Jab’s Builds! (Miss Piggy! The Swedish Chef! Sweetums! Gonzo!)

Where in all of your character write ups will go.
MacynSnow
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Re: Giganta (Modern)

Post by MacynSnow »

Jabroniville wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 3:36 am Image
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-You'd think being one of the few Giantesses in comics would have made Giganta a bigger starm, but I guess the Macrophile fetish community just hadn't coalesced at that point yet. She was rarely used in any Wonder Woman stuff I've read and hasn't mattered a lot, and is mostly known for jokes in side-comics or from her adorable Justice League Unlimited appearances, where she's equal parts girly and used for every bit of Fanservice they can muster for such a thing.

-In the Silver Age, her origin was revamped in 1966 to feature Doctor Psycho hypnotizing Giganta, a gorilla in a zoo, to fall in love with Steve Trevor. After Wonder Woman defeats Giganta, Professor Zool finds her and uses an "Evolution Ray" turning her into a huge blonde woman, who again goes after Steve. However, Challenge of the Super-Friends made the character a red-haired giantess, and so the character is soon shifted once more. She is now Dr. Doris Zeul, a brilliant woman dying of a rare blood disease. She tries to put her "life essence" into Wonder Woman's body, but Wonder Girl (Donna Troy) interrupts the experiment and Zeul's mind ends up in a test animal named Giganta instead. Desperate, Giganta-Gorilla kidnaps a comatose circus strongwoman named Olga who just happens to have size-changing abilities, and transfers her mind into THAT body, keeping the name "Giganta".

-So after all that... the character just kinda isn't important, I think, as bios contain little of her adventures. She tries to take over Skartaris with Villainy Inc. but is stopped by Wonder Woman. Then we skip all this time and end up in the "One Year Later" era where she teams up with Dr. Psycho & Cheetah to beat up Donna Troy and demand "The REAL Wonder Woman"- she is ultimately beaten by Hercules, recruited to help. She reappears in the Ryan Choi Atom feature as a teacher at Ivy Town University, and she is mind-controlled by a monstrous god into trying to seduce and capture him- she is ultimately freed from control and appears trying to reform. She actually DATES Ryan, but when she finds out he was convinced by WW to wear a wire, she freaks out and attacks her. Then Ryan is abruptly killed because DC was pulling all sorts of Mulligans at that point, and she's a bad guy again.

-She appears in Salvation Run and other stories allied with other villains, then gets hired by Bane for Secret Six. When she finds out that her teammate Dwarfstar was responsible for murdering Ryan (whom she didn't even know was dead at that point), she decides to torture him to death. This is her last appearance before the reboot and "New 52".

-This is a pretty hilariously minor bio for someone who I figured would be a semi-major villain, but for the most part she's just kind of a one-off goober powerhouse who is handily defeated. Though her whole "Started life as an ape" thing probably made her more of a joke back in the day. It wasn't until the modern era, with jokes about Giantess fetishes and the like, where she's gotten a new lease on life. Her appearances in JLU and the famous comic panels "HE NEEDS OUR HELP WITH HIS SEXY FIGHT!" (when a guy's teenage ally goes agog at Giganta's enormous size) have helped matters... but also kinda just made her silly again, but self-referentially this time.

-Giganta... is tricky to stat. Like most Giant-Sized characters in comics, you have to mess around a bit to leave them even remotely playable. But she's kind of a Jobber... but only to WONDER WOMAN, who is like PL 14, so she ends up highly powerful and very durable as well. +16 Toughness is fairly high, even for the DC Universe.
here's my take on Giganta & the whole Dr.Poison/PL misfire:
GIGANTA= unfortunately our good Dr.Zeul suffers from a problem all Size-changing characters have: how do you tell a story with them as a focus if all they do is grow/shrink? As much as people here rag on him, Hank Pym's(Giant-man/Ant-man early years) stories showed that the power(while intresting from a mechanics point of view) was fairly useless in ACTUAL combat situations. In NORMAL Marvel/DC, that is. In the Movie universes, however, where we have a more solid grounding in hard science, it can be rather powerful. Take Civil War, for example. Horrible Marvel comics storyline that almost closed the company, but an increadably well-done Movie. Ant-man was in both version's, but which one is he most remembered in?

DR.POISON= we have an intresting villian concept here that's always been wasted imho: the Villian who creates Villians/Heroes. Honestly think she'd a much better villian for somebody else other than Diana. As for the Power scale issue she and her colleagues(Dr.Malus,Arim Zola and Prof.Smythe) create; that's unfortunately just an inherent flaw in the MnM system as a whole. In order to change it, a GM would have to practically re-wire the entire creation set-up to eliminate it.

BETTER IN A TEAM? = i learned this while running D&D games: the party as a whole is going to be stronger than the individual members (despite levels). A team of PL 10 heroes are going to be able to deal with any ONE thing from PL 10-12 in two,three turns MAX in straight combat. Individually, said heroes would more than likely win by turn Ten. "Why the difference?", i hear you asking. It's a very simple awnser and harkens back to my D&D comment earlier. Each Hero/Heroine add's not just perspective, but power to a team when it's formed. In the above example, a group of PL 10 heroes would actually be(depending on number of members) closer to 12, thereby more able to easily handle a single, more powerful threat together than individually.

As an example, let's look a good 'ol Peter Parker the Amazing Spiderman. Individually, he's beaten every single member of the Sinister Six(with various degrees of success) who were at least one PL higher than him at each encounter(the exception being Doc Ock, who was two & kicked him around the first time). Let's put Pete at PL10 for this, so most of his first Six Villians(save Ock) are PL 11 and easily handled by Spidey. When they get together to form the Six, however, they almost beat him to death(save that first time, when they tried to do it solo and STILL lost). He has to often resort to getting his own crew together to stop 'em. The Six form a Pl 12-14 "Villian" that Peter(a lowly PL 10 solo) can't beat on his own. So, putting together a temp hero crew of Six people, he get's up to just there PL and manages to win.

I rest my case, your Jabbyness...
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (Fury! The Amazons! Dr. Poison! Giganta!)

Post by Jack of Spades »

Queen Clea's realm is the proper place to put all the "evil Amazon" stuff. She's a straight-up misandristic tyrant who enslaved the men of Venturia, and then when she meets Steve Trevor decides to get herself some of those American men because they'd make better slaves. I'd make Venturia an offshoot of the Amazons rather than Atlanteans, to put her squarely in Wonder Woman's territory. Venturia should probably be in a pocket dimension like Paradise Island to minimize her impact on history before Diana's mission starts bringing the two realms in contact with Earth more often.
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Davies
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (Fury! The Amazons! Dr. Poison! Giganta!)

Post by Davies »

Batgirl III (I think) suggested that the Amazons and the Atlanteans might be related, and there are a few versions of the Atlantis myth which would support that. (And one account of the Amazons, which I stole for my own purposes, has their origins in Western Africa, nearer to the Atlantic than Greece.)
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (Fury! The Amazons! Dr. Poison! Giganta!)

Post by Woodclaw »

Davies wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 4:32 pm Batgirl III (I think) suggested that the Amazons and the Atlanteans might be related, and there are a few versions of the Atlantis myth which would support that. (And one account of the Amazons, which I stole for my own purposes, has their origins in Western Africa, nearer to the Atlantic than Greece.)
In Flashpoint the story went that Amazon and Atlanteans had common ancestors and the marriage of Arthur and Diana was an attempt to reunite these two peoples... then everything went to crap.
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Jabroniville
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The Mask

Post by Jabroniville »

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THE MASK (Nina Close)
Created By:
William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter
First Appearance: Wonder Woman #24 (July 1947)
Role: Forgotten Villain, Abused Wife Turned Murderer
Group Affiliations: None
PL 7 (100)
STRENGTH
2 STAMINA 3 AGILITY 4
FIGHTING 10 DEXTERITY 4
INTELLIGENCE 2 AWARENESS 3 PRESENCE 3

Skills:
Athletics 6 (+8)
Acrobatics 4 (+8)
Deception 5 (+8)
Expertise (Science) 4 (+6)
Insight 2 (+5)
Intimidation 2 (+5)
Investigation 3 (+6)
Perception 4 (+7)
Persuasion 2 (+5)
Vehicles 6 (+10)

Advantages:
Equipment (Lab Gear?), Evasion, Fast Grab, Move-By Action, Ranged Attack 2

Offense:
Unarmed +10 (+2 Damage, DC 17)
Initiative +4

Defenses:
Dodge +10 (DC 20), Parry +10 (DC 20), Toughness +3, Fortitude +5, Will +4

Complications:
Involuntary Transformation (Nina Close)- The Mask is actually a weak-willed woman in her normal life, actually suffering a dramatic loss in stats if she reverts to that personality. Nina Close is only ST -1, STA 0, AGI 0, FIGHTING 0, DEX 0, INT 0, AWA 0, PRE -1.

Total: Abilities: 66 / Skills: 38--19 / Advantages: 6 / Powers: 0 / Defenses: 9 (100)

-Now here's one I've NEVER heard of before. One of the final characters created by Marston before he died, The Mask was a "tormented woman who developed a split personality" and would kill people by rigging S&M masks full of hydrocyanic gas over their heads. Yeah, that's a Marston character alright. She was the frail "mousy" wife of a millionaire industrialist who was trapped in one of those masks, and then many Holliday Girls are trapped in the same! She even swipes the Invisible Plane! It's not till the end of the story that Diana learns that this tough, vivacious woman is actually the demure housewife she saw earlier- a split personality had developed owing to the domineering of Nina Close's husband. The Mask reappears during the Silver Age when the Demons Three make a magical duplicate of her and other villains to trick the Justice League- Close is said to be still institutionalized at the time. The character makes a Post-Crisis Appearance in a Wonder Woman Annual as a masked, gunwielding villain. She is described as an abused wife who murdered her husband and now uses his fortune to empower similarly-victimized women.

-Humorously, DC has about nine billion villains also called The Mask. And the name is unlikely to be used any longer, as Dark Horses's The Mask became iconic thanks to the movie starring Jim Carrey.

-The Mask is a typical masked Golden Age villain- no physical match for the superhero she fights, but a capable, crafty villain who specializes in escapes and creating mysteries for the hero to solve. Once they're actually in combat, there's no contest.
Last edited by Jabroniville on Sat Aug 27, 2022 4:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
scc
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (Fury! The Amazons! Dr. Poison! Giganta!)

Post by scc »

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Not enough pictures of Giganta. And time for Jab's favorite question. What? No attractive? ;)
MacynSnow
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Re: The Mask

Post by MacynSnow »

Jabroniville wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 11:31 pm Image
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THE MASK (Nina Close)
Created By:
William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter
First Appearance: Wonder Woman #24 (July 1947)
Role: Forgotten Villain, Abused Wife Turned Murderer
Group Affiliations: None
PL 7 (100)
Now Good Sir, i beg to differ! She'd be a Perfect Villian for a Pl 8-9 Hero/Heroine to fight. Marston(like his colleges at the time) was stuck thinking in a more 'Pulpy' manner when it came to Villian's. While true, she'd have NO chance against anybody above PL 9(she's got too little defense & has no awnser's for any actual Superpowers), she'd be near-perfect as either a 'Redemable' Villaness or a possible Love-intrest to the Hero/Heroine (ala Black Cat) or just keep her as she is just move her down a Weight class or two(Wonder Woman to Troy to Wonder Girl).
Jabroniville
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Eviless

Post by Jabroniville »

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EVILESS
Created By:
William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter
First Appearance: Wonder Woman #10 (Fall 1944)
Role: Saturnian Slave-Driver
Group Affiliations: Saturn, Villainy Inc.

-Eviless, sporting one of the most "Golden Age" names EVER, is a now-forgotten character from the Golden Age. She debuts as a Saturnian slaver who fights Wonder Woman. She reappears recruiting a ton of WW enemies from Transformation Island (the Amazons' prisoner rehabilitation center) into "Villainy Inc.", who are ultimately beaten by Diana and recaptured. This was actually the last story written by Marston himself before he died- the embodiment of "emotionally misaligned people". She was retconned out Post-Crisis and replaced as the leader of Villainy Inc. by Queen Clea- I guess "Eviless" was just too much for John Byrne to deal with. She doesn't show up again until "DC Rebirth", now called Saturna and wielding necromantic powers.

-Eviless is just an evil chick with a whip, and no match for Wonder Woman. A good manipulator, I guess, but leads through intimidation.
Last edited by Jabroniville on Sat Aug 27, 2022 4:53 am, edited 2 times in total.
Jabroniville
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (Fury! The Amazons! Dr. Poison! Giganta!)

Post by Jabroniville »

scc wrote: Thu Jan 07, 2021 12:45 am Image

Not enough pictures of Giganta.
Comic vine is shamefully lacking in pics. DC fans are the worst. Yet another failure on DC’s part to make bigger stars of its characters :).
And time for Jab's favorite question. What? No attractive? ;)
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (Fury! The Amazons! Dr. Poison! Giganta!)

Post by greycrusader »

Whoa, people being bound by ropes and chains, oversized women dominating and enslaving men, a whole island of women in leather armor, whip-wielding villains...I almost think there was some sort of subtext in the Golden Age Wonder Woman stories.
Jabroniville
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Re: Giganta (Modern)

Post by Jabroniville »

MacynSnow wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 2:37 pm
here's my take on Giganta & the whole Dr.Poison/PL misfire:
GIGANTA= unfortunately our good Dr.Zeul suffers from a problem all Size-changing characters have: how do you tell a story with them as a focus if all they do is grow/shrink? As much as people here rag on him, Hank Pym's(Giant-man/Ant-man early years) stories showed that the power(while intresting from a mechanics point of view) was fairly useless in ACTUAL combat situations. In NORMAL Marvel/DC, that is. In the Movie universes, however, where we have a more solid grounding in hard science, it can be rather powerful. Take Civil War, for example. Horrible Marvel comics storyline that almost closed the company, but an increadably well-done Movie. Ant-man was in both version's, but which one is he most remembered in?
It's kind of weird how in comics they kind of write off big guys by making them 2nd or 3rd strongest on their team. Colossal Boy may be the worst example of this, where he's soooooo weak compared to the others.
DR.POISON= we have an intresting villian concept here that's always been wasted imho: the Villian who creates Villians/Heroes. Honestly think she'd a much better villian for somebody else other than Diana. As for the Power scale issue she and her colleagues(Dr.Malus,Arim Zola and Prof.Smythe) create; that's unfortunately just an inherent flaw in the MnM system as a whole. In order to change it, a GM would have to practically re-wire the entire creation set-up to eliminate it.
Not a bad idea. People like that are always necessary in books. I think Veronica Cale kind of ends up there in modern DC.

The stuff about "Guys who are better on teams" is interesting, but I never bothered to put it into stats because it doesn't come up much in the characters I've seen... except for Batman, who isn't that powerful even if the whole Bat-Family is out there. I think Captain America MIGHT be close, as he's like PL 11 solo and PL 12 on the Avengers at times.
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The Blue Snowman

Post by Jabroniville »

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In addition to having a hilarious name, Harry Peter also had a nasty case of SameFace.

THE BLUE SNOWMAN (Byrna Brilyant, aka The Snowman)
Created By:
William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter
First Appearance: Sensation Comics #59 (Nov. 1946)
Role: Weather Controller
Group Affiliations: Villainy Inc.
PL 8 (270)
STRENGTH
2 STAMINA 2 AGILITY 3
FIGHTING 5 DEXTERITY 6
INTELLIGENCE 2 AWARENESS 0 PRESENCE 1

Skills:
Athletics 4 (+6)
Deception 4 (+5)
Expertise (Criminal) 4 (+6)
Expertise (Schoolteacher) 4 (+6)
Insight 3 (+3)
Intimidation 1 (+2)
Perception 3 (+3)
Stealth 3 (+6)
Technology 2 (+2)

Advantages:
Equipment (Snowman Suit- Protection +2)

Powers:
"Icicle-Shooting Gun" (Flaws: Easily Removable) [9]
Blast 5 (Extras: Multiattack) (15 points)

"Telescopic Snow Ray" (Flaws: Easily Removable) [89]
Environment 15 (Impede Movement 2, Cold 2, Visibility 2) (90)
"Freezes Everything It Touches" Affliction 8 (Strength; Fatigued & Hindered/Prone & Defenseless/Paralyzed & Transformed to Blue Statue) (Extras: Extra Condition, Perception-Ranged +2, Area- 120ft. Burst +3) (56)
"Also an Actual Telescope" Senses 3 (Extended Vision 3) (3)
-- (149 points)

Offense:
Unarmed +7 (+2 Damage, DC 17)
Blue Snow -- (+8 Perception-Ranged Affliction, DC 18)
Initiative +3

Defenses:
Dodge +8 (DC 18), Parry +8 (DC 18), Toughness +2 (+7 Armour), Fortitude +5, Will +4

Complications:
Motivation (Greed)

Total: Abilities: 42 / Skills: 28--14 / Advantages: 1 / Powers: 98 / Defenses: 15 (270)

-Yes, the BLUE SNOWMAN. This has got to be one of the silliest characters I've ever seen- like, "Red Bee"-level goofy. This character is another woman disguised as a man, and the wielder of "Blue Snow", which freezes everything in touches. Blue Snow was invented by her father, who intended to use it to aide humanity (even Wikipedia dunks on this never being explained), but he died while working on it, and she instead used it to extort farmers by threatening their crops and livestock, calling herself "The Snowman". Wonder Woman arrives and forces "him" to reverse the effects. The character is among many recruited for Villainy Inc. by Eviless, altering the name to the more memorable BLUE Snowman.

-The character languished in obscurity following the Golden Age and was not used again until modern times, when Power Girl & Doctor Mid-Nite encountered her in the Power Girl series. She is accidentally killed and eaten by an alien bug that Vartox had brought to Earth in his attempts to woo PG.

-The Blue Snowman is usually nothing more than a common crook with some unique gear that was invented by another. The Blue Snow was created from a "Telescopic Snow Ray"- precipitation that covered a vast area and froze everything it touched (Create & Snare, sorta). At one point, she used a pipe that shot icicles. The second version used a Powersuit to generate ice and snow. Both versions are jobber-y, though.
Last edited by Jabroniville on Sat Aug 27, 2022 4:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Davies
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (Amazons! The Mask! Giganta! The Blue Snowman!)

Post by Davies »

In Marston's defense, and I can't believe I'm defending Marston, that particular trope (scientist invents something, dies, and then someone else uses their invention for evil) was well established by this point.

As to how something that freezes all it touches was supposed to aid humanity ... it facilitated the construction of pykrete, making shipbuilding cheaper?
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Re: Giganta (Modern)

Post by Ian Turner »

Jabroniville wrote: Thu Jan 07, 2021 7:13 am It's kind of weird how in comics they kind of write off big guys by making them 2nd or 3rd strongest on their team. Colossal Boy may be the worst example of this, where he's soooooo weak compared to the others.
Colossal Boy has the bad luck of being on a team with Superboy and Mon-El (and occasionally Supergirl), so he's SOL, and Hank Pym was introduced alongside Thor and the Hulk, and has later Avengers like Hercules, She-Hulk, Namor, etc. as competition, so yeah, it's always second-fiddle status for both of them.

Thanks to square-cube law (every time height doubles, weight octuples), even growing to sixty feet high (10x height) should increase weight by 1000x fold, and since Colossal Boy and Pym and Giganta don't just collapse into a gorey pile of torn muscle and shattered bone when they suddenly weigh 100 tons, that means they *must* have the strength now to lift 100 tons! (and that bone, muscle, etc. now has to be stronger even than steel!)

It does annoy me that comics don't always seem to take that into account. Pym or CB are shown at giant-size, and yet someone like Captain America can hurt them, when they should be as invulnerable as the Hulk or Blok at those sizes...

And ah, the Blue Snowman. DC and their cold/ice-villains... Mr. Freeze, Captain Cold, Killer Frost, Icicle, Coldsnap. Even the Legion had two, Frost and Cryo-King (seen a single time each, and promptly forgotten).
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (Amazons! The Mask! Giganta! The Blue Snowman!)

Post by Sidney369 »

DC missed out on having Byrna Brilyant team up with Minister Blizzard, another cold-themed Golden Age WW foe
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