Outlaw X Presents: American Folkcrime

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Now that I’m stuck at home due to pregnancy screwing up my powers, I better give y’all a break from me. I think there’s a pretty long break coming up, actually. Wherever I’m sending this off has probably had more than enough Gecko-centric adventures for a lifetime. When I got Qiang, she could already wipe her own ass and everything. I didn’t need to feed her, change her, or keep her from running out into busy traffic. Squeezing a baby out of my lady parts is a big commitment toward the life of a child, and not one that most people make easy on you. And I have it easy. Not everyone gets the financial freedom I do.

Granted, I don’t feel so free right now. The loss of my powers is making my life much harder. Some people go through a whole damn pregnancy. I even got diabetes in the days since then. My feet are killing me. My back is killing me. I piss all the time now. That’s not counting when my body decides to spread itself open, spit out a bunch of womb goo, and force an entire baby out of a hole that is not big enough for a baby. I have told everyone who will listen I want drugs and nanites when the time comes. Hell, if they give me enough, I’ll c-section my own damn self rather than wait on that thing to rip and tear my vagina like Doomguy in hell.

With that in mind, I’m putting entertainment duty on Outlaw X again.

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“Ya heard it on the X. Hey there, folks, if you’re hearing this, then I’ve successfully traveled back in time to do the July 4th show after taking July 4th off. Don’t ask me to borrow the time machine. We only get away with this if we only use it when necessary. On a side note, does anyone have a spare romaframpton? It’s an unusual and obscure part. Contact the station. We’ll pay fair prices.

Now, for the holiday, we’re going to go back and examine a few greats in American supervillian history. This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list, but I wanted to include some of our favorites. And for the newbies, this may be an enlightening story time here. You’ll learn a thing or two.

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Number One: Erikson, Lord of Vinland

This one slips in because someone has proposed that Vinland might have been in Maine. The official histories don’t know. They say Leif Erikson got lost. In reality, ancient super villain scrolls tell a different story. The Norse had produced some of the world’s best pirates for some time when Leif Erikson decided to seek out new lands and new civilizations. To boldly pillage where no Norseman had pillaged before. Instead, he found some cold place in Canada with a lot of grapes.

Leif Erikson took one look at the place and decided, “Fuck it, I’ll make a base here and no one will ever find it.”

Conflicts with the Natives would prove that wrong, and the Norse colonists were ill-prepared to feed themselves in the new land they had found. The scrolls recount epic battles between Erikson and Native champions who would inexplicably best him at every turn. They especially sought to drive him out of the area he’d settled and called Vinland. He’d named it that because of the abundance of grapes in the area. What he found out after some time was there was a certain cultivar of grape in the area with special properties. When ingested, it drove a person into a mindless fury. They would attack anyone on sight with increased strength and vigor.

Erikson soon realized the potential of these grapes, the Grapes of Wrath. He could have a terrifying army capable of destroying normal men. He could smuggle them into a besieged city and watch as his enemies killed each other. He could poison an alliance with a single cup of wine. Taking over the known world would be as easy as plucking grapes.

The champions of four tribes gathered and beat Erikson, driving him from Vinland forever and keeping him away. To this day no one knows the location of Leif Erikson’s secret lair. Thus, this makes it possible the best and most secret lair of all time. Legend has it that a super genius among the Natives is the cause of this; inventing a device that transported the entire base to another dimension or world so grapes could never again be claimed. We may never know where the Grapes of Wrath are stored ever since our time machine’s romaframpton broke.

Number Two: The Bunyan Gang

Everyone knows Paul Bunyan’s just a tall tale, right? A giant of a man who felled trees as easily as other people swatted flies and his companion giant blue ox is something out of a fairy tale. Or a comic book.

Paul Bunyan existed. He was a man of super strength who wanted to strike it rich, exploiting forests for his own gain. He ran a gang, with the most prominent members being his younger brother Cordwood Pete, cousin Tony Beaver, and associate Febold Feboldson. They were best known for lumberjacking, but not everyone knows that they used their abilities to crush the competition. They would clear rivals’ land and sell that lumber themselves, or they would steal the logs in great log heists. One story even tells of the famously hot-tempered Cordwood Pete arranging for the leaders of rival gangs to be assassinated on the day that Paul Bunyan became the head of organized crime in the early United States. Pete stacked up dead bodies like cordwood, hence the name.

In the end, their success went to their heads and led to their downfalls. Tony Beaver, eager to be out from under Paul Bunyan’s shadow, went to run the gambling in the western mountains of Virginia, a region now known as West Virginia. Everything was going fine for him until he got too full of himself. He started encroaching on the farmers by stealing shipments of peanut butter and melons to sell off on his own. Beaver had used loopholes and bribes to avoid the scrutiny of local authorities, but the plantations had money of their own. They got Beaver shut out of the gambling, lumberjacking, mining, and farming. It was the last time something that big was given to guys like that.

Feboldson and Bunyan ran a huge protection racket in Kansas, with that state and Nebraska both paying them for protection. Then they were hired to wipe out a tribe of Native Americans in the Great Plains. Except it was too hot. The Natives and the giant supervillains met and decided they could fight later, when it wasn’t so hot. The Natives, knowing their existence was at stake, drugged Babe the Blue Ox so that he fell asleep under Pike’s Peak. Bunyan and Feboldson knew the heat would bake the ox, so they decided to cover him up with rocks for shade. Unfortunately for them, that actually cooked the ox. Bunyan and Feboldson finished the job, but the pair got into an argument as Bunyan blamed Feboldson for the idea to shade Babe. The two fought a little until they decided to stay away from each other.

Feboldson lingered in obscurity after that, never as big of a name without his partner Paul Bunyan. As for Bunyan, he died an early death in a bar brawl, slain by a superhero wielding a hammer.

That leaves Cordwood Pete. Pete broke with the gang after Feboldson. The smaller of the Bunyan boys, Pete lived in Paul’s shadow even moreso than Paul. The hot-tempered younger brother loved to take sidework to show he was just as powerful as his big brother. Except one time, he stole Paul’s ax to do it. Hired by the railroad to clear trees and buildings out of their way, he used the ax to clearcut 50 square miles. Paul was furious at his ax being stolen and put Pete in his place in a fight. Pete was never the same after that, living out his life selling cordwood until he died in his 80s.

Number Three: Stormalong

Another man considered a giant by the tales, and a pirate from the New England area, Alfred Bulltop Stormalong once traveled the world leaving misery and strife in his wake. He created a technological marvel of a ship, the Courser. It was huge, far larger than a clipper ship of the day should have been. Stormalong’s constant inventing and engineering kept the thing afloat with new devices and new trophies.

For instance, the sables. He once robbed a prince of his entire stable of prized Arabian horses. The Courser was fitted with a stable and a short race track so that Stormalong could keep them as a trophy of his accomplishments. He once got fed up with the trip around South America. To solve the issue, he built and attached a drill to the front of his ship and ordered “Ramming speed!” while aimed at the coast of Colombia near the Isthmus of Panama. The ship carved a large canal right through, the Panama Canal. He even vandalized the English coast when he visited that island. That’s not a colorful expression. As his ship passed by the famously gray cliffs of Dover, he rather childishly had the ship sail close enough for him and his men to paint them white with a powerful dye that leached into the rocks.

So great was his power that he defeated the legendary kraken that sought to destroy his ship, using a device to create a whirlpool so great that it sucked the enormous beast to the bottom-most depths of the ocean.

We don’t know exactly when Stormalong met his end because of the way he disappeared. He sailed to Florida to harness the power of a hurricane and used it to achieve liftoff. A letter from a cabin boy to his beloved details that Captain Stormalong planned to sail to the moon. We don’t know if he made it.

Number Four: The Were Pack

Once there was a boy who was traveling with his family in a covered wagon and fell off the back of it. The night of the full moon came, however, and he transformed. His family escaped, but the young werecoyote was forced to fend for himself until adopted by a pack of coyotes. Eventually, the boy grew up and became a fearsome old west outlaw, with whips made of snake leather. Bill, as he was called, decided to make a name for himself by killing the most notorious serial killer of early Texas, a person who left a trail of dead bodies everywhere he went. Except this person was another were. He wasn’t wolf or coyote, but a werehorse who called himself Widowmaker.

Pecos Bill and Widowmaker decided to join forces. They terrorized the Wild West for years, teaming up with the likes of other old time villains like The Haint and brawling with heroes like the Blue Battler and Dr. Resolute. The Painted Desert got its name from when he painted it red with the blood of Native Americans he slaughtered, the body paint they wore staining the area further as they rotted.

His end, like that of many villains, came about because of love. He fell in love with a werecatfish named Sue. She adored him right back, but to prove his love to her, he kidnapped scientists and engineers to build him a device capable of blowing up the stars in the sky. Well, they weren’t capable of that, but instead one of them had a breakthrough and realized a way to create a barrier in the sky that would stop the light from getting to Earth. It was enough to fool Pecos Bill and fake his death when Pecos predictably turned on the scientists and executed them all. What the scientist would go on to do with this darkshield is a story for another time and place. What’s important is Sue said yes to Bill’s proposal.

Sue had a condition, though. I don’t mean a medical condition. She wanted to ride Widowmaker first. There was something of a rivalry between them, with Widowmaker wanting to be number one in Bill’s heart. Widowmaker knew she’d pull something like this and had been prepared. He’d warned the scientist who created the darkshield about the upcoming betrayal. He helped hide the man. In return, the scientist invented a device for Widowmaker that would tear Sue’s molecules apart. The only problem is that after he bucked Sue off, Widowmaker failed to account for Bill running to Sue’s aid.

The effect was said to resemble bouncing. Their images bounced as, little by little, the pair were dispersed up into the sky. Pecos Bill wanted to live the rest of his life with Sue, and that’s just what happened.

Number Five: John the Conqueror

Villains love to use “the Conqueror” as part of their name, but nowadays, you don’t get away with that unless you’ve actually conquered anything. Spinetingler isn’t the Conqueror. Cercopagis Lysis isn’t the Conqueror, no matter how much he’d like to be. No, John was the Conqueror.

A prince, betrayed and captured in battle, he was sold into slavery and survived the terrifying and ghastly trip to the New World, where he managed to escape with the help of his giant crow. It was illegal to be a runaway slave back then, which is why one man’s hero is another man’s villain. With his guile, willpower, and a number of magical artifacts he acquired over the years, he easily evaded slavecatchters. Eventually, he returned to Africa, but not before leaving magic in a plant named for him. Somehow, some way, he can always return to America, if only someone knows how to summon him.

One tale of his daring exploits that survives in the scrolls is of the time he dealt with the Hell dimensions. He fell in love with a demon, the daughter of a demon lord. The demon lord didn’t like John, and plotted to kill him. But first, he would trick and tire John the Conqueror. He gave him an impossible task: clear sixty acres in half a day., sow it with corn, and reap the grown corn in the second half of the day. With the aid of the demon woman, he obtained a magical ax and a special plow that allowed him to accomplish this. However, she warned John that the demon lord planned to kill him regardless.

John decided that a fair way to help accomplish the impossible and evade the demon lord was to steal the demon lord’s demonic horses. Despite the head start and the stolen horses, the demon pursued them and would gain ground whenever they needed to rest, eat, and sleep. In the end, they John the Conqueror and his love unlocked the secret of shapeshifting, allowing them to get away with the theft of the horses.

Conventional folklore says that stuff about going back to Africa and the magical plant, but in reality, John went to the Hell Dimensions. He deposed the demon lord and imprisoned him, ruling over the kingdom and finding a way to make it a safe haven for those damned by the “good people” of Earth that would enslave and commit genocide according to the letter of the law.

This isn’t the only one of our stories where demons factor in, and some would argue the tales seem impossible. Folks, I’ve seen the Hell Dimensions. Time doesn’t work right there. John could easily come back if he feels the need.

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