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Kofi was kind of cool in early Power Pack when it was a straight-up Heinlein juvenile and he was their alien buddy. They didn't make him Snarf.Edge & Christian posted:Uh... I know Julie Power is named after Louise Simonson's daughter (Walt's stepdaughter), who would've been a teenager at the time the book was released. Then again, Marvel in the '80s did a lot of self-referential humor in that same vein. For example, Henry Peter Gyrich, especially early on, is blatantly based on Jim Shooter. Byrne was doing that to gently caress with people.
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Feb 18, 2017 03:13
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That dude looks like Archie and Cletus Kasady had an annoying son.Edge & Christian posted:I mean, Byrne hated Jim Shooter and Byrne did a whole ton of petty poo poo in his 1980s comics (including killing everyone in Pittsburgh in the New Universe because that's Shooter's home town) but... Gyrich was created *by* Jim Shooter at least in part as a rib on himself (Gyrich was a stick in the mud from Pittsburgh who imposed rules no one liked but weren't done maliciously) but he doesn't physically resemble Shooter in anyway and to my knowledge Byrne never handled the character except when he penciled a few issues of the Avengers that David Micheline wrote. I have an old Fantagraphics book, The X-Men Companion, Volume II, which contains a bunch of interviews with Claremont, Byrne, Terry Austin, and Louise Jones, done in the early '80s when New Mutants was still in the planning stages. The interview with Byrne goes into how most of his characters are visually based on somebody real. Typically it's actors, but when Gyrich showed up in Uncanny #142, Byrne based him on Shooter. Also, Kitty Pryde's mother is apparently based heavily on Mary Jo Duffy.
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Feb 18, 2017 22:50
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Zombie Dachshund posted:... where can I read this? I want to say it's in the first issue or so of the Warlock and the Infinity Watch series from the '90s. It's Big Dumb Kid Drax rather than the current Knife-Wielding Assassin Drax, however. Now that I think about it, the movie kind of splits the difference between the two.
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Feb 20, 2017 23:03
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Shageletic posted:Re the Collector design above, why does Marvel rely so much on humanoid like profiles for their alien people? Outside of newer stuff like the recent runs of the Fantastic Four and Foundation, and books like Annihilation, it seems like a serial lack of imagination. It isn't Star Trek, there should be no bounds on what they could think up. A lot of these designs are from the 1980s or earlier and are heavily influenced by "Star Trek" and '60s/'70s sci-fi. The "widescreen" comics trend is still a good 15 years out. You still get a few good non-humanoid designs now and again, like the Brood (Alien ripoffs though they are), the "Snarks" from Power Pack, or Cloud from the Defenders (who turned out to be a member of a sentient race of nebulae who just thought s/he was human for a while, IIRC), but the go-to aliens tend to be humanoids. I believe the explanation in-universe, much as it was in "Star Trek: TNG," was that the early spacefaring Kree spent a lot of time messing with Earth people's DNA.
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Feb 21, 2017 22:41
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Edge & Christian posted:All in all the Serpent Society were kind of a fun/different dynamic for supervillains in the 1980s. When Diamondback decided to quit and team up with Captain America, half the team was still pretty cool with her as an ex-co-worker, and they even agreed to run interference fighting crime so she and Cap could finally go on a date. Between them and Dwayne McDuffie's earnest attempts to make Thunderball, Sorta Anti-Hero Or At Least Criminal Who Would Just as Soon Not Beat Anyone Up, they forever ruined the traditional event We're All Bad Guys, Let's Team Up to Destroy Humanity concept. Classy '80s Thunderball was a fun villain. I remember really liking those issues of Damage Control where he and John the yuppie were buddies.
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Feb 27, 2017 02:15
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:I didn't make it that far. I think it started out with art by Ernie Colon, and it reminded me of the terrible political cartoons in the newspaper. I LOVE Kyle Baker, though! The Shadow, Justice Inc., and especially his own graphic novels: Why I Hate Saturn, Cowboy Wally Show, You Are Here, I Die At Midnight. His style has gone through a lot of changes, but those four in particular are GOOD comics. I think Baker drew his issues of Damage Control in about fifteen minutes. They're bad. The third volume in general's got really sketchy art for some reason.
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Feb 27, 2017 07:58
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Tato posted:The end of the line is really a load of poo poo. One Nation Under Doom is the high point of the line, no one seemed to have a good idea for what the follow-up should be. The original plans were to do a jump ahead to 2101 and move ahead from there, but things got confused thanks to Marvel's money issues at the time and the collapse of the comics industry. Then Tom DeFalco got removed as EIC and lots of the writers/artists quit in protest, so you get random people just trying to wrap up 40+ issue series with some sort of satisfactory conclusion. If I remember the story correctly, as part of the turnover, a very popular editor at Marvel who was in charge of the 2099 books got unceremoniously dismissed, and the 2099 creators all left in protest. It's why the last few issues of Spider-Man 2099 are by Ben Raab.
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Mar 3, 2017 11:38
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:dude seems like the chumpiest chump to ever chump. One of the oldest comics in my collection is the issue of Daredevil where he fights the Trump. The Trump's big finishing move against Daredevil was a flash grenade, so he could escape while DD was blind. Also, if I remember correctly, that book did have his origin in it: he was an ex-con who got his nickname due to winning his prison's bridge tournament.
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Mar 6, 2017 03:57
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I always appreciated Eric Masterson's ground-level approach to Thor-style craziness. It was just a shame that he was saddled with '90s Tom DeFalco dialogue.
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Mar 14, 2017 02:42
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Weird coincidence: 8-Ball shows up for a panel in today's new issue of Star-Lord, so I guess there's another one now.
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Mar 15, 2017 21:56
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Pastry of the Year posted:And for the record, I think too much is assigned to "Claremont sure has a lot of crazy fetishes" and not enough to him just tapping into the dreams and anxieties of his target audience. Yeah, he's just doing a PG-rated spin on body horror, which has been a big part of Marvel since the jump. Ben Grimm is basically a Kafka character. Claremont gets a lot of poo poo because he's probably the most visible creator of the period, but let's face it: many of the best comics in the period surrounding his heyday were all just about as weird, especially if we're also talking about indies and early Vertigo. Howard Chaykin is almost as bad as Claremont when it comes to writing a barely-concealed version of his rich inner landscape, but he doesn't have Claremont's profile.
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Mar 18, 2017 23:04
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TripleU posted:In the Gruenwald Cap run, there were some backup stories about Battle Star getting kidnapped and depowered, but eventually breaking out of Power Broker's dungeon and repowering himself to break everyone else out. But I don't think anyone remembers Battle Star. He was just in Sam's Captain America book. He showed up to wrestle D-Man at a special anniversary reunion show. I always kind of appreciated how Battle Star has consistently just been a Good Dude in everything he shows up in. I was paranoid they were going to kill him when he appeared in Marvel Zombies Supreme, but he made it through.
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Apr 9, 2017 02:23
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Lurdiak posted:Nightbatmanhawk is conspicuously absent from that lineup. Did they want to avoid confusion with the 616 Nighthawk? (aka the only OG Squadron Sinister member that ever went sort of anywhere) A lot of characters died at the end of the 12-issue miniseries, including Nighthawk, and that lineup seems to only consist of the survivors.
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Apr 10, 2017 01:43
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Cat Yronwode is a harmless hippie who hasn't been particularly relevant for, what, twenty years? I think we're past the point where she could be considered "divisive." The true-crime trading cards were in pretty bad taste, though.
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Apr 18, 2017 10:25
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ImpAtom posted:Tigra just doesn't have like... a plot. She's a masturbatory fantasy with little else to her. Say what you want about She-Hulk but between her meta elements and her lawyer stuff she has a whole shitload of things to write about that aren't Hot Green Woman but nobody has ever given Tigra the time beyond the faintest lamest attempts. It's something you can place firmly at the feet of John Byrne, which surprises no one. One of the things he started loving up, around the same time he was retconning everything about the Vision, was having Tigra regress into a catlike state, complete with her going into heat (IIRC), which subsequently ruined her utility as a character for the better part of 20 years. Tigra used to be a cop and spent a lot of time working as a private investigator under the same roof as Jessica Drew and Lindsey McCabe (and Lindsey's another character who's been in limbo for a while). She's got some pretty serious investigation chops even before you bring her powers into account. I believe that played into Avengers Academy to some extent. If you did something like stole her outfit from the Marvel Adventures line (which was a one-piece) and set her up as a superhero/bounty hunter/private eye, you could get some pretty good comics out of her. They'd sell like a case of the clap, of course, but with the right creative team, it'd be well worth reading.
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Apr 19, 2017 03:53
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Sabra was pretty awesome in the Union Jack limited series from a few years ago. I remember there was a bit of a flap a bit after that because it looked like she'd been killed off during "Ends of the Earth" in ASM, but I believe one of the writers came out and said she was okay.
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Apr 20, 2017 01:54
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Soonmot posted:That was Silver Sable. No, it was Sabra. It's in her Wikipedia entry. Crossbones shot her.
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Apr 20, 2017 02:59
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I liked the art on the book during Dr. Druid's tenure, I'll say that much. It had a sort of firm, Steve Epting clarity to it. I'd like to say I was surprised by the hatred of Dr. Druid and how it escalated over time, but then I remember there's a backup story in one of the "Atlantis Attacks" annuals where they had Wasp and She-Hulk female-gazing at all the male Avengers and rating them on a 1-10 scale and they gave Druid a flat, hate-filled "1."
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May 16, 2017 23:14
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:I never realized how strongly Engelhart tied himself to Mantis, is she an ideal to him or more who he sees himself as? Does anyone really know (or care)? There are a lot of writers from the same period who went heavy into a single character to the point where it got pretty farcical; Tony Isabella is still pretty hype on Black Lightning, Jim Starlin has his thing for Warlock and Thanos, Steve Gerber had Howard the Duck, etc. I think Englehart's only noteworthy in that his pocket character didn't really get over with the audience, either while he was there or in the period afterward. SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:What was/is Nebula like compared to the films? A ranting psychopath warlord without any real depth of character.
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May 16, 2017 23:18
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If I remember correctly, the "no killing" rule was one of Jim Shooter's editorial edicts, and for the non-X-Men part of the Marvel Universe, it survived into the Tom DeFalco era through plot momentum. It got quietly put out to pasture around the time that Quesada became editor-in-chief, although it still crops up at odd times here and there.
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May 20, 2017 03:10
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Wheat Loaf posted:I actually don't mind that Wanda costume. She's had worse. One of my hottest comic-book takes has always been that Wanda's "The Crossing"-era outfit is the best she's ever had.
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May 23, 2017 01:51
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A.o.D. posted:If my occasional strolls through the Phobos Labs are any indication, chainsaws are most definitely lab equipment. Look, it's in the UAC packet, right after the section on human sacrifice. It's just science. This is how science works.
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May 23, 2017 18:58
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If I remember correctly, Blue Shield showed up every so often in Mark Gruenwald comics, where he was the security director of Project PEGASUS, and thus was the first person knocked out whenever something terrible happened. I think I own two comics with him in them and he's tormented by his own inadequacy in both of them.
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Jul 1, 2017 22:30
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I was never 100% clear on how the original '70s Nighthawk from the Defenders managed to come back to life, or why anyone thought it needed to happen.
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Aug 27, 2017 18:44
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TenCentFang posted:Mark my words, Woodgod is gonna show up in the MCU...'s next porn parody. That's too suitable a name to pass up. I'd wonder out loud whether or not Axel Braun knows Woodgod exists, but those parodies have a lot more insider comics knowledge in them than they have any right to.
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Sep 6, 2017 22:56
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