Marvel Universe

[jjreason]

Alex Ross has some odd fixation with Golden Age heroes. Get your shit together & draw me some early 80's X-men untold tales in your special painty way you weird, sour fuck.

[Rollo Tomassi]

Alex Ross has some odd fixation with Golden Age heroes. Get your shit together & draw me some early 80's X-men untold tales in your special painty way you weird, sour fuck.

Yeahhh, he doesn't even really contribute that much to these books, other than the Covers, and "co-plotting" credits. And for that he gets top billing on a $4 book. I don't know the last time he did any actual interiors. I want to say it was that 12 issue Justice maxi at DC.

[Rollo Tomassi]

I read the 3 issue Prestige book Elektra and Wolverine: The Reedemer by Greg Rucka from 2001. It's mostly prose with the occasional painting by Yoshitaka Amano every three or four pages. I'm 90% sure it's not in continuity but it was still a good read. Elektra is hired to kill a man and the assassination is witnessed by his daughter. It turns out the daughter is a genetic experiment based on Logan's healing factor and the govt dupes Logan into helping them retrieve the girl and kill the assassin. So this is the first time E. and Logan meet, which I don't know if that story has ever been told in 616. But seeing as how this happens during Logan's post Weapon X days ( he's living alone in a cabin) and Elektra makes subtle reference to getting shivved by Bullseye (she remarks on the scar on her chest) the timing is problematic for this being set in the 616.

Oh, and I read Rise of Apocalypse, 4 issue 90s dreck telling Apocalype's origin story with horrid Adam Pollina stylized art. The late 90s were a Dark Age of comics. Lot of crap came out then.

[Rollo Tomassi]

A couple of Carnage oneshots from 1996. One of them was written by Warren Ellis, but neither of them were very good.

[anarky]

Carnage: Marvel's answer to the conundrum, "Everyone likes Venom, and we want to give him his own book. But we have a policy against villains starring in books, so we have to make him a hero. How to deal with the absence of a symbiote-powered villain in the Spider-Man titles?"

Also known as "a steaming pile of shit" and "the villain who makes Stegron the Dinosaur Man look cool."

(In all seriousness, has Stegron been re-defined in the past decade or so? There's a character who's insanely dumb but, done properly, could fucking rock.)

[Rollo Tomassi]

Yeah, but who would want a "Stegron Unleashed" Video Game?
In all seriousness, I don't think writers could have very much fun with Carnage. He's like the Joker, but without any of the panache. It'd get boring writing a straight up homicidal sociopath whose entire shtick is "KillKillKillkillKillKilllll!!!!!!1!!" with no off switch.

[anarky]

Are you kidding? You wouldn't want to play a video game where the villain is a fucking Stegosaurus man?

Stegron, to me, really seems like, say, the Penguin. He's a fucking joke. But he doesn't have to be. The transformation Penguin made in the 90s, to a sort of modern-day Al Capone who not even Batman can prove to his satisfaction is overtly involved in anything warranting a superhero smackdown, was a shit-ton more interesting not only than the "fat guy with an umbrella helicopter who leads an army of trained birds," but most of the rest of Batman's Rogues Gallery.

Stegron looks fucking awesome (when drawn properly), he's tough, and he can fucking control dinosaurs. Which would be completely and totally useless if there wasn't a large portion of a continent full of them in the MU. Really, the idea I tossed out in the EIC thread (Stegron and Sauron teaming up and leading a dinosaur invasion of the human world) is so painfully obvious, I can't believe Grant Morrison hasn't stolen it yet.

Currently, he is the single biggest joke villain in Marvel. But he doesn't have to be.

[Rollo Tomassi]

I wouldn't put Stegron in the Top Ten biggest jokes in the Marvel U. Maybe not even in the top 50. That might be a fun project.

[anarky]

Stilt Man.

'Nuff said.

Want to include unfunny jokes? Squirrel Girl.

[jjreason]

I always think of Stilt-Man as the worst Silver Age hero, though there were some other stinkers in there too who never even got a 2nd appearance. How the fuck stilt man actually warranted appearing in so many titles so many times over the years astounds me. I wonder if they had inside jokes back in the 1960s.

[Rollo Tomassi]

Every time I ever saw Stilt-Man since I started reading back in the 80s, he was always the villain Spidey or DD was beating up on page one before the actual threat showed up. You never saw a multi part arc where Stilt was the main villain.
Then, during Bendis' run on DD, there was this really great issue where Stilt shows up in civvies at Matt Murdock's law firm. He's carrying a suitcase. He says to Matt "Hey. I'm Wilbur Day. This case has my StiltMan armor in it. Being a SuperVillain is ghey, so here's my suit. Do what you want with it. I'm moving to Milwaukee and opening a brewery." or something. I'm paraphrasing, but it was a great scene about the futility of heroes and villains and their cyclical lifestyle. So Stilt-Man was done. Turned over a new leaf.
Then that fuck Remender, who never reads anything or does any research about anything he's writing brought him back in Punisher without any explanation whatsoever just to kill him off. Then he went on and turned Punisher into Frankenstein because Marvel had shot down his shitty Monster Ville idea, and he just backdoored his shitty idea into the comic was assigned to write. Then the book got cancelled due to low sales. Because nobody wanted to read his shitty monster town story. Fuck you, Rick Remender. Why are you writing like five Marvel books now? God, you suck ass.

[anarky]

I thought Fraction killed off Stilt Man.

The scene you described sounds awesome, Rollo. Too bad they didn't stick with it.

I always liked Sandman as an anti-hero, for that matter. He was just a bank robber (even before they shoehorned in the bit about his daughter). He wasn't a supervillain. It was a more realistic take; the guy has some morals, but not enough to go save the day.

[Rollo Tomassi]

Eh. Fraction. Remender. One of those guys that shit on Frank last decade.

[Diabolical]

It was Fraction. Remender started really strong, but slid quickly. Fraction was never good.

[Rollo Tomassi]

Yes. My RemenderRage blinded me to who wrote what.