A
long time ago in the town of Neeksburg, New Jersey a young bird grew up to be
the Chicken of Tomorrow...from his humble, quiet origins, he would ... well, actually
he wasn't so humble. In fact, he was always kind of grouchy, seemingly because
everybody kept getting into horrible fixes and he had to go keep saving them.
Not only that, but Fission Chicken ("Fish" to his friends) kept encountering the
most horrendous, disgusting monsters and villians and stuff, generally loud, overbearing,
and noisy. But did anybody appreciate this? No, they'd complain that Fission Chicken
bent a lampost, or that he had a bad attitude. No wonder he was on the irritable
side!
There are many stories concerning the childhood of our erstwhile chicken... few
of them showing much congruity with the others. Various origin stories have him
being rocketed to Earth from another planet as a baby, or depict him as some manner
of government-backed mutation project, or that he got his considerable powers
from a mysterious elixir, or that a god of some sort imparted those powers to
him, and so on and so on. When asked if a particular story could be true, Fission
Chicken usually says, "Yeah, maybe." Sometimes he will make up a story on the
spot; for a while, he enjoyed telling people he got his powers from drinking chocolate
milk.
Among the many weird and powerful villians Fission Chicken has faced, the most
sneaky and tenacious are probable the Vortoxians, a race of marketing experts
from an alien planet who have replaced their original bodies with ones of plastic
and metal... so that they would be better executives. They frequently try to take
over Earth through various schemes involving alienized consumer products, hypnotic
media techniques, underhanded buyouts, and the like. Fortunately, the Chicken
of Wrath keeps finding out about their plans and is quick to take vigorous action
against them... generally with much noise and violence.
Another set of opponents is the Ditsy Empire... the insanely bloated, multinational
entertainent cartel that drapes its technicolor tentacles all over the world.
This bloated corporation is often in cahoots with the Vortoxians (not inappropiately),
at the same time being run by the mutated, disembodied brain of Walt Ditsy himself!
(Or at least it was before F.C. finished him... but "Walt" has come back from
apparent death before....)
In spite of all these mighty efforts of combatting the forces of brain death,
most people just don't appear to appreciate the Pullet of Power. Indeed, they
do not even comprehend that there was any danger to begin with; they believe what
the television tells them, they cannot understand that any beings would ever try
to "own" them. But Fission Chicken philisophically shrugs his shoulders, being
used to the situation after so many recurrences... and is always ready to battle
the next bad guy.
One thing Fish has never had to worry about is boredom; a seemingly endless parade
of bizarre entities keep emerging to cross swords with our hero. The Creatures
from Ineptune, the Ether Bunny, K'Celboo the ten-story slime demon, movie monster
Ferdie Cruller, the Dero, the Fuzzy Cutekins, P.U. Evolcraft (a necromancer, a
bad-smelling one), living toilet bowls of terror, and many more too grotesque
to list.
F.C. doesn't have a steady job... for money he occasionally obtains a huge chunk
of gold from the bowels of the earth, or fetches a fresh meteorite for a university
or something. On occasion he is showered with money from a grateful millionaire,
though such occasions don't happen too often, seeing as how Fission Chicken is
always busting up nefarious wealth-controlling plots of varying sort (remember
the Vortoxians and the Ditsy Empire)...
Yes, Fission Chicken has always fought against the soul-destroying forces of mediocrity,
banality, and greed. (He can't stand to watch what's on TV, either.) He stands
ever ready to take up arms against a sea of jerks and creeps, as touchingly related
in his immortal theme song (to the tune of "Yankee Doodle":)
Fission Chicken, Bird of Rock Fission Chicken, give them fits
Sees the living dead wake! Fission Chicken, be rude
Supersonic Fighting Cock Smash the bad guys into bits
Will mash them flat as pancakes! And make them look like dog food!
Yes we can all learn one of life's
most important lessons from the Chicken of Tomorrow... the most important of
which is that when you see a disgusting, wart-covered mutant hanging around
the neighborhood, or when plastic-bodied aliens come to evict you from your
house, just take a deep breath and zap them good with your fission ray... or
pick up the nearest multi-ton steel girder and beat them into a mushy pulp.
That'll teach them!
A Manticore Graphics production.
©1986 - 2004 John P. Morgan.
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