The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
You know that asteroid that almost destroyed Earth in the 90s? Turns out the whole thing was secretly created by Michael Bay, who then PAID Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to look heroic while blowing it up!
You know that asteroid that almost destroyed Earth in the 90s? Turns out the whole thing was secretly created by Michael Bay, who then PAID Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to look heroic while blowing it up!
The comic features Cueball on a pier with a guitar, sharing a conspiracy theory about the origin of Gordon Lightfoot's song 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald'. This song, which was one of the most recognizable and successful of Lightfoot's career, recounts the fate of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a Great Lakes freighter which famously sank during a storm on Lake Superior, resulting in the deaths of the entire crew.
The song was written only a few months after the incident. In Cueball's version, it was Lightfoot himself who engineered the wreck, in order to provide material for lyrics to fit a tune he'd already composed. Cueball then goes on to suggest that a "young" director James Cameron engineered the much greater maritime disaster, the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, so he could create a film about it 85 years later (when Cameron was 42 years old).
This theme is carried further in the title text, which suggests that director Michael Bay created an actual asteroid in the 1990s and directed it toward the Earth, in order to provide material for his film Armageddon. However, there was no such asteroid: unlike the other examples, this film was not based on real events.
The first, third, and fourth lines of Cueball's song are identical to the 9th, 11th, and 12th lines of Lightfoot's. Cueball's second line, "It was due to set sail for Cleveland" does not match Lightfoot's 10th, "Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin", but is closer to Lightfoot's 14th line, "When they left fully loaded for Cleveland". It is possible that Randall made this change in order to tighten the otherwise fairly loose rhyming scheme of the song. After Cueball's first four lines, his song departs significantly from Lightfoot's.
In real life, the cause of the ship's sinking remains unknown, but it's speculated that the ship's hull broke up in the rough waters of a storm. Lightfoot, who wasn't involved with the ship at all, [1] devoted considerable time, effort and money to the families of the disaster's victims. In addition, while the comic presents Lightfoot as desperate for a career-making song, he was already internationally famous, with multiple hits, when the wreck occurred.
Only a day after the comic was released (March 23rd, 2024) a YouTuber recorded Randall's version of the song.