Getcher motor runnin’ and head out on that highway, but watch for merging superhumans! Welcome to Ten Things: Ten Super Bikers!
Whooshman-Bicarbonate Films, in conjunction with An Amateur Comics Historian and Harleen F. Davidson, Presents:
TEN THINGS: TEN SUPER BIKERS!
10) KAMEN RIDER GILLS
Once a promising swimmer, Ryo Ashihara started to metamorphose after a near-fatal car accident, becoming a strange human/insect hybrid. An encounter with the evil alien Overlord put him on a path to villainy, using his powers against heroic Kamen Rider Agito (of whose powers Ryo’s form is an unstable copy.) Agito eventually saved his life and Gills teamed with the hero to bring Overlord down and left town to ride the roads in search of his destiny.
His armor and cycle are patterned after the cactus longhorn beetle.
9) MOTORMOUSE
While not precisely a superhero, his opposable thumbs and use of advanced combustion technology at least mark him as a superior mouse. Motormouse was chased down the roadways of America by Autocat, who may have wanted to eat him or just to install proper mufflers on that thing. Either way, he and his feline pal/would-be predator are very much reminiscent of Tom & Jerry with a much higher fuel budget.
8) THE BIKER MICE FROM MARS
It’s weird how many rodents gravitate to the motorcycle lifestyle. Throttle (the tan-furred leader), Modo (the gray-furred big guy) and Vinnie (with the cyborg faceplate) at least have the excuse of being from another planet to explain their humanoid forms, though why their main foe is obsessed with ’30s gangster tropes is less clear. Crashing on Earth after their world was pillaged by Plutarkian empire, the Biker Mice fight for Earth’s natural resources from their base in Chicago, with the hope of one day returning to Mars.
7) BULLET BIKER
A villain and thief for hire in California, Dillon Zarro is to motorcycle riding what Hawkeye is to archery, using his skills to distract and to make his scores. His cycle (or, to be more specific, cycles, as they’re rigged to explode if he loses them) is full of gadgets and machinery and his wrist-unit doubles as a machine gun.
He’s been MIA for more than 20 years, so it’s time for that big Bullet Biker resurgence!
6) GHOST PANTHER
After Gamora sought to save the universe by capturing everyone and folding it “in half”, King T’Challa became an exile who worked the stunt riding circuit under the alias Johnny Blaze. Though he was killed during a stunt, he was returned to life by binding his soul with demon Zarathos, making him a demonic-powered biker with a panther’s skull. Though the universe was eventually saved and restored, Ghost Panther and his fellow Warpworld denizens were preseved within the Soulstone itself.
5) THE VIGILANTE
A singer/songwriter known as ‘The Prairie Troubadour’, Greg Sanders swore a vow of justice when his sheriff father was killed by criminals. As The Vigilante, Greg prowled the streets of New York roping criminals like dogies and joined the Seven Soldiers of Victory. When the Seven Soldiers were dispersed through time by a villain, Greg was transported to the American Old West, returning to “the present” decades after he had left.
Greg seemed to prefer motorcycles to those temperamental horses.
4) THE BLUE BIKER
H-Dial wielder Vicky Grant can call her ride a motorcycle all she wants, but that’s clearly a bicycle or, at best, a moped. It still works the same, though, and a super-biker is a super-biker for our purposes. I would caution her about riding a vehicle with spoked wheel while wearing a cape, lest we get into an Edna Mode situation.
Seriously, though, where would she even KEEP a motor in that thing?
3) PHENIX
Patrolling the mean streets of Chicago with an arsenal of cutting-edge weaponry, Patricia Hope is a socialite by day and a merciless vigilante by night. She has superhuman physical and mental skills (which suddenly developed after she was left in a coma by a brutal assault) and uses her parents’ charitable foundation to support her leather-clad crime-punching activities.
She seems to have a large fleet of motorcycles in different styles, shapes and colors.
2) BLACK CANARY
A masked gang-buster in her earliest incarnation, Dinah Drake (later to become Dinah Lance) was a member of the Justice Society of America on the world designated Earth-Two. She eventually married and retired, only to return to action with the JSA after encountering their dimensional counterparts from Earth-One. After her husband Larry died, Dinah chose to emigrate to Earth-One and join the Justice League, beginning a seemingly endless series of retcons to explain how a woman who was in her mid-20s in 1947 could continue to fight without any superhuman powers, leading to the creation of her identical replacement daughter (thanks to magic.)
Black Canary history gets COMPLICATED, my friends.
1) MUMEN RIDER
Satoru (last name as yet unrevealed) is brave to a fault and fights crime in a world of superhumans, never backing down, even from the most powerful foes. Using his bicycling skills for justice, he eventually teams up with One-Punch Man and is offered a promotion to B-Class hero, but chooses to stay C-Class due to his lack of superhuman powers, showing that he’s not only a good hero but a good, self-aware man.
Plus, his basket always cracks me up.
This week’s Ten Things topic is all me, but feel free to follow along @MightyKingCobra for more Ten Things madness on Twitter. Or, you can check out the full Twitter archive here! As with any set of like items, these aren’t meant to be hard and fast or absolutely complete, if only because all the cool kids ride motorcycles, thanks to The Fonz. (#TopicalReference!) Either way, the comments section is below for just such an emergency, but, as always: Please, no wagering!
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