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Man, I always think I read "most" of Gruenwald's Quasar and then I remember it ran for sixty issues and if you look up pretty much literally any alternate universe or comic being from pre-1990 there's a weird footnote on the wiki about what they did in Quasar. From Wundarr to the New Universe to Buried Alien to the Young Gods.
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Feb 10, 2017 23:51
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Man, I know people use "problematic" a lot, but Sharon Ventura was a PROBLEMATIC character. She was introduced as a pro wrestler who engaged in lots of really dangerous physically demanding activities because her mom died in childbirth and her dad was a military jerk who hated her for being WEAK and KILLING HER MOTHER and denying him the chance to have A SON, THE ONLY WAY FOR A MAN TO HAVE A LEGACY. So she hated her dad but wanted to prove SHE WAS JUST AS GOOD AS A MAN. Then she got super powers through *THE POWER BROKER* aka Mike Carlin's weird steroid allegory. Except also the Power Broker's goons [did whatever the CCA/Shooter would allow in terms of heavily implied rape] so now she still hated her dad but also hated all men and she was going to prove she was BETTER THAN MEN, BECAUSE MEN ARE MONSTERS AND PIGS AND NO MAN WILL EVER TOUCH HER AGAIN. During this she struck up a friendship with fellow pro wrestler Ben Grimm, who clearly had a crush on her but she only hung around him because while she hated ALL MEN he was just a lumpy rock monster, not a MAN, so she could feel really comfortable around him.    So then she joined the Fantastic Four, but only because Ben was the leader and not THAT MAN Reed Richards, and then on their first mission she got hit by cosmic rays and mutated into a Thing. Upon turning into a Thing, she immediately snapped and turned suicidal.   Because, she laments to the Thing, what man would ever want her if she's some hideous rock monster? A quick Fall of the Mutants crossover cheers her up, because as bad as she's got it, at least she isn't a mutant, and a few issues later she finally decides it's okay to hook up with the Thing now that they're both rock monsters. She stuck around on the FF and dated the Thing for awhile, until Doctor Doom slid up in her DMs and was all "hey I can make you a pretty lady again instead of a rock monster, but you have to spy on the FF for me" and she accepted the plan, but when Doom told her to KILL the FF, she reneged on the deal and thought everything would be cool. It was not cool, and Ben broke up with her, she was very sad, then Doom like turbo-reversed his thing so she turned into an even worse looking monster and tried to kill the FF for real and got put in jail, where she has been almost completely, politely, ignored for the past two decades.
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Feb 11, 2017 21:19
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Yeah, there is not a huge amount of effort being taken to ensure consistency in Sharon Ventura backstory. Her last real storyline was in Tom DeFalco's FF run where she was super monster-y and working for the Frightful Four, in which she nearly beats Sue to death before escaping with the rest of the evil team. (1994) Then she doesn't get mentioned for several years, until she appears in a few pages of Claremont's run attacking Wyatt Wingfoot's tribe. Wyatt talks her down and she surrenders, and I guess maybe they let her stay with Wyatt because _________ rather than putting her in jail. (2000) She next turned up (I think in human form, but i forget) in Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's Marvel Knights 4, still chilling with Wyatt Wingfoot. Sue calls her up to invite her to a Ladies' Night. (2005) Then Dan Slott had her appear on one of the 50 States Team in the Initiative (as a traditional looking She-Thing) but she is shot and killed by the Skrull Kill Krew almost immediately, because whoops! She had been replaced by a Skrull at some point. The next issue she's shown getting recovered from a Skrull ship, but then never really mentioned again. (2008) And then yes, she turns up as like an evil prison warden or something in James Robinson's F4 story arc, made that no one had come checking up on her in prison, even though by all rights she was actually in some combination of chilling with Wyatt Wingfoot, working for the Initiative, or being kidnapped by Skrulls. No idea how she actually got put in jail, unless like she was abducted by Skrulls in prison offscreen circa 1995 and then when she came back SHIELD went "oh no, we paroled a Skrull, not you, get on back to jail." (2014) FInally, she showed up again as a normal looking human lady wrestling at Madison Square Garden in that goofy rear end wrestling issue of Captain America: Sam Wilson a few months ago. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Feb 11, 2017 |
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Feb 11, 2017 22:52
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Speaking of Gruenwald's Quasar being a repository of cosmic/other-universe weirdos... I remember Quagmire from Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme maxiseries which serves as a weird contemporary/mirror to Watchmen, but I didn't remember him looking quite so spiky and bondage-y. Turns out he didn't!  It's kind of confusing in that practically everyone in Squadron Supreme is a clear pastiche of various DC characters (kind of like Angor/Extremists at DC, coming soon again in JLA!) but none of these folks in the INSTITUTE OF EVIL particularly map to anything at DC that I can tell. He's also linked the ~THE DARKFORCE DIMENSION~ which everyone seemed to try to make A Big Thing in the 1980s, but I don't think has been referenced anywhere at all outside of I guess Mister Negative, obliquely?
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Feb 13, 2017 03:05
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:darkstar was a russian mutant who had access to it, but i think she is dead again. Jeph Loeb brought her back in Red Hulk because he did not give a poo poo about any sort of status quo for the Winter Guard so an assistant editor literally added in some dialogue about how this was a new Darkstar who was surgically altered to look like the original Darkstar and colored her hair red. Then original Darkstar came back in the Necrosha crossover but re-died at the end. Then the redheaded one got killed in a one-shot about the Winter Guard. Then a THIRD Darkstar was introduced, but she got killed and replaced by a Dire Wraith in a "Darkstar & the Winter Guard" mini-series a year or two later. Then the original Darkstar I guess like came back as a ghost and possessed the Dire Wraith and became Darkstar again. *Then* Doctor Octopus when he was trying to kill 99% of the planet so he'd be remembered as History's Greatest Monster ("WORSE THAN HITLER! That's what people will say when they mention me!") teleported all of the Winter Guard into deep outer space, where it was suggested that Darkstar and everyone else died. But then they showed up fighting monsters in Monsters Unleashed so I guess they got back from space?
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Feb 13, 2017 03:43
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Don't worry, Captain Ultra got a suitably gritty revamp for the 21st Century. I seem to remember a lot of people speculating that he was THE CAPTAIN in Nextwave but that obviously was not the case. BUT he was part of Wonder Man's REVENGERS team in the late unlamented garbage time section of Bendis's Avengers run. Now he's clearly on a list of "background bad guys to put in a prison scene" because he's done so in both Pleasant Hill and Civil War II: Choosing Sides.
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Feb 13, 2017 23:26
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That was kind of a fun/"fun" thing about the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe Master Edition (the looseleaf one, 1990-1993) versus OHTMU (1983-1985) or OHTMU Deluxe Edition (1985-1988). The first two were pitched/organized/edited by Mark Gruenwald and a gang of other people who came up through fanzines and put a lot of thought and effort into them, writing entries like they were biographies of real people from an encyclopedia inside the Marvel Universe. They also were writing/editing a lot of books at the time, so that sort of mentality carried over so when a character was introduced they'd generally have things figured out, both on a character level and how they fit into the greater MU. By 1990 when OHTMUME launched we were in the throes of just letting the Image Founders kind of write whatever they felt like and draw whatever they felt like, so you get entries like that Cable one, where the editors are kind of going "so uhhhhhhh what has actually been established about this character? He's... strong? His eye is probably cybernetic? He knows Wolverine, somehow?" As for how goddamn goofy Cable looks as a yeoman-style action figure design, that's another interesting difference between the two. I think at least *part* of the theory behind the Master Edition was that it would actually serve as an in-house style guide for how costumes/characters are meant to look in an era of highly stylized artists. Having Keith Pollard crank out like 600 of these identikits is probably a lot more functional towards that end than the original Marvel Universe handbooks, which pulled together a pretty insane list of people to contribute more "portrait" full body shots of all of the characters. Over the course of all of the issues from 1983-1989, they got: 1. Then-popular artists to contribute (John Byrne, Frank Miller, Michael Golden, George Perez, Walt Simonson, Johns Romita, Jim Starlin, Dave Cockrum, Howard Chaykin, BWS) 2. Older artists who had more or less broken ties with Marvel (Kirby, Ditko, Steranko, Trimpe, Murphy Anderson) 3. Up and comers/unknowns (Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Mike Mignola, Bill Sienkiewicz, David Mazzuchelli, Kyle Baker, Kevin Maguire, Art Adams, Evan Dorkin, Erik Larsen) 4. Even artists who rarely if ever worked/would work for Marvel (Dave Gibbons, Curt Swan, Brian Bolland, Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubert, Stan Drake, Jose-Luis Garcia-Lopez, Wayne Boring) Which was a lot cooler than the Keith Pollard profiles but maybe less useful as an actual reference.
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Feb 15, 2017 23:39
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Uh... Power Pack was actually pretty darn popular for the first few years it was coming out? I always thought it was weird that the Powers's dad was clearly drawn to resemble Walt Simonson but the mom didn't not look like Louise, but Mom Power always had strawberry blonde/blonde hair: Dad Power:  Walt: (several years after PP launched, he used to have more hair)  Mom Power:  Louise (and a younger Chris Claremont):  Other than that, I dunno. I know Kofi was a late addition to the Simonson/Brigman run of the book, and I haven't read any of it in so long... I wonder if TPTB decided it was too creepy for a bunch of little kids running around in secret with an adult Horseman Alien, and decided it would be better if they snuck off to hang out with a kid Horseman alien? Also most of the Horseman Aliens died in Infinity, but at least their Horseman Inhumans got to appear in HIckman's FF first.
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Feb 17, 2017 22:07
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Endless Mike posted:Today, Kofi is one of the world-famous, two-time world tag team champions New Day.
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Feb 17, 2017 22:48
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Wanderer posted: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. Byrne definitely drew Jim Shooter as a villain in the Legends mini-series and had him more or less kill himself via bungling a fight with Guy Gardner as he insisted he was powerful and smart though. Also because a lot of old guard Marvel people (not all of whom hated Shooter, contrary to popular belief) there's sort of a throughline (which has been acknowledged somewhere, though I can't find it at the moment) that whenever anyone sort of pushed the throttle on "Henry Peter Gyrich, evil monster bureaucrat" someone would try to pull back and do a soft "Henry Peter Gyrich, well-meaning patriotic but grating bureaucrat" throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Of course by the 21st century there was a total enough turnover that they seem to have gone whole hog with "Henry Peter Gyrich, Nazi collaborator, Sentinel Extermination Booster, Brainwashed Killing Machine Creator."
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Feb 18, 2017 04:10
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Wanderer posted: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. Looking at this panel someone posted online I don't really see the resemblance:   But it makes a lot more sense in Uncanny X-Men #142, just a few months after Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter screwed up their Dark Phoenix plans, to throw some shade at Shooter, as opposed to in Avengers when Shooter wasn't yet EIC and was *writing* Avengers platooning Byrne and Perez as two artists getting their first "big title" break. Then again, I am more confused than before about who designed Gyrich initially because everything seems to say it was Shooter/Perez but Byrne appears to have drawn the character the first time he appears unnamed? Also I apparently *wrote about this exact thing five years ago*. Anyway, he actually looks kind of more like Shooter/Frankenstein in that first appearance than he does circa UXM142, but maybe Terry Austin softened it up. As for Manslaughter, I don't remember anything specifically about him, but I picked up two of his only appearances out of quarter bins as a kid, almost solely on the basis of sweet covers:   Also because I liked FINAL ISSUES because they seemed really important back in the 1980s. Partially because this book somehow ran 152 issues! What sort of epic wrap-up must that warrant? Also Jim Shooter had a real love for closing up any loose ends and sealing up the toy box so the last issue of the Defenders features the death of almost the entire team. And what legends they were! Valkyrie! (who to be fair was also in my dad's old Defenders comics from the 1970s) Moondragon! (ditto, but also she was already back from the dead like three years later when I bought this comic) Andromeda! Gargoyle! The Interloper! And Manslaughter! The character who had only joined the team the issue before! Apparently Manslaughter came back from the dead after this profile, to appear in a single issue of the 1990s CAGE mini-series in a montage of assassins.
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Feb 18, 2017 23:31
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Incredibly (or maybe not) there have been (at least) THREE Razorfists. The first one got accidentally got shot and killed by his crimeboss in his first story arc, but then later Doctor Doom (yes, Doctor Doom) build a pair of robotic Razorfist duplicates to fight Shang-Chi. Then the same crimeboss had two twin brothers in his employ who each lost *one* hand in a car accident, so he made them both Razorfists, but accidentally shot and killed one of the twin brothers pretty much in the same manner he killed the first Razorfist. The surviving half of the second pair of Razorfists has appeared a lot more than I ever thought, and has been apparently murdered at least twice (by Wolverine and Elektra) but always comes back with no real explanation. He only had one razor arm (inconsistently, and sometimes he could take off his one razor arm and put a regular cyborg arm on) up until about ten years ago when Colleen Wing cut off his remaining flesh arm. I noticed that the OHOTMUME appearance list covers the inconsistent use of one vs. two razor arms and at least one of his apparent deaths. I have no idea how much if any of this is retconning, which also speaks to people talking about the 'created by' thing. It doesn't really matter that much for a mook like Razorfist, but (for instance) it's always weird when people pull out who created Starlord, who: 1) First appeared in a single Steve Englehart/Steve Gan short story where he was supposed to be a normal Earth guy who evolved more and more powers rotating through the signs of the Planets/Zodiac until he became a fully cosmic aware Godlike being. 2) Then appeared in a series of Heinlein inspired space adventure stories by Claremont/Byrne 3) Then was revamped again as a sort of Christ figure in a two issue Moench/Sutton story 4) Then did not appear between 1981 and 2004, when Keith Giffen dredged him up to be a burn-out hardbitten jailbird in Thanos/Annihilation 5) Then his entire personality is more or less recalibrated and he's deaged and given largely an entirely new backstory to fit into the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman So like technically, Steve Englehart and Steve Gan created the character of Starlord, even though he doesn't retain the personality, appearance, backstory, or really anything from that first story. There are lots of smaller examples of characters appearing in backgrounds or as unnamed people in shadows who then later are revealed (often by completely different creative teams) to be characters that go on to a good deal of success. It's not an excuse not to credit creators, but to use movies as an example, Keith Giffen (who actually DID draw the first appearance of Rocket Raccoon, which bears very little on the movie character) almost certainly contributed more to the content of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie than did (say) Steve Englehart, who technically created Starlord, or Arnold Drake who created the title Guardians of the Galaxy even though it was for a single story in 1969 which featured no one from the movie except Yondu, who was an orange skinned noble savage from the 30th century who was technically in the continuity of HG Wells's War of the Worlds.
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Feb 21, 2017 23:03
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Warstar had a toy in the X-Men cartoon line in the 1990s that I won at a bar trivia night recently because I was able to identify that he was in fact Warstar. He/they are still alive, they showed up in a group shot of Mighty Thor in the past month or so. I want to know who got all cheeky and named them Beany and Cecil. Probably Claremont?
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Feb 22, 2017 20:41
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Warstar had only appeared twice in Claremont X-Men (and once in a Mantlo-penned ROM annual) prior to showing up in the OHOTMUDE in 1986, which I seem to recall having the B'Nee and C'cil names, so it's either him, Mantlo or Gruenwald adding weird details into a bio I guess.
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Feb 22, 2017 22:00
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I always wanted the Death Throws (a team of juggling based supervillains!) to have a team of pro yo-yo'ers as their archenemies.
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Feb 24, 2017 23:53
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The Serpent Society's whole gimmick (as initially set up in Gruenwald's Cap) was that they were like, the original Franchise Supervillains For Hire. The original leader Sidewinder was like a midlevel executive for Roxxon who caught wind that there were criminal enterprises being undertaken and when they were looking to contract out people to fight Iron Man he was all 'I got this', hired a couple of snake-themed dudes, used shady Roxxon stuff to give other people powers (and imposed snake-themed codenames/costumes on all of them) and formed THE SERPENT SQUAD. The next time they showed up Sidewinder was in the middle of rebranding them as the Serpent Society and was going around giving sales pitches to people about how they'd get health benefits and collective bargaining agreements and really disrupt the supervillain for hire game. This was smack in the middle of the SCOURGE storyline where someone was murdering supervillains left and right, and also an early and important part of Gruenwald's like, ur-pitch for Captain America, that it was the 1980s and he has to stop fighting Nazis. So instead of everything being Hydra this and Unfrozen Nazi that, the Serpent Society were supposed to be like Modern Military Industrial Complex super villainy, which dovetailed directly into the whole "Captain America No More" / John Walker / The Captain / Red Skull abandons the principals of Nazism and takes extreme capitalism as his new avenue to power that ran through the first 5-6 years of GruCap. There was even a longrunning subplot where there were various internal disputes in the Serpent Society leading to Viper (good ol' fashioned Hydra LET'S DO SOME CRIME BECAUSE I HATE HUMANITY Viper) staged a hostile takeover and her first big plan as CEO was to poison the DC water supply so that everyone (including Ronald Reagan) get turned into mindless kill-crazy snakepeople. Surprisingly, a number of people in the Serpent Society decide this is a bad idea and end up helping 'the good guys' reverse this plan. 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. All of this said, I don't remember a single loving thing about Fer-de-Lance.
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Feb 27, 2017 00:16
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Keith Pollard was just taking his cues from the Def Comedy Jams of his day, in which it was posited that white folks don't have any asses.
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Feb 27, 2017 01:36
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Thunderball's run under McDuffie (aka pretty much the only time his characterization is anything other than "one of the Wrecker's minions, you know, the black one") was pretty much exclusively in Damage Control, I thought it was also in some Acts of Vengeance tie-ins, but that was just his rehab of Chemistro, and his first work with the Mad Thinker that he later revisited in his Civil War mop-up issues. The comics in question I was thinking of were half of Avengers Spotlight (nee Solo Avengers) # 26-29, and Iron Man #251-2. Also Gruenwald's Cap definitely gets creaky at points but from his run from Cap #307 (introducing Madcap, as seen in the current Deadpool run!) at least through Streets of Poison is some really good of-its-era superhero stuff that dissects a lot of tropes and concepts of the Marvel Universe/superhero comics. Get much past issue #400 (Gruenwald wrote the book for like a decade) and you start hitting CapWolf and Steve wearing 90s Armor but I keep meaning to re-read the first half+ of that run, and this thread has added Quasar to my list of things I want to revisit from Gruenwald, who is responsible for an insane amount of stuff we kind of take for granted in terms of comic book worldbuilding, from the Marvel Universe handbook itself to a lot of formalized concepts/jargon about 'multiverses'/'canon'/etc. based on his fanzine writings in the 1970s. Also Damage Control is loving awesome, it was literally the first thing that I bought as a kid that made me start deliberately following writers and while the art can be off-putting (especially the Kyle Baker issues when he was in one of his 'let's try a new art style' phases) it's another really fun/clever explorations of how to tell different types of stories inside a superhero shell that along with Gruenwald's stuff is like the secret foundation of modern comics nearly as much as the Miller/Moore axis. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 05:17
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Everyone who followed Steve Gerber on Defenders seemed dead-set on making the book the "weird" team book counterpoint to [Avengers/FF/whatever], and JMD's tact seemed to rely heavily on demonic/occult stuff. One of his first stories was Hellcat getting possessed by a demon from THE SIX FINGERED HAND which led to a meet-cute with Son of Satan and their eventual marriage. He also largely set up a whole cosmology where there really was a SATAN who was the supreme evil being, and Mephisto and Satannish and Thog and all of the Satan-lites from previous Marvel books were like, his lieutenants. Schemes between different factions of demons ran through like his entire run, and over the next few years the team fought Dracula (who was also possessed by/combating demons), satanic rock star Asmodeus Jones, Ghost Rider (who at the time was literally a rebellious agent of Satan pre-Zarathos stuff), and as like the final Big Really Bad Demonic Thing That Had Taken Over the Squadron Supreme Universe, NULL THE LIVING DARKNESS, who hasn't been seen since outside of handbooks and that Marvel Adventures book. I feel like Paul Tobin and some of the other writers for those book picked out some of the characters by flipping through a handbook and daring each other to work in Null or some other obscurity. I had only read bits and pieces of this Defenders run, but in addition to leaning heavily on the satanic/demonic stuff, it also pushed way more Christianity-themed counterpoints into the Marvel Universe than anyone had outside of the occasional Christ Figure business with Adam Warlock or Wundarr. The team got stocked with Devil-Slayer (a guy raised in a Satanic cult who found God and now Slays Devils), Gargoyle (Isaac Christians, native to Christianboro, who tried to make a deal with the devil AVARRISH to get his town out of a recession, but got stuck in a Gargoyle body but also realizes the power of Godliness through his mistakes and turns against the demons and joins the Defenders. There was even Cloud, who certainly initially seemed like some sort of omnipotent androgyne cherub who decided to join the team but then got retconned into like a Cosmic Cube taking the form of two dead teenage siblings or whatever? Pretty sure the "Cloud is not an angel" thing came long after JMD took off. The old FF villain Miracle Man shows up as an amnesiac priest who is performing miracles for Jesus but it turns out he's hurt by Son of Satan's powers and because he's a bad guy he renounces God/his native powers to try to steal Satanic powers before realizing that Jesus Saves. I don't know what any of this means, but Null was created in no small part because the writer had already burned through and beaten almost literally every Demon/Satan big bad guy in the Marvel Universe by then.
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Feb 28, 2017 18:41
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I mean, JMD grew up in Brooklyn playing in rock bands and writing for fanzines, and in his largely-autobiographical Brooklyn Dreams graphic novel the main character has an Italian dad and a Jewish mother and was raised Catholic-adjacent. His parents' background is true, who knows how much of the rest of the narrative is poetic license, but if I had to guess there weren't a ton of Quakers playing in garage bands in 1970s Brooklyn?
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Feb 28, 2017 21:28
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I may be overstating things, it's not like Defenders could pass for a Jack Chick or Spire comic or anything, but between his run on Defenders, some of his Spider-Man stories, and his recent work on Phantom Stranger, he's definitely more willing than most to play with Christian iconography in comics. It's probably not just Christian iconography either, pretty much all of his creator-owned work (Moonshadow, Greenberg the Vampire, Seekers: Into the Mystery, Brooklyn Dreams, Mercy) are a lot about people trying to find meaning and faith and redemption and etc. etc. in strange worlds that mishmash a lot of different faiths/belief systems together as 'real'. I haven't read most of these books in years (or at all) and I am basing this on equally hazily remembered interviews from the 1980s and 1990s. Regardless, I thought it was interesting how chock-a-block his Defenders run is on it, I agree it's much less obvious in some of his better known runs (though to be fair a lot of those involve him co-plotting and/or just scripting over Keith Giffen, who based solely on his public persona and writing history I would guess is far less interested in spiritual matters. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Feb 28, 2017 |
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Feb 28, 2017 21:54
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Man, I've read countless issues of Avengers books with lovely Zodiac storylines and all I can ever remember from them is that under the mask, the original Taurus looks just like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.   
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Feb 28, 2017 23:50
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One thing you can probably never take away from Eric Masterson: he's got a pretty solid AC/DC walk-up theme for those annual Avengers softball games. He's also not the Masterson with sexual assault allegations against him. vvvvvv oh poo poo, may have spoken too soon. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Mar 14, 2017 |
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Mar 14, 2017 03:34
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Bird-Man II was one of the bar full of D-list supervillains (and Turner D. Century) gunned down by Scourge in an issue of GruCap I just re-read. His murder apparently doesn't even warrant a mention in "significant issues" for the two Bird-Men, apparently. Possibly because literally the entire career of Bird-Man II (and the Ani-Men II) Daredevil #157: Burst through a window on the last page Daredevil #158: Ani-Men kidnap Matt Murdock for Death-Stalker. Bird-Man tries to fly away, but Black Widow rips his wings off and punches him out. Ape-Man and Cat-Man deliver Murdock to Death-Stalker, are handed some money, then are immediately murdered by Death-Stalker. Captain American #319: Bird-Man appears in a crowd scene, is promptly gunned down by Scourge. Captain America #320: Bird-Man's corpse is discovered in a big ol' pile by Captain America. Then he got resurrected in Remender's Punisher run, but did nothing of note other than appear in some group fights. I guess he's hypothetically still alive? Punisher explicitly re-kills about half of the gang, and Bird-Man doesn't appear in the back half of the storyline, so either he died or ran away off-panel.
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Mar 15, 2017 04:04
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Ahem, that's Frog-Man II, who they EXPLICITLY TELL YOU NOT TO CONFUSE WITH FROG-MAN I. THEY ASKED YOU POLITELY BUT FIRMLY RIGHT IN THE MASTER EDITION.
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Mar 15, 2017 22:26
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Lurdiak posted:Frog-man 2 is also pretty obviously biting Leap-Frog's gimmick more than anything to do with the original Frog-man.
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Mar 16, 2017 03:49
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Rirse posted:Didn't Frog Man II get horribly maimed in the Thunderbolts series with Osborn in control? Frog-Man (II) and Spider-Kid were briefly a team-up in 1980s Spider-Man comics, as a couple of nerdy goofs that wanted to show up Spider-Man. In Thunderbolts Spider-Kid was now Steel Spider, a hard-drinking rebel fighting the SHRA. He got a scene of being a cool badass who could hold his own with some of the Thunderbolts, then Venom ate most of him.
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Mar 16, 2017 04:15
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Claremont did the storyline where Karma was possessed by the Shadow King and while he controlled her she got really fat. Then he did that from Excalibur. Though really this ranks extremely low both in terms of frequency/depth of recurring fetish-y/body horror/whatever things that crop up in Claremont's X-Canon. Like barely a footnote.
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Mar 18, 2017 22:32
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It's kind of great what a huge percentage of these characters X-0 is pulling up have the throughline of: 1) Were the pet character of some writer in the 1970s or early 1980s 2) Everyone completely forgets about them 3) They appear in the first version of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe 4) A couple more years pass and Mark Gruenwald goes "ehh, might as well use this person in one of my comics"
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Mar 24, 2017 16:46
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I'm working my way through Gruenwald's Captain America primarily because of this thread, and while it doesn't make a ton of sense in the comic either, Power Broker's exoskeleton in the comic was a lot more like... I guess the power loader thing in Aliens? The "hands" were not mapped directly to his big beefy hands, but sort of an extended robotic hand past his that allowed him to work machines and pick things up. His big beefy legs couldn't walk, he just had little rocket boots. I don't know how he moved his arms though. And yeah, the weird set-up of Power Broker's Power Giving was basically: Some people would get super powers and some people would get turned into monsters (as seen on the cover of this issue I bought as a very little kid)  Unbeknownst to all of the successful powered-people, the "failed" power-ups just got dumped into the sewer. All of the people who got powers were told they had to take a special pill from the Power Broker to keep their powers stable, let they turn into rampaging brutes, because this whole thing was set up to be a weird allegory for steroids in professional wrestling initially. Later in GruCap it's revealed that actually you can have Power Broker powers forever just fine, the pill was some sort of... I don't know what, but it was just a drug entirely unrelated to the powers that he made everyone take so they'd have heroin-withdrawal style freak-outs if they didn't come back to get it from him on the regular, but this allowed all of the people powered-up by him (which was like half the supporting cast of GruCap at that point) keep being superheroes after they take him down. Then there was a follow-up story where a bunch of the Z-listers with Power Broker powers got kidnapped to be used as depowering-guinea pigs to "get it right" when Power Broker gets depowered. Most of them turned into misshapen (but mentally intact) jelly blobs and poo poo, but then USAgent bursts in, makes PB/Malus turn them all back into normal humans off-panel, then smashes the machine to poo poo before Power Broker can cure himself. Because USAgent was kind of an rear end in a top hat even after he stopped being insane.
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Apr 8, 2017 21:22
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Fun fact, I don't think Jim Starlin ever wrote the character of Starhawk, or Guardians of the Galaxy. But I don't remember Starhawk's hosed up history enough to know if all of this was part of Steve Gerber's early run, something weird Jim Valentino cooked up as a retcon, or something some other weirdo the used them in between. Definitely not Starlin though. Also TripleU come on, Lurdiak and I explicitly mention Battlestar (ex-BUCkies, Bold Urban Commandos) in the posts directly above yours, I even specifically mention the story you cited.
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Apr 9, 2017 04:35
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TripleU posted:I ain't got my glasses on but I ain't see it -- just mentions of Left-Winger and Right-Winger. My bad! Loving this thread, regardless.
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Apr 10, 2017 03:29
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That's his cousin G.O.D.O.T. - Genital Organism Designed Only for Thrilling
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Apr 10, 2017 22:37
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Reminder that Matt Fraction introduced MODOGS in his Iron Man run, only to make them just super evil MODOK clones (designed only for GENOCIDE)
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Apr 10, 2017 22:41
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Shadowhawk was such a weird series of comics, and I do kind of get the impression Valentino was at least half-parodying the trends of the day. His even potentially "straight faced" superhero work is limited almost entirely to Guardians of the Galaxy and Shadowhawk, and both of those are questionable. He's a dude that broke into comics 30+ years ago by pitching "normalman" parody strips in the back of Cerebus, has spent the majority of his time outside of those two properties working either in autobiographic/roman a clef comics or things that are straight up silly (Normalman, Samurai Penguin, Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Sabrina the Teenage Witch(?)) From the bits and pieces of Shadowhawk I remember, it very very quickly went from "A GUY BREAKS BACKS AND HAS AIDS" to "breaking people's back is really lovely" to "what if there was a Silver Age Shadowhawk?" to "what if like, there are Shadowhawks throughout the millenia?" to "uh I dunno, what if a new Shadowhawk fights corporate crime? Can you break a corporation's back? Also who wants to write this, not me!"
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Apr 11, 2017 20:58
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THIS ONE was/is literally the only person who was an Avengers from 1963-2000 or whatever that I can't defend as actually an interesting/potentially interesting character. In addition to a weird rewriting of history where secretly every successful film/TV show/anything is basically created by him, Steve Englehart's project-by-project history of how for SOME REASON editors kept complaining when he tried to turn the Avengers, Defenders, Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, JUSTICE LEAGUE, etc. books into Mantis-starring projects is pretty entertaining.
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May 12, 2017 18:06
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Remember when Doctor Druid was like the one chauvinist character who tut tutted and complained about Monica Rambeau (or later She-Hulk) being in charge of the Avengers because he was RIGHT THERE with all of his experience and maleness to do the job? Remember then how he got seduced by Nebula and destroyed the team and got lost in the timestream? Say what you will about Doctor Druid, but he was at least an interesting character with whom they really leaned into "unlikeable jerk" and paid off the story within a year or so.
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May 16, 2017 18:31
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Steve Englehart was only 25 when he started writing the Avengers and was definitely in the "young dudes take drugs and read Herman Hesse and watch a bunch of Kung Fu movies" axis of guys from mid-1970s Marvel. Mantis was his first original character, and Englehart was clearly a dude into the whole Continutiy of the Marvel Universe (his early work also brought Patsy Walker over from being in an old teen comic, continued Roy Thomas's trend of reintroducing Golden Age heroes in the modern Marvel Universe, he did the first crossover between the old Western characters and modern heroes) so it's kind of understandable on some level why he'd be so attached to his first "real" contribution to the MARVEL UNIVERSE he so admired. It's just a shame he didn't have a better first idea? Here's an interview from two weeks ago with an older and wiser Steve Englehart about Mantis: quote:Well, she is my first creation. Maybe not the absolute first but the first sort of major one and maybe the first for all I know.. I mean the deal was I was writing The Avengers and I thought they needed to be shaken up and I had this idea of bringing in a sort of femme fatale character who would seduce all the male Avengers and cause dissension and so forth, and that was Mantis. Also "Doctor Druid is kind of an rear end in a top hat" was at the very least subtext for a decent part of Stern's run (he was introduced in the last year or so and didn't do all that much before Stern quit/was fired off of the book) and Walt Simonson made it text. It's been awhile since I re-read Stern's Avengers run but in retrospect he wielded a well-meaning but incredibly heavy hand in terms of having literally every Good Guy (Cap, Thor, Silver Surfer, Jarvis, random police officers and firefighters, grandpas, kindly old bankers) say something every drat issue regarding Wasp/She-Hulk/Monica Rambeau to the effect of "That's a strong and attractive woman -- no, a STRONG PERSON. She's every bit as heroic and capable as me!" There's an issue where a cabbie wolf-whistles at She-Hulk and then tells her she shouldn't wear those shorts if she doesn't want to get whistled at and She-Hulk smashes the front of his cab and Cap and Thor sort of stand to the side going "that's on you for being a pig, man" There's a weird bit of dialogue where some old white government agent dude basically narrates an entire interaction with Monica along the lines of "I thought I'd miss working with Captain America but Captain Marvel is just as strong and thoughtful as him! She gives me hope for the younger generation! If I were forty years younger, I'd want to marry her!" So when Doctor Druid shows up and is immediately "so uh, why are we letting Wasp be the leader again? Some dippy broad with wings? Oh, she's stepping down? Fantastic, I'll be happy to take over and -- CAPTAIN MARVEL? HER? REALLY?" it's pretty clear authorial marking that he's a dick.
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May 17, 2017 00:17
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I mean, Monica because Avengers chairperson in Avengers 279 (written by Stern) and stays chairperson for the whole of Stern's run. Steve Rogers leaves the team in Avengers 284, and Stern leaves partway through issue 287. Ralph Macchio fills in as the writer from 287-290, and 290 has a plot assist from Mark Gruenwald where he is literally whisked into the scene by a Cosmic Cube and he beats some newfangled Super Adaptoid because it cannot adapt TO HIS SPIRIT AND COURAGE. The story set up by Stern (with a bunch of different AI characters) is abruptly resolved with that, and Simonson picks up with issue 291, where Steve Rogers is gone without any mention and Monica is still the chairperson. In Walt Simonson's short run Doctor Druid (being manipulated by Nebula) manipulates the team into voting for him to replace an injured Captain Marvel (who tried something or other to stop Marrina/LEVIATHAN from destroying the East Coast and was left a withered, nearly dead husk as a result) as the new chairman, but by that point the team was down to Black Knight, She-Hulk, Thor, and Doctor Druid. Within three issues the entire team disbands after Black Knight goes into a BLOOD CURSE coma and She-Hulk and Thor realize what Druid is up to, so it certainly isn't portrayed as Druid (or anyone else) being "better" than her. I know that Marvel Age ran a story about how Roger Stern wanted to bring back Luke Cage (who hadn't appeared for a few years and ended Power Man/Iron FIst framed for the murder of Iron Fist) and hinted at resurrecting Iron Fist and having them both join the Avengers (back in 1988) but he left the book before that happened. I had assumed for years that this was the conflict that got him fired off of the book, but the most directly I've seen Stern address the issue is this quote from an old interview: quote:I’d disagreed with one editorial suggestion about the Avengers line-up. My editor wanted a change that I thought distasteful, and I sent him a memo to that effect. I would have liked to have discussed the matter further, but I was never given a chance. Instead, I received a message that I was fired. That certainly *could* be something like what you described, as it would have been distasteful as heck. He confirms over here that the "distasteful" changes involved Monica Rambeau, so you're probably right. In the back of Avengers 288, Mark Gruenwald says this about the departure: quote:Sometimes mid-April, I had Roger fly into New York for a conference to map out the next year's Avengers storyline and coordinate them with our two component books Captain America and Thor. In an afternoon long session attended by the various concerned writers and editors we worked out what I thought would be an interesting, innovative direction. It seemed like all participants agreed. [b]However, when Roger got back home and began to work out the specific details of the scenario, he reported that he couldn't come up with any way to make the scenario work without doing injustices to some of the characters involved. The bottom line was that he didn't want to proceed with the story line we all discussed ... Something had to give. I informed Roger that I wanted to proceed with the agreed-upon story line and thus, would hire another writer who could get behind the scenario and do it justice. I'm not really sure what that storyline was (I guess the Walt Simonson death-and-rebirth of the Avengers??) but it sounds like it went through so many revisions from pitch meeting to print that it wasn't nearly the character assassination of Monica Rambeau as it might have originally been.
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May 17, 2017 01:30
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The Island stuff was later, the basic lineage of Avengers (which was also the first book I started collecting as a little kid, Seldom Posts!) was that Roger Stern took it over from Jim Shooter way back with issue 227 in late 1982. Over time he got sick of having his stuff derailed by whatever was going on in [Cap/Thor/Iron Man/whatever] and so he really leaned into having most of the team be b-listers without their own titles. This was when there was a whole lot of focus on Wasp, Captain Marvel, Black Knight, Hercules, Namor, Vision, Scarlet Witch, etc. Then came the whole "bring back Cap and Thor and show how they're the Real Best Avengers" edict and Stern quit after five years of actually pretty great superhero comics. Then Walt Simonson came in with the edict of dissolving the old team and bringing Cap and Thor back in, and I guess he was given Reed and Sue as a concession because they weren't being used in Englehart's Fantastic Four and Simonson had some FF-inspired cosmic ideas he wanted to do. But Simonson still wasn't having any fun with the book, and left like one issue into the new lineup. Lucky for Walt, Steve Englehart was in the middle of fighting with the FF office because they didn't want him to let Mantis take over the book, and soon after told him that they wanted him to bring back Reed and Sue, who he hated. By this point after some fill-ins John Byrne had taken over writing the Avengers, and he had no interest in using Reed and Sue because he was still bitter over whatever slights he perceived in the editors not letting him do his Doomwar story or whatever, so he'd quit FF a few years back which led to Englehart taking it over. All of this cleared the way for Walt Simonson's run on Fantastic Four, which was great, so whatever. Then after sixty consecutive issues of Stern/Milgrom/Buscema Avengers, then an abortive year-long Simonson/Buscema run, here's the writers lineup for Avengers #301-360 301-303: Macchio/Gruenwald 304: Danny Fingeroth 305-318: John Byrne 319-324: Fabian Nicieza 325: Mark Gruenwald 326-333: Larry Hama 334-339: Bob Harras 340: Scott Lobdell 341-342: Fabian Niceza 343-352: Bob Harras 353-355: Len Kaminski 356-360: Bob Harras Somehow (I was a child) I put up with all of this poo poo and kept buying the book. EDIT: Forgot why I actually posted. I was wrong, the Island stuff was at the verrrrry end of Stern's run, then the Island sank in Acts of Vengeance (during the Byrne run) and then someone or other put them back in the mansion after that. Though I could have sworn one of those lovely short runs in the 320s-330s took place on HYDROBASE
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May 17, 2017 18:50
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