Sunday, July 10, 2011

Zebra-Man & Zebra-Batman


CROSS-EYE ALERT!!! Viewing this picture for too long may make you spin in your chair or maybe fall out of it altogether - or maybe not. Consider yourself duly warned. I like to be a user-friendly bloggest. Today we have another Batman villain from Detective Comics #275, January 1960. Seems this guy invents a machine that generates lines of force and a belt to control the resulting power to commit crimes. He can tear the steel doors off a vault and pull over a water tower to almost crush the pursuing dynamic-duo. Then Batman figures out where the Zebra-Man is hanging out and raids his HQ, only to be irradiated by the energy machine, at which point he repels everything and everyone in the room, including the machine, which ends up broken. Without the controlling belt Batman repels everything around him so he can't even eat or ride in the Batmobile or anything. Of course he's still walking on the ground when I suspect he'd actually be repelled into the air but let's not split hairs here. Now unable to eat or drink Bats is facing with slow death when he notices he can approach an electromagnet in a junk yard and comes up with a plan. He magnifies a manhole cover, lures Zebra-Man over it so he can grab the belt and restore both of them to non-repellent being once again. Thus Batman and Robin bring to a rapid end an otherwise promising criminal career and I'm sure Bats hurried home and had a nice, juicy steak. One minor issue I had with the story was that in one part Zebra-Man is standing on a small boat and lifts the wreck of a rather large freighter. I suspect, all things being equal, doing that probably would have resulted in the boat he was standing on capsizing. For the figures, which I did at different times, I used a JLA Atom figure for Zebra-Man and a Super-Powers Collection Batman for the Batman figure. I painted them white and then went at it with a fine brush to give them the stripes.

No comments:

Post a Comment