Friday Night Fights: Thunder - Round 1: Calculate This!

Welcome to the first round of our host Spacebooger's latest bout, Friday Night Fights: Thunder. Tonight's round of mathematical mayhem comes from the backup story in Detective Comics#463, written by Bob Rozakis and drawn by Mike Grell and Terry Austin, which features the debut of the Calculator. Before he went on to become Oracle's evil counterpart, ol' Calc used to dress up like this:

His M.O. was to steal things on the day they would be worth the most valuable. Here, he attempts to steal the life of Ray Palmer's old friend Professor Richard Bagley on the day he's announcing his greatest invention, the Quake-Breaker, a device designed to channel the power of earthquakes for constructive use. This leads to a showdown with the Atom. Unfortunately, in the course of the battle, Bagley is swallowed up by a chasm caused by the sudden appearance of a freak earthquake and dies, thereby making Calculator's theft a success.


Needless to say, the World's Smallest Superhero is PISSED.

Our button-pushing Big Bad would go on to face Black Canary, Elongated Man, Green Arrow, Hawkman, and finally Batman throughout the course of this six-issue arc. After being defeated by each Justice Leaguer, he would push a special button which would "inoculate" him against being defeated by that same foe ever again. Because....magic science, I guess? (Rozakis could match his fellow Bobs Kanigher and Haney in Bronze Age wackiness and then some.) Anyway, other than the bad fashion sense,  I never got why this period Calculator was thought of as lame in the more modern stories, because his abilities here were pretty baller.


For tonight's fight music, since I've already used Kraftwerk in the past, I'm going with this "number" by Regina Spektor.

For more computation craziness, click here. And don't forget to vote!