http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2015/11/27/the-line-it-is-drawn-268-2015-thanksgiving-leftovers/

I also created an additional Who’s Who entry “just because.” Enjoy.

http://xum-yukinori.blogspot.com/2015/11/unapologetic-zaree.html

That makes 12 entries, 15 pages total. Almost halfway to creating one volume…

O) I liked Mary Wilshire’s art on the Secret Origins story fine, but looking at Power Girl in that static pose, she just isn’t cutting it. Too meek, no personality or passion. Though the actual story was garbage, I never minded Power Girl tying into Arion and ancient Atlantis. Anything is better than her being the Diet Mr. Pibb Xtra on Earth-Only-Stocks-Coke-Products when we all know Supergirl is a true Pepper. I prefer Anj’s ancestor-to-Andromeda Daxamite alternative though, and I have another under my hat.

P) You know those three packs of comics they used to sell at grocery and toy stores? Well, there was a little thrift store in Pasadena when I was growing up that made their own, and that’s how I got two of the three Titans drug comics (I’m not sure I knew of a third until you guys brought it up.) Perhaps not objectively in hindsight, but as a kid I preferred Protector’s look to Robin’s. Today, he looks like an NPC from the Champions RPG, but I like him for the nostalgia and old school aesthetic, if not for the drug drama (what is his stance on medicinal marijuana, is what I’m asking?)

Q) That is one awkward Question profile, and the recycled Shiva does not help. Those high waisted pants and the boxy midsection make Vic Sage look more like The Penguin. I always wondered if O’Neil ever intended to tie Vic to Mr. Szasz? Anyway, though I’ve never sat down and read the full run of this volume, the out-of-sequence and years apart portions I have read were the best material Denny O’Neil and probably Denys Cowan ever produced.

R) Qurac rocks, and got tons of usage in late ’80s DC comics. They’ve killed everybody in Qurac and Bialya at various points, but they keep coming back because you need fake Middle Eastern nations for super-heroes to jack with to address global concerns without ticking anyone specific off.

S) Ugh. Rampage. What was the point of porting the Savage She-Hulk over from Marvel? Has she been killed off yet? Has no one cared enough to bother with killing her off? Just throw her corpse into a pile of massacred z-graders for shock value and we can never speak of her again outside statistics. She can take Peacemaker’s spot.

I) I have very little experience with or interest in Mr. 104, but the drawing is amusing. If you asked if I liked Mon-El, I’d say yes, but I’d struggle to explain if you asked me why. Probably because he was a Daxamite touted as more powerful than Superman at a time that was rare, although he still got his blue trunks handed to him in Eclipso: The Darkness Within. Moonbow has an alright name and look, but I don’t see her as a Green Arrow foe just because they have an m.o. in common. Give her to a different street level vigilante, and not a freakin’ Nuclear Man. I like the boldness of Muse’s costume. I have some of those later Warlord issues with Power Girl and New Atlantis, but I’m not sure I ever stayed awake all the way through reading one. George Perez’s fidelity to the Olympian Gods was a buzzkill, because he was so into the mythology that it got in the way of telling good Wonder Woman stories.

J) This is not a good drawing of the Outsiders, and their expanded line-up halves any reasonable argument for their continued existence. As little as I care about Halo to begin with, giving her an all-contrast/no-color costume manages to make her even less appealing. Don’t make fun of Overthrow… to his face, as SDCP needs the billings since they lost Lucky Strike. I don’t see how Perez did Wonder Woman any favors by forcing everyone to try and pronounce Themyscira when Paradise Island worked fine. “Robin, to the Lemuel Schibi Memorial Underground Cave Network!” K.I.S.S.

K) Speaking of which, it takes a special kind of stupid to turn The Parasite into a near nude large hulking green-skinned menace. The purple guy was one of the first Superman villains I encountered in comics, so I’ll always have a soft spot for him, and it bothers me that other heroes borrowed a lesser version of him away for a number of years there. I’d just assume stick with the Neal Adams look from the ’60s, but if he’s going to be modernized, let’s stay away from the sucky leach/obese Venom take and hew more to Alex Ross’ scaryass screaming-man-in-a-wrinkled-garbage-bag version. Also, this guy never comes up in fan movie talk, but he’s translated to animation better than virtually any other Superman foe, and he has obvious advantages in an Injustice Gang/JLA story as well.

L) So Keith Giffen plotted the Menthor strip in Wally Wood’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, in which the psyche of the deceased original bearer resided in the helmet that gave him and his successor their powers. After that book was prematurely canceled due to lawsuits, Keith Giffen worked on the Peacemaker strip from the aborted Blockbuster Weekly, and I think he recycled the premise of a hero’s helmet containing the identity of a dead predecessor, which Paul Kupperberg picked up on when Peacemaker reappeared in Vigilante/Checkmate/solo mini-series.

Kupperberg seemed to share Alan Moore’s reaction to the hard right politics of the original 1960s Gill/Boyette series, as each portrayed the character type as a psycho/sociopathic abomination. Taking a firm political stance while writing mainstream super-hero comics was still novel in the 1980s, but I feel the demonization of right wing ideology by the commonly left wing creatives (at least the working writers) has contributed to the contraction of the industry. “He loved peace so much that he was willing to fight for it” is obviously intended to be a dichotomous statement, and one that would naturally rub hippy peaceniks the wrong way, but super-heroes are an inherently right wing concept that appeals to people of that persuasion. It isn’t fair that a sizeable segment of the comics audience is consistently backhanded by scripters with agendas. In facts, I think DC missed an opportunity to set themselves apart as an alternative to Marvel’s targeting collegiate liberals in the late ’60s by holding fast to their longtime conservative inclinations. Instead of, say, giving Steve Ditko a platform for his objectivism, they had scripter Steve Skeates undermine the artist at every turn until he gave up expressing himself on widely distributed books. By continuously marginalizing right wing readers, they pushed many of them out of comics instead of providing them their own space with characters sympathetic to their philosophies, like Peacemaker.

All this is to say that Peacemaker was unnervingly hardcore in his time, and would have contributed more to DC creatively and economically if his creators’ vision had been upheld rather than ridiculed, making him a nutzo hearing the voice of his Nazi father as he became cannon fodder on Diablo Island in a stunt that failed to save the Eclipso series. Also, brown, white and blue is a surprisingly strong color scheme, and I dig the goofy but practical helmet on a guy who wore a jet pack and was constantly being shot at.

M) I looooove un-American super teams, and to a much lesser degree, regional ones. Comic books are so U.S.-centric that I always perk up for characters in our continuity but from someplace else. The People’s Heroes are flatly colored, one dimensional and painfully obvious Mike W. Barr excretions, but because they’re Russkies and showed up in Suicide Squad, I’m still down with them as recurring villains in the Global Guardians ongoing series I want but will never get. Pravda means “Truth,” by the way. Their new team leader today would be Oligarch, and their costumes would be track suits.

I have been in a bit of a funk about the podcast as late, since the update to Who’s Who just didn’t have the gonzo crazy characters that were such a common occurrence in the original series, but I really love large parts of this issue. A couple of specific items:

1. Madmen- These guys are the perfect example of the sort of fun characters that I’m talking about and proof that this run of Blue Beetle was the last great comic that DC put out before everything became dark and gritty. Look at those colors! I made a custom Super Powers action figure of the lead Madman (Fleeter) and, although quite challenging, it was my most rewarding figure to create.

2. Magpie’s fascination for shiny things: Didn’t this get grafted onto Selina Kyle’s personality at some point, basically becoming the reason why she had to be a thief, that she just couldn’t resist stealing the pretty things?

3. The double shot of Marine Marauder and Mentalla is definitely a highlight of this issue. The color schemes and art for these two are quite stunning. On a side note, I’m impressed that neither of you defaulted to Outsider hate when covering MM. Maybe you have matured.

4. I learned something from you today!! This issue’s entry for Metallo is really the only contact I’ve had with this version of John Corbin. Therefore, I had always assumed that the art was a depiction of how he really looked, half human looking and half robot. I’ve never been capable of investing in John Byrne’s run on Superman. If he isn’t helping Jimmy Olson not be a giant turtle man or fighting the menace of sixteen different varieties of Kryptonite alongside half a dozen animals from his home planet, why would you read a Superman story? Seriously, though, I like Byrne and I like Superman, I just have never been able to overcome that this isn’t the Supes I grew up with.

5. Like everything Booster Gold, I love Mindancer. Jurgen’s ability to craft a villian’s appearance always makes me happy. I’m surprised that neither of you brought up the big reveal for this character, though. Despite all of Shag’s comments about this character’s hotness, don’t we discover that under the mask that she is actually skeleton faced, or in some other way horribly disfigured? I remember that being a huge surprise to me when it was revealed.

6. Shag is right (I know, I know, Shag. We can stop right there.) that Mr. 104 does look very much like a Legion villain. Flipping through the book, that was my first thought as well.

7. New Atlantis: I must have blocked this out, but I have no memory of Power Girl showing up in Warlord (even though the back cover proves that to be true). I remember that these were dark days for Kara, almost as bad as the post crisis was to Donna Troy, but I did not know that she ever appeared in the Warlord books. I might have to look into those appearances.

8. Olympian Gods: George Perez makes characters that I couldn’t care less about much more palatable. And, yes, Aphrodite is hot in this picture.

9. The Outsiders: I have the entirety of the run of these characters from the 80’s and filing them is next to impossible because of the number of times the title shifts from “Outsiders” to “Batman and the Outsiders” to “Adventures of the Outsiders”. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an “Adventures of Batman and the Outsiders” at some point. They seemed to be very fond of trotting Batman out whenever sales dipped.

Side note: I miss the days when DC felt they had to limit Batman’s appearances based off of what a normal human being could realistically do. In order for him to start “Batman and the Outsiders”, he had to quit the JLA. When he rejoined the League, he dropped out of the Outsiders. There was no thought of giving him 15 different titles like he has today.

Side, Side Note: I don’t think Atomic Knight was ever really a member of the team. I remember he appeared in a number of issues (I blocked most of that out because if you are not riding on the back of a Giant Dalmatian drawn by Murphy Anderson [God rest his soul], are you really an Atomic Knight?) but I don’t think he was ever offered or accepted membership on the team.

10. My Wonder Woman will always come from Paradise Island. In my DC Universe, there is no such thing as Themyscira.

11. Wow, we again got through an Outsiders entry without an overabundance of loathing. I also love me some themed villain teams like the People’s Heroes.

12. I have very fond memories of the Protector. I, like every other comic book nerd who was handed one of the anti drug issues in the 80’s, wondered who the heck this kid was and what had happened to Robin, but as I read the issues, with their objectivist morality that spoke to my young soul, I looked past the cognitive dissonance that everyone thought of this newby as the leader of the Titans and began to be won over by the Protector’s single minded determination. As a matter of fact, when I played super heroes in my back yard as a younger kid, the costume I envisioned myself wearing was patterned after Jason Hart’s, and my backstory was similar to his. I led a super hero group called “The Drug Busters” and we fought against the evil pushers that populated my very white, middle class suburban neighborhood. I feel it really important to say at this point that, despite everything I just wrote, I still somehow wound up married to a wonderful woman who lets me occasionally touch her in romantic ways.

Back to the point, however. As much as I loved the Protector, they really should have redrawn Robin to be Jericho and then everyone would have been happy.

And, on that note, I will sign off until next time!

Keep up the good work!

As for the 29 comments by day 2, half of them are me being wrong about something. Ignore at your leisure.

Eh, I suppose so, re: the Magpie animated series redesign, but honestly I didn’t see much difference in the elements of either costume: both have tiny underwear, one has fishnets, one has thigh highs, both expose lots of cleavage, etc. I guess what I’m getting at is I don’t think the animated show exactly sexed her up compared to her original design–Byrne did that just fine on his own when he created her, only filtered through an ’80s fashion aesthetic.