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

Where in all of your character write ups will go.
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Ken
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (The Eradicator! Silver Banshee! Superboy-Prime!)

Post by Ken »

Dear God in Heaven, I don't have the words to describe just how much I hate Superboy-Prime.

I bought DC Comics Presents #87 off the rack, and despite the confusion it raised, I enjoyed it. We had already seen Earth-Prime's "Superman", he was a chap called Ultraa from Justice League of America #s153, 158, 167, 169, 170, & 201. So maybe there were multiple Earths that, due to their dearth of heroes, the heroes of Earth-One didn't realize weren't the same place. And then Marv Wolfman spoiled this brand new character with the g*dd*mned final two issues of R*ping of Roy Thomas' DC Career (better known as Crisis on Infinite Earths) that basically ruined what had previously been a great story.

Fine. Character's gone. He's almost, but not quite recreated in the "Pocket Universe". And then dies.

Then there's the shitstorm that is Infinite Crisis. Let's bring back the Superboy of Earth-Prime, Luthor Jr., and Kal-L from whatever Hell Marv left them in, AND make them the bad guys. Yeah, they redeemed Kal-L at the end... basically making him the patsy to Luthor Jr. and Superboy-Prime. It still pisses me off that when showing the trio's motivation, and shows them watching the post-Crisis Singleverse that they just SKIP a decade of comics. They jump from one panel showing the death of Jason Todd, Doomsday killing Superman, Bane breaking Batman's back, Diana fighting Wonder Artemis, and Parallaxative (the last two being from 1994) to a panel showing such highlights of the Radium Age as Max killing Ted and Sue Dibny's funeral. They ignore that DC published comics between 1994 and 2004. Stupid, f*cking, g*ddamned Dan Didio and Geoff Johns.

I will admit that I mostly enjoyed Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds. I thought the whole "we must redeem Superboy-Prime" thing was weak, as was the he's-stuck-back-on-Earth-Prime ending, but I did appreciate seeing a comparison contrast of various Legions, as well as the resuurection of Kon-El and Bart Allen.
Last edited by Ken on Fri Feb 03, 2023 8:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (The Eradicator! Silver Banshee! Superboy-Prime!)

Post by Ares »

Silver Banshee was someone who never really mattered much despite an interesting visual design and some unique abilities. That her abilities were magical in nature meant Superman had to be more careful around her, but outside some early Post Crisis appearances she never really mattered much.

Shadowdragon was set up as an elite martial artist and ninja, notable for his stealth abilities, a suit that further enhanced them, and apparently being so good a martial artist that he could avoid Superman even when the Man of Steel was specifically using superspeed to try and grab him. They actually played around with that tho, as after he got home it was revealed the strain of avoiding a speeding Superman actually caused him some injuries regardless. It's just that evading and some injuries were better than getting KOed and imprisoned. They seemed to be trying to set him up as a major player in the street level / ninja / martial arts arena, but after those initial Superman appearances he only showed up once to my knowledge, basically to get his ass kicked by Shiva and establish that yes, she was better than the new guy.

Silver Banshee probably would work best as a solid journeyman mystical villain, while the Shadowdragon name is good enough that the guy could either be re-invented or just given to a new person to make use of it.

Superboy Prime . . . yeah, he's just a mess. I'm kind of glad they tried to give him a redemption story, but that's overwhelmed by the fact that he didn't need a redemption arc until Geoff Johns and Dan DiDio came along. The original Crisis wasn't perfect and the ratio of how many problems it fixed vs problems it caused to DC afterwards is up for debate. But the ending was satisfying. The original Superman, the first superhero, takes down the most dangerous threat the multiverse had ever seen, being able to enter paradise with his wife, a young Superboy and their friend, Alexander Luthor. It was a worthy send off to a character meant to represent the original, green car over his head, criminals fleeing in fear Superman.

I will not say that Infinite Crisis wasn't without merit. A return of the multiverse and rectonning back in some Pre-Crisis elements was something I supported (depending on the elements), and Crisis was a big enough story that revisiting it or doing a sequel to it had merit, though I would have waited for the 25th anniversary of 2010, but they apparently couldn't wait another 5 years. But what Johns and DiDio felt less like a story honoring the original Crisis and more like picking its bones for ideas and breaking anything related to it. Alex Luthor is now a villain because "all Luthors are villains" despite Alex coming from Earth-3 where that Luthor was it's only hero. Superboy is turned into a strawman for online comic fans that Dan and Geoff just had to thumb their nose at. And the original Superman, the guy who started it all, had to watch his wife die and then got beaten to death by a whiny brat on a distant planet. It basically undoes Crisis in the most spiteful way possible, denouncing passionate fans, saying the past wasn't as good as you remember it, but also that stuff between Crisis and Infinite Crisis was pretty bad. And even now, DC keeps going back to Crisis over and over.

Superboy Prime, and by extension the rest of the Crisis survivors, were basically broken so that Dan could call out people he didn't like because he felt they complained too much about things, which given Dan's own history basically makes Superboy Prime one of the worst cases of projection in comics.
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (The Eradicator! Silver Banshee! Superboy-Prime!)

Post by Ares »

And welcome back, Jack.
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Gary the Witch-Boy

Post by Jabroniville »

GARY THE WITCH-BOY (Garok)
Created By:
Leo Dorfman & Bob Brown
First Appearance: Superboy #178 (Oct. 1971)
Role: Silver Age Magical Friend

-"Gary the Witch-Boy" apepars in the 1971 story Superbaby's First Friend, back when DC was doing like "LOL Superman as a baby also had powers and these are his adventures!" stuff. The magical apprentice wizard alien Garok appears as "Gary" and befriends a baby Clark Kent, where they show each other their super-powers (and startle some thieves by demonstrating super-strength in their attempts to "help" these men move their stolen goods around) before their parents squirrel them away to avoid being spotted- some rangers move in on the soap lather the boys accidentally created on the lake, and in the process find and capture the thieves. The next year, Garok returns, and then it's seven more years until his final appearance, now in the "Superboy" stories.

-Now a full-fledged sorcerer, Garok returns, being forced to battle Superboy after his aged master warned him of impending doom. Naturally Lana Lang's uncle Professor Potter finds some "griffin egg" that pulses with universe-destroying power, and Superboy guards it- Gary now has "Marvel Superhero Disease" and instead of explaining anything just barges in and steals it, turning Pete Ross & Lana into plant-creatures in the process. Superboy immediately attacks, wrapping Gary in his indestructible cape after a short melee, and Gary then explains things- the two team up and stop the cocoon from opening. They destroy it with magical fire (its only weakness) and they declare to always be friends. And that was the last of Gary the Witch-Boy. That story sounds a bit goofy for 1979, I dunno.
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (The Eradicator! Silver Banshee! Superboy-Prime!)

Post by Batgirl III »

The Superman titles took a little longer to enter the Bronze Age than others, so Clark was still engaging in Silver Age shenanigans well into the Seventies… ‘79 seems a little late, even for him, but it also kinda sounds like a filler issue. “Oh, damn, we don’t have the script for May’s issue done. Here’s one we didn’t use back in ‘75. Run it.”
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Ken
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (The Eradicator! Silver Banshee! Superboy-Prime!)

Post by Ken »

Probably because the Bronze Age isn't so much of an Age as clumsy designation trying to pretend a gradual decade+ long shift in comic book making sensibilities can be fit into a tidy box.
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (The Eradicator! Silver Banshee! Superboy-Prime!)

Post by Batgirl III »

I dunno, there’s a definite sea change in the way superhero comics are written, presented, and consumed between comics of the 1930s-40s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s-80s, 1990s, and 2000-Present.

As with trends in music, fashion, or film it’s never a hard-and-fast date. We weren’t all listening to disco on December 31, 1979 and then instantly all switching exclusively to New Wave on January 1, 1980. But there are definitely market trends that can be objectively measured – sales disco albums dropped off significantly, sales of new wave acts increased. There’s the also subjective, but still documentable, shift in how people wrote about music or talked about music – popular music magazines stopped covering the Beegees and started covering the Bangles, radio stations switched formats, fashion magazines changed the styles they covered, etc.

So while their isn’t any empirical and falsifiable scientific test to objectively say “this is a Silver Age story” nor any calendar date at which one can say “everything before here was Golden Age;” The labels are usually a good enough approximation of the broader trends in any given era.

If we were having a Session Zero for an M&M campaign, with Alice and Bob saying they want a “four-color, Silver Age tone” and Charlie saying he wanted something more “Bronze Age approach” and Deborah saying she didn’t care as long as it wasn’t “too X-Treme Iron Age.” We’d all know more or less what it was that they meant.

Genre is always a broad term, there’s always things the edges of any genre that make it fuzzy if you zoom in.

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Batman (Vol. 1) #325 July 1980 compared to Batman (Vol. 1) #92 June 1955. You can’t possibly convince me that these two books are part of the same genre.
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (The Eradicator! Silver Banshee! Superboy-Prime!)

Post by Skavenger »

I enjoyed the introduction of a "new" Silver Banshee in Secret Six; the idea that becoming a banshee is something that can happen to multiple people, this general "curse" instead of just being a single person, makes it akin to being the DC universe version of the Wendigo.
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Re: King Kosmos

Post by Ares »

Jabroniville wrote: Wed Feb 01, 2023 8:45 pm Image
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That is a pretty good rendition of Kirby's style, I will say.

KING KOSMOS (Oswald Mandias)
Created By:
Elliot S. Maggin & Keith Pollard
First Appearance: DC Comics Presents Annual #2 (July 1983)
Role: Would-Be Conqueror
Group Affiliations: None
That is a pretty decent Kirby design, and the guy's name, look and general schtick as a time traveling conqueror could make for a solid villain. Given his whole look and schtick, maybe flip it around, make him a New God from the PAST, one who possibly helped Metron create the original Mobius Chair. Metron's origins are often left ambiguous and it's made clear that he isn't actually a New God . . . so what if Metron and King Kosmos here are actually OLD Gods, from the 3rd World and survived only thanks to the prototype Mobeius Chairs they had access to. But since they lacked the X-Element, Kosmos is lost in time while Metron only barely survives the event that kills the old gods, and spends time perfecting the chair, eventually coming to Darkseid for the X-Element that will complete it. Kosmos meanwhile could wind up lost in the timestream, his identity of Oswald Mandias being a name he takes in one time period, and he can be used as a different type of time traveling threat, different from the Time Trapper, Per Degaton and other time traveling bad guys by being a physical threat and not a schemer and manipulator.

. . . and WOW I'm dense. It only just clicked that Superwoman being from the future is a play on Superman's whole "Man of Tomorrow" title by making her a literal "Woman of Tomorrow".
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (The Eradicator! Silver Banshee! Superboy-Prime!)

Post by Batgirl III »

That is a pretty decent Kirby design, and the guy's name, look and general schtick as a time traveling conqueror could make for a solid villain. Given his whole look and schtick, maybe flip it around, make him a New God from the PAST, one who possibly helped Metron create the original Mobius Chair.
Loving that idea: Kirby’s Fourth World mythos was built on the premise that the New Gods had replaced the Old Gods, in a grand cosmic cycle that was predestined to repeat itself time and again. So… What if “King Kosmos” was one of those Old Gods? IIRC, we’ve never really had any canonical stories about the Old Gods.

He could be the equivalent to Highfather or Darksied of the last iteration of the gods, escaped the götterdämmerung of the last cycle and somehow managed to arrive in the present.

He could be sort of a cross between Kang’s plotting, Galactus’ origins, and easily justifying high tier power levels.
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The Supermen of America

Post by Jabroniville »

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THE SUPERMEN OF AMERICA
Created By:
Stuart Immonen
First Appearance: Supermen of America #1 (March 1999)
Role: Forgotten Super-Team

-Supermen of America is a book I actually remember a bit of from the year I graduated High School- I had initially thought it was supposed to be a "thing", but it turns out to have been a mere special created by Stuart Immonen and then a miniseries by Fabian Nicieza. The idea was they were another bunch of heroes stationed in Metropolis, handling stuff Superman was too busy to. The name comes from the "Supermen of America" fanclub in the 1940s.

-The team was all gathered by Outburst, a man who'd been saved from Doomsday by Superman, after the shooting death of a boy band singer. Young & naive, they are willing to accept Lex Luthor's funding for a superteam meant to protect the team in Superman's absence. Outburst gathers his girlfriend White Lotus, then Brahma, Loser, Pyrogen & Psilencer. Yes, very 1990s. They were paid heroes but meant well. Psilencer was killed by a gang member, leaving the rest of the team badly shaken, but they recruited Maximum as well. When a space-entity called "The Unimaginable" was unleashed under their actions, the day was saved, but LexCorp cut ties with them.

-The team has largely vanished into the ether, with the "Grant Morrison Era" and "Geoff Johns Era" immediately following this run and not really using them. They are briefly seen in the background of Infinite Crisis. In 2011, a new team is formed containing Iron Munro, Livewire, Super-Chief, Superman, Supergirl & Superboy.

-The Supermen of America are a great, GREAT example of the superiority of Marvel's fans to DC's fans. This team was in a frickin' MINI SERIES. They're named superheroes! Yet information about them online is almost IMPOSSIBLE to find- power levels, specific powers, etc. You can find Marvel characters who appeared in only a single issue that have HUGE pages on Marvunapp giving approximate power levels, histories, issue numbers of events, the character's friends and family, and even commentary on which writers used them best or plot threads that got dropped. But NAHHHHHHHHHH they're *DC* characters! Who cares? Just list some names and maybe if you're lucky a power or two! That's good enough. DC fans SUCK :P.
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Re: Jab’s Builds! (The Eradicator! Silver Banshee! Superboy-Prime!)

Post by HalloweenJack »

greycrusader wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 1:04 am
HalloweenJack wrote: Thu Feb 02, 2023 10:39 pm And Superboy Prime actually had a bit of character development during the end of Death Metal (exxxxtreme!) where he ended up being on the side of the heroes more or less due to happenstance, had a moment where he bonded with Krypto, and ended up acting like a hero instead of a strawman.

Why it's almost like if effort is expended you can make stories.

Oh hi Jab.
Hey, thanks for coming back!
maybe for a bit anyway,
Jabroniville
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Outburst

Post by Jabroniville »

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OUTBURST (Mitch Anderson)
Created By:
Stuart Immonen
First Appearance: Supermen of America #1 (March 1999)
Role: Forgotten Superhero, Magnetic Hero

-Outburst formed the Supermen of America, accepting money from Lex Luthor to do so- he and his family had been saved from Doomsday by Superman, and he wanted to honor the hero. He has magnetic super-powers.
Jabroniville
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White Lotus

Post by Jabroniville »

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WHITE LOTUS (Nona Lin-Baker)
Created By:
Stuart Immonen
First Appearance: Supermen of America #1 (March 1999)
Role: Forgotten Superhero

-White Lotus took her name from some Superman characters of years past. She was trained by the Warlords of Okaara (same as Starfire). She had a "malleable Auric force field" (which is used to create solid force around her, enhancing her punches and durability) and is half-Asian, half-black.
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Brahma

Post by Jabroniville »

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BRAHMA (Cal Usjak)
Created By:
Stuart Immonen
First Appearance: Supermen of America #1 (March 1999)
Role: Forgotten Superhero, Strongman

-The only character I remember from the old days, Brahma was the team strongman. He also learned to use Growth powers, but grew more petrified and stonelike the larger he got.
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