Comic Chaos

The cost of this adventure is 25 cents.

Eight-year-old David sat cross-legged on the sidewalk beside his friend Jimmy.


“What you got there?” David asked.


Jimmy held up a comic proudly. “Captain Marshmallow No. 1.”


David squinted at the cover. A superhero in a fluffy white suit was punching a villain in black licorice armor.


“How much did it cost?”


“Twenty-five cents.”


“Too much!”


“You wanna read it or not?”


Jimmy opened the comic.


Captain Marshmallow burst onto the scene at exactly the wrong moment. The bank was being robbed, the mayor was screaming, and the villain had stuck a traffic cone over the security guard’s head. Customers lay face down on the floor, too terrified to move.


“Citizens!” Captain Marshmallow cried. “Your soft and squishy protector has arrived!”


Nobody cheered. One old man sarcastically yelled, “Whoopee!”


Mostly because his cape was trapped in the door of a 1963 Checker taxi.


After wrestling himself free, he waddled into the bank, where his enemy, Baron Von Bitter, stood in black licorice armor holding the terrifying Cannon of Doom.


“The city will soon belong to me!” Baron shouted.


Captain Marshmallow gasped. “You’re the man who replaced movie theater butter with black sticky goo. You black-hearted meany.”


“I REGRET NOTHING!”


A woman trapped in the vault cried, “Help! He’s tied me up with licorice rope.”


“Monster,” Captain Marshmallow whispered.


Baron Von Bitter blasted sticky syrup across the room. Captain Marshmallow slipped on the wretched stuff, bounced off three desks, and accidentally smashed into the villain.


KABOOM!


Syrup exploded everywhere.


“You defeated me with uncontrolled flailing?!” Baron cried.


“The Fluffy Tornado,” Captain Marshmallow said proudly.


The villain escaped in a licorice-shaped helicopter, yelling, “Next time…the world will taste my BITTER, foul nature to its fullest extent!”


Jimmy closed the comic dramatically.


David blinked. “Okay… maybe twenty-five cents wasn’t too much.”