Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Turnabout Is Foul Play


Can YOU


Name This Marvel Villain??



When Jalome Beacher developed a chemical coating that was totally frictionless, he did what anyone would do who was fired by an unscrupulous new boss, turned down for a bank loan to start his own business, and found himself desperate for money: treat a speed skater's costume with his slippery coating and begin a life of crime as Slyde. Slyde is obviously an ends-justify-the-means guy--yet it didn't take him long to find that pulling bank heists appealed to him. And law enforcement was hard-pressed to stop him, or even (heh heh) lay a glove on him:



Nor did they have much luck with hot pursuits, probably because these officers never went to the Starsky & Hutch hot pursuit classes:



(No, I don't know how Slyde overheard their conversation inside that car, either. You and I couldn't do that even if its driver wasn't gunning the engine and those sirens weren't blaring.)

But let's see how much luck Spider-Man has with this guy:



Not much.


Slyde later comes into possession of evidence that his former boss is actually laundering money for the mob, so he attempts to blackmail him. You may have guessed that a slippery coating isn't going to do squat to stop bullets, so Slyde is walking sliding into an ambush and doesn't suspect a thing. But Spider-Man does, getting the word on the street about what's going down, and shows up to help the guy out--at least until his life is no longer in danger, and they can settle the score between them. But it turns out that Slyde arranged to work with the D.A. to nab the mob boss, so Spider-Man is about to give him a pass; yet in the end, Slyde decides that all the green in the blackmail money is too tempting to let go, and he slides off with it before anyone can stop him.

Slyde pops up a few more times in other stories, even becoming one of the Masters of Evil if you can believe it.  But criminal fame proved too slippery for him to ever get a grip on.

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