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]

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 flow of time around him. Motherfucker is a deep-sea-diving Iron Man with the brain for relativity physics of Reed Richards, and what makes the whole thing worse is that he is inhumanly patient.

And Kite Man? Ever hear of BASE jumping? There are assholes in superhero comics whose entire gimmick revolves around having jet-packs or Nth-metal wings that allow them to fly, but Kite Man thinks they're all fucking pussies, because he can take off into the air from ANY platform with nothing more than some fabric and some twine. Think your fortress has security? Give Kite Man a body heat-masking one-piece, and he'll sail right past your fucking defenses, because there's no thermal engine signature or metal or even SIZE to call attention to him on most advanced electronic counter-surveillance, because he can fly by you on a kite that's smaller than a modestly sized flock of birds. Think you can take him out in aerial combat? Only if manage to land a shot, and he's so goddamn maneuverable that the Batplane, or even Hawkman, trying to catch him would be like William "the Refrigerator" Perry chasing after a ballerina. Kite Man will not only fuck you up, he'll also humiliate you simply by virtue of making you lose a fight to KITE MAN, after which he'll fly into your bedroom window and fuck your woman. With a penis that's shaped like a kite. Because that's how he rolls. He's the goddamn MACGYVER of flight.

[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.

My contribution? Part of my superhero character's background was that his dad was a sheriff on a Native American reservation, so when the government started trying to impose superhero registration, my character and his dad persuaded several Native American tribes to confer honorary tribal membership to any number of superheroes, thus putting them legally out of reach of the U.S. government's regulations. And since my character was anti-authoritarian as fuck, he informed the government representatives of this development with a message that ended with the words CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST FUCKHOLES HAHAHAHAHA.

[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").