The Amicable Herculeans

 

The Amicable Herculeans are a group of former supervillains and supervillain henchmen (mostly henchmen) united under the tutelage and guidance of Koga ninja master Bakeatama. Bakeatama has made arrangements with the authorities to be responsible for the Herculeans both as their trainer and handler. They have all been sentenced to house arrest in the back of Bakeatama’s antique and curio shop and can only ever leave the shop under his direct supervision.

 

Though many doubted that Bakeatama could reform the supervillains through ninja instruction and worried that all his project would create would be thugs with ninja skills, the Herculeans have been a remarkable success. They assisted the Valancian Power Officer (and huge fan of Earth superheroes) City Hero in the apprehension of Andru “The Killer” Sewart and have worked with Martin’s school students as combat instructors (their powers and training make them formidable, but not insurmountable, to new ERC 2-3 students).

 

The Amicable Herculeans are known for being quite an very odd bunch, as their name suggests, but weird as they are, they have certainly become far more amicable under Bakeatama’s tutoring, perhaps even heroic.

 

Bakemono Atama, Bakeatama

 

 

“The way of the ninja is the way of total discipline–discipline of mind, body, and spirit. It is through this discipline that a man’s character develops, or in some cases, emerges for the first time.”

 

Bakeatama, whose supename is a portmanteau of Bakemono, meaning monster, and atama, meaning head, for Monster Head, is a Koga ninja master.

 

His true name is a closely guarded mystery. Rumor has it that his father was a high-ranking member of the Koga clan during the Worlds War. The Imperial government was, like all members of the Axis powers, strongly opposed to unregulated superhumans. The Koga clan, and their rivals the Iga clan, were low-grade superhumans owing to their bloodlines. There were yokai in their bloodlines which made them superhumanly stealthy and highly athletic, but nothing more. In the early days of Imperial anti-superhuman policy, their borderline status as superhumans allowed the ninja clans to exist without oppression–so long as they assisted the Empire in spying on, apprehending, and assassinating other superhumans. Japanese superhumans learned to despise and fear the ninja, the Empire’s hands and eyes in the shadows.

 

When the Worlds War began, Japan was given a volkfeld generator by her German allies. The volkfeld was the Axis’ final answer to the superhuman question. It generated Vril-waves that detected superhuman activity. Once identified, a superhuman’s powers could be suppressed through a barrage of mental static that prevented the superhuman from focusing, or the superhuman could be summarily destroyed in a burst of Vril energy. In certain cases where a superhuman’s powers were deemed “prosocial” and useful, the volkfeld could even enhance the superhuman with Vril. Basics that had proven themselves “worthy citizens’ were empowered by the volkfeld with Vril powers. Through the volkfeld, the Axis countries were finally able to get a handle on natural superhumans, or what they called “random parahumans.” Through “socialized hyperstasis,” superhumans and prospective superhumans would either be useful to the state or they would not be at all.

 

Overnight, the Imperial government reevaluated the ninjas and their tolerated position within society.

The ninja were no longer needed. The volkfeld did their job for them, and so they became subjected to the volkfeld. They, who had monitored and oppressed superhumans, were now subjected to the same oppression. The clans were decimated, purged of elements that the government felt were less-than-patriotic. Those that remained were encouraged to show their patriotic spirit plainly, lest the authenticity of their patriotism be questioned.

 

The ninja were all but wiped out at the conclusion of the war. On one end they killed by their own government, on the other by American superheroes. Bitter at how their country had drafted and disposed of them, many fled overseas to other countries to start afresh, including the first Bakeatama.

 

The Bakeatama of the present was not the first Bakeatama. That would be his father, who became Bakeatama when he developed a means to draw out the latent powers of his Koga bloodline. Through the use of special masks, Bakeatama could give himself the powers of his distant yokai ancestors. By donning an oni mask, he became as strong as an oni. A kappa mask granted him the ability to breathe underwater, a kitsune mask gave him the ability to cast illusions, a tengu mask allowed him to fly, and so on. He perfected the art of yokai masks, but he did pioneer it. The ninja kept more than a few secrets from the Imperial government. He never intended to use the masks. He created them to finish what other ninja slain by superheroes and the volkfeld had started, but Mainline City has ever been a city with about as many supervillians as superheroes, and so when his humble curio and antiques store was targeted by the supervillain Professor Shock, he donned his oni mask, and cleaned house. He found he quite liked being useful to the common good and getting to put his long-suppressed ninja skills to use and continued to be a superhero throughout the 1950’s and 60’s.

 

He was a master of all weapons, but especially the spear, and favored using one that projected fire which was forged by a kitsune in the 19th century.

 

His son, the current Bakeatama, inherited the legacy in the 1970’s, a time when the development of martial arts for superhuman practitioners was entering a golden age of innovation and instruction. He spread the arts of ninjutsu throughout America. He met, befriended, and sparred with the superheroine martial artist Steel Dolly. In the 1980’s, he trained several members of MARS–Military Arsenal Reduced Size, an attempt to combine traditional military organization with superhero operatives.

And in the late 90’s, a band of unlucky supervillains kicked down the door to his antiques and curio shop…

 

Specs

 

 

“This is going to be a snap! Do those jokers really think they can beat us?”

 

Specs has always been on optimist. He never called himself hired muscle, only ever a professional henchman. He never suffered a defeat, only ever a momentary setback. When the cops were after him, it was a sign that he was gaining notoriety. When his boss was put away, it meant a fresh start with another, better boss.

 

Specs, named so because of a pair of X-ray glasses he received as payment from the mysterious Mr. Gimmick, financier and gadgetool manufacturer of the BOL. His specs allowed him to see through walls and fire blasts of high-intensity X-rays (actually ultraviolet waves, but he doesn’t understand the difference). He never figured out that secure places like banks can detect when people are scanning through their walls and that he inadvertently led many of his gangs into a superhero ambush.

 

Specs isn’t smart, but he’s smart enough to know he’s not smart, and has never coveted the leadership position. He’s a henchman, and he likes being a henchman. He’s saved up several mementos from his long career, his favorite being a perkunite sword he got for being a member of the Stormcloud gang. True to their name, the weaponry of the Stormcloud gang were gimmicked to fire bolts of electricity.

 

Specs has been a regular of the Shark Pool bar for a couple of years and has helped the other regulars find “employment opportunities.” Specs is a sociable guy. He listens, he talks, he knows things, and he’s never ratted. One night at the bar, fresh from yet another failed gang, Specs suggested to his pals that they get over their string of bad luck by pulling a very simple and easy job–a smash and grab on a curio and antique shop ran by a short, old, Asian man.

 

This seemingly defenseless man turned out to be the Koga ninja master Bakeatama, who easily thrashed the gang with a broom and remarked that it was such a pity that they were going to have to go to jail. He was a teacher, and he wished to teach these young men how to turn their lives around. Back in Japan, he had successfully reformed several young criminals into honorable shadow warriors.

 

Specs, seeing his beating at the hands of Bakeatama as yet another lucky break, begged on his knees for the ninja master to take him as his pupil, and his friends quickly followed.

Specs likes working for his new “boss.” He finally has one that he doesn’t worry about ending up in jail. Bakeatama finds Specs a good student, hardworking and dedicated to learning the ninja arts, but he finds it frustrating that Specs doesn’t accept responsibility for anything that happens to him in life. He hopes to one day get Specs to recognize the consequences of his mistakes and acknowledge that his life is not a single unbroken chain of good luck. If Specs can acknowledge that some parts of his life are less than ideal, then he can learn how he had an active hand in making those parts less than ideal.

 

Patch

 

 

Patch has always been kind of slow, and he knows it. When the other neighborhood kids organized themselves into a gang and broke windows, he went along, because he thought they were his friends, and though they left him to get picked up by the police, he considered it his own fault. He was too slow getting away, too slow to figure things out.

 

Patch continued to be used as muscle and a fall guy. He was in prison, out of prison, and back in prison on numerous burglary and accessory to burglary charges. He figured it was just the way things were. He was a career criminal. That was his life, that was who he was.

 

Then he fell in with the Scrounger and his gang. But when he bumbled a break in and tripped an alarm, the Scrounger punished him by stabbing him in the eye.

He would have been arrested then and there, and it probably would have been best for Patch to be arrested, but another member of the gang, a lowlife named Specs, helped Patch to his feet and together they escaped the superheroes that arrived to investigate.

 

Specs became Patch’s best friend, his first friend.

 

Specs got Patch fixed up at an underground clinic, and told him that his new eye patch added a lot of character to his persona. Patch liked Specs. He made everything sound better than it really was.

Patch joined Specs as a regular of the Shark Pool bar where Specs mingled with underworld elements and planed his next move. The Scrounger was nothing, just a speed bump on their way to the top. They were going to go places–but the first place they were going to go to would be an antiques and curio shop. It was an easy job, and Specs wanted them to pull an easy job to build up their confidence, especially Patch’s confidence.

 

One failed burglary later, and Patch found himself a student of Bakeatama.

 

Patch liked being a student. Most people that bossed him around hurt him, but Bakeatama really cared for him, even though he trained him hard.

 

Bakeatama recognizes Patch for what he is–an old dog that’s been kicked around for far too long. To build up his confidence, Bakeatama gave Patch a magic axe from the back of his shop. The axe is an artifact from the world of Nazarth, and projects a wave of energy with each swing. The harder its swung, the more powerful the energy wave produced is.

 

Mr. Yellow

 

 

 

You’d never guess by looking at his physique and the company he keeps, but Mr. Yellow is a learned scholar. He was an archeologist specializing in the study of the lost empire of the Hyades star cluster, infamous for how it abruptly fell to ruination.

 

A healthy mind in a healthy body and all that.

 

Of all the Amicable Herculeans, he is the one that fell the hardest. All of them fell from various heights and landed in the Shark Pool bar, but he alone fell from the heights of the stars.

 

The Hyades were once united under the rule of emperor Yhtill, a powerful telepath who maintained constant mental communication with the planetary rulers of his vast domain. Yhtill was, by all accounts, a good ruler, and the planets under his rule prospered, but he was ambitious in the extreme. He wasn’t satisfied with ruling his star cluster, and wouldn’t be satisfied with anything short of the universe, but his aims were far beyond his reach. His empire was hemmed in by the Chromians, and all his power was useless against their sun-swallower armadas. In an attempt to strike back against the Chromians, he exhausted his psychic might in the construction of a thought-form, his ideal version of himself made out of oneiric energy. This super-being, this King in Yellow, would conquer the stars in his name, in his image.

 

But the King in Yellow turned against Yhtill. He saw his creator was a lesser version of himself, which he was, and held him and his aims in contempt. He thought he could do much, much better than Yhtill as ruler of the Hyades. Yhtill only wanted to rule the stars. The King in Yellow wanted to remake the stars into grander, finer things. So the King in Yellow stretched out his golden dream across the Hyades and absorbed the people of Yhtill’s empire into his mind. The star system was depopulated in an instant, but the King in Yellow left Yhtill all alone to molder in the ruins of his empire, his dream.

Chromian and Weft Authority archeologists have picked over the ruins of the Hyades ever since its depopulation, and many felt that they were well and truly cleared of anything of value. All that remained were empty palaces that cast tall shadows across quiet lakes.

But there are still mysteries in the Hyades, and sometimes they call to people, as they called to the archeologist that would become known as Mr. Yellow.

 

Promises of power whispered through his mind as he was guided by an unknown force to remove a stone and uncover a sword carved with strange signs. He thought they looked like little pinwheels.

 

Holding the sword in his hands, he understood what it was–a weapon made by the telepathic knights of Yhtill. It was able to channel the substance of the King in Yellow, and, with the right mindset, the King himself.

 

No one truly knows how they will respond to the temptation for power until it comes for them. Few would have imagined that a little archeology professor would be willing to sell out his universe to a dark god, but that is exactly what he did, though in his defense, the King in Yellow has a way of warping minds to his will. How much of his decision was his own and how much was the King in Yellow is something only he knows, and his lawyers strongly advise him not to share his knowledge.

 

Our humble archeologist became the Swordsman in Yellow, a theatrical, flamboyant supervillain. He infused his clothing with yellow energy pulled from the odic layer until he shined like the sun. He prepared to serve as a gateway for the King in Yellow, a bridge between his world and our own.

 

A team of superheroes, the Intercessors, had detected a surge of psychic activity coming from the Hyades and quickly investigated. The Swordsman in Yellow prepared to infect their minds with his king’s evil and turn them into the first of what would be a star-spanning army of slaves…but then something happened.

 

They started to laugh at him.

It was the mouthy MS, Athanor, who started it. He called him Lemonhead. And when Athanor saw that the comment made him freeze, he added some more. And then the entire team got in on the act. They called him Mr. Sunshine, Mellow Yellow, the Yellow Coward, the Sunflower Kid…

 

It was more than he could stand. He had never been mocked so thoroughly in his life.

 

His feelings of humiliation were so great that they disrupted his psychic connection with the King in Yellow.

 

The power left him, and in its place came more shame, more humiliation.

The Intercessors couldn’t determine how much of his actions were his fault, so they let him go. He was, after all, no longer a threat. They even let him keep the sword because it too was drained of power. It could glow yellow and shoot bolts of psychic energy, which compared to what it could once do, was absolutely nothing.

 

The little archeologist would meditate on the sword for days on end, trying in vain to so much as glimpse the King in Yellow again, but the King no longer wanted anything to do with him. The King was completely disgusted by him. Never had he encountered a vessel with such a weak mind. He didn’t want to drive the archeologist insane, he didn’t want to kill him, he didn’t want anything to do with him. So he left him alone. All alone.

 

He tried to make a living as a low-level supervillain, because his academic career was in shambles as “the guy that made a deal with the King in Yellow” and he was addicted to the rush of power. He kept the Knight in Yellow name and took to robbing convenience stores. The press ended up calling him Mr. Yellow, and he rolled with it. He knew they could have called him much worse. One day, the convenience store owner turned out to be an old Black Terror soldier and chased Mr. Yellow out of the store, laughing at how he really was yellow after all.

 

Mr. Yellow never tried robbing a store again. Broke, depressed, and feeling as low as when the King abandoned him, he crawled into a bottle at the Shark Pool bar and stayed there a very long time. But though his spirits were low, Mr. Yellow never stopped believing deep down that he was destined for great things, and so when Specs suggested forming a gang and knocking over a local curio and antiques shop, he thought it was finally time to step back into the game.

Mr. Yellow is now an obsequious student of Bakeatama. He wants be the best student, and believes that being the most educated places him closer to Bakeatama’s level. He constantly praises his “master.” Bakeatama may not be a space god, but compared to Mr. Yellow, he might as well be. Bakeatama believes that the first step in rehabilitating Mr. Yellow is in distancing him from the Knight in Yellow. To that end, Bakeatama has forbidden him from using his sword, or any other kind of weapon. Mr. Yellow must learn to rely on the power and skills of his own body.

 

He was the one, by the way, that named the team. He wanted to give them a name that would make them stand out.

 

Mission accomplished, in that regard.

Baldy

 

 

“Let’s see how you fight when I turn all your fancy gadgetools into sticks and stones, because trust me buddy, we fight with sticks and stones, I’m the palooka with an advantage!”

 

Baldy was a minion for the Scarecropper, a farm-themed luddite who dressed as a scarecrow and used weaponry infused with chronal energy that degraded objects into their primitive antecedents. A gun became a flintlock and then became a sling. A man became a boy and then an infant. the Scarecropper used his weapons to transform advanced farming machinery into plows and hoes, believing that farming needed to return to a romantic , labor-intensive 19th century ideal. When the Scarecropper started losing engagements with the Barn Razor and his partner (in more ways than one) HH the Heartland Heartbreaker, Baldy decided he didn’t like the gang’s chances and left–but not before taking a chronal scythe with him.

 

It was either a scythe, hoe, or pitchfork, and the scythe looked cooler.

 

Scarecropper wasn’t bitter. He was the good sort of supergang leader. He figured it was his fault that Baldy left, and didn’t hold it against him that he took the scythe, he was behind on paying the gang after all. He also figured that it could do some “good” in Baldy’s hands by reverting objects to older, better forms.

 

Baldy attempted a brief solo career in Mainline City. With a simple cloak, he became the Time Reaper, but a close call against the Red Queen made him retire. He thought for sure he had the perfect weapon to counter her nanite swarms, but she was able to fight him off regardless, and he only narrowly avoided capture. He then became a regular at the Shark Pool and participated in Spec’s robbery attempt, but when he was offered the chance to turn legit under Bakeatama’s tutelage, he initially balked and chose prison instead. He wasn’t used to being on a winning team and didn’t think he could be on a winning team, but when he saw all the regulars jumping aboard, he caved to peer pressure.

 

Baldy puts up a tough front, but deep down he’s a skittish pessimist. He likes to have his scythe do the fighting for him. Once he’s turned an opponent’s weapons to sticks, he figures he’s done his contribution to the team. Bakeatama works hard to get him to come out of his shell and fight alongside the rest.

 

Headwound

 

 

“Careful, boy. You see my scar? That’s compared to what I did to the guy that gave it to me!”

 

Headwound would like you to think that he got his headwound due to a knock-down, drag-out fight with a superhero, or through a back alley surgical procedure that put a neural booster in his head, but in truth, he got his wound from a superhero who put too much force behind his punch. He sued, won, got a lot of money, and was only in prison for five years for robbery because the judge felt bad for him. He’s actually very rich now, and could live comfortably without ever robbing another store again, but all his friends were henchmen, and he didn’t want to leave them. He’s terrified of them learning how wealthy he really is.

 

Headwound also suffers from PTSD from his wounding, something he denies. He sees confronting his PTSD as an admission of weakness, but some of his friends are pretty sure he never got over the incident. Specs knows, because he’s a people person, and gave Headwound a spare lighting sword from Specs time as a member of the Stormcloud gang because he felt sorry for him.

 

With all his money, it would be easy for Headwound to fix his face, but doing so would be to let his friends know that he has money. And besides, it makes him look tough, and Headwound knows that if he can’t be tough on the inside, then he can at least be tough on the outside.

 

Bakeatama hopes that he can help Headwound confront his weakness openly and honestly so that he may develop true strength and to that end stresses mental exercises with his training.

 

Mask

 

 

“Yeah! I love mixing it up! Let’s go! You, me, right here, right now!”

 

Mask’s mask does nothing to hide his identity. Any superhero data service like Library can bring a client Mask’s entire dossier in an instant. He wears the mask because he thinks its cool.

 

A long time ago, Mask was a promising up-and-comer in the world of superpowered combat entertainment. He played a hell billed as “The Great Train Robber” for various promotions until he was told to take a dive at the height of his popularity to give a younger talent a push. He didn’t like this, he so didn’t like this that he went way off script and broke his opponent’s arm.

 

Banned, sued, and his popularity plummeting, Mask decided to leave the the ring behind and go bad guy for real. He found the thrill of real combat with real superheroes like nothing he felt in the ring. He thought he did pretty good against the Red Queen, though he had to run away from her at the end, but then he went up against Vapor Riser of the superteam Limitless, and he was humiliated.

 

It wasn’t fun fighting someone made of air. It didn’t matter how hard he punched her. She didn’t even notice him. She would have taken him down easily if she didn’t have another, stronger, more important supervillain tot apprehend.

 

Feeling lower than he had ever been, he wandered to the Shark Pool bar and became a regular. When Specs suggested he and other regulars team up to pull an easy job on an easy target, a little curio and antique shop, Mask jumped at the idea and was introduced to the shop’s owner–and his broom.

 

Now a student ninja under Bakeatama, he delights in the opportunity to become stronger, but Bakeatama knows he’s got a great deal of darkness in his heart. Bakeatama hopes to reign in Mask by teaching him self control and gave him a weapon from the back of his shop to help in that teaching–a copy of his flame spear. When mask wields it with care, it’s a powerful and agile weapon, but if he wields it without any thought, he can burn himself.

 

(Behind The Scenes Inspiration)

 

First, props to FigureRealms for the pictures. It’s so hard to find good pictures of old bootleg toys on the Internet. Is the hobby really that obscure?

 

Moving on, I give you Amicable Herculean, a bootleg line from the late 80’s/ early 90’s (dates always have to be estimated for this kind of thing) produced by an unknown manufacturer. Seriously. FigureRealms has to list them as “unknown.” Since I love public domain stuff (though knowing my luck, some triad boss that grew up thinking these were the coolest action figures is going to put a hit out on me), I decided to put the Amicable Herculeans right into the Capeworld setting with some fleshing out and character development. They needed some, even more than other bootleg lines, as what they’re supposed to represent is rather cryptic.

 

For most bootleg lines, you more or less understand what the toy is supposed to be just from a glance. The guy that looks like Batman is probably supposed to be a superhero. You might not know whether the He-Man toy with a wolfman head is supposed to represent a good warrior or an evil warrior, but you know he’s from a Vance-meets-Howard world and wouldn’t look out of place rubbing shoulders with He-Man, Lion-O, or Thundarr. But with Amicable Herculean…well, there’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s start with the name of the line.

 

Amicable Herculean? It sounds too good to be true. It is pitch-perfect engrish. It, at once, tells you everything and nothing about the toys. Perhaps it’s the result of someone translating something like “Good Heroes” to Chinese and then back to English? In the garbling, good becomes amicable and heroes becomes herculean.

 

Though if they were meant to be called “Good Heroes,” they certainly don’t look the part.

 

For most of the Amicable Herculeans, you got guys that look like they came from the opening to the 1966 Batman show, and while the weapon they come with varies (not as in “this one has a scythe and this one a sword,” as in “the one with glasses could have any weapon or no weapon at all), they always have a turtle shell and a mask that can best be described as “TMNT after they stole the Battletoads sunglasses.” Sometimes the head is in the familiar TMNT green, but most times its blue, or red, or black.

 

As the packaging suggests, kids were expected to turn the thug-looking characters into…characters that were something like the TMNT. Like, imagine if Shredder hired some guys to impersonate the TMNT and do crimes to make people hate them

 

That’s actually the plot of one of the 80’s cartoons, by the way.

 

So at first glance, the Amicable Heruleans appear to be a knock-off of the knock-off Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang. But another theory states that the unknown company that made the Amicable Herculeans made them TMNT  characters by way of accessories in an attempt to circumvent copyright. But we’re dealing with hardcore unknown Hong Kong maker bootlegs. We’re dealing with a product from a world with no rules. Copyright is like Sora from Kingdom Hearts II, its got no power in the Underworld. If they wanted to make TMNT toys, they would have made TMNT toys. Some bootleggers did just that.

 

So why the turtle costumes? I got a personal theory that may explain some of the weirdness around Amicable Herculean. I think Amicable Herculean came about from an attempt to rip off two toy lines at once–not just TMNT, but Dick Tracy.

 

The 1990’s Dick Tracy film was a small-scale pop culture event. It was a Disney film and had considerable money behind it. Disney wanted a film like Burton’s Batman, a hyper-stylized comic book film with a bygone setting. There were action figures, of course there were action figures, and Playmates, who did the highly successful TMNT figures, were hired to make them.

 

The line was heavily influenced by TMNT, which in 1990 still had some momentum. Just a glance at the toys can tell you how much they took from TMNT–the stocky look, the big heads, and the grotesque gross-out aesthetic. A lot of people forget how heavily TMNT toys leaned into the grotesque. Just look at figures like Pizzaface for an example.

 

 

Also, something interesting about the Dick Tracy line was that there were only two good guys–Plainclothes Tracy himself and his sidekick Sam Ketchem. Everyone else was a gangster with a gross freak face.

 

Ah…street toughs with gross freak faces…and now we know why Amicable Herculean exists.

 

 

Someone in Hong Kong got ahold of the Dick Tracy toys. “Ah.” they said to themselves, “I see what the next hot thing is. Gross street thugs.”

 

Then, probably because the film underperformed at the box office (a damn shame too, it was highly entertaining. It was a pure comic book film), they hedged their bets by putting in turtle parts, so that if ugly thugs didn’t catch on (they didn’t), then they could fall back on relying on tried-and-true ninja turtles.

 

Adding to the weirdness is the wrinkle of there being turtle headed characters with bathrobes. Their packaging is slightly altered. Instead of a mohawk thug, they got angry “I just finished my shower and can’t find my coffee” Raphael. I think these characters were an attempt at course correcting after they figured out that yes, the kids want more ninja turtles instead of gross thugs.

 

A shame, really, because I got a soft spot for generic bad guy toys. I can’t help but feel for guys that exist just to lose.