Groovy Kingdom of the Thanksgiving Cobra

The Groovy Agent is serving up a Thanksgiving feast today with a series of posts...first up, The Shadow # 3, by Denny O'Neil, Mike Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson! Go give it a read! It's definitely something to be thankful for!

The Myth of All Ages

Interesting post here by Christopher Butcher, discussing what he calls the 'Myth of All Ages' over at Comics212. I may not agree with everything he says, but it's all food for thought, I think. Check it out, feel free to comment.
For the record, I enjoy both the Marvel Adventures line and Simpsons comics, when I pick them up. I also enjoy Elephantmen. No reason you needed to know that last bit, I just felt like sharing.
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What? It has a rhino in a business suit! Who can resist that?

See? Rhino in a business suit.

There The Rook Shall Plant His Mark

Have you read the adventures of The Rook? No? Why not? He punches vampires. And Nazis. Nazi-vampires. Also Russians. Go check out the author's website. Then, go buy the books. You won't be disappointed.

Everyone Laughs at Skurge

Still one of the best damn death scenes in comics. A good villain gets to go out the hero, at the very end. This is redemption done right. A split-second choice that changes everything.
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No one is laughing now, Skurge.

Sometimes, I Wish...

...that we had seen more adventures of Marvel's Dracula in space in the Star Trek universe. Because what's more entertaining than reading about Tomb of Dracula Dracula turning the Enterprise into his personal hell-ship and joyriding around the universe, just f@ck!ng $h!t up?
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Nothing. That's what. It's the story Gene Colan was born to draw and Dan Abnett was born to write. You know you want it.

Origin of the Species

This is how Wolverine: Origins should have played out. I would have paid money for this, if only because it makes Wolverine semi-interesting. Also, we need more radioactive animals in comics. Ferrets, Wombats, Platypi, I don't care what they are, as long as they are radioactive and unpleasant.

Ben Grimm-Sensitive Man

Then There Was That Time That Bullseye Hit Venom In The Eye With A Poodle...

Super-Fly Meets The Equalizer

I like webcomics. They're free, they help me start my day better than the funny pages ever did, and frankly I spend way too much of my work-day clicking 'next' on a variety of strip archives. And since this is a comic-centric blog, and webcomics are a type of comic, well, I thought maybe I could point you towards one of my new favorites today in lieu of that joke about the Thing's cup-size I had planned.
WORLD OF HURT, written and drawn by fellow South Carolinian Jay Potts, bills itself as "the internet's #1 blaxploitation webcomic", and I have, as yet, seen little to contradict that statement.
In Mr. Potts' own words it's "a comic strip love letter to the Black action films of the 1970s. I’m not talking about the flicks with signifyin’ Technicolor pimps performing slow-motion karate or anything featuring Ray Milland’s head surgically attached to Rosie Grier’s body. If you want to know where I’m coming from with WORLD OF HURT, check out flicks like Shaft, Superfly, The Mack, Trouble Man, Foxy Brown, or Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off. "
See, that's just something that I can get behind when it's done well. And, frankly, Mr. Potts is good at what he does. The first storyline, "The Thrill-Seekers" is well underway, and I find myself eagerly popping around hoping for a new strip just about every day.
So, I recommend you head over there post-haste, starting with the beginning of the storyline,pop in some Booker T. and the M.G.s for mood music, and get to enjoying WORLD OF HURT

Villains with Potential-Mr. Hyde

Ah, Mr. Hyde. What's not to like, right? There's the literary connections, the snazzy neo-Victorian duds, the unremitting psychopathy. I'm not normally a fan of that last one there in my villains, but Hyde is the pitch-perfect ax-crazy megalomaniac. If there's one villain who should scare the crap out of the heroes, it should be him.
Unlike a lot of the other villains I write about, Hyde actually gets used quite a bit. He pops up fairly regularly, and gets used in pretty much the same fashion every time. Either he's playing 'tank' for another villain (the Cobra, Baron Zemo, the Hood, etc.) or he's selling drugs (because he's a chemist, see?).
Now, the latter is interesting, because it really illustrates just how unpleasant Hyde is, in either persona.
Let's take it by the numbers. Calvin Zabo, mild-mannered sociopath and polymath, creates a chemical solution which will, ala Robert Louis Stevenson, unleash his inner psychopath, so that he can indulge his warped fantasies to the fullest. Zabo gets the capital to create this wonder-drug via theft and murder, so right there we know that this isn't just a spin on the Hulk or even the literary origins of Hyde's moniker. Zabo is bad, but Hyde is worse. Where Zabo is calculating, amoral and quite intelligent-sort of like a low rent Henry Pym-Hyde is impulsive, sadistic and violent-basically, an evil version of the Gray Hulk. So, essentially, what we have here is two villains in one, and most writers to-date seem to get that...Hyde wrecks things and Zabo acts creepy, strung-out and unpleasant.
But that's it. That's as far as they go. And that's short-sighted.
Wait, what?
Yeah. Not my usual line at all, but frankly, this works well. See, Hyde, like his namesake, is supposed to be the basest desires of an already terribly unpleasant example of a human being given form. He is the twisted fun-house mirror of humanity, and no perversion, calumny or crime should be under his radar. Hyde is pure, capital 'E' evil. He's nightmare fuel. For other villains, you have to twist them and their backstory a bit to make them 'scary' (Dr. Light as a rapist, for instance). With Hyde...well, the nastiness, the adult situations, it's built right in.
Think about this...Hyde isn't a brute in the traditional sense. He's not dumb but his goals should be relatively fluid and chaotic. He's not a bank robber or a world-beater. He's a destroyer and a corrupter. The ultimate anarchistic sybarite, one who wants to light the world on fire and watch it burn and feel the flames on his own skin. He wants to break down society intimately, obviously and eternally and indulge every vice that has so long been denied him. And he wants you to join him.
But Zabo isn't like that. Despite his desire for what Hyde offers, his addiction to it, he's not that kind of monster. Zabo wants hedonism without the heresy. Zabo is the bank-robber, the drug-dealer, the planner, the thinker. He's petty and materialistic and slightly afraid of the thing he's created.
What if, all this time, the Hyde we've been seeing, the one who partnered with the Cobra, who joined the Masters of Evil, who does super-villain-y things...what if that was Zabo indulging himself, even as Henry Jekyll did when he first turned into Hyde? And what if, slowly, bit by bit, Hyde was (even as he did in the book) becoming his own seperate identity? Getting stronger and stronger, even as Zabo becomes weaker and weaker. What if, one day, Zabo found out that he couldn't control Hyde anymore?
What would happen then?

The Man of Bronze and the Man of Brick

Ol' Groove has one of my favorite issue of Marvel Two-in-One up for perusal by fans of that sort of thing. Either click the pretty picture, or click here to go visit Diversions of the Groovy Kind for an awesome read!

Rainbow Raider, Where are You?

4thletter! tends to have some insightful posts. This recent one here is of particular interest to me, because it concerns what can be quite the polarizing concept in regards to super-heroic storytelling, i.e. is it okay for heroes to kill?
My two cents? Sometimes.
But that's not what I'd like to talk about, because frankly they say it better than I could. What I'd like to make mention of is this part here:

More bank robbers. More drug runners. More art smugglers. More mad scientists with misunderstood but rampaging creations. More nuisance criminals like the early Riddler. More money launderers. More bizarre (and non-sexual) kidnappers.

Less brutality. Less parodic violence. Less sexual assault. Less ‘this time it’s personal’. Less crimes that need to be resolved with a death.

More Batman doing detective work. Less Batman beating up snitches for information. More Wonder Woman dealing with mythological fantasies and modern-day mindsets. Less Wonder Woman snapping necks to save the world.

The comic book world doesn’t need heroes that are darker, it needs villains that are lighter.

Yes. A thousand times yes. Amen. Preach it.
Frankly, I feel that it devalues a character like the Joker (a character that should be pure nightmare fuel in a can) when every other villain in Batman's rogues gallery is just as psychopathic and just as dangerous. From a writer's perspective, when every villain is of an equal level of unpleasantness, there is no more fun to be had from them.
Casual death and destruction is not a motivation-it's the absence of motivation. And while the 'monster-on-a-rampage' story is great fun once in a while, having a variation on it every flippin' issue is quite boring.
Less super-terrorists. More super-art-thieves.
Or, more simply, come back, Rainbow Raider! We promise we won't let Geoff Johns kill you again!

Rochambeau

More super-powered slugfests should end with a shot to the nuts. It's more realistic than the Ultimate Nullifier, is all I'm saying. Funnier, too.