that would be Tom Russell’s unfinished crossover story, “The Afro of Darnation,” one of the many self-admittedly awful stories he flooded RACC with at 15. The afro-wielder in question was Pope, evil post-apocalyptic counterpart of Manga Girl’s sidekick Fuzzboy, who was probably meant to be a parody of Bishop. (I only just figured that out.) We’ve been through two real world Popes since then.

“Maybe he had been killed?  That would probably be a good thing, he couldn’t be considered a really significant net.hero unless he had undergone an apparent death plotline.”—UM’s death-wish, which is part of his desire for significance, was going to be part of Afro of Darnation. He was supposed to die at the end by wishing for a heroic death, in much the same way Colossal Boy did in the postboot Legion of Superheroes.

UM has been plagued by unfinished stories from the very beginning. His plot has never quite gone the way it “should.” He seems to be a force for narrative chaos, deflecting the stories he’s in from taking a coherent track.

“the lovely net.heroine Manga Girl”—UM’s crush on Manga Girl was one of the details I was absolutely sure were in Tom’s original issues, but then when I read them it turned out I had extrapolated it myself. The same was true of UM’s appearance—I’ve always seen him as being sort of lanky and scrawny, but FISH Force #5—the only story he’s in that wasn’t written by Tom or me—describes him as “burly-chested.” His feelings for Manga Girl helped humanize him a fair amount, as well as inspiring the creation of multiple other Manga Girls later on.

“In his hand, he held an umbrella.”—Masterplan Lad is, in a weird sort of way, a reflection of the Doctor. His name and umbrella recall the Seventh, but he’s quite the opposite of him personality-wise—instead of an agent of chaos who disrupts the stories he arrives in, he’s an agent of order who makes doomed attempt to stabilize the stories he’s in. He’s taken on some overtones of the First Doctor over time, though, an alien being dragged into the role of adventurer by his human compatriots.

He was also something of an author avatar or, in LNH terms, a Writer Character. (The character who is a writer’s central focus and embodies some trait of them, from the days when the LNH was more RP-like.) Some of the issues he’s faced are obliquely inspired by my own life. Of course, pretty much everyone in the cast has some of me in them.

“which had never successfully been exterminated and which Doctor Stomper theorized had been around long enough to develop their own complex culture”—In one of the cut scenes from issue 4, the cockroaches would have actually shown up.

“dwarf Ninja Bush”—most people probably don’t remember this any more, but the original Ninja Bushes were based on the running gag of inept ninja carrying around branches to disguise themelves in The Tick.

“a red laser beam (which actually looked like red tint on a movie screen) hit the strange green sentinel, and it exploded in a really impressive CGI sort of way.”—at this point, the idea was that ruling vegetables have hihgly advanced special effects, while the ragtag rebels can only afford fake and cheesy ones.

“smile crossed her face, a smile that reminded him in its vitality and charm of Manga Girl’s”—It’s hard to picture Victoria smiling like that today. In fact “the girl” doesn’t even get a name in this issue. She’s just there as an object of desire for UM, reflecting both his and my overactive adolescent hormones. Over time, she developed her own perspective and turned into a character with a fair amount of depth in her own right. And a name. It’s interesting how her arc reflects the gradual emergence of feminist consciousness in geek culture

To be fair to my past self, “the girl” in this issue doesn’t represent the baseline for how I was writing women at the time. The descriptions were more male-gazey then I’m comfortable with now, but I learned pretty quickly, writing central female characters like Lydia Forward, who we’ll get to later. Probably a lot of that’s down to my mother, who helped me be not quite as dysfunctional an adolescent as I could have been.

There’s also the fact that most of the series is told from strictly inside UM’s point of view. It only breaks it a couple of times, for foreshadowing scenes and such, as well as for Victoria’s plot thread later on. So we learn a lot about him even though he’s pretty repressed,

“I don’t think that there would be very many people around to hire you these days.”—to this day, I’m not sure where the name Ultimate Mercenary comes from. Probably the answer was that Tom was a 15-year-old boy at the time and thought it was cool, which thankfully fits the character as well.

“”Right,” said the other Talent.  ”Killing him shouldn’t be too hard.”“—oh yes, that.

I didn’t know who these people were and what they actually wanted when I threw in this cliffhanger. Later on, I did establish a background for them, but then dropped this plotline entirely. Nowadays, I aim to have some idea of what I’m doing with a plot element befroe I throw it in, even if I completely change it later on.

Also, I don’t think Masterplan Lad was originally supposed to be part of the Knights Temporal, who were supposed to be big bads in the LNH series I originally reserved UM for. I (uncharacteristically) simplified things by making him part of them. I’m still quite proud of that name, though.