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The Hooded Hood Chronicles #1: The Secret Origin of the Hooded Hood Monday, 15-Nov-1999 15:07:38
The Hooded Hood Chronicles #1: The Secret Origin of the Hooded Hood Rain lashed the ancient stone walls of Herringcarp Asylum. The thunder almost drowned out the insane laughter of the twisted maniac incarcerated there. “Mr Hood? Mr Hood, it’s time for your medication.” The tall, cloaked figure spun around on the attendant, curtailing his villainous laughing practise but making up for it by rehearsing standard baddie pose #3, the quite difficult one where the arms are folded high on the chest and the groin is prominently presented. Only the very best villains can do this properly, complete with the Kirby foreshortening, but the Hood managed it. “I require no medication,” the masked figure hissed, two glowing green eyes flashing beneath the deep grey hood. “I require vengeance! I require my foes to abase themselves at my feet! I require all mankind to be my slaves!” “Perhaps after supper, Mr Hood,” the attendant suggested. The green eyes narrowed into a Liefield frown. “You mock me? You think that because I choose to reside here in this lunatic pit that my powers have atrophied?” The attendant began to look nervous. “Now, Mr Hood, don’t get all agitated… I know you haven’t had the sort of publicity that Baron Zemo has had, or even Dr Moo, but on the other hand….” “You have the effrontery to mention the name of Zemo in my presence!” snarled the Hood. “For this you shall feel the full measure of my power.” The cowled crime-czar gestured, and the ripple of retconning spewed across the room towards the screaming attendant… who was suddenly a toothbrush-moustached traffic warden – and always had been! Dr Valium entered the cell as the traffic warden fled down the corridor sobbing. “I thought we agreed, Hood, no more retconning. Remember why you are here.” The Hooded Hood assumed villain posture #2, the one with hands clasped behind the back looking nobly out of the window into the storm-tossed night. “I remember,” he whispered. “Say it,” the doctor advised him. “It’s time for your exposition therapy anyway.” The cowled crime-czar spun around, timing it perfectly so that the lightening silhouetted him against the window. “I am the greatest enemy to the Lair Legion who never was!” he began. And behind him the Colan-like weirdly-angled panels of flashback began. “They thought they were so clever, Jarvis and his cronies. Back when they fought Byrne, when they tried to prevent the retconning of their world, they thought they had won. Oh, a few minor changes perhaps. The loss of that trivial Dark Knight, the possible existence of the Visionary, but nothing of significance. But they never thought what it might do to me!!!” “The beginning, Hood,” Valium urged. “Start at the beginning.” “It was so very different then. Continuity meant something. I first fought them in “When Pastries Clash” [Tales to Baffle #143]. It was an epic battle. I almost had them. Lisa was transformed into a tweed-clad librarian by my retcon powers and was too busy trying to alphabetise the mansion library to interfere. Fin Fang Foom was, and had always been, a rather large gerbil. Banjooooo… well, I had removed the best part of him. Now he was simply Banj. Not a single one of them had their origin intact. I was winning…” “This was, as I recall, your seventy-fourth conflict with the team…?” prompted the doctor. “Well, yes,” admitted the Hood, “but I erased all the ones where I didn’t win, obviously.” “Please continue.” “I was winning, finally winning,” the cowled crime-czar remembered. “And then that… that Zemo triggered his massive plans, released the Byrne-energy across the Parodyverse. And at that moment I, and all my schemes, were totally erased!” The thunder rumbled at the ideal moment as the Hood subconsciously used his dramatic timing abilities. “My years of careful planning and judiciously ignoring anything I didn’t like written by anybody else were wiped out in an instant by the far greater force. But where I was seeking to bring order, that creature of Zemo’s brought only chaos and disaster.” The Hood turned round and asked in a puzzled voice, “What is the point of changing things simply for the sake of it? Surely the point of change is to enslave mankind and bring it grovelling into a new age of subservience?” “That may have been Byrne’s plan too,” reflected the doctor. “In any case, the Lair Legion thwarted the plot.” “And I was cast out,” spat the Hood, “Forgotten. How could Jarvis not remember that he began life as Lisa’s pet poodle until I retconned him into his current form as a long term plan to shatter the group apart? And Starseed… before I took him on, his expression was GOSHHHH! But it is all forgotten!” “Calm yourself, Hood,” Dr Valium advised. “You know that you have to keep control of your powers. They are unstable now. Any further use of them and you might destabilise your own existence, or even that of the whole Parodyverse.” The Hood turned suddenly, allowing the shadows to fall right across the doctor in the best traditions of Marshall Rogers. “So you have been telling me, doctor, ever since I found myself here. But unknown to you I have been wandering strange pathways in other guises. Recently the one called Jarvis invited me back to the Parodyverse. The poor fool. He knew not what he was doing. But look around you doctor. You are no longer on the Spider-Man Board, or anywhere else you have ever been before!” Dr Valium stared around him in shocked comprehension. “No! The tangled continuity! The impenetrable in-jokes! The constant references to the personal lives of posters! You have brought the whole of Herringcarp Asylum back into the BZL!” “Now you begin to understand,” gloated the Hooded Hood. “Already I begin to weave my subtle alterations. Some of the posters have already been substituted, their origins changed, their motivations rewritten. Before the Lair Legion knows what has happened, they will find themselves without friends, without hope, without any plotline save my own…” “No…” gasped the doctor, feeling the cowled crime-czar’s power begin to wash over him, changing him too. “And then, when they are my shattered, loyal slaves, and only then, will I send them to annihilate the treacherous Zemo once and for all.” The Hooded Hood paused and dashed over to the piano, realising that he had not yet demonstrated a great love of art and culture to round him out as a first class super-villain. Later he would be kind to a peasant child even as the villagers both feared and admired him. The lightning managed one final effort as the Hood summoned a minion that had not existed but a moment before. “Take that… thing away,” he told the trembling flunky, gesturing to that which had been Valium. “Send it to the Lair Legion. Address it to Yo, I think. An early calling card. And deliver a bunch of orchids to Lisa… and some dog-biscuits to Jarvis.” The flunky scooped up the always-had-been-a-rabbit and placed it into a box. “Add a message,” the Hooded Hood instructed. “Write: one month.” And his secret origin once more established, the Hooded Hood assumed villain pose #1, hands on hips, mouth Ditko-wide and slavering, head back… and resumed his laughing. Response to a comment from Baron Zemo: Ah, how well I understand the ennui of living in a drab world of mortal specks who little regard and even less understand one's transcendent genius! On the little matter of my death vendetta to grind you into the primal dust and send your soul howling forever into abysmal blackness, I trust you understand that there is nothing personal in it. And clearly it will take some time to reduce the vapid heroes of the Parodyverse into drooling incontinence, so in the meantime feel free to drop around at Herringcarp Asylum any time and I can have a cup of tea always have been waiting there for you. I have the latest issues of Domination and Devastation on subscription if you need to borrow them. Clearly, I only purchase them for the articles on torture equipment. HH The Hooded Hood represents his first ever contribution to the BZL, heralding the reposting of all kinds of ropey old tat comprising his first series of stories about the Parodyverse |
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