Who's Who In The CBU Update 2009

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper, are the owners of Wicker Man Studios and of Gun Street Girl, its flagship project created by Barbara and artist Ryan Howe. Barbara has written for many websites, and served a one-year stint as Managing Editor of the multiple-Eisner-award-winning print magazine Comic Book Artist. Park is the Editor-in-Chief of indie comics company Septagon Studios, and of Comics Bulletin's sister-website MangaLife. Together, they also co-wrote the graphic novel Half Dead, published by Dabel Brothers Productions and Marvel Comics, and later picked up again by Desperado Publishing, and the New Media project The Hidden for manga publisher Tokyopop. They both also adapt manga and edit manga and comics for various companies.

The Day Everybody Fought Everybody

By Park Cooper

Even now the memory of it is fading from my mind.

I first heard about it from Merryman of the Inferior Five, who was contacted by Angel and the Ape, who got a tip from Gorilla Grodd, who heard about it from Vandal Savage.

Angel and the Ape contacted the Flash, who immediately alerted the JLA.

By then it was already far too late, but better far too late than never. I guess.

Let me back up.

It all started with the Wizard.

You know, The Wizard? From Earth-Two?

Or are we Earth-Two? I can never keep that straight.

Every so often, the Wizard'd get the idea that he'd team up with villains from Earth-One or Earth-Pi or whatever and they'd fight the JLA. Happened like once a year. Of course, the JLA always teamed up with the JSA to defeat them.

One day, just out on his own, he tried to ambush Wonder Woman coming home from a date with an Army officer named Steve. She whupped him. Real bad. Used the lasso to humiliate him in front of the whole town.

It got to him.

He got the idea of teaming up with the Secret Society of Super-Villains.

And the Monster Society of Evil.

And the Injustice League.

And EVERYONE ELSE.

The plan was to quietly get together, pick a time and a place and a dimension, and then open a can of en masse kickass.

And then to beat the hell out of every other hero in that dimension's timestream.

And then to start the same thing in the next dimension.

This was scary, big-time evil.

A lot of villains weren't even asked, because this was gonna be cookin' with evil gas and they couldn't trust anyone who might turn traitor and leak (for as long as could be avoided, anyway).

They ignored the Shade right off but grabbed monsters who don't get out much, like Solomon Grundy, right off.

The first lucky thing that happened for the Wizard was that the Time Trapper heard about his plans from T.O.Morrow. That helped a lot with getting everyone together.

The villains chose the Present as the time just for convenience, but knew that place would be a problem. Everyone knew that wherever they fought would be skragged for miles around, and they didn't want to accidentally fry the relatives of one of their own. On the other hand, most of the Villains required things like oxygen.

Finally, The Wizard got a suggestion from a sorceror named Deimos that a world on the flipside of the earth's surface, Skartaris, might be handy. Everyone got ready.

I don't know much more than that, but I got called in because it quickly became clear that ANYONE might be useful in this thing.

So with the help of the Spectre, a bunch of people from other dimensions decided to take the battle to the bad guys before they could strike. Our information was bad.

They were ready for us.

It was a blur after that and is getting blurrier. Here's what I remember:

The first problem was the Kal-El family showing up from across the timestream. That helped a lot until the air was magically turned to 1 part kryptonite per 10 million. It didn't help that, fighting inside of the Earth, no one was going to have access to a yellow sun. Firestorm made a second mini-sun, Element Lad tried reversing the damage, but things didn't look good.

Someone gated in the entire population of the planet Daxam, but they fared ill against Cosmic King turning people's clothes to lead as fast as he could.

In fact, the magic flew fast and furious. At some point, Mister Miracle called in Lightray, Orion and New Genesis, which was a mistake because Darkseid was just waiting for that. At that point the Earth was in danger of exploding from the inside, so someone cast a spell that moved the whole she-bang.

I heard they were trying for Asgard, since the JSA had once been trapped there in a big fight for years holdng off Ragnarok.

Instead the whole thing just moved to Hell.

So all the heroes and all the villains and all the aliens met all the demons and everything got much worse.

When Lobo accidentally killed Jason Blood in a bout of friendly fire, Etrigan cut loose. Turns out that without Jason Blood to hold him back Etrigan was hopped up beyond even the ability of the Phantom Stranger and Zatanna to deal with him.

It was then that the Gods started turning up.

The first one popped in right next to me.

It was Vext and I knew then that this mess could only end in one of two ways and neither of them featured the good guys exactly winning. I was right, too.

Next, Metron, Brainiacs 5 through 8, and a whole herd of Chronii from across the timestream managed to kill almost all of the various Time Trappers from across the timestream. With their deaths, a rift was opened up into what I heard Lord Volt call "Hypertime."

And I thought things were bad before?

I nearly had my butt handed to me by this guy called Galactus. I was WAY beneath his notice, but he nearly fell on me when the Swamp Thing rebuffed him... a mutant named Dazzler was eating up all the sound in the area so I didn't notice until I was almost swatted by this giant purple ass.

The Anti-Monitor showed up but he was defeated well enough by what was left of the Kal-el family. The Guardians of the Galaxy ran interference for them and helped keep everyone else out of the Supers' way. However, that focussing of their attention allowed Entropy to kill almost 1/4th of the GL corps.

Crazy Jane didn't even NEED Typhoid Mary's help in destroying Mentallo and Metallo after Dr. Strange made it possible for each of her 64 personalities to temporarily manifest in 63 extra bodies simultaneously.

It was amazing seeing some people fighting on the side of the heroes. Ra's al Ghul, the Hellfire Club, Nimrod and the Sisterhood of Dada took out Mojo's Warwolves with ease but had a little more trouble with the Super-Adaptoid. Thank god that all the Amazos overloaded and melted down.

At one point I almost had to laugh when I saw The Dummy chasing Brother Power, The Geek.

The worst of it all started when the Evil Tim Hunter Squad actually hit on Death while she was busy helping Roy Harper to his final reward. They actually irritated her. Soon Destruction himself showed up and started dropping people left and right. But frankly we were all grateful for the thinning of the crowd, even when we lost people on our own side.

It was at about this time that I saw Constantine sneaking off somewhere. I'm not stupid. I followed him. He, Peter Wisdom, and Jenny Sparks were eavesdropping on Lady Quark, Takion, Brainiac 2, the Molecule Man, and Thanos trying to do something with time travel. Wisdom kept the third-stringers like Professor Vic Chalker off our backs. He almost drew the attention of a flock of Sentinels that blotted out the mini-sun like passenger pigeons, but Supreme got Nimrod to override them and call them off to be destroyed in a fight with thousands and thousands of Ultrons.

Whatever the Smart Party did, it worked. At Constantine's suggestion, they sent Adam Destine off to grab the Wizard from the past before he could actually think up his plan in the first place. Once he arrived, the White Witch and Clea paralyzed him (aided by the now-dead doctor's Eye of Agamotto) and then killed him. Just in time, too. Darkseid had just released his secret weapon: a trained breeding pair of Sun-Eaters. Turns out the female is even bigger than the male of the species.

But that didn't matter as time rewrote itself. Suddenly it was just me and the She-Hulk standing in front of Death and Destruction and this guy with this big book and a tall white guy. I mean really white, like Death. She-Hulk asked what the hell we were doing there. Book-Guy, Destiny, explained that an event like this needed two mortal witnesses for it to be unmade "in accordance with the Oldest Rules." She said why us. White-Guy, Dream, said that we had access to awareness "even outside of the realities of Hypertime." Whatever THAT means. Didn't matter, I was glad. At first I was also glad when he said that we would only remember all this conciously for a short time. Then I got to thinking that horrible as it all was, it was still a heck of a story.



Oh hell! Whatever I was writing, I just spilled soup all over it! That'll teach me to eat at the table. I mean, you gotta eat at the table, but it'll teach me to try to do two things at once. There goes like twenty pages of something that's now illegible, and I can't remember what it was. Something about a dream I had about superheroes? I don't know anymore. Heck.

I could just try free-writing, free-associating, and seeing what I come up with...

Hi! Thanks for buying what I hope will be a very lucrative novel! My name is Irwin Schwab, better known as Ambush Bug! Make that THE Ambush Bug, like THE Batman. And... um...

Nope, I got nothin'.