Like any red-blooded American boy grown up into a red-blooded American man child, I loves me some dinosaurs. I probably grew up in the best possible generation for kick ass dinosaur action. Jurassic Park, Xenozoic Tales, Primal Rage, Super Mario Bros. The Movie, Dinosaurs both suburban and Extreme! Hell, we had such a vast selection of Dinosaur related media, we even had the luxury of hating some of it. Anybody remember Theodore Rex? No? Then congratulations, your ability to block out painful memories is more advanced than mine. So, in honor of the self evident awesomeness of our Prehistoric ancient ones, I've decided to dedicate the second installment of my comicbook universe mosaic to all things giant reptile.
Dinosaurs are probably most relevant to the canon of my universe through The Improbables, a team of teenage superheroes active in the 80's and reformed in the modern era after years of exile to another dimension. The team in its original form was widely considered to be on the lower tier of super groups, often battling goofy oddball villains mostly to provide fodder for the animated kids show based on their exploits. The team included -
Thing Man: A shape shifting Team Leader with the ability to transform into any inanimate object.
Springer: A cyborg with hydraulic spring loaded arms and legs allowing him to leap great distances and attack with immense physical force.
Ellie Mental: Springer's magically powered girlfriend, able to transform into elemental forms resembling the classic four elements (Fire, Water, Earth, and Air)
Mighty Mite: An eight inch tall amazon warrior princess whose super strength is inversely proportional to her size.
Air Bag: A synthetic humanoid with a hollow elastic body that he can manipulate by altering the flow of air through himself.
And most important to this topic - Thesaurus Rex: a Tyrannosaurus from a parallel reality dominated by dinosaurs, with average human level intelligence but an above average vocabulary.
The team would face their greatest challenge when the orphaned Thesaurus Rex would learn that his presence in this dimension resulted in a portal being kept open to his home world, allowing the despotic ruler of DinoEarth, Tyrantasaurus, to mount an invasion. In order to stop him and send him back, the team banded together to close the portal, but instead found themselves trapped on the other side, leaving Thing Man and Air Bag behind, the former trapped unconscious in object form as a cymbal clanging monkey, and the latter lost and alone without his teammates.
Many years later, the team would find their way back, hardened by their experiences on DinoEarth and molded into bad ass adult superheroes, rejoining a bitter and cynical Air Bag and a half insane re-humanized Thing Man. That would be the plan for the ongoing series anyway, starting in the present with their return, then telling the rest of the story in flashback.
Apart from the main storyline of the Improbables, the other dinosaurs are generally either solo characters or part of other teams. A brief overview in no particular order:
Prof. E. Saurus: A super scientist who spliced his own DNA with multiple dinosaur breeds. A founding member of the Conquerors' Club, a sort of Algonquin Round Table for sophisticate supervillains, resembling a Velociraptor with a human head.
Technosaurus and Dinoboy: A tag team comprised of a human teenage prodigy and a mad scientist refugee from DinoEarth, their minds switched into each others' bodies. Now an excitable human kid inside a cybernetic T-Rex body, and a callous reptilian genius inside the body of a boy, his teeth now filed to points, together they fight crime awesomely.
Dr. Dactyl and his Pteromen: A super intelligent supervillain and rival of Prof. E. Saurus who attempted to replicate his gene splicing process on his own body, giving him the head of a Pterodactyl, but without the wings that make that creature relevant or interesting. He now toils secretly to build a race of Pteromen, mindless mutant servants with Pterodactyl bodies and human heads
Dino-mite and Dyna-mite: A tag team duo comprised of a heroic Velociraptor munitions expert with a suit stacked with explosives, and his best friend Dyna-mite, Mighty Mite's magic wielding sister able to fly and turn her body into a living grenade.
Killasaurus: A genetic hybrid of the most violent prehistoric creatures who ever existed, a fictional character in a comicbook universe within the comicbook universe brought to life along with the rest of his team, S.P.I.K.E (The Syndicate of Psychotically Insane Killer Elites).
Tyrannosaurus Hex: A resurrected T-Rex skeleton with dark magical powers, currently enrolled in the Arcane Underground, a secret school set up to train the next generation of magic wielding superheroes.
And finally, Abrasaurus Lincoln: Ancillary member of the Lincoln League, a group of super heroic Abraham Lincolns collected from various parallel Earths, all either surviving or being rescued from their assassinations, in this case, the bearded brontosaurus 16th president of DinoEarth.
I also have this note for some character named Dr. Super Dinosaur, but I don't have any other descriptions or character connections associating the name with anything. I imagine I probably just liked the name, but decided I already had too many dinosaur mad scientists in my universe to add another one. That fact in itself is kind of illustrative of how insane this whole project is.
Anyway, see you next time.
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