Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Silver Age Comic Trivia V

What was the real name of the Big Man?

Hint: The Big Man was a criminal mastermind in early Amazing Spider-Man issues.

Yesterday's Answer: As several people knew, yellow was the one colour that a Green Lantern's ring was powerless against (hey, I said it easy!) This was of course a story-telling device invented to provide GL with a weakness, akin to kryptonite for Superman, or fire for the Martian Manhunter, as without it, he was just too darn powerful! In a story I read yesterday, he was faced with saving several people whose yellow amusement park ride had come loose and was plummeting to the ground at breakneck speed. He couldn't just grab it with a big green hand, because the car would've slid right through the fingers. Instead he created two giant green springs to cushion its landing, with the comment, "Good thing the bottom of the car wasn't yellow." Except, of course, that a previous panel had shown that, in fact, the underside was exactly that colour! Oops!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Had to look it up so will not post an answer.

Q: Are these the type of questions you usually get at the Comicon? I must say they seem very tough. Mark Waid must have a secret super memory power.

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

The "Green Lantern weakness = Yellow" question was far easier than anything we ever get asked (it'd be equivalent to putting "what's 8 plus 5?" on a university level math quiz). The other questions are more in line with what the style of question we see, with a couple of caveats:

1) Sometimes I still do 'dumb' them down a bit, as when I asked who brought the Secret Six together (Codename: Mockingbird) rather than asking you to name, say, three of the six (which was a question one year that I have to admit I didn't know... because I hadn't read the comic series yet).

2) Try to appreciate, as you read each query for the first time, that I (and my fellow panelists) get asked the questions verbally (so, often you're just trying to parse the odd sentence structure as Quizmaster Craig Shutt reads it out and it's typically a race to see who can chime in first . On many occasions I've honked my horn (that's the 'chime') before I actually knew what the answer was, simply because my brain was telling me that, given a couple seconds, it could come up with it. And in most cases, my brain came through! But when it didn't, my teammates are pissed because then the "other team" (usually just Mark Waid) gets to hear the entire question once more and attempt an answer.

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

Also (at the risk of sounding vain as well as giving this whole frivolous event too much significance), remember that while we lost to Mark Waid again last year, as we have every year, I had more right answers than the other three members of my team combined. If even one other person on my team had been able to contribute as many correct responses as I did, we'd almost certainly have taken the crown last year (and the year before was even closer).