Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice:
Acknowledgements
Preface to the 2012 Digital Edition
Issue 1 – Giant Sized Special Deluxe Gold Foil Embossed Holographic Variant Cover Collector’s Edition
Issue 2 – So Many New Characters!
Issue 3 – Dr. Menace Strikes Back. For the First Time. Again!
Issue 4 – Bringin’ Down the House
Issue 5 – The Restaurant at the Beginning of the Book
Issue 6 – Let Them Eat Cake
Issue 7 – Food Fight
Issue 8 – Serial Cereal Industrial Espionage...ial.
Issue 9 – College Daze (IT IS A CLEVER PLAY ON WORDS!)
Issue 10 – GIANT RADIOACTIVE SPIDER MUTANTS! And the Mall.
Issue 11 – The Lost Tribe of Arachnor
Issue 12 – They, Robots
Issue 13 – War and Spiders
Issue 14 – On the Road
Issue 15 – Today’s Lunch Special: Justice!
Issue 16 – Driving Mr. Nuklear (Crazy)
Issue 17 – Speed Limit Enforced by Radar
Issue 18 – Beach Birthday Blowout, Yeah!
Issue 19 – A Bad Case of Crabs
Issue 20 – A Worse Case of Crabs
Issue 21 – You Can Catch Crabs from the Ocean. Both Kinds.
Issue 22 – Planning for Failure
Issue 23 – Wherein Angus Has Too Much Crab Meat
Issue 24 – Hijackery!
Issue 25 – Teaching Assistants of DOOM
Issue 26 – Back to School
Issue 27 – A Cult Above the Rest
Issue 28 – Combative Religions
Issue 29 – The Ravages of War
Issue 30 – Adventure into Science!
Issue 31 – The Terrible Secret of Rachel
Issue 32 – Are You Experienced?
Issue 33 – Getting Choked Up
Issue 34 – Drinkin’ Buddies
Issue 35 – The Mechanical Revolution Begins! And Ends!
Issue 36 – Law and Disorder
Issue 37 – Due Process
Issue 38 – Blind Justice
Issue 39 – Like Father, Like Son
Issue 40 – The Reign of Superion
Issue 41 – He’s SuperiorTM in Every Way
Issue 42 – Usurper!
Issue 43 – The Gambit
Issue 44 – The Enemy of My Enemy
Issue 45 – The Gathering Storm
Issue 46 – Clash of the Titans
Issue 47 – Ain’t Got Time for Physics
Issue 48 – The End of an Age
Issue 49 – Not From Around Here
Issue 50 – Strange Visitors from Another Planet
Issue 51 – A Long Time Ago, on the Other Side of the Galaxy…
Issue 52 – We Have Reached an Accord
Issue 53 – Everyday Monsters
Issue 54 – Victory, Lunch, and Murder!
Issue 55 – Turning Point
Issue 56 – The Fall of Nuklear Man
Issue 57 – Everything Falls Apart
Issue 58 – Epilogue
Sort of an Epilogue or The End of the Sequel I Never Wrote
Nuklear Age
by Brian Clevinger
Copyright Notice:
NUKLEAR AGE copyright © 2012. All rights reserved. Nuklear Age, the Nuklear Age logo, and all characters, likeness and situations featured herein are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Brian Clevinger. Except for review purposes, no portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of Brian Clevinger. All names, characters, locations and events in this publication are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is coincidental.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank all the brilliant pulp and comics writers of the previous century. You guys were just a bunch of charlatans and hucksters trying to make a few bucks, but somewhere along the line you screwed up and left us with a legacy of wonderful and absurd stories that will be forever lodged in our subconsciousness. We are richer for it. I’ll be lucky to fulfill just the charlatan/huckster part and get a hot meal out of this line of work.
Preface to the 2012 Digital Edition
So, me and this book, we got a history.
I started writing it in the summer of 1996 and finished it in December of 2000. It was "my life's work" at the ripe old age of twenty-two.
Of course, sitting here today at the ripe older age of thirty-four, it's obviously the clumsy work of an amateur. I feel a pang of embarrassment every time someone hands me a copy to sign. But, y'know, that's okay. This is what I was writing back when I was too young and inexperienced to know I couldn't write. It was the age of dial-up modems and Grunge music being more-or-less "in." It was an embarrassing time for all of us!
And the fact that to this day I'm still asked to sign well-worn copies of this thing at conventions speaks to something about the book. Yeah, it's flawed. The prose is purple and the craft is clunky. Also it’s a million pages long. But people found a way to connect to it and to love it anyway.
So, what the hell. I'll be a little embarrassed and a little proud.
Addendum to the Preface Because I'm Dumb
Oh, hey! I almost forgot.
Okay, so, folks have been asking/begging me to write the sequel, Atomik Age, for years. And, guys, I tried. I did. There's fragments of four or five attempts at Atomik Age on my hard drive right now. I got as far as one-third of the way through once. All I can say is the magic wasn't there, and I'm doing you a favor by not subjecting you to it anyway just to turn a quick buck.
But!
I can give you guys a taste of it. This edition of Nuklear Age contains the never before published final chapter of Atomik Age. Yes, it's true. Since I tend to figure out the endings of stories before starting them, I wrote the final chapter before I wrote the stuff that would lead to it.
While I can't give you the sequel, but I can give you its ending.
It's a little trippy!
Issue 1 – Giant Sized Special Deluxe Gold Foil Embossed Holographic Variant Cover Collector’s Edition
High caliber machine-gun fire tore across the city. Debris and shards of glass spilled over the streets as an explosion rocked the earth and gave way to a cacophony of screams that mixed into a tumultuous cocktail of civic chaos.
“It must be Tuesday,” Nuklear Man said to himself as he soared over the downtown spires of Metroville. He made a wide golden loop around the roof of an office building that had all the harsh angles and weird geometry of a modern skyscraper. Another volley of heavy arms fire barked up at him from the streets. Scores of bullets zipped by like furious bees. Nuklear Man’s highly advanced mind buzzed with intelligence. It was a simple matter of calculating a series of trigonometric equations to pinpoint the gunfire’s exact origin in the streets beneath him and rocket into justice.
SMASH!
Nuklear Man stumbled out of the demolished rubble of what had been a very large bank lobby. He groggily shook the dust out of his hair. “Wish I knew trigonometry.” He coughed up a puff of plaster.
The street was full of abandoned traffic and the sidewalks were devoid of humanity. The citizens of Metroville were used to things like this and they knew how and when to clear an area. The Eyewitness Action on the Spot Breaking News Force team was already setting up along nearby storefronts and behind the larger parked and overturned cars. Since they were news anchors, the area was still devoid of humanity.
Nuklear Man examined the filthy state of his outfit. Its sun-themed yellows and oranges were a soup of masonry gray. T
he trademark Nuklear Style N with little electron orbits displayed on his chest was completely obscured and he certainly wasn’t going to have any of that. The state of his cape wouldn’t bear mentioning at all. He closed his eyes and concentrated. A glow emanated from his body as his ever-present Plazma Aura intensified. It grew, slowly at first, then burst like a hundred simultaneous camera flashes. He was clean once more.
Nuklear Man could see the news crew making a fuss on the other side of the street. There was a lot of pointing and other excited gesticulations in his general direction.
“Geez, you’d think they never saw a fantastically handsome Hero before.”
The actual object of their attentions then turned the corner.
Mechanikill.
A two ton walking gun platform, it was some sort of robot, presumably of the Military Prototype Gone Horribly Awry variety. It was built with one very simple design philosophy: bullets kill people. Each of Mechanikill’s arms were five Gatling guns. They were already spinning up as Nuklear Man’s light speed reflexes kicked in.
“Hey, Mechanikill!” he would have said, if not for the hail of bullets that blasted him out the side of the ruined bank and into the street. His superhero outfit was a dusty shambles all over again.
Nuklear Man was flat on his back in the middle of the street. Half a dozen vehicles had been pushed aside or knocked over on his way there. “Well, that wasn’t fair,” he said while raising himself up on his elbows.
“Fair?!” Mechanikill’s speakers spat with digital surround sound ire. “Don’t talk to me about being fair!” It waddled over to Nuklear Man smashing chunks of debris with every robotic step.
“For the love of Liberty’s cape,” Nuklear Man muttered as he stood. “You don’t talk to me about fair!”
Nuklear Man’s verbal riposte scrambled Mechanikill’s logic circuits for an instant. This happened at least once every time they clashed and it would have been the perfect time for Nuklear Man to follow up with a devastating barrage of attacks to subdue the Metallic Menace by way of complete destruction.
But no.
He saw the news crew scrambling into position to get good shots of this new battlefield. He reflexively Plazma Burst his costume clean. It wasn’t that he was vain, he just couldn’t live in a universe where he wasn’t beautiful. He turned back to Mechanikill.
“I don’t spend several hundred dollars a month on dry cleaning so that my spiffy outfit can take this kind of abuse from the likes of you!” Nuklear Man said as Mechanikill’s digital senses returned.
"You just cleaned yourself!" the robot spat.
Nuklear Man stomped over to the robot and shoved an accusatory finger in the vicinity of its optical sensors. He often found the best way to deal with things like accusations and the truth was to ignore them entirely and forge ahead undaunted. "And I most certainly don’t take a good five minutes from my busy schedule of eating, sleeping, eating again, and watching cartoons to patrol the city for acts of villainy—so I can perpetuate the illusion that I’m actually doing my job while being given license to dispense justice by completely disposing of justice—only to have you pop up and delay my return to the sweet, sweet couch where I can continue my eating, sleeping, cartoon cycle!” He gave Mechanikill a shove that knocked him back a few heavy steps. “So don’t you talk to me about fair!”
“You said that already.”
“Don’t you said that to me already!”
There was an audible pop as Mechanikill’s logic circuits, already strained beyond their Reasonable Limit, finally blew. The robot shuddered as the final nuances of sanity coursed out of its intelligence matrix. It made a sickly whine like a smoke detector in a blackout. It teetered, hovering between vertical and horizontal alignment for an eternal moment, and collapsed backwards in slow motion.
Nuklear Man took a deliberate step away from the fallen beast. “It was self-defense!” His eyes darted back and forth. “Yes. And since he’s not in any condition to testify otherwise, I’ll get away with it! Again!” He turned to walk away as casually as a man running away in blind terror can. He took three panicked strides from the slain husk and froze. A bolt of terror ripped up his spine and strangled his brain stem. The Eyewitness Action on the Spot Breaking News Force team had captured the whole dirty murder on tape.“Way to go Nuklear Man!” the sound man cheered.
“Yeah! We got it all on tape!” the cameraman pumped his fist enthusiastically.
“This’ll get me the top story for sure!” the anchorman said to his cell phone.
“Curses!” Nuklear Man cursed under his breath. He shrugged. “Well, I suppose it was going to come to this eventually.” Fusion-like energy rippled from his clenched fists. “I must eliminate all witnesses: actual, potential, and imaginary! The Purging will be swift and without remorse.”
“Excuse me,” a voice from the neighborhood of the Hero’s knees said. It sounded like listening to a tax form being read aloud.
“Yeah, sure. No problem,” Nuklear Man said absently. What little of his attention that existed was focused entirely upon the news team. His every step brought them closer to no longer being a problem.
“Excuse me,” the voice repeated. There was a bored quality to it, as if its content was somehow distant from its source. A sigh that bordered between exhaustion and impatience preceded nearly every statement.
“Right. Already done. Now stop bothering Mr. Hero-Man. He has some ‘business’ to attend to.” Nuklear Man looked down to give a big happy reassuring smile that certainly wouldn’t belie the violence he was yearning to perpetrate across the street. But the smile was shattered. He bent over to be nose to nose with the master of the bothersome voice. “So, uh. What’re you supposed to be?”
He was a little green man only two and a half feet tall with thick, leathery skin and a bulging bald cranium that accounted for nearly half his height. He wore a faded blue uniform that was all wrinkles.
“I am Bibbles, your typical Transdimensional Pantemporal Postal Service employee.” His voice was a geology lecture spoken at a geologic pace.
“What’s a Transwhozawhatsit…thingie?”
“The TPPS was founded early in the history of Everything. It was established as a way to effectively ferry important documents to and from the most important and valued individuals of every universe in completely trusted and regulated manner.”
“Oh! The TPPS. Sure, gotcha.”
“It’s also the most depressing job known throughout all of existence,” the alien added. “Like you care.”
“Er…”
Bibbles continued, “An employee of the TPPS deals with the most powerful and influential creatures of a trillion worlds in a billion universes. This, of course, is responsible for the TPPS’s renowned low morale, which has become so low in recent millennia that it has become a point of pride. Becoming personally aware that one is no more than an infinitesimal speck on a quark in a universe of unimaginable size usually leads to the eventual mental breakdown of even the most stable and well-adjusted creatures. Most employees go on a killing spree long before their retirement.”
“Y’don’t say,” Nuklear Man said, taking a step back.
“Most scientists just think it's something in the glue.”
“Well. Glue has been known to…um. You’re not starting your mental breakdown and subsequent killing spree here, are you?”
“No.” There was a peeved quality to his comatose tone. He held out a small envelope so heavily covered in stamps that Nuklear Man wondered just where the address was supposed to go. “I have a letter for a 1 (one) Nuklear Man.”
Nuklear Man smiled proudly. “That's me! Gimme!” He bounced like a small child giddy with the glee of Christmas morning.
Bibbles could already tell that he wasn't dealing with one of the intellectual giants of this backwards world. “Well, ‘Nuklear Man’, I'm going to need two pieces of identification first.”
Nuklear Man’s smile disappeared. He reared back to his full height. “I
uh...I don't have any ID.” He scratched at the back of his head. “People just sorta know who I am. I tend to stand out in crowds, you know. What with the superpowers, the villainy thwarting, and whatnot.”
Bibbles rubbed his eyes methodically. Nuklear Man could’ve sworn the alien existed in slow motion.
“I can't give you the letter unless you can give me two pieces of identification. It's standard practice. It is very important that we are one hundred percent certain that the proper people receive their mail. Entire civilizations depend on our parcels. Worlds have been saved and destroyed by a simple matter of postage. The fates of galaxies could rest in any of our many, many deliveries. As such, I'm going to need two pieces of identification.”
The Hero was at a loss for words. He adopted his “brainy” look, which would have been more impressive had Atomik Lad not thrown away his monocle in a fit of being goddamn tired of it several days prior. “Well, Bibbles,” he said, carrying on heroically despite the missing monocle, “Who else would I be? Hmm?”
Bibbles stared up at the “Hero” in front of him for several long moments. He took a deep breath.
“Since there are an infinite number of universes, each one rife with infinite variations upon every possible facet of existence, the odds of you being the real Nuklear Man are one in infinity to the power of infinity. And though our method of Waveform based dimensional time travel is quite advanced, we aren't arrogant enough to believe that we can overcome odds of that magnitude every single time we turn the machine on.
“You could be a clone, a past version of yourself, a future version of yourself, a clone of a past version, a clone of a future version, an evil twin, a clone of said evil twin, an evil twin from an alternate dimension, a clone of an evil twin from an alternate dimension, an adept shapeshifter, an evil twin of an adept shapeshifter, and so on along an infinite list of variations I have neither the time nor the inclination to discuss with you.” He paused. “With that being said, I need two pieces of identification, please.”
The Hero thought for a moment or twenty until even he could see the impatience oozing from Bibbles.
Nuklear Age Page 1