Thursday, April 23, 2015

For people who think Mothra's scary. Or the moth from Silence of the Lambs...

There's an early episode of Spongebob Squarepants named "Wormy," in which a friendly worm turns into a harmless butterfly. By "harmless" I of course mean eye-meltingly terrifying.

I'm not sure at what size butterflies would become horrifying to me. Any spider bigger than a dinner plate? Scary. A butterfly might have to be the size of a compact car before it reached the same level of disturbing. A butterfly the size of a man, possibly startling; a guy in a butterfly suit? Not so much. A guy in a butterfly suit with a gun? That's more confusing than anything.

I swear to god, I would love to read a comic where the night watchman actually took care of this himself: "Yeah, I was on my rounds, when this freak dressed up as a butterfly jumps out at me. So I pistol-whipped him a few, then called the cops. Yeah, I think 'jump out dressed as a butterfly' was his whole plan."

So, he can't fly in that suit, but he's swinging by a rope and shooting at Captain America in it? Well, it had the virtue of not having been tried before, at least. Although, I guess a lot of stuff may not have been tried yet, since this story first appeared in Captain America Comics #3 in 1941! "The Queer Case of the Murdering Butterfly and the Ancient Mummies," story by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, art by Jack Kirby, inks by Reed Crandall. It was reprinted with some edits as "The Weird Case of the Plundering Butterfly and the Ancient Mummies!" in 1966's Fantasy Masterpieces #3.


Bonus: Cap talks some smack and hits a huge brute with a dinosaur tusk. Hey, pull a knife on Cap and see what happens...

2 comments:

SallyP said...

For some reason I just really enjoy seeing Cap call someone an imbecile.

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

Cap don't take no mess!
Soooo The Butterfly(scary name btw;)must've been like what, the spirtual grandfather of Killer Moth?

I totally agree with you on that Nightwatchmen totally being able to pistol whip that nut though.
I figure between his age and the total obscurity of the butterfly mask, they both were equal in terms of vision;)