The ORIGINAL plans for Bat-Rogues before NML (plus: Wizard mag's "report: on Arkham Asylum)

[about_faces]

While I was recently spelunking through the world's most awesome hellhole of a comic shop, I found a copy of Wizard Magazine's all-villain issue, The Dark Book. Specifically, Dark Book '98, their follow-up issue.

I used to be an avid Wizard reader, but gave up due to a combination of the internet and the fact that they were doing shit like this

Comments

[box_in_the_box]

Dark Book '98 was brilliant. I actually created an entire reformed JLA-style superhero team out of the 10 worst supervillains that they listed.

[about_faces]

That was the closest the book came to the mean-spirited nature of Wizard that turned me off the magazine in general (being a Hal fan at the time didn't help either). Even then, it was still a good feature, but I have to raise issues with them including Clock King. Yes, his costume and methods were silly, but his origin is excellent. Henchgirl was reading their description of his origin, and going, "What the hell, this is a great origin! I want to see somebody actually explore this!"

Kite-Man and Turtle Man, on the other hand, I cannot defend. Nor the Duke of Oil, but I still love him anyway.

[box_in_the_box]

Bullshit. I can defend all fucking three.

The Duke of Oil? He's a regressive redneck oil tycoon who's just found out that, to paraphrase RDJ, he went full Deckard a while back and didn't even know it. How does a guy who, if his character was created today, would be a full-fledged Randroid Tea Party member, cope with knowing he's merely an AI copy of an actual human being, when he doesn't even believe in evolution, or anything else other than the Invisible Hand and bootstraps? Robots have even less civil rights in superhero comics universes than blacks or Muslims have in a post-9/11 world, so now HE'S the minority.

The Turtle? Yeah, he's slow, but if we give him the advantages of his namesake, without making him a mutant or some other such genetically derived superhuman, he's a dude who Tony Starked his own goddamn armor, capable of withstanding undersea pressures, and judging from the meager resources we see that he possesses, he might as well have built it IN A CAVE!!! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!! Oh, yeah, and it also alters the

[about_faces]

You're so awesome, Box. Why can't more actual comic writers have your kind of imagination? I've always said, there are no bad characters, just bad writers.

[box_in_the_box]

You think that's cool, check this out:

Over on the Parodyverse, me and my fellow writers cooked up a government-goes-after-all-the-superheroes-and-forces-them-to-register-or-be-declared-outlaws line-wide story back in 2006, the same year that Marvel debuted Civil War. No big deal, right? We are the Parodyverse, after all. Except that we started posting with the first chapters of our story several months before the first issue of Civil War hit the stands

[lego_joker]

Nice.

Now come up with a defense for Ra's al Ghul.

[box_in_the_box]

I like Ra's, when they're not relying so much on the Lazarus Pit and adding new daughters to his family willy-nilly. Ra's is like Videodrome; he's dangerous because he has a PHILOSOPHY, and when he's written right, it should be one that has some merit to it. I like supervillains (and superheroes) with philosophies, because then, instead of their motivations simply being petty greed, random insanity or a campaign of revenge against their foes, it becomes about their political, social and/or religious agendas. They do what they do, not even so much because they want power for THEMSELVES, as because they want the WORLD to be a certain way. Magneto and the Red Skull are obvious examples of this, but even Doom and Luthor believe that they should be in charge because they know what's best for everyone else (indeed, especially as written by Paul Cornell, Luthor is a Miltonian Lucifer figure, who explicitly states that, within the DC Universe, "Atheism isn't a LOGICAL choice, but it is the most ETHICAL choice").