Armstrong Fatbuckle

Armstrong Fatbuckle
A.K.A.	The Worst Man in the World “Boney”
Character Information
Species	Human Skeleton
Gender	Male
Residence	New York City Hell (Reality Z-25 31-H)
Occupation	Businessman Superhero
Romantic Partner(s)	See list
Behind the Scenes
First seen in	COMIC: Hell Is Too Good For Him
Copyright	Paul Hoppe (?)
Index	List of appearances

In Reality Z-25 31-H, New York City bon viveur Armstrong Fatbuckle was dubbed the Worst Man in the World for his rude, superior, offensive disposition. Following his death in a car accident, he proved too infuriating for even the Devil to deal with and he was banished back from Hell to the land of the living in the form of a talking, walking skeleton some nicknamed “Boney”. The resurrected Armstrong continued to enjoy a life of wild partying and, indeed, ended up mellowing down to an extent and joining the Odds.

Description

Physical appearances

At the time of his death, Armstrong Fatbuckle was an ordinary-looking middle-aged Anglo-Saxon, slightly portly without being truly fat. He had short, fair hair and light-coloured eyes. After his resurrection, he appeared as a clean white skeleton, whose skull's facial features were capable of contorting to form lifelike expressions. He decided to forego wearing any clothes, no longer possessing any attributes which modesty might require him to conceal. (COMIC: Hell Is Too Good For Him)

Personality

In life, Armstrong Fatbuckle was rude and superior to everyone he met, not only spending his life attending expensive and decadent parties, but also doing his level best to ruin them for everyone else, a mocking, drunken smirk on his face. It was only after being resurrected as a skeleton that Fatbuckle mellowed down somewhat, remaining a bon viveur but becooming a positive presence for those around him, such as loose women of New York City, to whom he became a kind of protector. (COMIC: Hell Is Too Good For Him) He had a folksy cunning, able to trick villains into their doom. (COMIC: Redistribution)

Powers & abilities

Following his resurrection as a living skeleton, Fatbuckle displayed the ability to continue controlling limbs even after they were separated from the rest of his body. (COMIC: Enter–the Legion of Light!) He also did not seem overly inconvenienced if a weapon pierced through one of his bones, so long as it did not prevent him from moving. (COMIC: Battle of Britain) This gave him a certain edge in a physical fight, although he had no special strength or skill as a fistfighter otherwise. (COMIC: Enter–the Legion of Light!) During the Odds' battle with Insecto's guards, Armstrong stole an Insect Person's spear, though it's unclear how well he could wield it. (COMIC: Battle of Britain)

Biography

Life and death

Armstrong Fatbuckle leaving the last party of his mortal life. (COMIC: Hell Is Too Good For Him)

Armstrong Fatbuckle spent his life in 20th century New York City blowing his considerable money on expensive parties and affairs. After a particularly wild night, he crashed his car while drunk-driving. He was buried in a cemetary of the worst people in history, alongside Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler; his tombstone read simply “The Worst Man in the World” rather than stating his name. (COMIC: Hell Is Too Good For Him)

Resurrection

The Worst Man in the World rises from the grave. (COMIC: Hell Is Too Good For Him)

Fatbuckle's soul ended up in Hell, where he was personally greeted by the Devil himself. Despite the latter's attempt to scare him, however, Fatbuckle simply fell back on old habits, ignoring the Devil and behaving as rudely as possible; he mocked the demon with the fact that, already being dead and in hell, there was little the Devil could do to threaten him further. He went so far as to sleep with the Devil's consort, Mephista. This was the last straw for the Devil, who banned Armstrong's soul from hell and returned it to his now skeletal body on Earth as an undead. (COMIC: Hell Is Too Good For Him)

Adjusting to his new lease of life

Armstrong takes a strange resolution while living the high life. (COMIC: Enter–the Legion of Light!)

Immediately after his resurrection, Armstrong Fatbuckle attempted to simply resume his old life of wild partying. He had one wild soirée, until he discovered the trick the vengeful Devil had played on him: finding himself alone with the woman he'd flirted with, he realised that as a skeleton, he utterly lacked the physical means to make love to her, at least in a way he would enjoy. However, his despair was short-lived, as he quickly decided that he still could party and dance away a night, and that, anyway, this fate still beat being damned by far. (COMIC: Hell Is Too Good For Him) Indeed, he found his new life so heavenly that his thoughts turned to the possibility of redeeming himself sufficiently to be allowed to visit actual Heaven to see how it compared. Armed with this new heroic resolve, he constituted himself the ally and protector of the group of strippers he had been partying with. (COMIC: Enter–the Legion of Light!)

Facing the Legion of Light

Armstrong Fatbuckle fights Red Vicious. (COMIC: Enter–the Legion of Light!)

Armstrong's first opportunity to do good did not take long to arise as the night-club was attacked by the self-righteous, bigoted Legion of Light, latter-day knights in armour who held a Magic Sword. Believing Armstrong to be a demon when he leapt to the girls' defence, the Legion used their sword to summon “another” demon, Red Vicious, to fight Armstrong. Although initially managing to use his ability to keep moving detached limbs to his advantage, Armstrong was overwhelmed by the red demon, only for the thankful strippers to help him fight him off. Captain Evening, “Jenny Everywhere”, Merv the Griffin, Professor Madison and Rodney Rabbit then crashed the now-largely-figurative party and helped finish routing the Legion and apprehending its members. Once it was clarified that despite his foreboding appearance, “Boney” had been on the right side of this fight, Evening and his friends took him back to the Captain's home, where they painstakingly reassembled Armstrong's skeleton. They then offered him the opportunity to join the growing superhero team coalescing around the Captain. (COMIC: Enter–the Legion of Light!)

Among the Odds

Armstrong Fatbuckle goes on a date with Armagedda. (COMIC: Redistribution)

Armstrong officially became a member of the Odds alongside Merv the Griffin, the Captain and Jenny. Their first case together was that of the “reverse robberies” happening all over town, which turned out to have been organised by Armagedda in a confused effort to destroy humanity. The group's attack on Armagedda's lair did not amount to much, but after they were captured, Armstrong improvised a deception, claiming (in reply to a supercilious Armagedda's questions about why they were resisting against the inevitable) that they simply hoped to let humanity survive long enough to pass on its “greatest cultural achievement”, which he named as “the all-American date”.

With Armagedda reluctantly agreeing to go on such a “date” with him, he got her to shed most of her powers and take human form. The two enjoyed an evening out, including dining at a restaurant and going back to “Armstrong's place” afterwards, while the Captain, Merv and Jenny planned their next move. Armagedda (unlike Armstrong) didn't much enjoy the date on the whole, but it served its purpose: coming back from it to her lair, she was knocked out by Merv while still in human form and then forcibly shifted by Jenny to another universe using the Magic Sword of the Legion of Light. (COMIC: Redistribution)

Armstrong apologises to Jenny for his carelessness. (COMIC: Shower Intermission)

Shortly after these events, Armstrong accidentally walked in on Jenny in the showers of the Fortress of Evening. This seemed to cause her much distress, not for the obvious reasons, but because she had attempted to shift away the instant she heard the door opening, only to find that she couldn't: banishing Armagedda seemed to have temporarily sapped her shifting energies altogether. (COMIC: Shower Intermission)

Trip to England

Armstrong during the Odds' fight with Insecto's guards. (COMIC: Battle of Britain)

Armstrong accompanied the other Odds to England when they were called by Chief Inspector Dennis of the Yard to help deal with the matter of a city which was being taken over by Insect People. It turned out that the Insect People were not taking it over militarily, just showing up all over the city and behaving in unpleasant but not violent or illegal ways. However, a fight still broke out after the Odds entered the Insect People's giant anthill to speak with their their leader, when they refused to abide by the labyrinthine waiting line the Insect People insisted they go through. In the ensuing skirmish, Armstrong was speared through the right eye-socket, with the weapon piercing the back of his skull, but Armstrong quickly overpowered the Insect who'd stabbed him and took the spear for himself.

Armstrong comforts the Blue Knight. (COMIC: Encore)

The Odds decided to extend their vacation in England a little while after foiling Insecto's plans proved anticlimactic. (COMIC: Battle of Britain) They tracked a magical signature Merv the Griffin had perceived, and unearthed the Blue Knight, an immortal Arthurian knight, from underneath a monolith. After the Knight discovered to his shock that his body had wasted away to nothing, and he was an incorporeal spirit in hollow armour, the also-undead Armstrong helped him deal with the initial shock. (COMIC: Encore)

Return to New York

Armstrong with Professor Madison at Captain Evening's party. (COMIC: Meanwhile, On Earth)

Jenny, announcing that she had recovered her powers completely, shifted the entire Odds team, now including the Blue Knight, back to the Fortress of Evening in an instant, with them appearing in Professor Madison and Rodney Rabbit's bedroom. Madison began running tests on the Blue Knight while the other heroes freshened up in the Fortress's shower room. They soon had to leap back into action as Rodney informed them, based on what he was seeing on live television, that the ceremony where Captain Perfect was to be given the Keys to the City by Mayor Wilson was under attack by a giant robot called “Ultimatron”. The Odds rushed to the scene, but only succeeded in distracting Perfect, who was knocked out by the robot. They tried to defeat Ultimatron, but had little luck, with Centennia soon arriving and dispatching it herself.

After it transpired that the entire attack had been staged by Captain Perfect as a publicity stunt, he was punched into the distance by Centennia. Impressed, Captain Evening asked Centennia if she would consider joining “the Odds”, and she seemed to agree. To celebrate their victory and Centennia's joining, Captain Evening organised a party at the Fortress, inviting “all his hero friends” — including the Odds, the Terrific Two, Glow Girl, Mysto the Space-Wizard, the Big Bad Wolf, Red Riding Hood and Terry Tornado. Armstrong decided to sunbathe on a deckchair on the roof, incongruously wondering partway through if he had “put enough lotion on”. Later, he clinked glasses with Professor Madison as the assembled heroes watched the sunset from the Fortress's balcony. (COMIC: Meanwhile, On Earth)

Fighting the Cosmic Solution

The Cosmic Solution knocks Armstrong to pieces. (COMIC: Journey Out Of Misery)

After a robot known as the Cosmic Solution began attacking New York City (having actually been sent by the Cosmic Order to carry out the destruction of humanity following Armagedda's failure), Robot Madison summoned as many heroes as she could. Although a small team including Mysto the Space-Wizard, Terry Tornado, the Big Bad Wolf, Red Riding Hood and the Human Tree got there first, Captain Evening soon answered the call, leading most of the Odds into battle on his Skycycle — the team consisting, in this instance, of him, Merv the Griffin, Centennia, the Blue Knight, and Armstrong.

As soon as he arrived, he ordered Centennia, Merv, the Human Tree, and anyone else noted for physical strength to try and keep the robot contained while he worked out a longer-term solution with Robot Madison; Armstrong joined in this effort. With Hank Richards's surprise contribution, they managed to work out a scheme to distract the robot and drain power from him. It went off according to plan, although this had little bearing on how the threat was ultimately resolved, but as it wrestled itself free of the pile-on of heroes just before Evening connected it to Richards's device, the Solution blew Armstrong apart, scattering his bones, with a punch. (COMIC: Journey Out Of Misery)

Recurring elements of The Cosmic Beholder

The Odds The Blue Knight • Captain Evening • Centennia • Armstrong Fatbuckle • Merv the Griffin • Jenny Everywhere • Jenny Nowhere • Jung-La The Terrific Two & associates Kelly • Jenkins • Professor Madison • Robot Madison • Rodney Rabbit • The Mutant Villains Armagedda • Bureau of Singularity • Captain Perfect • Doctor Brain • The Devil • Hexia • Insecto • Jesse Brain • New Protectors (Kate Kerrigan) Other characters Alicia • Babs • The Big Bad Wolf • Glow Girl • The Human Tree • Mysto the Space-Wizard • Red Riding Hood • Terry Tornado Items Doctor Brain's Portal • Fortress of Evening • Magic Sword of the Legion of Light • Odd Mobile • Professor Madison's device • Skycicle