Armstrong Fatbuckle
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. During this superheroic career, he was sometimes referred to as the Living Skeleton (COMIC: Tales To Behold Halloween Cameo Caper 2014, Symbiote Surprise) or the Human Skeleton. (COMIC: Road Trip Of No Return, Symbiote Surprise)
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!, Road Trip Of No Return) 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) If the upper half of his skull was blown off, for example, he lost his eyesight but suffered no other ill effects. (COMIC: Season of the Witch) 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!) After patching up a shattered bone, he seemed to be able to heal over time, leaving no visible cracks. (COMIC: Season of the Witch)
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 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
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
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'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 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)
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 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.
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
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)
At some point, he stumbled into a strangely unaggressive Armagedda, back on Earth at full power. They ended up going on a second date, and he even went back to what she told him was “her place”. Still unsure of her intentions, Armstrong finally told the other Odds about the encounter and led them to the base in question, where it turned out that this had all been a trap to lure all the Odds in the lap of the alliance of villains created by Evil Cloak, who revealed herself as their very own Jenny — who was not an incarnation of Jenny Everywhere as she'd led them to believe, but of Jenny Nowhere. In the subsequent battle, Armstrong was knocked down by Jesse Brain, and didn't manage to collect his bones together again until after Nowhere had been killed by Gazoom, putting a rather abrupt end to the fight. After the Odds returned to the Fortress of Evening, Armstrong announced his intention to take Merv and the Blue Knight on a road trip to show them sights of 21st century Earth. (COMIC: Meanwhile, In Queens)
Fighting the Cosmic Solution
However, the project had to be postponed when 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). Although Robot Madison had summoned as many heroes as she could, meaning 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.
As soon as the Captain 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)
A vacation
The Odds (now joined by the real Jenny Everywhere) were offered a vacation by the mysterious Mr Montibar, and flew to the equally-mysterious, magical Kokotomo Island, where dreams could magically come true for a limited period of time. In Armstrong's case, this allow him to party wildly and merrily with the Valkyries Gertrude and Brunhilda. He then returned home on the same plane with the other Odds, save for Jenny and Centennia, who decided to stick around on Kokotomo. (COMIC: Tales To Behold Halloween Cameo Caper 2014)
The Odds, now reduced to the Captain, Armstrong, Merv and the Blue Knight, finally went on the low-key road-trip in the American countryside that Armstrong had initially suggested, trying to forget their troubles and simply enjoy life, camping out in the countryside at night. Eventually, however, during one particular pit-stop near a creek, they ran into trouble as a duo of corrupt, drug-trafficking policemen knocked out Armstrong, Merv and the Knight with tranquiliser darts and took them prisoners, afraid that the heroes would meddle in their trafficking.
They missed the Captain, however, who had gotten knocked out as part of an unrelated accident while away from the group; teaming up with a young, naïve and surprisingly athletic Sheriff, who knew nothing of her subordinates' corruption, he found the drug-dealers' lair and helped his friends break out, after which they easily overpowered the villains — while their leader Druggo had previously claimed to have superpowers, it turned out that he was simply delusional. The Odds then went for a midnight swim in the creek with the Sheriff, who needed some time to relax and rethink things. As he advised her on how to deal with this betrayal, the Captain realised that he needed to take his own advice to her to ultimately “just keep going”, and decreed that the Odds should return to New York as there was “work to be done”. (COMIC: Road Trip Of No Return) Upon returning to New York, the Odds joined with numerous other heroes to offer their help to Professor Madison in her work rebuilding after the damage dealt to the city by the Solution. (PROSE: Epilogue to Destruction)
Against the Shadow Queen
When the Shadow Queen attacked New York City, the Odds — including Armstrong, the Captain, the Blue Knight and Merv the Griffin — responded almost immediately. Despite their speed, they did not fare well in their first battle against the Queen's shadow-warriors, who were intangible when they tried to punch them, but very much capable of dealing damage to flesh-and-blood — or, as the case may be, bone — opponents. Only the setting of the sun brought an end to the fight, forcing the Queen to retreat lest her shadows dissolve into the darkness of the night. However, the Captain managed to hurl a tracking device at her.
In the middle of the night, the Odds followed the tracking device to the Queen's house, where they distracted her by cutting off her electricity. In the confusion, they stole her Shadow-Ray and, getting Professor Madison to walk them through it over video-phone, reprogrammed it to create shadow-beings loyal to them rather than the Queen. When they attacked the Queen and her shadows openly, it was with the help of the Shadow Odds, living versions of their own shadows (including a Shadow-Armstrong). They handily beat the Queen's warriors, with Merv and the Shadow-Merv teaming up to prevent the Queen from escaping aboard her Flying Platform. After the Queen surrendered and was taken into custody, the Captain was interviewed by Amanda Allen, explaining how they'd beaten the Queen. At Armstrong's suggestion, the Odds then took possession of the Queen's Flying Platform, which they used to chase down remaining evil shadows, returning them to normal using the Reverse-Shadow-Ray. (COMIC: Chasing Shadows)
Foiling Hexia
When the supervillain and witch Hexia took over the Channel 6 studios midway through a special edition of Hero Hour, Captain Evening, who was the programme's special guest, was incapacitated and kept trapped by Hexia with the other hostages. After they were alerted to the situation by the Commissioner, it fell to Armstrong, Merv the Griffin and the Blue Knight to rescue him and the others, forced to plan on their own without the Captain's strategic guidance. Armstrong climbed in through the pipes, emerging in the lavatory and startling one of Hexia's goons, whose clothes and wig he stole in order to slip closer to the villainess unnoticed. He was eventually recognised, leading to a fight breaking out as the Blue Knight (disguised as an extra hostage) and Merv (who'd been waiting outside the window) revealed themselves. While the other two did the heavy lifting, Armstrong focused on untying the Captain.
After Hexia tried to flee to the roof and hopped onboard a getaway helicopter, Merv and Armstrong tried to give chase, but the Griffin initially proved too slow, especially when forced to carry Armstrong in one arm. However, Jung-La intervened and briefly knocked Hexia out of the vehicle. Though she used a vanishing spell to teleport back into the cockpit, this slowed her down sufficiently for Mervin to grab onto the railing of the helicopter. He and Armstrong climbed inside and, despite Hexia shooting Armstrong's skull off, quickly showed themselves to be more (and weirder) than she could deal with in her already-tired state, such that she gave herself up.
Subsequently, Armstrong found the fragments of his skull and taped them back together. The clean-up, during which the Captain complimented the other three Odds for their resourcefulness in his absence, and offered Jung-La the chance to join the team, was cut short when the Commissioner called the Odds' attention to the New Protectors' latest broadcast, which announced that they had essentially declared martial law on New York, and furthermore, that independent superheroes would now be considered criminals. (COMIC: Season of the Witch)
Fighting Kate Five
When Kate Five, secretly under the evil influence of her symbiote, visited the Fortress of Evening, Armstrong had the dubious luck of being the one to answer the door while the other Odds were partying on the roof. After getting the locations of the other Odds from him, Kate took him by surprise and managed to scatter his bones, stuffing his pieces into a pair of storage cabinets before heading upstairs. However, one of Armstrong's arms slowly managed to get free and make its way to the roof. There, it found that Kate had rendered most of the Odds unconscious and was trying to choke Centennia to death. Armstrong's arm managed to distract Kate enough for Centennia to get a second wind and gain the upper hand, even separating Kate from the symbiote. This knocked out Kate herself, and by the time she woke up, Armstrong had been reassembled, joining the other Odds in reassuring her that they didn't hold her behaviour while possessed against her. (COMIC: Symbiote Surprise)
| Recurring elements of The Cosmic Beholder | ||||||||||
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