A Neat Idea Made Neater Still

In that selfsame issue of Captain America I mentioned in the previous post, there was also a Hostess Fruit Pie ad featuring the Thing versus an animated building:

I’ve always liked the idea of inanimate objects made sentient, and it becomes all the cooler with buildings, so I looked up a few images that sprang to mind when I saw that ad. John Byrne also used the concept in Superman v2 #11, when Mr. Mxyzptlk—which I pronounce “Muhxeezuhputluk” no matter what others think. I also say/think “Darkseed”, not “Darkside”, so there :p —brought the Daily Planet building to life as one of his first post-Crisis stunts:

Alan Moore ran with a similar idea in his second issue of Tom Strong, introducing the Modular Man to us, an inventor called Temple Baldry, who had created a special kind of immortality by putting his sentience into critter-like modules that replicated themselves like a virus and were able to take over scores of buildings and the like in no time. Chris Sprouse gave Moddy (I’m like Spider-Man in my desire to shorten villains’ names) a very eerie design, and I’m particularly fond of Todd Klein’s echoey font for Baldry:

Alex Ross and Jim Krueger took it one step further still in their Universe X series, very ably drawn by Dougie Braithwaite, who should really do more in comics because he’s great. He’s currently penciling the JUSTICE maxi-series, which Alex Ross then paints over—looks really sharp, even if the story is a bit slow, so far. But I don’t care with art that nice-looking. In any case, back during Universe X, they had the Absorbing Man absorbing the whole of New York City (!) turning him into this:

Best of all: the Big Apple sticks around like this, shaped like a giant Crusher Creel, with all the buildings at bizarre angles and such, making the city look incredibly surreal. I think it’s a quite original idea; it was one of my personal highlights of the entire X-trilogy and wish they had shown more of how the people adapted to living in a New York looking all odd like this.

I’m sure there’s many more examples of buildings come to life, but these are the ones I thought of straight away. I wonder if there’s a Scrooge story where the money bin either gains sentience or is attacked by another sentient building...