A member of the
Status Quo Maintenance
League of Nations.
Joining forces with Captains
Libya and
Confederate States,
they fought such dangerous and
subversive foes as Democrator,
The
Egalitarian, the
Gun Control Lobby* and their arch-nemesis,
The Guy Next Door Who Says They're Stupid And Should Just Go
And Do
Something Constructive.
Their adventures were chronicled in The Adventures
of the Status Quo Maintenance League, an independently
published comic which ran from July of 1955 in the US
and selected Spanish-speaking nations.
The comic was discontinued in 1976 due to
legislation against targetting tobacco advertisements
at children: each issue came with a free Extra-Light
Kid-Size Super-Cig, which promised that one in every
thousand would bestow super powers on the smoker, with
a small cursory warning that children should give them
to their parents, and that only very grown-up, popular
and cool people should smoke.
Until that point, though, it had a loyal following:
not amongst children, as they could tell when they were
being manipulated, but amongst junkies who had realised
that the free cigarettes were heavily laced with cocaine
and amphetamines and spent their days buying up whole
shipments of comics, extracting the narcotics from the
cigarettes, smoking what they needed to get them through
the day and selling the rest on at vastly inflated prices
to their contacts.
It could be asked how it was cost-effective for tobacco
companies to give away free cocaine with a 50ยข comic.
The answer is simply that they bought directly from the
source, applied for a permit to import for pharmaceutical
purposes, tax free, and brought bands of braindead hobos
into their factories to operate the largely automatic
manufacturing machinery in exchange for food.
The laced cigarettes were never discovered in the comic's
investigation: the publisher wished to avoid a scandal and
withdrew the comic without complaint, neatly sidestepping
lengthy and revealing probes into corporate conduct.
After The Adventures Of The Status Quo Maintenance League
was shut down, it became necessary to find another venture
to increase world knowledge of the tasty goodness of tobacco.
This came in the form of the programme, run in China and South
Africa, known as "Drag For Victory!". In the two countries,
quantity of rations and white privileges respectively were
dictated solely by consumption of tobacco, until the UN stepped
in and were forced to assassinate key personnel.
This was the beginning of a chain of events which triggered
a worldwide war over public smoking laws which annihilated half
of the world's population and resources. When the thousands of
disparate forces were exhausted, a treaty was signed in 1979 that
no person alive at the time would ever speak of the war or the
events leading to it again on pain of death. It was signed by the
entire surviving population of the earth and was afterwards
incinerated to protect those responsible.
I am only able to write this because of a loophole which states
that if the events are presented as a work of fiction, thus
diminishing the credibility of any who can claim that the
events really happened before they are silenced, the author will
not be killed but only rapped painfully on the crown of the head
with a tablespoon.
* The Gun Control Lobby was an antechamber. Accidentally
given life in an explosion of superdense boronium in
issue #0026, Right To Bear Arms, it went on to make
convincing and level-headed arguments for the safety
of all citizens before Captain Libya discovered its
only weak point (attack), and destroyed it utterly,
except for the single piece that inexplicably survived
and was taken by Doktor Pinko, later to become the source
of all his power as Pinkor, Strange Man Who Is Pink in
#0155, The Pink Awakens.