Troublemakers, Inc.

In August 1953, six Freedom City-based super-criminals united in pursuit of greater ill-gotten gains and decreased likelihoods of jail. Despite their apparent sense of concord, the supervillain-sized egos involved made agreement on a team name difficult. In the end, Calendar Girl’s repeated suggestion “Troublemakers” won out once the other members grew tired of continually rejecting it (“Incorporated” was added at the Bee-Keeper’s insistence).
Troublemakers, Inc. lived up to the name with a series of daring robberies over the next six years. Though its getaways were usually foiled by the few costumed heroes still active at the time, the team’s incarcerations rarely lasted long. This was due in part to their collective ingenuity, but mostly to the Amazing Rando’s considerable jail-breaking skills.
The team’s last recorded exploit took place in late 1959. After that, some of the members (like the Bee-Keeper) continued on as solo supervillains, while others either returned to civilian life (like Teen-Age Caveman) or disappeared completely (like Calendar Girl). Whatever their individual fates, the members of Troublemakers, Inc. remain emblematic of a time in Freedom City’s history when larger-than-life criminals remained a threat–albeit a degraded one–opposed only by heroes who continued to do the right thing in the face of growing postwar public indifference.

Structure

The Amazing Rando

The Amazing Rando is the matchless Master of Himalayan Arcane Arts. Just ask him. He’ll tell you all about it. At great length.
Rando claims to be from a secret lost city in the Himalayas occupied by mystics similar to himself, “just not as amazing.” He persists in this assertion despite his obvious non-Asian ethnicity and Southside Freedom City accent. However, he does wear a turban, and for most people in the 1950s, that’s proof enough.
In truth, Rando really is pretty amazing, despite having been born in one of the more mundane neighborhoods in Freedom as plain ol’ Randall Schmook. Inspired by a circus performance he once saw as a kid, Schmook dedicated himself to mastering the incredible physical and mental feats displayed by the legendary fakirs of India. Through many years of traveling the subcontinent, sheer determination and dumb luck, Schmook eventually realized his lifelong goal. He then directed his astonishing new abilities towards a new end, one more indicative of his rough-and-tumble upbringing: knocking over Freedom City banks.
While alone Rando is more than a match for a typical bank guard, and there’s no brag, all fact when he boasts no jail can hold him, he’s still outclassed by the likes of The Centurion. Learning this the hard way led to his joining Troublemakers, Inc., seemingly the one villain team willing to put up with his pretentious and condescending manner. Sure, it is grating for the others to be constantly reminded just how amazing he is, but Rando keeps the team’s incarcerations short. For its members, that’s more than enough compensation.

Calendar Girl

Anna Cline was a mere child on that fateful December 7th back in 1941, completely unaware of the day’s momentous events. On that day Anna, running home ahead of her siblings, nearly collided with a strange man appearing before her out of thin air. The man quickly flew away from the scene, but not before young Anna was bathed in the strange energies released during his emergence from the time/space continuum. At the time, she was startled, but seemed otherwise unaffected.
This changed not long after her sixteenth birthday, after she made a sincere wish to find out what was going to happen on tomorrow’s episode of her favorite radio soap opera. Without warning, Anna found herself instantly thrust forward in time a whole day!
Initially frightened by it all, she soon found her curiosity overcoming her fears. Through gradual trial and error experimentation, Anna discovered because of her chance childhood encounter with Dr. Tomorrow, she had the power to control the flow of time around herself. After that, the teenager soon learned another important lesson: the squares’ rules no longer applied to her.
Her powers could be put to dire use by an evil soul, but Anna was at worst mischievous. At times she gave in to the temptation and committed some petty crime. Almost as often, she succumbed to guilt and tried to make restitution once she realized any real harm had been done by her actions. Such pangs of conscience eventually drove her to turn herself in to the authorities, but two minutes in police custody awaiting the dreaded phone call to her parents was all it took to get her to reconsider going straight.
She then leapt back a day in time, suddenly appearing before a just-arrested super-criminal, creating a distraction that allowed him to escape custody. Inspired by the super-crook’s daring and resourcefulness, she resolved to follow his example and become a supervillain in turn, dubbing herself Calendar Girl. Her time-traveling powers offered nearly unlimited potential, but as a consequence she had no clear idea what crimes to commit with them. Soon tiring of her own lack of focus, she used her powers to seek out the other few remaining active supervillains, and located the Bee-Keeper just in time to be recruited into Troublemakers, Inc.
Despite her turn to crime, Calendar Girl remains first and foremost a teenager, full of wants, uncertainties, anxieties, slang, energy and inexperience in great equal measures. Although her teammates are occasionally frustrated and annoyed by her youth and exuberance, they all remain very protective and fond of “the kid” on their team. Almost unconsciously, they’re teaching “the kid” super-villainy is fun and consequence-free, as well as providing her guidance and direction on bigger larcenies than swiping movie-star gossip magazines off the newsstand.

Doctor Zorka

Little is known about the background of Doctor Alex Zorka beyond his status as a naturalized Hungarian-American. He appears tall and frail, and in his early 70s, with a fondness for dark suits, dark cloaks, and black cigars. Most remarkably, he is a quasi-sane super-scientific genius, with a penchant for building bizarre and homely robots designed (however improbably) for world conquest.
Zorka’s reputation as an erratic criminal genius was well-known in the underworld, and in the Bee-Keeper’s estimation, it made him a perfect candidate for membership in his aborning association of crooks. Once invited, Dr. Zorka realized the value his erstwhile allies would have as stooges, bodyguards and potential test subjects. Some might even prove worthy of serving as lieutenants in the forthcoming Zorka World Order. Thus, he accepted the Bee-Keeper’s offer and joined “the coalition” (Zorka utterly refuses to use the team’s proper name) as its mad scientist in residence.
Despite himself, Zorka also became the team’s slightly irascible, slightly mad grandfather figure. He still occasionally glances at his fellow members as if he’s wondering how they’d fare as disembodied brains in a tank, and remains capable of annoyed outbursts unquotable in a 1950s comic book. Underneath it all, however, in his own crazy way, he’s come to enjoy the companionship of his fellow supervillains. To be sure, he hasn’t backed off one bit from his plans to conquer the world with ugly giant robots and exploding mechanical spider drones. Dr. Zorka’s simply learned the joys of having some people to share such a wacky triumph with.

The Smoker

Like many other men in post-WWII Freedom City, Ted Daniel got his “Greetings from the President” letter and soon after wound up wearing G.I. green. Once inducted, his fellow soldiers all seemed to take an immediate liking to the good-natured and devilishly charming Ted, just as people had his whole life. As a result, Ted was able to shmooze his way out of being shipped over to the fighting in Korea, instead finagling his way into a “special duty” assignment stateside in New Mexico.
Unfortunately for Ted, his “special duty” put him uncomfortably close to an A-bomb test, designed to gauge the effects of such a blast on nearby ground troops. While the other dogfaces worried aloud about being nuclear guinea pigs, Ted just did as he always did and wrapped his crooked smile around a chain of Chesterfield cigarettes. His nonchalance seemed vindicated, as afterwards he showed no adverse effects from the radiation exposure.
It wasn’t until after Ted had been discharged and settled into an amiable but aimless civilian life back home in Freedom that he first discovered what the long-term consequences really were. Under strain and facing down a violently irritated fellow bar patron, Ted first discovered he could avoid a punch by turning his body into a coherent cloud of smoke.
Most people would’ve been shocked or horrified by such a transformation, but Ted immediately saw its potential, embarking on a career of using his uncanny abilities to win bar bet after bar bet. He was in the process of winning yet another drunken wager when he first encountered a plain-clothed Bee-Keeper, out to drown his sorrows after his latest foiled scheme. Impressed by Daniel’s truly superhuman abilities, the two became fast friends, and between brews the Bee-Keeper first suggested to Ted he give costumed super-villainy a shot.
Trying his criminal luck as “The Smoker,” Ted quickly discovered that while his powers made intruding and escaping a cinch, they also made it nearly impossible for him to carry away any loot. He needed help, and fortunately for him, his pal the Bee-Keeper had come to the same conclusion at the same time. Having just sprung himself from jail, the Bee-Keeper made a beeline for his old drinking buddy with an invitation to form a villain team.
The Smoker became an integral part of Troublemakers, Inc. from its inception. However, despite his new criminal vocation, he remained the same easy-going guy he’d always been, and any pretension to true villainy on his part is invariably just a prelude to a joking refutation. While his teammates aspire to quick riches and world conquest, the Smoker is in it for laughs, and because his skill-set that doesn’t qualify him to do much else. Sure, robbery is illegal, but just as long as no one gets killed and it keeps the drinks and smokes coming, it’s as good a living as anything else as far as Ted’s concerned.

Teen-Age Caveman

Bobby Vaughn became a Freedom College freshman by virtue of a workstudy scholarship, and spent his free hours helping out the school’s biology department. One day, Bobby was carrying a rare coelacanth (a fish previously thought extinct for millions of years) to the campus laboratories. Unbeknownst to him, the specimen had been sterilized with radiation prior to shipment, and when Bobby accidentally cut himself on the coelacanth’s teeth, he became infected with its irradiated blood.
This infection triggered a startling transformation in the young man, causing him to revert to the form and mentality of his prehistoric ancestors. Enraged and uncomprehending in his primitive state, the new Big Monster on Campus went on a destructive rampage, nearly destroying the big Homecoming Dance in the process. However, thanks to Centurion, the Teen-Age Caveman was apprehended and restored to his former All-American boy self with no memory of what he’d done in the interim.
News of the incident made all the Freedom City dailies, but was soon forgotten by anyone not looking for recruits to his new supervillain team. Unfortunately for Bobby Vaughn, the stories prompted the Bee-Keeper to procure his own rare irradiated coelacanth and arrange for the young man to come into close contact with it. Improbable as it was, it was an occurrence that repeated itself throughout the 1950s, whenever the Bee-Keeper needed muscle for Troublemakers, Inc.’s next big score.
Normally mild-mannered, patriotic, school-spirited and prone to saying “Gosh!” a lot, Bobby reverts to an easily angered, easily confused brute when in his Teen-Age Caveman form. While the junior Neanderthal’s natural inclination is to flee from noise and strife and go in search of wild game, the Bee-Keeper is ever-ready to fool him once again into becoming his criminal pawn.
Even when he’s too furious and/or stupid to follow orders otherwise, his schoolboy Neanderthal crush on Calendar Girl still prevails. Teen-Age Caveman always does whatever she asks of him, and he remains fiercely dedicated to her happiness and well-being.

1953 - 1959

Type

Illicit, Gang

Leader

The Bee-Keeper