Friday, June 13, 2008

The Friday Challenge - 6/13/08

Update: Oops, sorry, missed the link to Sean's entry. It's included now.

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It's been a long week here in Casa del Calamaro. Last weekend we had the multistate road trip that culminated in the Ordeal by Airline — and I guess we're lucky that we did it do it last weekend, and not this weekend as a certain party tried to reschedule it to at the last minute, because this weekend I-94 is closed between Mauston and Madison due to the flooding of the Baraboo River.

Anyway, that was last weekend, then this week turned out to be more work-intensive than expected, and on top of that today is The Kid's birthday. How auspicious is that? The Kid turns 13 on Friday the 13th.

Pushing my luck, then, I've finally gotten around to the Friday Challenge, and I find we've got quite a few entries this week. Here they are, in roughly the order received. If I've missed anybody or if there are any broken links, please let me know.

Henry
Snowdog
Passin Through
Bane
Vidad
KTown
Rigel Kent
Mick
Sean

As always, you're invited to read, comment on, and vote for your favorite, with the winner to be announced on Sunday.



Now, as for this week's Friday Challenge: my original idea was in far too poor taste, so here's the backup idea, which came to me as I was reading through the accumulated comments from last week. Specifically, someone (sorry, I forget who) pointed out something that had never occurred to me before, but now seems glaring in its obviousness. Aside from Frank Miller's Dark Knight 2, which doesn't count, you never see Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor together.

So that's what we have this week; a totally fanboy challenge. Two insanely rich men; two captains of capitalism who travel in the same circles and yet somehow never meet; two obviously brilliant but deeply disturbed guys with matching obsessions with crime and gadgets: what's the real story? Are Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor actually one and the same, and if so, is it Bruce Wayne who is actually Lex Luthor with a good toupee, or is it Wayne who takes off his toup to become Luthor? Or, if they actually are different people, is Superman merely an unwitting pawn in the battle for market share between LuthorCorp and Wayne Industries — a tool of Bruce Wayne, as it were, who's using the Big Blue Dunce to cripple his toughest competitor?

Or is it simply pure happenstance that Wayne and Luthor have never met, and once they finally do, might they recognize each other as kindred spirits, become golf buddies, and eventually agree that whatever their other differences, they're in full concord on one point: the Kryptonian is a major pain in the ass?

So that's the challenge this week. Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor: sort it out.

As always, we're playing by the loosely enforced rules of the Friday Challenge, and playing for whatever's behind Door #2. You can post your entry in the Comments on this post, post it on your own blog or website and post a link here, or email me your entry and I'll pdf and post it. The deadline for entries is midnight Central time, Thursday, 6/19/08.

P.S. And given the rarefied social stratum in which they move, what happens when Wayne's and Luthor's various ex's meet and start comparing notes?