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Post by lawrenceliberty on Jan 22, 2024 16:22:44 GMT
We know at least when he is not in college, Freddy lives in Mrs. Wagoner's boarding house along with salesman Leroy Marks, mechanic Red O'Reilly, and cop Jim Bellows- none of whom looked any older in the posts Suspendium stories so they all must have been in the trap. Billy seems to have lived in an apartment rented from Ma and Pa Potter and next door to Dexter Knox and his grandmother. None of them aged either so they must have been in the trap. I figured it was really big celebration and almost all Marvel family associates were there. Sterling Morris lives in a mansion next door to Billy's girlfriend Cissy.
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Post by dans on Jan 23, 2024 2:54:03 GMT
Actually, Lib, in one of your stories (I think) it was suggested that somehow the Suspendium Trap caught people who weren't even in attendance to the celebration - I think it said 'people from around the nation'. I may have misread that. But I wonder if there was some other factor involved in capturing them?
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Post by lawrenceliberty on Jan 23, 2024 17:08:06 GMT
Do you think Suspendium itself might have some kind of age slowing effect even on people not caught in the trap itself but who subsequently spent time in frequent proximity to those who were caught in it? I always liked the idea that Ian Karkull's Earth 2 chronal energies that slowed various JSAers aging also did same to folks they spent a lot of time with like Alfred, Dian Belmont, or Jimmy. I thought perhaps Suspendium itself did something to the atmosphere on E-S and slowed all aging on E-2 to some degree. I guess that idea that a whole lot of characters attended the ceremony and were caught in it might be safest answer. Perhaps, some villains came there to disrupt the ceremony and by chance had their own aging slowed too.
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Post by DocQuantum on Jan 23, 2024 18:13:09 GMT
Yes, I agree with this idea. In fact, I have an origin idea for Suspendium itself that plays along these lines and may help to explain some of the unique qualities of Earth-S that make it different from other Earths.
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Post by dans on Jan 24, 2024 16:16:33 GMT
Our current timeline for Earth S has this information about Jim Barr:
"Jim “Bullet” Barr, orphaned son of Police Sgt. Pat Barr, completes his education in criminology and ballistics and attempts to follow in his father's footsteps by joining the Police Department, only to be turned down due to being too physically weak. He soon becomes a civilian laboratory criminologist at the Police Department instead of a police officer, then completes his invention of a Crime Serum or Crime-Cure."
The fist Bulletman case was in 1940. I'm going to postulate that Jim graduated from college at 22 and it took him a couple of years after he took the job as a police scientist before he completed his "Crime Cure" serum so in 1940 he's 24, or born in 1916. Next, Sue is a year younger, so born in 1917. Next, Sue's father Lt. Kent was 25 when Sue was born, so he was born in 1892, and joined the police force in around 1916. So at the time of the Suspendium Trap incident, he was 60. He was promoted to Lt. in 1949 so he might have been a captain when he was trapped. In any case, he slept for 20 years until 1972, and it is currently either 1988 or 1989 on Earth S, so he is now 76 in 'years lived'. And retired for at least 10 years. He is probably more fit than an 'average' 76 year old who has not been exposed to Suspendium, but still, he's no longer a spring chicken.
I guess none of this is vitally important, but right now he is showing up in my current story and I want to treat him appropriately.
Do these things sound reasonable to you guys? Anything I ought to rethink?
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Post by DocQuantum on Jan 24, 2024 16:54:02 GMT
Based on the first Bulletman story in Nickel Comics #1, it's hard to tell how much time elapsed between his beginning work at the crime lab and perfecting his Crime Cure, but the story doesn't indicate how much time passed, unlike other parts of the story which are more definite about how much time passes. I figured he'd been working on his Crime Cure since at least college by now, so it's already been years in the making. The only question in my mind is how much time might have passed from his presumed graduation from college to joining the civilian police lab after being rejected from the police department, since the story was published in May, 1940 and presumably takes place around that time. Usually college graduations happen in late May or June, if I recall correctly, so either all the events from his rejection at the police department to the end of the story take place in a short time window, or just under a year passed from that rejection. Jim Barr is a genius, so I don't think it would take him more than a year to complete something he's potentially been working on for up to 4 years by then (4 years of college).
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Post by dans on Jan 24, 2024 17:00:18 GMT
so take a year off his age or move his birthday forward a year. Doesn't impact Mr. Kent's age very much, he is still in his mid 70s in 1988 (in terms of 'years alive and not in Suspendium')
Again really not that important, but he worked his way into the story, so I got to treat him right.
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 24, 2024 22:25:13 GMT
I was reading the DC Fandom wiki page, and it seems that Earth-S' universe's periodic table is somewhat different from ours when it gets to certain trans-uranic elements- shazamium (element 98), sivanium (element 99) and marvelium (element 100) all replace californium (98), einsteinium (99) and fermium (100) in ours. All of these are metals, albeit radioactive ones as one might guess. However, that doesn't seem to apply to the three elements in Universe-S, all of which are metallic as well but which have particular properties. Suspendium is listed as a chemical compound. Shazamium seems to have spatiotemporal properties, given that it's a bracelet that surrounds one of the hands of the spectral Great Wizard, who can use it to move about in space and time. Is suspendium's composition therefore based on a mixture of shazamium and another element?: www.theworldsmightiestmortal.com/2017/06/captain-marvel-creates-marvelium.html
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 24, 2024 22:31:11 GMT
It's also slightly different on Earth-Two. When the JSA first met the Injustice Society ( All Star Comics 37 [April 1947]), Brain Wave confronts Green Lantern in "Uthorium Town". For some reason, then, uranium or another trans-uranic element is named differently there. Clearly, it's used in nuclear weapons, so it may well be Universe-Two's version of uranium or plutonium: dc.fandom.com/wiki/All-Star_Comics_Vol_1_37
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Post by dans on Jan 25, 2024 0:23:17 GMT
what I know about sivanium and marvellium are that they both block the magic lightning. In my story Crisis Over Earth S there is some indication that sivanium and marvellium may be the same metal but I didn't do any research about it back then... so the interplay might be just some macho boasting between characters
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 25, 2024 0:32:11 GMT
It seems from the article I linked to that they have different properties, Dan. Sivanium can be used to replicate organic matter, while marvelium's atomic density is such that it can even hold ghosts captive- and the Marvel Family are apparently the only ones strong enough to manipulate it.
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Post by dans on Jan 25, 2024 13:14:52 GMT
yeah, I didn't do any real research into Sivanium or Marvelium. I just invented Thundranium from the Earth T universe, and had 3 different characters (Captain Marvel, Captain Thunder, and Sivana Jr.) each boasting that their supply of metal would block the magic lightning, but none of the three actually took the time to analyze each of the three types to see if the really all were the same.
In my story, when the heroes gathered on the Rock of Eternity, Thad Sivana's 'Jiffy Machine" was fed quantities of raw material and then worked like a 3D printer, squirting back those raw materials in a pre-selected body armor design. The body armor created for the Thunders and Marvels used at least one and maybe a combination of two or three of these particular metals, so the magically transformed heroes would be protected from the lightning projector weapons of BattleWorld, which had the power to change them from their magical forms back into their mortal forms. Which would have been inconvenient in deep space...
Since all three metals actually seem to be different from each other and at least 2 of them fall in radioactive areas of the Periodic Table, it is a good thing each of these metals was only used to create body armor worn by the Thunders and the Marvels. I can just imagine the mutations it might have caused if one of the non-invulnerable heroes had worn a body armor suit composed of some combination of the three! (in fact, every one of the heroes in that story was in close proximity to either a Marvel or a Thunder or both for extended periods during that adventure...) (one would think that Captain Thunder and Captain Marvel, who discovered Thundranium and Marvelium, would be aware of the radioactivity and would have considered the consequences long ago when they first discovered them...)
Say, I wonder if having scraps of each of these three metals in close proximity for a long time might be dangerous somehow? If they had worn their armor for extended periods, would it have exploded? I wonder what the Jiffy Machine did with any leftover raw material? Since the assembled heroes were in a rush (they had to stop a Death Star from destroying Earth S) it seems possible that they never did a complete clean up on the Rock of Eternity, and there might be a scrap heap of discard metal including scraps of Thundranium, Sivanium, Marvelium, and titanium, somewhere on a wide ledge on the Rock of Eternity... hope it's not dangerous!
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Post by dans on Jan 25, 2024 13:28:20 GMT
Shazam might be a bit unhappy if suddenly there was a nuclear explosion on the Rock of Eternity... say, maybe that's why Billy was filling in for Shazam in the Earth S future stories Lee and I wrote?
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Post by lawrenceliberty on Jan 25, 2024 19:13:36 GMT
I see Shazam running out and saying, "Hey, you kids get off my yard in the middle of space."
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 26, 2024 0:31:07 GMT
I imagine the Rock of Eternity has its own physical laws, though. It's not bound by conventional standards of space and time.
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