Invincible, Issue #8

* Part 4 of 4 of the Eight of Enough storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Invincible, Issue #8! In the previous installment, Omni-Man (Mark’s mustachioed dad) kills everyone in the Guardians of the Globe.

That’s it. That’s all. It’s really somethin’! What’s Mark gonna do when he finds out?

He’s going to keep eating his dinner or he’ll be sent to bed, that’s what.

Invincible, Issue #8 [January, 2004]
Written by: Robert Kirkman

Omni-Man McDad is outside in the driveway talking to a mysterious figure in a trench coat and hat. “I just can’t believe they’re all… dead,” Nolan says like a filthy liar that he and everyone and humanity in general is.

Anyway, fiddle-dee-dee. Whodunit? No idea, but Mr. Trench Coat intends to find out. “What do you know about Black Samson?” the man asks. Nolan knows a lot about Black Samson! For one thing, he’s a cuckoo nutbar and he stole his suit back from the cleaners before it was even done yet.

“Do you think Samson is capable of this?” asks the man. The answer is a resounding HELL NO! Black Samson sucks with his powers. He wouldn’t have been able to take out the entire Justice League! Ahem… I mean… Guardians of the Globe.

Well, nevertheless, Black Samson is the prime suspect until Nolan does something stupid like accidentally drop 900 copies of his confession out of a 105-story window.

Amidst the clandestine discussion of INCREDIBLE WEIGHT, Invincible flies home through his bedroom window to find Atom Eve crying on his bed.

“Eve? What are you doing here?”

“Oh, Mark… it was horrible! It was Rex… with Kate… … …and there was more than one of her!”

Sounds like a sexy, fun time. Did you get in on that, Eve? Hmm? Eve? Why are you still crying, Eve? Did you get in on that? Did you hear me?

“He was cheating on me! With that… multi-slut!”

Oh, right. Not a sexy, fun time… … … … …yet…

Atom Eve buries her head in Invincible’s lap. Just really burrowing in there face first. Just slobbering and getting the crotch all wet, baby.

Once, Rex stole my toothbrush and used it to clean a part of his body that definitely wasn’t one or many tooths.

Mark’s mom catches Mark with Eve’s head in his lap. And from her angle, it didn’t look good. “Downstairs. Both of you. NOW!”

Whoops, that’s embarrassing! Mark gets the talk, but not the birds and the bees. More like the keep-girls-out-of-your-room and the or-else-you’ll-be-picking-up-your-teeth-with-broken-fingers.

And then Mark gets more of the talk. Kinda like the just-fuck-somewhere-else-so-I-don’t-know talk, which makes Mark all kinds of embarrassed. “Mom! We’re really just friends!” he yells with his little snot-nose. Mark is a wimp. He should be hitting that.

Nolan comes home to tell his son that the Guardians of the Globe are dead. All of them. Even Alfalfa and Spanky! So clean yourself up for the funeral tomorrow, it’s gonna be a doozy!

At school the next morning, Mark and William discuss physics class in the hallway. KINETICS AND FORCES? WOOZLE WUZZLE? A girl comes up to Mark and hangs him a note in a pink envelope. “Open it later when you get home,” she says seductively, swishing as she walks away.

SHIT! He’s mad at me now! I should’ve called him a sack of dildos first!

But Mark doesn’t have much time to ogle because he sees a buff, burly-looking kid named Derek Sanders walking the halls. It’s weird because a month and a half ago he was turned into a human time bomb so Mark thought it might have taken him longer to recover. Nope! William confirms that he has a metal torso now! Isn’t that neat? Pure beryllium alloy! Toxic as fuck!

Well, they have a brief somewhat pleasant exchange, but now Mark has to head off the the funeral. William, in the middle of what is luckily an empty hallway goes “OH YEAH, THE SUPERHERO GUYS, AND YOU MUST BE GOING BECAUSE YOUR DAD IS A SUPERHERO, AS WELL AS YOU, MARK GRAYSON” before Mark has a chance to tell him to cork his hole. Luckily, only Eve is there to overhear, and she does just that, but she’s cool, you see.

“Was that Derek?” she asks Mark.

“Yep.”

“Wow.”

Indeed, “yep” and “wow”.

Before the funeral, Invincible beats up a guy dressed as a giant elephant. Knocks him out cold, probably killed him. It looked like fun.

Back at home, Dad’s getting ready for the Main Event. Mom asks him what they should do for Mark’s birthday this year. You know, Mark. Their son. His birthday. Which is next week. And, ha, Dad forgot because “MUH FRIENDS DIED”, which makes Mom feel bad. If I told that to my wife she would just tell me to eat a butt in outer space.

The funeral is full of stupid-looking costumed heroes and mutants. Mr. Trench Coat has ruled out Samson on account of him being a big hermit doofus lately, so that leaves the supervillains as the next list of suspects. Omni-Man is in the clear… for now…

Omni-Man gives the eulogy. Here, I’ll post it for no reason other than I need to fill in some space!

…as dead motherfuckers! Ha! OWNED OWNED OWNED OWNED!

But he actually calls them “legends”. Sorry.

In the middle of the eulogy, Omni-Man draws attention to two very large, very suited bad guys. They’re just here to pay respects to a group of worthy adversaries, nothing more. Invincible, with the strength of a spud, tells his dad that he’ll keep an eye on them.

Suddenly, the gravestone behind Omni-Man explodes. The culprit is a ranting, frothing, floating man who looks like Sinestro in heat. His name is Sanford and he was supposed to kill the Guardians of the Globe. He was robbed of his right! GGGNNNAAAHHH!!!

So now we’re fighting this douchebag, who doubles as Samson’s butler. “You can’t stop me! I won’t quit until I see their bodies destroyed! They abandoned Samson – turned their backs on him when he needed them most! For that they must pay!”

Uh-huh. Well that’s wholly uninteresting, sir. Try again.

Sanford gets knocked cold, making Samson cry. The two villains paying their respects are like “man, you defeated us in less time with less help than this nerd.”

After the service, the villains commiserate with one another, looking quite suspicious. They are certainly up to something…

Usually, though, there are more of those little Jell-O squares.

Meanwhile, Atom Eve decides to swing back over to the bridge tower secret base where she caught her boyfriend fucking her other friend and also copies of her other friend. She catches the two of them being lovey-dovey and she gets mad and she leaves. “Eve! Wait!” Rex says, trying to run after her. “It doesn’t have to be this way…”

Oh yes it does, Mr. Frisky! Yes it does!

Speaking of frisky, Mark goes home to finally tear open that lovely-smelling pink envelope that a GIRL gave him today! Ohhhh boy, it’s probably an invitation to the inside of her pants! And–

“CALL ME 278-2886″

Fuck yeah!

Mark doesn’t have enough time to process the whole “call me” aspect of the note. He starts hearing a pebble bounce off his bedroom window. It’s William. Use your phone, nerd. What year is this? 2004. I was texting in 2004!

Welcome to 2004 when being gay wasn’t cool yet for some reason.

“Man… that Amber girl wants me to call her.”

“Really? You stud.”

“I don’t even know her… she’s in my history class, but we’ve never spoken.”

Cool. Cool cool cool. Anyway, William wants Mark to fly him around so Mark best do it before he doesn’t want to be friends anymore. And Mark needs William for reasons I haven’t figured out nor seen evidence for yet.

In their marital bed, Momma and Poppa Grayson mull over the day. Dad wants to write another book to pay for Mark’s future useless college adventure.

“You okay?” asks Mom.

“I’m fine. Why do you ask?” says Dad.

“You just haven’t been yourself lately.”

“Jesus, Debbie! Seven of my colleagues were just murdered!”

Oh boo hoo, motherfucker. My friend was murdered yesterday and I already forgot his name.

Well, Debbie doesn’t buy it. This doesn’t seem like sadness. This seems like HAPPINESS. But not quite that! More like pensiveness…

“I’m fine,” Dad says unconvincingly. And the subject is verily dropped.

We end our story in the cemetery. That Derek Sanders guy approaches a gravestone. “David Hiles – 1994 – 2003. Forgive him, he lost his way.” That’s the gravestone’s epitaph. Derek doesn’t say it out loud. He says stuff about what a bitch Hiles was and then he pees on his grave!

It looks like this:

PEE

Meanwhile, two young boys approach another grave on the other side of the cemetery. They have shovels, and they aren’t for sandcastles. I don’t think so, at least!

“Why are we doing this again?” asks the nervous one.

“Because, I read on the internet that if you drink from the Immortal’s skull you’ll live forever,” responds the confident one. That’s a funny way of saying “I wanna fuck that sexy corpse”, but we can’t always be so subtle.

The nervous one points out that the dude has only been dead for a few days and, ergo, he hasn’t skeletonized yet. The confident one is pretty confident that they can just deal with whatever they find, and plus, you want someone else to get the idea first? Ninja please.

So they start digging. They dig dig dig. And diggity diggity dig. And diggity diggity diggity diggity diggity dig dig. And then they strike gold!

“We’ll take it from here, boys,” says Villain #1 who was at the funeral. “You have no idea the time you saved us.”

“Indeed,” says Villain #2 who was at the funeral.

And then everyone exploded and died a violent, fuzzy death.