Plot twist!
If Supreme Leader didn’t go scorched earth, then who did? If Scandal wasn’t the target, who was? Who’s going round blowing stuff up in Villain City?
Answers will be revealed at some point in the future. Maybe. There’s an entire possibility that I just forget about this whole plot thread. It’s not like I write stuff down.
Next Chapter: Injustice
Who knows? The MATT Knows! BWAH! HA! HA! HA!
But enough of this shadowy comment. (groan)
Scandal did it.
Hmm.. My first guess would be that Supreme Leader did it and is lying his ass off in front of Luthor in order to get a list of Luthor’s fire-based troubleshooters for later reference(killing). But he’s lazy as #^@% and Luthor’s not dumb enough to parade “potential solutions to Supreme Leader” in front of the fireboss..
My vote’s for Luthor. Scandal was a wildcard. Doxing Heroes dovetails with Luthor’s past schemes (It’s sensible to drop a file or two over to Scandal as cheap removal), it’s a good intimation move against the Kickboys, and he has that pleasant habit of trying to solve as many issues as possible in one move (killing Persephone destroyed the tunnel system, and forced Team Kick to interact with Succubus (which took her off the board)).
Also, it totally makes sense to blow up a section of the city THEN show off some lookalikes while your actual experts bunker down. (and shooting Scandal then blowing up his lair removes a threat to the eventual counter-supreme-leader plan anyway)
So I’m going to sort-of echo SV and say it was Matt. Because faking that hit is how I’d remotely pressure Luthor, they’ve already established a willingness to kill (Zodiac), Scandal was a villain, and Team Kick owned Scandal’s projector a few strips back (which means they probably have his data).
Whoa! I thought SVGeezer meant Matt the author knew, not Matt the sidekick. Has Dark Matt emerged…?
Not Matt with a beard?
Showing my age there, as that was clever, in the 1980’s….
Still haven’t seen a Matt in Real Superheroines…
Aw, chat ate my deeppost
Casting a vote for Greyhawk: They’ve been cool with killing villains since Zodiac (technically Superior City since they leveraged the villain population as shock troops), and this move pressures Luthor like nothing else (he benefits heavily), and there’s a reasonable assumption that Scandal was Luthor’s piece (since they’re both competent, Luthor had cell data on the heroes via the app, and Scandal was doxing them)
As an additional point, this sifts the Kickboys down to the super-loyal and zealots, which fixes future spy problems rather nicely.
Actually, what if it was Scandal. Hear me out, Scandal uses every lead he has and exhausts every possibility. And yet he finds nothing about Supreme Leader. It’s completely possible that Scandal would be too proud to admit he’s stumped, so he opts to fake his death and start again as someone else.
He used the bribe money from Grayhawk to buy the explosives, so in a way it was Matt’s fault.
A lot of good theories here… I suppose it would suck if I later reveal it was some brand new guy that no one has heard of and had no real discernible motive, huh? Like, maybe he’s a mortal enemy of The Angler… “Your fishing mastery is useless against the explosive might of Codmageddon!”
By the way I’ve been wondering for a while. Seeing as how Supreme Leader mentioned Kickman and co being considered villains in villain city. Does that mean they’re eligible to hire minor villains or is there a bunch of red tape in the way.
Red Tape is a GREAT villain name! (Wonder if he’s ex Soviet…)
I’d say Scandal himself is definitely a possibility for being the responsible party, partially because setting up the fire/explosion seems to be something that would take quite a bit of preparation time if it was due to some normal means and he seems to be the only one who knew he’d be doing a ’emergency live broadcast’, although if someone gave him a hot tip then that person might have also suspected that Scandal would do an immediate broadcast and have had time to prepare. The most likely candidate for providing Scandal a ‘hot tip’ seems to be Luthor, if things go that route.
I don’t think they’ve pinned down the cause of the explosion yet. What if the fire/explosion was due to a flammable gas like natural gas, propane, or hydrogen? That wouldn’t leave any ‘residue’, especially for hydrogen since that just combusts with oxygen to yield water vapor and any excess hydrogen would just float off into the sky and disperse leaving no trace. Sure it would take a lot but that’s true of any physical chemical explosive. A ‘grain elevator’ type explosion involving a fine flammable dust might also fit the available evidence although it would probably leave more detectable residue than a hydrocarbon gas. Since the explosion was in an industrial and warehouse area the possibility of industrial scale chemical production or storage is reasonable, as was pointed out in Scuttlebutt 13 panel 2.
Of course with all the wild possible variations introduced by the existence of superpowers there’s also the possibility of a small meteorite (a small Tunguska event) or even things like illusion or memory modification but the city block sized scale of it makes those just as concerning as a real fire/explosion. However there hasn’t really been any hints of something like this so that would be like it being somebody completely new.
Lot of great skuttlebutt in the comments this week… Is everyone ready to lock in their FINAL answers?