Today’s recipe is a summery treat that I’m sure the great and wise Tony Stark once enjoyed many sunsets with. May I present to you…

SoCo and Lime

Get a highball glass. If you don’t have one, then take the old-fashioned glass you made your White Russian in the other day and wash it out. Drop a few cubes of ice in it, then add 1 part Southern comfort and 1 part lime juice. Feel free to garnish with a slice of lime. Don’t forget to watch a sunset off of the balcony of your Malibu home.

Hello? Anybody there?

*cricket noises*

Hey guys! Sorry about the huge delay, but the pictures of our latest gathering were stolen by King S’gakt of the Underpeople and taken back to his lair at the center of Mars. While Captain Dangerous is off retrieving them I’ll be posting daily recipes for drinks that can help even the least Starktastic among us drink like Iron Man himself. Some will be my own creations, other (like today’s) will be tasty drinks that already exist.

Today’s drink is a favorite of The Dude, burnout from the 1998 classic The Big Lebowski, played by none other than Iron Man villain Jeff Bridges.

White Russian

Fill glass with ice. Put in a shot of vodka, and a shot of Kahlua. Fill the rest of the glass with milk or cream. Enjoy!

This month’s Aquaman contest has been “won” by none other than The Handler. Now, I say “won” because in a contest to be the lamest superhero in history, nobody really wins. Also, The Handler gets it by default because he rules over more water than any of the rest of us (he has a pool), and is practically a dolphin (he was on swim team). The reason for such a lack of posts is because being Aquaman is really super extra double boring, such that nobody wanted to hang out in a pool for this reason.

ANYWAY.

Onto the fun of August! This month’s hero competition is…

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN. YEAH.

Yes, this is a picture of Iron Man with HIMSELF in the background… KICKING CAPTAIN AMERICA’S ASS. He’s that awesome.

So, this month we will be drinking heavily and making suit of armor (aka cardboard boxes with arm holes) out of scraps (aka crap we bought at Home Depot) in Afghani/Vietnamese caves (aka my back yard).

Good luck to the rest of our team and happy viewing to our readers!

Ok, so this weekend’s Aquaman training was a little more low-key than normal - as opposed to being Loki, which we’re saving for when we train to be Super Villains. Hah! I crack myself up.

Sorry. Anyway, our big plan was to go to the beach and see who was most comfortable in the actual ocean. Strangely enough, convincing our super team to go to the beach and have fun proved to be the hardest task thus far in the challenge. “Hey, you wanna wake up at 8am for a month and run three miles every day?” “Sure!” “Want to go to a beach and lay on the sand and just generally take a day off?” “No way, man!” Go figure. Anyway, so that plan was scrapped.

Instead, several of us went to the mall, which may not seem very Aquaman related until you realize that MALLS WERE INVENTED IN ATLANTIS! …maybe. Well, they might have been. Ok, but you can’t prove to me that they *weren’t invented in Atlantis. Plus I *really* needed some pants. And, if you will recall, Aquaman’s favorite (and only) item of clothing was pants! See, it makes sense, it really does.

However, in order to justify our training further we also purchased a game called Endless Ocean for the Wii. As soon as we got back to our Secret Super Base, we popped the game into our Secret Super Wii and grabbed ourselves so Secret Super Refreshments in order to truly enjoy the virtual Aquaman experience. Endless Ocean, for those who haven’t heard of it, is a game that simulates scuba diving and includes things like swimming, riding around on boats, and making friends with fish. Sounds to me like a perfect simulation of Aquaman!

So after about 20 minutes of trying to decide on a name for our diver (we ended up going with Arthur Curry) we launched into the game with excitement. The next 20 minutes were spent trying to get past the dialogue that somehow managed to be more boring that talking to an actual marine biologist to the part where we get in the water. Then finally the moment came - we got our first diving order! Yay! Now we just have to get in the water.

To someone listening in on our Super Secret base using powerful and tiny microphones, the rest of the evening probably sounded something like this.

Wait, you mean the ladder on the side of the boat doesn’t let you get in the water? Nor does the diving platform at the back of the boat. You mean you can walk around the entire boat without getting any hint about how to actually get IN THE WATER? ISN’T THAT THE POINT OF THIS GAME? HOW DO YOU GET IN THE (explative deleted) WATER?

Oh… there’s a menu button.

Ok, now I’m in the water. Hey look, there’s a fish! Let me try to be friends with it. (Waving the Wii-mote) Oh, look, it likes me! Hooray!

Oh, you can’t get any actual information about it until you get it to “Level 2″ of liking you? (Sounds like my love life) Ok, well, I just have to keep shaking this Wii-mote and eventually it’ll get to level two.

*Shake Shake*

*Shake Shake*

(From kitchen) Captain, you want another marguerita?

Sure!

*Shake Shake*

*Shake Shake*

(From kitchen) What are you doing?

I’m trying to get this fish to like me.

(From kitchen) By giving it a (extremely suggestive statement which, if you have ever used a Wii-mote and have a somewhat dirty mind, you can probably guess)?

Well, that’s how I make friends!

Ok, the point of all that was this: I spent about an hour playign this game, most of that time being spent on a) talking to fictional people who are less interesting than the real people I know, who are none to interesting themselves, and b) performing a lewd gesture to a fish that STILL didn’t like me enough to tell me more than it’s name. (Ok, now it really sounds like my love life.) The most interesting part of the game was when I figured out there is button you can press to sit on a lawn chair and “look at the ocean”. I’m pretty sure that playign a video game that simulates sitting in a chair looking at an ocean is as close to comatose as you can get while still conscious.

But then it struck me - this is a PERFECT recreation of how boring Aquaman’s life must be! I mean, think about it, if you were a super hero with the powers to breathe underwater and make friends with fish, diving wouldn’t be any fun at all! There’s no danger of drowning, and you can hear all those idiot fish yammering on about kelp or whatever it is fish talk about. Cell phone charges, maybe. Who knows? It’d be boring as dirt. And yet, your powers are only useful underwater! It’s a dichotomy of existential proportions!

The point of all this is that, without realizing it, we all gained a deeper understanding of the anguish it is to be Aquaman, possibly the lamest super hero ever. And so I ask you, the readers, to give Aquaman a break. He’s kind of a jerk sometimes, but if you lived on nothing but seaweed, were king of an underwater city of douchebags, and looked like the lead singer of Nickelback, tell me you wouldn’t be a little cranky. Walk a mile in another man’s flippers before you call him a pansy.

Hey, folks! I just set up a store for all your GS! apparel needs, so check out the link on the sidebar, or click here and get to shoppin’!

First of all, I would like to thank you, the fans, for making it possible for me to pretend to be Captain America. Well, I mean, I could have pretended without you, but they would have probably put me in some kind of institution where the primary rule is to try not to drool on the other patrons. Anyway, the point is, I’m not crazy.

No, wait, the point is that I won the Captain America Challenge! And to the victor go the spoils! The spoils, in this case, were the opportunity to buy myself a shield and then spend two hours after work tonight trying to remember how to work my photo editing software. I mean, how can it be so hard to draw a freaking rectangle? Computer age my ass.

But the end result of all this work is that I got to recreate some of my favorite Captain America panels. Now, since we are constantly toeing the boundary between legality and having to sell our organs on the black market to pay Marvel their copyright infringement settlement, I can’t post the original panels here. However, I can post links to these panels, in case you don’t recognize out flawless recreations. Anyway, without further ado - the prize for Captain America month, won by yours truly!

And this next one, a Collision Course piece that he was making at the same time! Oh, the coincidence!

This first one is a recreation of the… well, the first one. The first issue of Captain America, still probably his most memorable cover, in which he punches Hitler. Jon was the only person willing to play Hitler in this picture, and only if we drew a moustache on him. We pointed out it wouldn’t show up in the picture, but apparently that wasn’t the point… we didn’t ask. Anyway, thanks to Jon for being my Hitler and Jeff for being Bucky. For comparison, the original panel can be found here:

Cover of Captain America #1

Here you can see we are recreating *SPOILER ALERT* the death of Captain America. Ok, I realize that is only a spoiler for those of you who haven’t read a comic or heard anything about comics in the past 6 months, but c’mon - my Mom reads this blog, and I don’t even think she knows what a comic is. Anyway, I didn’t want to futz with this one too much, because it’s a dramatic moment in the history of comics. I think Pat captured the feeling of Random Black Dude (he was a major character, right?) in his brilliant facial expression. As you can see, I am busy channeling the spirit of a boated carp in my portrayal of the hero himself. For comparison, check this out:

Death of Captain America

We probably should have waited to do this one until we had done Thor, Iron Man, Wasp and whoever the heck that other guy is, but we didn’t. For those of you who didn’t instantly recognize the flawless recreation here, this is the cover of the first issue of The Ultimates, showing that Captain America is a true leader. The fact that none of the other characters on this cover appear in the issue is just further proof that cover artists are awesome and completely out of touch with reality. Like David Bowie. Anyway, compare here:

Ultimates Issue 1 Cover

That’s all I got for today.

Yesterday was our first official training session for Aquaman month! It was pretty much awesome. Check out this amazing shot! (Click on the pic to check out the whole album!)

There are also some awesome videos (yeah, for real realz) which I would show you here, but this stupid website won’t let me embed things.  Blah.  So GO WATCH THE VIDEOS!