31 Witches | Agatha Harkness

"I have been trying to reach you for several days, Susan. I'm afraid it was I who caused your son to have his fit. My efforts to contact you became too... unrestrained." -- Fantastic Four #140 (1973)

The Marvel 52, Part Five: Marvel Heroes

Sorry for the silence the last couple of days. Busy busy. I'll have to do a project update sooner or later. Kill All Monsters is coming along nicely and I've been working on a short, prose story about an old, pulp character named The Purple Scar, but I could give you some more details about both of those.

Anyway, the last twelve titles in my Marvel 52 are the big guns.

12. The Liberators by Gail Simone and Colleen Coover



The Lady Liberators were introduced way back in Avengers #83 as a team of villains (of course) to fight those poor boys of the Avengers. They made sort of a comeback in recent years though as a heroic group when She-Hulk formed an informal team of superwomen to fight the chauvinistic Red Hulk in Jeph Loeb's Hulk. Then they got together a couple of other times after that in She-Hulk and The Mighty Avengers.

I'm all about the female superheroes, so it would be awesome to have a book where they could team up regularly. Maybe have a core team of She-Hulk, Valkyrie, Black Widow, and Hellcat with other women coming on for particular missions. Since that's sort of Marvel's version of Birds of Prey, it's unoriginal, but entirely appropriate to have Gail Simone writing it. And Colleen Coover draws Marvel women (and men, for that matter) like nobody else.

11. Valkyrie by Paul Cornell and Jill Thompson

I know there's a bona fide female version of Thor, but Valkyrie's been around a lot longer and has the benefit of not being exactly a female version of Thor. She has the whole, cool Viking thing going on without just copying him. I know Paul Cornell could do awesome things with that and Jill Thompson's got a great, fantasy style that would suit very well.

10. Runaways by Brian K Vaughan and Ben Caldwell

Vaughan has said that he always wanted Runaways to be a series that other creative teams could pick up and run with; that he wanted it to be sort of his legacy at Marvel. But though other creators have done pretty well with the concept, unfortunately no one's doing anything with it now. I'd correct that and bring back the writer who started it all. Ben Caldwell has a great, manga-esque style that's perfect for books about (and targeted to) younger kids.

9. Agents of Atlas by Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk



Quite simply the most definitively awesome team book anyone's ever made in the history of comics. It was Jeff Parker's baby, so no one else can touch the writing, and though there have been a few excellent artists working with Parker on it over the years, Leonard Kirk was the first. I'd want that dream team back on it again.

8. Spider-Man by Phil Hester and Pia Guerra

Spidey is a character that I haven't been excited about since the '70s. Phil Hester could change that by bringing the same mix of high adventure and everyman troubles that he put into Firebreather. As for Pia Guerra (Y: The Last Man)... Why, oh, why isn't she drawing a monthly comic book right now?

7. The Fantastic Four by Brian Clevinger and Darwyn Cooke



Brian Clevinger's proven that he's not about to run out of wacky science stories for Atomic Robo anytime soon, so why not share some of that with everyone's favorite family of super scientists? And you know you want to see Darwyn Cooke cut loose on a series like that.

6. Pet Avengers by Evan Dorkin and Katie Cook

Evan Dorkin can write a damn good animal story. Not just a cute, funny animal story (though they are that, too), but a real story about animals you care about. I sort of want his Beasts of Burden partner Jill Thompson on this one, but I'm trying not to be completely unoriginal and Katie Cook's not only awesome, she also has a thing for Marvel and pets.

5. Young Avengers by Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung



Okay, maybe I am totally unoriginal. But in my dreamworld, Heinberg would have time to write a monthly series about these characters he and Cheung made up. I loved it when they were on the book, but in other hands the characters haven't been as exciting.

4. Iron Man by James Turner and Nicola Scott

If I can't have Robert Downey Jr play Tony Stark right there in my comic, something else that could get me to buy it would be to have James Turner (Rex Libris, Warlord of Io) write it. Like all my favorite writers, Turner has an insane imagination and unrestrained abandon about letting it spill out of his head and onto the page. And he's hilarious. I'm not saying that it hasn't been this way lately, because I haven't read Iron Man in years, but in general the character needs some craziness. It should be a scifi/superspy comic and I'd love to see Nicola Scott ground something like that in reality.

3. Thor by Neil Gaiman and George O'Connor



I went back and forth about whether I'd prefer to have George O'Connor (Olympians) write and draw this one by himself. He's certainly got the ability to tell fun stories about mythological characters.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how amazing it would be to see Gaiman make Asgard as huge and epic as the Dreaming.

2. Captain America by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener

If there's something else Clevinger appears to like as much as superscience, it's WWII history. Not only could he tell some fantastic flashback stories to Cap's adventures in those days, he's also a guy who - like Brubaker - can let that time period continue informing the personality and choices of the modern Captain America. And why not let Clevinger's Atomic Robo cohort, Scott Wegener be in charge of bringing it to life?

1. The Avengers by Paul Tobin and Cliff Chiang



Paul Tobin's already been writing the best Avengers comic around for the Marvel Adventures line, so he should get his shot at the main book with one of the best superhero artists working today.

The Fantastic Four Hates Cephalopods

The awesome Mike DeStasio sent me these pictures from an old, Fantastic Four story book called Fantastic Four: The Island of Danger. The art's by Earl Norem.

Thanks, Mike!

The Thing and the Challengers of the Unknown ALL Hate Cephalopods

[Marvel Two-in-One: The Lost Issues]

Movie News: Blackbeard's daughter and Frankenstein's hottie

Blackbeard's Daughter



Penelope Cruz's role in Pirates of the Caribbean 4 has been announced as Blackbeard's daughter. Since she's also a potential love interest for Captain Jack Sparrow and this man is her dad, this should be a blast. [MTV]

A Film with Me in It



I love the premise of this comedy about an unlucky man whose friends and acquaintances keep dying from unbelievable accidents that clearly look like he murdered them. Check out the trailer and see if you don't too.

Don McKay



I'm not sure what it is about the trailer for Don McKay that makes me so interested. I like Thomas Haden Church, but he carries the same, stunned facial expression throughout the entire trailer. I also like Elisabeth Shue, but that's largely out of nostalgia for Adventures in Babysitting. Maybe I'm just in the mood for a steamy thriller about a woman manipulating her former lover into murdering someone in the deep South.

Frankenstein, Captain America, and more Johnny Depp (as a spy this time) after the break.

Art Show: Every Girl Wants a Pony

Namora



Cosplayer Unknown; PhotoShopping by theblackhauke.

Bentlys Trading Post



By Robert McGinnis. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Faeries, aliens, and more superheroes (some of them in fishnets) after the break.

And Now the News: So Many Ways to Take a Life

Here's the rest of the news from last week that (mostly) wasn't about Disney's buying Marvel.

Meandering Aquaman

The Stonechat Museum - a Hawkman blog - picked up a quote I missed from Dan Didio about the difficulty of finding a spot for Aquaman in the current DCU:

Where is Aquaman: Rebirth? It’s hard for us to do a Rebirth because Rebirths stand for something to us. It’s a particular character returning who had the lead mantle of that character, and him being re-established in the world. Aquaman has never been removed from the role, with the exception of maybe what we did with the One Year Later. It’s a different sensibility going on there.

The other thing with Aquaman is he never got the level of traction the other characters did. He never broke free. Most people’s references to Aquaman really are the cartoon series from the 1960s and Super Friends. We look at Aquaman a lot of times and say "What is the iconic interpretation?" When we do that, you have 15 different answers because the problem with Aquaman ... is that every time he was rebooted, the origin was moved a little bit to the right, moved a little to the left, moved around half way and then it came back three quarters. He never really had a clear change and his story just meandered along. Our goal following Blackest Night, if there is an Aquaman, would be to make sure to get clear what the iconic interpretation is and present it in the best light possible.

I don't have any real concern that DC's going to leave Aquaman dead at the end of Blackest Night, but what this does sound like is that there are no definite plans for him yet. They're still feeling their way around, trying to get to that "iconic interpretation." Which is strange, since Didio says what the iconic interpretation is right there in his comments: the '60s and '70s cartoons. Maybe those are what I should be checking out instead of old issues of Justice League.

Doris Danger: Giant Monster Adventures



It's like they're making this stuff just for me now.

The Three-D Musketeers

Paul WS Anderson is adapting The Three Musketeers in 3D. I have a hard time getting as upset about this as /Film does. Anderson's not a brilliant director or anything, but he's no Uwe Boll either. I've very much enjoyed the Resident Evil movies and it's not like there aren't a zillion, other, good Musketeers movies to fall back on if this one blows.

And really? I don't get what /Film is complaining about other than some justifiable concern that Anderson may not make a very good movie. He wants to make a Musketeers film that's "rich in eye-popping action, romance and adventure?" Good! That's exactly what a Musketeers film should be. And it's kind of putting words in his mouth to say that he wants to make a "non-period period film" when all that he really said was that he didn't want the "corsets and feathered hats" to be the focus. I don't want them to be the focus either. The Three Musketeers shouldn't be The Duchess.

Gripe all you want that Anderson's making another movie. I do that about Michael Bay all the time. Just don't pretend that he's ruining some sacred franchise by doing a new version of it with some cool technology.

Untitled Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz Spy Movie

Double O Section has new information about the cool-sounding spy movie formerly known as Wichita. Like most people, I've been skimming over Wichita news because of the non-descript title and missing that it's about a woman whose life is turned upside down when her blind date turns out to be a super spy and takes her on a violent, worldwide journey to protect a powerful MacGuffin.

Fantastic Four movie reboot

I think it's interesting that on the very day the Disney/Marvel deal was announced Fox let everyone know that they're starting from scratch and making a completely new Fantastic Four movie. All they have so far is a new screenwriter with a shaky resumé, but - as much as I'll miss Chris Evans - I welcome the attempt. Please please please let them get it right this time.

Half-Minute Horrors



How scared can you get in 30 seconds? Lemony Snicket, James Patterson, Neil Gaiman, R.L. Stine, and others want to help you find out.

Dark Days direct-to-DVD movie has a director



That's good news. The bad news is that Melissa George isn't returning as Stella. Not that no one else can play the role, but it would've been nice to see her back if only for continuity's sake. Hopefully they'll find someone who (with a new Eben) can stick around for a while and make future sequels like Return to Barrow and Eben and Stella.

Still, Dark Days is my favorite of the 30 Days of Night books and I'm looking forward to seeing how this comes out. Especially since Steve Niles has a co-writing credit on the screenplay. The director (and other writer) is Ben Ketai, who's been involved with the 30 Days of Night web shorts.

Rambo V: The Savage Hunt

This story on the proposed next film in the Rambo series sounds like it's trying very hard not to say the word "werewolf," but I totally hope that's what it's about.

Trick 'r Treat review



I've been hoping that Trick 'r Treat is as cool as that poster makes it look. According to /Film, it is.

Inglourious Wizerds



"That’s why every sonofabitch we find wearin’ a Death Eater mask, they’re gonna die."

It gets said often, but still not enough: Chris Sims is a genius.

No more Harryhausen comics



Ray Harryhausen and Bluewater Comics have parted ways, each saying that they're the party who made the decision to leave. The only disappointing part of that news is Harryhausen's statement that there are "no plans to move the properties to another publisher," because frankly the world needs Harryhausen comics. We just need some with a professional level of art that Bluewater hasn't been providing.

Of course, "no plans" doesn't mean that Harryhausen wouldn't consider other offers; just that there aren't any attractive ones on the table right this second. Hopefully someone will step up and make some comics worthy of the man's imagination. Of course, I'd rather have no Harryhausen comics than deal with the frustration of constantly seeing ones on the shelves that I have to pass up because they're awful.

Steampunk Art at Oxford



Brother Calvin's turned up a steampunk art exhibit at Oxford University. Reason #5,695 that I need to visit Britain.

Saturday Night Art Show: Her Toxic Terror

Vikings



By Warden Wood. [Galactic Central]

Shark



By Sam Nielson. [Avalanche Software Art Blog]

Jules Verne



By Ted McKeever. [Hey, Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!]

Unused Incredibles Villain



By Lou Romano. [Admiral Calvin]

Marooned Under the Sea



By HW Wesso. [Poulpe Pulps]

Yuki 7 in The Pinch of Salt



By Bob MacNeil. [One of many awesome Yuki 7 illustrations at Kevin Dart's blog]

Black Canary



By Mahmud Asrar.



By Justin Coffee. [Comic Books!]



By George Perez. [All About George Perez]

Poison Ivy



By Jason Lysinger. [DrawerGeeks]

Hulk Geo



By Jamie Roberts [Kirby-Vision]

The Human Bat v. the Robot Gangster



By - as near as I can tell - RS Davies. [American Pulps & Magazines]

I Just Want a Glazed



By Jeremy Vanhoozer.

The Galaxy's Greatest Comic Magazine!



By Otis Frampton. As I commented on Otis' blog, I never noticed before how closely the original Star Wars heroes match up with the Fantastic Four. There's the hero, his girlfriend who becomes his wife, her impetuous brother, and the hero's monstrous-looking best bud. Pretty cool.

What’s So Cool About the Sub-Mariner? Part Three

Almost everyone agrees that Marvel’s Sub-Mariner (aka Namor) is more successful than DC’s Aquaman. Using their early Silver Age stories as reference, I’m trying to figure out why that is. Part One. Part Two.



First of all, I'm sorry about not posting all week. Yuck. Trying to get caught up from last weekend got the best of me, so I'm gonna do some double-posting over this weekend make up for it.

But back to Namor: so far his coolness in comparison to Aquaman comes down to three things: the undersea world Namor comes from (which is filled with stranger creatures and stronger drama than Aquaman’s), his relationship with Susan Storm (giving his character an arc to develop over a series of adventures), and his ability to be powerful outside of water (so that he’s not limited solely to underwater exploits).

We last saw Namor in Fantastic Four #6. At the end of that issue he returned to the sea, still hurting over not being able to find his people thanks to humans, but unwilling to continue his war of vengeance against the surface world and risk hurting Sue. This is still his emotional state when we next see him in Fantastic Four #9. He catches a news report – he’s apparently restored power to his ruined city and had the cable hooked back up – saying that the Fantastic Four has gone broke. Reed’s been playing the stock market and not doing a very good job at it, so the team’s going to have to sell everything to cover their debts and split up. Seeing this as an opportunity to win Sue over, Namor develops a plan.



It’s not a very good plan though. In fact, it’s a little embarrassing. Rather than let the group split up and then try to approach Sue when Reed’s not around, Namor comes up with a cockamamie scheme that involves his buying a Hollywood movie studio. He knows where a lot of sunken treasure is hidden, so he starts SM Studios and offers the FF roles in his first film. The three men are naturally distrustful, but Sue’s impressed with Namor’s powerful confidence. Having no other options to save their team though, the fellas come around and agree to make the picture.

Namor’s master plan is to put the three men into deadly situations under the pretext that they’re filming stunts. His overconfidence gets him into trouble though and he leaves Mr. Fantastic and the Human Torch alone with their perils, sure that they’ll be defeated. He decides to fight the Thing himself though and for a while it looks like they’re evenly matched, which is pretty much what we’ve seen the last couple of times these two have fought.

In these early issues of Fantastic Four though, the Thing would occasionally transform back into Ben Grimm as a result of some of the testing that Mr. Fantastic was doing to try to cure him. Unfortunately, that happens during the fight with Namor and Ben goes down.



Thinking that he’s defeated all three men, Namor returns to Sue and lets her in on his plan. Now that they’re out of the way, he wants her to marry him. Sue, on the other hand, lets Namor in on how stupid he’s been. If he had come to her truthfully and peacefully she would have considered his offer. She tells him that by attacking her teammates he’s fighting her as well.

They tussle briefly after that, but it’s not clear what the stakes are. Sue’s fighting for the honor of her team, but it’s hard to tell what Namor wants if he wins. I choose to believe – because it’s getting clearer that his feelings for Sue are genuine – that he doesn’t intend to force her to marry him. Rather, I think that his arrogance is once again getting in the way and that he can’t let a challenge go. When she declares that they’re enemies, he retaliates by acting like one.

During their fight, Namor once again shows that he’s got the same abilities as certain sea creatures. He tries his electric eel power on her like he did against Doctor Doom in issue #6, but when that doesn’t work he uses the radar-like senses of deep-sea, cave-dwelling fish to spot and capture the invisible Sue.



Fortunately for Sue, the rest of the FF show up just in time and triple-team Namor. They almost have him when Sue throws herself between him and them. She hates seeing them gang up on one person, but she also tells Namor that she expects him to uphold his end of their contract. He says that he will and that their movie will be produced and that they will get paid. He then returns to the sea once more as Sue rubs it in to Reed that Namor went to all this trouble because he loves her. Man, they’ve got a weird relationship.

Next week: Namor in the hands of... the Puppet Master!

What’s So Cool About the Sub-Mariner?

As long as I’m digging into Aquaman’s past, it might (I hope!) be interesting to check out how Marvel worked with Sub-Mariner about the same time. And by “about the same time” I mean that it was only a couple of years after Aquaman reappeared in the ‘60s that Namor also made his Silver Age reappearance in the pages of The Fantastic Four.

I know even less about Namor’s Golden Age stories than I do about Aquaman’s (which is limited to a couple sentences I read on Wikipedia), but from Marvels and similar stories that talk about his WWII career I get the sense that he’s always been an anti-hero at best. The exceptions being the times he was an outright villain.

His encounters with the Fantastic Four paint him mostly as a villain, if a sympathetic one. That automatically makes him more interesting than Aquaman, who – in those days – was really nothing more than a cookie-cutter superhero with a water theme. None of this is surprising of course. It was absolutely typical for DC to create iconic, high-concept heroes and simply come up with wacky, high-concept adventures for them. Marvel, on the other hand, made its name by creating fascinating characters and then developing them over the course of their series.



Not that Aquaman had no character development (his meeting Aqualad and forming a relationship with Atlantis are two early examples) or that the Fantastic Four never had wacky, high-concept adventures (in fact, most of them were exactly that). But for the most part, Aquaman’s early stories can be read completely independently of each other and in practically any order without making you so much as blink in confusion.

The Fantastic Four’s adventures, on the other hand, built on each other. If a particular high-concept was successful (like Namor or Doctor Doom or the Skrulls were), then you could bet that not only would they return, but that their next story would so heavily reference the previous one that it would really just be a continuation of it. In short, Marvel had discovered serial fiction while – generally speaking – DC was just telling continuous stories with the same characters.

All of which is a very high-level view at the difference between the two characters. Having already dug into Aquaman a little, I want to do the same with Namor, if even more so. In looking at his early appearances in the Silver Age, I’m not going to focus much on his personality. One reason is that I’ve just covered that above, but a better reason is that that’s where everyone goes when discussing the difference between him and Aquaman. I think it’ll be far more interesting to look at Namor as a water-themed character. In other words, regardless of how grumpy he is, are his powers and his story more or less interesting than Aquaman’s?



Namor’s first Silver Age appearance is in Fantastic Four #4. In the previous issue, Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, left the group due mostly to the Thing’s constant pissing and moaning. I’m going to try to stay focused on Namor in these posts, but it’s worth mentioning that the Thing was extremely whiney in the early days. Not pleasantly grumpy like he can be around Johnny these days, but constantly complaining about everything. Everything was always about the Thing and how rough he had it.

You have to cut the guy a little slack, because physically he got the worst of the cosmic rays that gave the team their superpowers. But I quickly got tired of the Thing’s personality and I had the advantage of being able to close the book whenever I wanted. I don’t blame Johnny for taking off on his own.

Johnny knows that the others are going to look for him, so he heads to the roughest part of town he can find to lie low there for a while. Spending the night in a men’s hostel, he finds an old Sub-Mariner comic to read and coincidentally meets an amnesiac with incredible strength who bears a striking resemblance to Namor. Johnny figures out that it is Namor and takes the disoriented Atlantean to the ocean to jog his memory.



He drops Namor into the water and sure enough, Namor recollects who he is. He returns to his underwater city and finds it destroyed, the glow of nuclear radiation still pulsing from atomic tests. Namor doesn’t believe his people were destroyed, but he doesn’t know where to begin looking for them either. Ticked off, he returns to the surface and vows to take revenge on humanity.

As strong as he is, he’s not so cocky as to think he can go to war against the surface world all by himself. Fortunately, he knows the location of a sleeping, underwater behemoth named Giganto. And the Atlantean trumpet that will wake the monster up and control it.

Here’s an important difference between Namor and Aquaman. Aquaman fought his share of alien or mutated sea monsters, but they were always presented as the menace he was trying to overcome. And more importantly, they were always presented as being strange and irregular. Aquaman would use his mundane sea creatures to fight these things, ultimately sending them back to whatever world or dimension they came from. For Namor, Giganto is something that exists in his world all the time. It’s certainly not commonplace or mundane, but you get the feeling that Namor lives in a much more exciting place than Aquaman.



In fact, Namor says as much when he reveals that Giganto is just one of many sea monsters at his disposal. When the Fantastic Four defeat Giganto, Namor claims that it’s no big deal. He says that he can use the trumpet to “unleash a horde of undersea monsters such as mankind never dreamt of.” It’s only by disorienting Namor and making him lose the trumpet that the Fantastic Four are able to temporarily defeat him. The issue ends with the Thing’s worrying over Namor’s escape and Mister Fantastic’s bravely stating that the Four will be ready when Namor returns.

It’s not going to be so simple though. Namor proves a couple of times in this issue that he’s more than a match for the group in a straight-up fight. He appears to be stronger even than the Thing and at one point knocks all three of the Four’s men out at the same time. There’s really a lot of attention given to how powerful Namor is; another difference between him and Aquaman, who needs to call in some whales if he wants any heavy lifting done.

The final difference between Namor and Aquaman from this issue is that Namor falls in love. Aquaman’s too much of a bachelor-hero to have time for icky girls, but Namor’s smitten by Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, as soon as he sees her. He calls her the loveliest human he’s ever seen and immediately offers to consider forgiving humanity if she’ll marry him. He may be in love, but he’s still a butthole.



Sue actually consents, but Namor senses that she’s only doing it because he’s forcing her and that ticks him off even more. Which is how we know that he really likes her. He’s in no position to romance her, but he’s not going to take her by force as an alternative. In his own, jerky, prideful way, refusing her reluctant agreement shows that his jerky, prideful proposal was at least genuine.

Namor does of course return, and only two issues later when Doctor Doom asks for his help in defeating the Fantastic Four. We’ll take a look at that next week and also see what kind of effect – if any – Namor’s had on Sue Storm.