here's my take on Giganta & the whole Dr.Poison/PL misfire:Jabroniville wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 3:36 am
-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.
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...