Showing posts with label comic books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comic books. Show all posts

Sunday, 25 April 2010

Sunday Stealing: The Fandom Meme




You can play here.

Rules: We all are fans. Be it Star Trek or Twilight, you are a fan of something. Pick a subject, book, TV or movie series. Now tell us all about it!

I couldn't decide whether to be classical and go with Buffy The Vampire Slayer or topical and go with Doctor Who, so just to disappoint fans of both equally I'll do neither and go with DC Comics.


1. The first character I fell in love with:


That would be Black Orchid, a character who turned up in a handful of stories during the '70s, though unlike other super characters they never told you who she was (no origin, no secret identity) so she had the enigmatic angle going for her. Sadly, Neil Gaiman came along and gave her a backstory in the '80s so I kind of lost interest in the character then, once all of her mystery had disappeared.

2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now:

That would be Barbara Gordon, who used to be Batgirl. I pretty much lost interest in the character when Alan Moore decided to cripple her in his Batman/Joker graphic novel The Killing Joke, thus ending her Batgirl career. However then she came back as Oracle, a character who sits at her computer all day, so the mix of struggling in the face of adversity and computer nerdity made me more of a fan of her than I'd ever been.

3. The character I would shag anytime:

Assuming the characters were real, I wouldn't shag any of them anytime, because I've got a way more super girlfriend. Besides, shagging super-powered beings could be dangerous, have you never read Larry Niven's Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.

4. The character I'd slap:

These people have super-powers, so slapping them wouldn't seem a good move.

5. Who are my 3 favorite characters.

The original Red Tornado (cool '40s cross-dressing hero with a frying pan for a helmet)

Zatanna (a magician who can make anything happen by saying it backwards - though I'm not sure if she just pronounces the words as if they're spelt backwards or actually talks backwards like that dwarf in Twin Peaks)

Mazing Man (if only because he looks amazingly like my avatar)

6. What are my 3 favorite pairings.

If this means pairings in a relationships/fanfiction sense rather than pairings in a Dynamic Duo sense, then I don't really think about such things.

7. Which character I'm most like.

Maybe Snapper Carr who was a powerless character who just hung around the heroes snapping his fingers and talking in cool lingo. Then again, the hero Adam Strange who's unknown on Earth and then becomes a hero when he gets beamed to the world of Rann seems a good metaphor for the comic-reading experience where you're suddenly immersed in a sea of heroes.

8. The coolest thing about the canon:

The imagination and ideas of seven decades that it's all built on.

9. The lamest crappiest thing about the canon:

These days it seems to be one Crisis after another, and character deaths are merely a pre-amble for the characters returning from the dead

10. My guiltiest pleasure in this fandom:

There are all sorts of really awful so-bad-they're-good pleasures to be found in comic books. My blog name comes from a brilliantly banal issue of Brave and the Bold where microscopic hero the Atom made a comatose Batman stops the criminals by bouncing around his brain to control him.

11. What story I wish I could read (or art I wish I could see)

That would have been Alan Moore's Twilight of the Super-Heroes series, that never came to fruition, though the proposal itself is a great read.

12. What story I wish I had written/still want to write

If I wanted to write stories, then I guess I could write substandard fanfiction or hang out at a DC comic fanfiction site (though the people there would be way more talented than me).

Thursday, 16 April 2009

Thursday 13: Comic Book Romance

Header from samulli

This week we've actually been given a theme of weddings, so, since I've not been to that many weddings, here's a list of thirteen comic book weddings I've read about (all characters copyright Marvel and DC Comics):


1. Reed Richards And Sue Storm

Back in Fantastic Four Annual #3, Mister Fantastic tied the knot with the Invisible Woman (what did he see in her?). Clearly the idea of a wedding wasn't thought enough to lure in the fans, so they gave us this cover:



The marriage also featured in the acclaimed '90s series Marvels, in which artist Alex Ross gave us this scene. Talk about a guest list (click on the picture and play spot the celebrity).



2. Crystal and Quicksilver

Another Fantastic Four issue, and another wedding. This time we have Crystal of the Inhumans marrying the mutant Quicksilver. All they wanted was a quiet wedding.



3. Superman and Lois Lane

Back in the '60s, Superman was always marrying Lois Lane (or Lana Lang or Lori Lemaris), but in imaginary stories (below is a famous one where he's married both Lois and Lana).



Then in the '70s, he married Lois for real, albeit on a parallel world, Earth-2:



Then, finally, in the '90s, after shuffling his feet for over half a century, Lois and Clark finally got married:



4. Batman and Catwoman

Back on that parallel world, Earth-2, where Superman married Lois Lane, Batman was depicted as marrying Catwoman, and they eventually had a daughter, The Huntress, who continued his heroic legacy.



5. Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson

Spider-Man married Mary Jane back in the '80s in Spider-Man Annual #21 (but they've both recently forgotten about it and gone back to being single - hey, that's comic books for you):



And, just to show that zombies can be in love too, here's a zombie version:



6. Jor-El and Lara

Superman's parents are shown being married below. A few years later their planet will explode. You win some, you lose some.



7. Adam Strange and Alanna

Adam Strange, a nobody on Earth who's beamed to the planet Rann and gets to be a hero (a cool metaphor for reading superhero comics if ever there was one), here marrying his longtime alien girlfriend, Alanna. Alan Moore subsequently took some of the romance out of it all by revealing that Adam was merely being used for breeding purposes, the male populace of Rann being sterile.



8. Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl

Two members of the Legion of Super-Heroes who recently turned up on the TV show Smallville (as did Zatanna, but not in the same episode of course, that would just be like bad fanfiction). Anyway, the two Legionnaires got married in this over-sized Treasury Edition with a cover that screams everything but wedding at you.



9. Bruce Banner and Betty Ross

The Incredible Hulk got married, although his wife later died due to his gamma radiation. Poor Hulk.



10. Rick Jones and Marlo Chandler

Now we get down to some of the more obscure characters to non-comic-readers. Rick Jones is one of the Hulk's friends and he got married a while back in undoubtedly the funniest wedding comic I've ever read (courtesy of writer Peter David), which also featured a cameo from Neil Gaiman's Death.



11. Donna Troy and Terry Long

Donna Troy, aka The Teen Titans' Wonder Girl, got married to dull non-superhero Terry Long back in the '80s.



12. Yellowjacket and The Wasp

Yellowjacket (aka Hank Pym aka Ant-Man aka Giant-Man aka Goliath) married his girlfriend The Wasp, in one of those weddings you hear about where a python tries to crush the bride. Don't worry, the animal wasn't hurt.



13. The Flash and Iris West

I've not actually read this one, but I wouldn't reach that magic 13 without it, and it's got a cool cover, so let's include it.