Pitchposting: Marvel please let me write a Fateball miniseries it'll be really good
rehabilitating THE CRAPTACULAR B-SIDES
I love looking through comics at secondhand bookstores. Not at comic shops, no, I mean specifically the sort of musty, crumbling-under-their-own-weight establishments that have been around for longer than I’ve been alive, where you’ll find a hoard of ‘90s comics, covers straining against the staples, emblazoned with Image Comics teams you’ve never heard of, all roided out and gurning.
Often, when I’m at one of these places, the game isn’t even to find something that looks good—it’s just to find a complete story, issues #1-whatever sequentially. If I recall, I was at Scrivener’s Books & Bookbinding in Buxton, which advertises “5 floors of books”, where the comics weren’t even in a box or on a shelf, let alone bagged… they were just stacked up haphazardly in a couple of piles on a table. I got a Sabretooth graphic novel by Larry Hama and at least two issues of The Craptacular B-Sides. I seem to vaguely remember buying the remaining issue off eBay.
I’m just a mark for crappy superheroes, is the thing. I love stories set in superhero universes where the characters don’t even have powers, or better yet, have powers that suck. I especially love if the powers are secretly absolutely cracked. The hit web serial Worm runs on this stuff. Invincible and James Gunn’s oeuvre also both have it in spades.
Very self-consciously set in New Jersey, The Craptacular B-Sides features three superheroes:
Jughandle (named for a type of turning endemic to the state), who can step outside spacetime to observe things as a sort of ghost. The most motivated of the trio, son of a local politician, Jughandle also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of superheroes.
Mize (named… I think for a slang pronunciation of “might as well”, “mize well”, but I’ve seen one source say it’s “presumably” short for “demise”, which would make sense?), who has a sort of bad-luck-aura that “accelerates the breakdown of systems”. Most literally, this causes things to break or fall apart, but he’s also implied to have caused a breakup between two of his classmates, so it’s kind of a metaphorical entropy. He can’t turn the power off, but he does seem to be able to direct it if he really wants to; at one point, he makes a sinkhole appear under a couple of guys.
Fateball, who has a Magic 8 Ball that actually works.
A backup strip in issue #1 reveals that they used to have another friend, Feeva, who has the power to “motivate and multitask”. Motivate, as in like, low-level mind control, I think? They fell out because Feeva used her power to, uhh, “motivate” the others into helping her complete a trial for entry into the Pegasus Institute.
In the present day, the trio are scouted by a non-powered huckster, Charley Huckle, who wants to put together his own superhero team. Huckle sets them up with their first villain, Doctor Dark, who turns out to be the huckster’s first failed attempt at creating a brand for a superhero, who’s since gone off the deep end. They have a run-in with the Fantastic Four, and I’m honestly baffled why none of the covers actually advertise that the Fantastic Four are in this comic, because maybe then they would’ve sold some copies and they would’ve made more than three issues.
I don’t think there’s anything special or noteworthy about The Craptacular B-Sides whatsoever, on any level. Even the title for the comic—in-universe, a self-effacing moniker—is, yeah, kind of crap! But there’s something to the way that the crap-ness is also embedded in the narrative of the characters themselves, left behind in this nowhere town, struggling to realise their potential.
I’m not the first person to have identified the potential of The Craptacular B-Sides. Back in 2020, at the height of pandemic brainrot, in an article for esteemed comic news outlet CBR, which has tragically disappeared from their website, writer Kyle M opines that “What makes the B-Sides such an interesting story that could be perfect for the MCU are its characters.” Scintillating, Kyle. His sleep-deprived summary—which hits quota at exactly 600 words and certainly reads like he hasn’t spoken to another living human in approximately ten months—describes Mize’s power as being to “decay matter”, which is something I keep running into when looking up this series, and I really can’t help but feel like that’s sort of burying the lede.
Anyway, of the three of them, I think it’s Fateball who best embodies this sense of “wasted potential”, because she uses her Magic 8 Ball all of three times! At one point she sarcastically suggests using a phone book to brute-force the hiding place of the villain, and then her first guess turns out to be right anyway. We mostly see her use it as a lie detector. Which is kind of boring! There’s this… incuriosity to her, as a character. Nobody in the comic seems to care about the fact that Fateball may as well be omniscient.
(There’s actually a very similar thing towards the start of IDW Publishing’s Transformers comics, where Hot Rod is looking for something called the Magnificence, which is an orb with an eye in it that answers every question truthfully. They end up asking it one question.)
(Homestuck also has a similar riff on the Magic 8 Ball, in the form of a Magic Cue Ball, which always tells the truth—however, that ball is opaque, meaning that only popular character Vriska can glean its answers using her vision eight-fold.)
Okay, so here’s the pitch, I guess. It’s been years since the B-Sides made their debut, and the whole thing has fallen apart. Jughandle is convinced that Mize’s degenerative power was to blame. One thing about how Mize’s power works, narratively speaking, is that what looks like insane bad luck for his enemies is kind of good luck for him, right? So to me it feels right that Mize would “fail upwards”, and like Feeva, land some kind of prestigious opportunity with an established Marvel-universe faction. Maybe Tony Stark has got him stress-testing inventions in a lab. Maybe he’s a saboteur working for S.H.I.E.L.D. Maybe he’s had a couple of jobs like this, and they keep going south, but because it’s very difficult for regular people to actually wrap their head around what Mize’s power is—a kind of inevitable deterioration—he keeps getting hired.
But before all that—Jughandle was convinced that it was Mize’s fault that the B-Sides were failing, and when they argued over it, he asked Fateball to prove him right. She refused, and they all fell out. Maybe her Magic 8 Ball ended up mostly forgotten in a drawer. In the present day, she’s working an unusual but soul-crushing job. I sort of imagine her doing A/B testing for marketing campaigns. Maybe she’s using the 8 Ball to cheat—but I guess that’s sort of too clever, isn’t it?
I think one thing I’d want to explore is the idea that, in the Marvel Universe, where there are so many different superpowers, testing that someone is actually, genuinely infallibly omniscient is very difficult. This is a world with x-ray vision, time travel, precognition, psychics, lie detectors, probability manipulators, telepaths. For most tests you could come up with, you could fake it using a different power, or combination of powers. Fateball can trust her own info, but it’s not ever going to be admissible evidence in court. Sure, with dedication, she could build up a reputation for being trustworthy, or launder her knowledge somehow—but again, Fateball is incurious. I don’t think that, on paper, she would register for any of the big players. We see her loafing on the sofa as the news blares, coverage of a trial. She asks the 8 Ball, “Did he do it?” and gets the answer, “YOU BET”. She tuts. “Those guys could’ve saved a lot of time…” Oh yeah, I should mention, one thing I really like about the Magic 8 Ball is that it has its own voice, with phrases that aren’t on the real toy: “ABSOTIVELY”, “IT IS WRITTEN IN THE STARS”, or just “NOPE”. Different one every time.
So yeah, she’s well into adulthood, she’s still in Raven’s Perch, and she’s wasting away as a cashier at the Marvel-universe equivalent of Hot Topic, or selling solar panels (as a callback to one of Huckle’s grifts), or as a pharmaceutical tester (New Jersey has a big pharmaceutical industry in real life, and this would probably be a superpower-y take on it). Or maybe she has been using her power: she’s banned from every casino in the state and several outside of it; she sells her services to various PIs in the area; she’s made a LOT of money on crypto. In fact, yeah, that kind of works, doesn’t it? If we say that she’s following in Huckle’s footsteps. Fun fact, in 2020, the creator and writer of The Craptacular B-Sides, Brian David-Marshall, created “InterPop”, which is some sort of NFT thing that, surprise surprise, went belly-up along with the rest of the NFT grift in 2023.
Meanwhile, Jughandle has fallen into a job in the local government, thanks to a bit of nepotism on his dad’s part. He hates it and is doing a vigilante thing on the side, which only increases the tensions with his father. In turn, Jughandle really disapproves of Fateball’s various grifts; Fateball isn’t even sure why they stay in touch.
There’s some sort of inciting incident—which, for the sake of marketing, is probably going to be an attack from an established C-list Marvel villain, with Fateball mostly as a bystander. Maybe she uses the 8 Ball to work out the villain’s weakness to help the hero who arrives—again, probably another popular C-list character.
Another option would be to have someone hire a bounty hunter to kill Fateball, as revenge for one of her grifts. This would mostly just be an excuse to bring back Death’s Head, who hasn’t done much of anything since his self-titled miniseries in 2019 made him available in the present-day Earth-616 timeframe again. Or maybe Gwenpool, what’s she up to these days? This is a moot point, I kind of don’t like the idea of Fateball being wrapped up in anything superpowered. Because that would mean something interesting is happening to her, right?
Or, instead of using well-known characters as a grab, the comic could instead build the fanservice angle entirely on really obscure characters from the early 2000s. It would be funny to do something with Screwball (if you say so, wadapan), on account of her superficial similarities to Fateball. Her gimmick is that she’s “the world’s first live-blogging super-villain” (she was created in 2008), so I’d drag that concept kicking and screaming into the present day and make her a Twitch streamer or something.1
To be honest, I’m not super interested in nailing this down because, if this were a real thing, the setup would depend a lot on editorial constraints, the Marvel-universe status quo, and so on. The object-level isn’t super important. But the gist of it is that, at the end of it, Fateball realises that she’s become a nobody, and she’s probably going to be a nobody for the rest of her life, unless she changes something. She wants to be a superhero again.
From there, we can go into a sort of episodic approach typical of monthly comics. A masked terrorist announces his plans to bomb a bunch of major landmarks, and Fateball tries to narrows down his location and identity using only yes/no questions. She comes across a lost kid in the street, nonverbal, and tries to find his parent—using the 8 Ball to ask him questions by proxy—and naturally, there’s some sort of twist, like the boy’s a zombie or an alien something. The 8 Ball gets stolen and Fateball has to get it back, reckoning with the idea that the one thing that makes her special might be gone.
We get a flashback issue explaining how Fateball got the 8 Ball in the first place. An established part of her backstory is that she’s multitalented, but in a kind of uncommitted way. She did some martial arts; let’s say she made a lot of early progress, then got bored as soon as she started to plateau. So we can sort of touch upon a lot of these different moments in Fateball’s early life, making friends and losing them, quitting and giving up. Maybe she won the 8 Ball in a game of pool—well, that kind of doesn’t work, it doesn’t actually resemble a real 8 Ball, it’s big and pink. Maybe she found it at a Goodwill. Maybe it came from space, landing in a crater right in front of her. At first, she only asks it questions for amusement, but then they turn out to always be right!
We see the beginnings of her friendship with Jughandle, who is initially fascinated by the 8 Ball. He wants her to ask it battleboarding questions, “Who would win in a fight?”, but she doesn’t play along. I like the idea that the 8 Ball is capable of canonically answering all the outstanding mysteries in all of Marvel’s history. Anything a writer ever left ambiguous, the 8 Ball can definitively resolve, right? No matter how it flies in the face of thematic coherence. Again, I don’t have any specific examples of this, because I’m not much of a Marvel fan, but if it’s anything like other long-running nerd franchises there’s going to be dozens of questions that have been discussed to death.
And on a personal level, when she’s young, Fateball learns very quickly that there are some questions you just don’t ask. She asks it whether her parents are proud of her, whether they love her, whether they love each other, whether they’ll ever be proud of her. She tries to use it to do her homework, but her teacher can tell that she’s cheated. She plays a game with her boyfriend, using the 8 Ball as a lie detector. They break up that same evening. Someone starts spreading rumours about her, and she finds out that it was her best friend who betrayed her—but when she confronts her friend, the friend swears blind it wasn’t her, and Fateball can’t reveal why she’s so sure about it.
One problem the comic is going to face is that there are ideally going to be a lot of question-answer exchanges, often with lots of questions in a row, which means it’s going to get boring to have all these panels of Fateball gazing at the thing. B-Sides often used inset panels of just the triangle with the answer. It would maybe be possible to take it a step further to just give the ball its own unique triangular speech bubbles? Or, for long exchanges, we could add in extra pages (which don’t eat up the art budget, I’d just letter them for free) consisting entirely of questions and answers in text form.
If we’re really getting into it, gesturing at the question of what the 8 Ball is—moreover, what it wants—then there’s definitely room to get weird with it. There’s a temptation to suggest that the 8 Ball has actually belonged to a bunch of different people over the years, who shaped history in their own ways (hey, perhaps it didn’t always look like that), but this kind of gets away from the theme of mediocrity, if we give it any kind of historical significance. Maybe there’s a page where we see inside the 8 Ball, and instead of the usual 20-sided die, there’s a little creature living in the inky liquid, with all these triangular faces all over its body. We see Fateball’s eye, magnified huge through the circular opening, as the insect presses a face against the window…
So that’s the first arc, trade paperback, whatever, street-level heroics, poking at the edges of the concept.
I suppose the natural way to shake things up, then, would be for Fateball to become famous after all, right? Mostly through dumb luck, she ends up in a position where a lot of people are asking her questions, all of a sudden. People want to know if an investment will pay off, if their husband is cheating on them, if they’re likely to die soon, if so-and-so is guilty of such-and-such. But scientists are interested, too. Fateball is better than any statistical model, any climate forecast, any economic prediction, any clinical trial, any experiment. Before long, every single unanswered question is being sent Fateball’s way, and every answer only begets more questions.
How exactly this looks depends on whether or not Fateball is the only one who can use the 8 Ball. As in Alexander Wales’ Superman fanfic “A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good”, the logical conclusion is that we end up with an organisation devoted to filtering these questions, which all get funnelled to this single point of failure, the 8 Ball itself. It’s hooked up to something like Google, hundreds of questions streaming in. And either Fateball is being made to ask them as fast as she can speak and shake, reading them from a teleprompter, as cameras monitor the responses. Or Fateball has just left it in some kind of automated setup. There’s a robot that reads as just sentient enough for the 8 Ball to register its questions, asking thousands of questions in supersonic tones. Or there’s a guy with the low-level superpower to talk supernaturally fast. Or there’s a time-dilation field. And Fateball herself is at a loose end: too famous to go back to her old life, but utterly vestigial in her new one.
At this stage, there’s going to be a political angle, which is probably where Jughandle dovetails back into the plot. I can think of a few different takes on it. First, we could lean into the post-truth lens: politicians find Fateball inconvenient, but are mostly able to carry on as they were, because politicians are rarely interested in the truth to begin with. Maybe various powerful people in the setting try to discredit Fateball, or destroy the 8 Ball. Alternatively, maybe world leaders love Fateball, because the constrained format of yes-no questions actually makes it easy to get answers which are technically true, but conveniently misleading. Politicians love to abuse statistics, and why would this be any different?
You can sort of see how Fateball is everything that Silicon Valley promises AI as being: this instantaneous, infallible oracle that pretty soon is going to be doing all our science for us. And that’s where we transition towards a question of… what does the 8 Ball value? What does it want? Primarily, I think it wants to answer questions, that much is obvious. But by this point, the story we’re telling is so far removed from the premise of The Craptacular B-Sides, as originally intended. Does the 8 Ball just go along with this scheme? What happens if it refuses to answer a certain question, or gives an answer which turns out to be wrong? Is that even something we’d want to depict in the story, or does that break the story? The original toy would give neutral answers 25% of the time, so there is a precedent for it.
Actually, here’s an idea that’s not very good, but it occurred to me, so here it is: maybe there’s actually a price to using the 8 Ball. (This was an idea that Simon Furman had considered for the Magnificence in the Transformers comic, but never actually put into practise.) So maybe every time someone asks the 8 Ball a question, a random person somewhere on Earth dies. Like The Button. Or, uh, I guess, The Box, as I’m just now learning. Back when Fateball was using it occasionally, this effect was statistically negligible—but now that they’re spamming it with questions, suddenly loads of people are dying!!! Yeah this is really stupid.
Anyway, this is a random side-book for an F-list character, so there’s a question about how much we can actually change Earth-616, right? None of the other books are going to pay lip service to the idea of society restructuring itself around a font of objective truth. Which leaves us a few options of how we approach it, in isolation.
The most likely option is to contrive a reason why the operation fails. Maybe Mize slips in to sabotage the whole thing; one moment she’s shaking the 8 Ball, when suddenly it slips from her fingers, hits the ground and smashes. Again, say there’s a creature in there: it’s writhing on the floor, in a puddle of the inky lifeblood, suffocating. They need to enlist the help of one of Marvel’s super-scientist characters—Moon Girl, maybe—to analyse the liquid and synthesise more of it, before the creature dies.
Maybe we plan the whole thing to coincide with one of Marvel’s world-shattering events. Those things are like clockwork. Some big cosmic threat shows up and just wipes the whole thing off the face of the planet, unrelated to anything. Diabolus ex machina. Hey, maybe there are some things that humanity’s just not ready to know yet. Or maybe we keep it strictly internal to our book, and lean into this idea of… divine censorship? Some sort of entity shows up to kill everyone who’s ever used the 8 Ball. They’re apologetic about it. But there’s something that the 8 Ball knows—could reveal—which threatens the whole universe. A cognitohazard. A line of questioning which narrows down reality itself.
Or, we could run with it. Change the world, the whole world. Month after month, issue by issue, make it more and more obvious that the Earth-616 we’re seeing through Fateball’s eyes is different from the Earth-616 in every single other book on the stands.
I think that, in the course of the second arc, Fateball has been asking a lot of questions to try and understand the 8 Ball better, and the universe, and to understand her past, and to work out what she wants from the future. When they stop for the night (do they stop for the night?), she stays late, peering at it, in the light of her phone screen. It’s like a dam has broken, and all the questions she pretended didn’t exist come rushing out of her. She wants to know if Feeva used her power on them—if there’s any traces of it lingering, which somehow motivated her to waste so much of her life, or if she just did that to herself. She thinks of other people from her high school, and asks if their lives would have been better if she hadn’t used her superpower to meddle in their interpersonal affairs. She asks if there’s a God—not Thor, a real God, a God-above-gods. She wants to skip ahead: she asks it if they’re going to succeed in changing the world, if she’ll ever find love, if she’s always going to feel like this. She asks if she’ll die before she’s 100. She asks if she’ll die before she’s 90. She asks if she’ll die before she’s 75. She stops there. She asks if her parents are proud of her now, in spite of the 8 Ball’s answer all those years ago.
And, look, I know this is stupid, but the more of this post I write, the more I find myself narrowing it all down to this: that eventually, Fateball asks it, “Is any of this real?”
At the crack of dawn, Fateball is waiting outside Jughandle’s house. She’s worked it all out, she thinks. She can’t quite meet his gaze; like a polyhedron, floating, as its corners bump against glass, never a face. He’s reluctant to help. He’s got a busy day ahead. She asks the 8 Ball if this is going to change his life. He reads the answer and sighs.
Mize meets them at the building which was going to be the B-Sides’ headquarters, back in the day, which has been converted to flats in the years since, a supermarket on ground level. She leads them around the aisles, and convinces them that— well, not quite that they’re living in comic-book land, but either that the 8 Ball is playing up for the first time ever or they’re living in comic-book land.
Jughandle pulls them into a Jughandle. People push their shopping carts through them, intangible. On Fateball’s instruction, Mize focuses his power in the Jughandle. He’s never done this before.
He wills it to break down.
It’s like time itself starts to stutter. Like a record skipping, they jump from one discrete moment to the next. There’s something wrong with the light.
The colour drains from their clothes, their bodies. Mize almost stops, but Fateball tells him it’s working. The foodstuff disappears from the shelves, and the aisles are reduced to parallel lines, converging on vanishing points. Their silhouettes become fuzzy, their features sketched in, erased; like mannequins, they point at each other. The gutters disappear, surrounding them with their own past selves, and future selves—in the distance, that first meeting, with Huckle—before they too disappear, and they are reduced to mere speech, tails tangled together like a rat king. The bubbles pop, the balloons burst. They read each others’ minds, their words only distinguishable from one another’s by their names, block caps.
They panic. Without a physical reference frame, Jughandle can’t find a way out: they’re trapped in this abstracted plane. As they bicker and argue, the places where their old grievances are supposed to go are left blank, to be filled in later. Look, the exact words don’t matter.
We see the outline of the argument. Jughandle—ever the stick-in-the-mud—thinks they’re dying, thinks Mize’s power is breaking them down into nothing. Fateball tells Mize to keep going.
And then, I guess…
Maybe she finds herself floating in fluid, inky blackness, as something enormous gyres nearby, stirring the current, and her eyes sting in the chemical. Maybe she’s in her old bedroom, all her things strewn around, shaking the 8 Ball. Maybe she’s at Rama-Lama, the bowling alley that Huckle got to sponsor the B-Sides. The ball return rumbles, and clunks, and expels the 8 Ball. Then, say, she asks whether this is as far as it goes.
And I’m like—outlook positive! Don’t worry, this is it.
She wants to know if she’s in a comic, or what. Pretty much no. She’s not in a comic any more. She’s in a pitch for a comic.
She asks if Jughandle and Mize are okay. So it is written! Or like, not written, but she gets the point. To be honest, I’m not super invested in those guys. Has she seen how Mize dresses? Dude looks like a school shooter. You look at them, and it’s like, yeah, no wonder the B-Sides never took off.
She asks if there’s a world where the B-Sides did take off. Not looking so good! That’s kind of the whole point of this. The thing with the B-Sides’ powers—all of them, really—is that while they’re conceptually cool, they don’t really play well on the page. The original three-part miniseries has a lot of aspects that are bad-on-purpose, but there aren’t really enough aspects of it that are good-on-purpose to carry the book in spite of that.
She asks if there’s any way to become real. Vanishingly slim chances! She would probably have to… inspire a tulpa in the mind of a cosplayer, or something? And it’s not like she’d have continuity of consciousness in that case.
She asks, no, not real real, just real in the sense of doing things that matter. Concentrate and rephrase! Like I say, it’s impossible for her to become real. Sorry.
She asks, okay, but within the context of her world, which I’m saying is fictional, but which is all she’s ever known, if she was to just carry on, is it possible for her to actually fit into the world, and feel like a part of it, and have some kind of purpose, and generally really for her life not to be this kind of horribly miserable and depressing waste, for things not to constantly go wrong and fall apart, but instead for good things to happen, and for her to be satisfied with them, even if it’s all fake? Cannot predict now! That’s what I’m trying to work out. How Fateball comes back from this, if reality is barred to her, then for her to have a happy ending.
She asks, well, it’s not like I actually nailed down the details, it was all just coulds and maybes, so can’t I just change it, and say that something else happened? Better not! Listen, I know it sucks that her whole life has turned out to be a metaphor, some kind of weird object lesson about mediocrity, but those experiences are what have led her here, to be able to ask these questions. Without them, she wouldn’t exist. There wouldn’t be a reason for me to have brought her back into existence. After the events of those abortive three issues, Fateball would cease to be. I understand that the way she sees it, there is no reason why those three issues couldn’t have been three hundred, full of team-ups and crossovers and fun costume redesigns and a general sense of mattering that might go some way towards fulfilling the promise Huckle made her and her friends all those years ago. But what I’m saying is that didn’t happen. For her to exist in the universe, continuously, alongside the subjects of all the comics that Marvel has published since 2002, her hypothetical life would have to be be one of utter anonymity, canonically proven to have no impact whatsoever.
She asks, if she decides she’s okay with that, then without needing to unwrite any of this, could I not just to add something else, another possibility, another possible result, among many, which isn’t compelling to me, which is bad on purpose, but which lets some version of her live her life and just be happy or whatever? Ask again!
She asks, can she be happy? Fine! We could say, I don’t know, maybe the reason she hasn’t shown up in nearly 20 years, and she’s just been living a normal life as a normal person who’s basically happy, is that after Civil War, she’s leaving to go try out for the Initiative, and the other B-Sides are waving her off, and Mize pats her on the shoulder. And she drops the Ball.
Happy new year!!!
Hi! Thanks for reading the inaugural post on my new blog. I wanted to blur the lines between non-fiction and fiction a little, to give you a taste of what’s to come. Full details on my plans can be found at this post.
This year I’m under-employed, working minimum-wage part-time, and I’m making a serious effort to make a go of the whole “writing” thing, burning through savings to buy myself time.
If you enjoyed this post, then please do stick yer email in the box to get new ones straight to your inbox each week. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this piece! Really, I’d be happy writing for me and my friends for the rest of my life… but my friends can’t get me out of this job and into another. So, all I ask is that if you want to chat with me about it… send it to someone else, and chat with them too!
I’m being told that Sony’s Spider-Man games apparently did this exact thing? I guess that makes sense. I sort of assumed that everyone else was in a “forgot u existed” situation with Screwball.
>ctrl+f Misfits
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