Atomic Nerds

I think most of you are already familiar with the Bulwer-Lytton contest, which if not you should immediately go become familiar because it will provide you with many hours of hilarity. The general idea is a challenge to writers to come up with the opening lines of the worst novel imaginable, or at least the very worst opening lines possible. As you only need to deliver the first few lines, the results range all over the place from criminal punning to rampant absurdity to prose so purple it glows neon, and in any case the results all tend to be hysterically funny.

Well, Topless Robot has come up with a similarly spirited contest for the Batman comics: Try to out-Miller Frank Miller. For those who are unaware or simply don’t follow comics, one of the early breakout efforts in comics by Frank “Sin City”, “300”, “whoreswhoreswhoreswhores” Miller was writing Batman comics. He went from retooling the character from a more than vaguely silly man who went around with a young boy dressed as a bat to a much darker and grimmer version of the character that was widely recognized as brilliant, to eventually descending into what most of what even his fans would term self-parody.

Yes, it’s a fairly narrow slice of audience that will find this funny, but for those people some of the results are absolutely hilarious. Our favorite:

Joker has Commissioner Gordon hostage in the old Axis Chemical Plant. GDB goes down to local orphanage in the middle of the night and takes all the ones old enough to stand on their own for more than 10 seconds. He dresses them in domino masks and red tights, then piles them into a new Batmobile made from a garbage truck. They sing “The Wheels On The Bus” as Batman speeds towards the plant, and Batman tells them to “Shut the fuck up or I’m going to come back there!” 10 minutes later, Joker is walking around on the top of the Axis administration building. Hearing a loud noise, he looks down and receives a painful blow to the face. He shakes it off and looks down at what he’s been hit with: a mashed toddler in a red diaper with an “R” on it. The Joker, sensing that he’s no longer the craziest part of this deadly game of cat and mouse, starts to run for the green helicopter where the henchmen are waiting. As he runs, he dodges a steady rain of orphan Robins. Back in the Batmobile, GDB loads another screaming round into the Robinator.

…But they’re all good.

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