6 Other Marvel Cartoon Ideas, If We’re Gonna Get Weird With It
A couple weeks ago, Marvel and Hulu announced an animated partnership with a truly weird lineup of shows. Howard the Dark? Hit-Monkey? M.O.D.O.K.? A random team up of Dazzler and Tigra? There is no logic in this place! Clearly the driving force behind these shows was to get as esoteric as possible. They wanted to get weird with it!
So let’s get weird with it, too!
This is already pretty weird
I will readily grant that whoever came up with these show ideas picked some truly wild characters. But they’re only scratching the surface of how weird Marvel can get! Join me after the jump as I put my extensive comic book knowledge to the test and come up with six other Marvel cartoon ideas, if we’re gonna get weird with it!
New Detective Pikachu Trailer Threatens My Sanity
I have been a fan of pokemon since Red/Blue, when I randomly decided to get the game for my old school original Game Boy after reading a magazine article. I’ve played every main generation…though I completely avoided the card game, all spin-off video games and barely watched the anime. So maybe I’m not the world’s biggest fan.
But the very existence of the Detective Pikachu movie is blowing my freakin’ mind!
This is pure madness. How else do you explain this trailer? All those realistic looking pokemon! All those surprises! And I love that song! That this movie exists, and could be amazing, and could kick off a whole new franchise of realistic live action pokemon movies, is just the sweetest idea ever.
Though I don’t really like Ryan Reynolds as the voice of Pikachu.
Also, somebody ask me about my Master Six pokemon fan fiction. I’ve been sitting on those ideas since I was a teenager writing fan fiction.
—————————–
In a Little More Than 2 Years, Nearly Every Single One of My Favorite Comic Book Characters Has Been Killed
As a longtime comic book reader, I have my personal list of favorite characters. Everybody has one, right? Those characters that you love to read about and see pop up in new comics. For a lot of people, their favorite characters are big name superheroes, like Spider-Man or Batman. For me, I tend to prefer the smaller supporting characters. That’s just what happens when you read a lot of comics and are exposed to a lot of characters.
As such, when I started this blog back in 2011, one of my earliest Lists of Six was my top six favorite comic book characters of all-time. With the exception of one name, that list has remained pretty firm over the past eight years.
In the past two years and a couple months, nearly every character on that list has been killed. Several characters in my Honorable Mentions addendum have been killed. And a couple other characters I love have either been killed or nearly killed within this time frame.
I don’t…I don’t know what’s going on.
I don’t presume to think this is some sort of targeted attack on yours truly. I think this is just the unfortunate cost of loving minor comic book characters, the sorts of characters that can be chewed up and spit out as any given writer sees fit.
But damn, this has been pretty hard on the soul.
And I guess I just felt like listing them off, as if that would help me somehow. Let’s start with my favorite characters list:
Multiple Man was killed in Death of X #1 in October 2016.
He’s still dead. Multiple Man has returned to comics, replaced by one of his duplicates. And his character has been re-written as a feckless coward. So that’s some good salt in the wound.
The Mimic was killed in Extermination #5 in December 2018.
This one was really disappointing. He made a surprise appearance in Extermination after being out of comics for a few years. I knew from the moment he appeared that he probably wouldn’t survive the series, and I had to wait several months for those fears to be confirmed.
Phil Urich was killed in Amazing Spider-Man #797 in March 2018.
Phil was my favorite superhero as a kid, and the first comic I actively started collecting on my own, issue-by-issue. I endured years of him being transformed into an unrepentant villain before they finally put him out of his misery.
Tim Drake was killed in Detective Comics #940 in September 2016.
Thankfully, his death was a fake out. He survived and returned to service shortly thereafter. He’s even gone back to being just “Robin” instead of the far more ridiculous “Red Robin”. So there’s at least one happy ending in this list.
That’s it for my list of favorites. I listed “Robin” on that list as more of the concept of the character. Damian Wayne, the current Robin, is still alive…but if I’m being honest, he hasn’t really been ‘Robin’ in a long time. The concept of ‘Batman and Robin’ as a team is pretty dead. So does that count? Not to mention that Damian was killed in early 2013. So for a short while there, Robin was dead.
The Spot is also still alive, but he’s the one character I would probably take off my list of favorites. I’ve always been a big fan of the Spot, and will always be a big fan of the Spot, but there are characters I like better. Which is probably why he’s still alive.
How about some of those Honorable Mentions at the bottom of the page?
Mach X was killed in Thunderbolts #12 in April 2017.
Technically speaking, we didn’t see a body, and that’s usually a good sign they might come back. But we haven’t seen Abner Jenkins since then, so he’s as good as dead.
The Scorpion was maybe killed in Venom Annual #1 in October 2018.
I’m not too sure about this one. It does appear that Venom kills the Scorpion, but then Scorpion has been showing up in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man recently. I may have to check and see if there’s an explanation.
Strong Guy was killed in Uncanny X-Men #12 in February 2019.
This is the most recent, and inspired this list. Strong Guy is Multiple Man’s best friend, and one of my favorite duos in comics. And now they’re both dead, and neither one particularly cares about the other these days. So just bleakness all around.
Avalanche was killed in Uncanny Avengers #1 in October 2012.
That happened a year after I started my blog and he’s still dead. The recent X-Men Gold comic introduced a new Avalanche, but I didn’t read it, and I’m pretty sure the character didn’t stick around. The X-Men have since ignored the new Pyro also, and he joined the X-Men towards the end of that comic. So that’s not looking good.
That’s the major list. Eight of my favorite comic book characters have been killed since I started this blog, most of them within the past two years or so. And only one of them has been properly ‘resurrected’ in that time. It’s just a little soul-crushing.
That’s not counting the time Stingray was nearly killed in a recent Avengers comic. Or the speculation that Simon Baz, my favorite Green Lantern, is probably going to be killed in Heroes in Crisis.
I don’t have any larger point to make. And I’m largely just whining. But c’mon. There’s only so much my soul can take. Is it really so wrong to have favorite comic book characters? Is there somebody specifically targeting me?
When will it stop?
All I really know is that Beta Ray Bill had better be very careful now that he’s a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s almost no way he’s going to survive that comic.
——————————-
Hench-Sized Comic Book Reviews – 2/23/19
Last week had a bunch of comics; this week, not so many. Such is the ups and downs of buying and reviewing comic books! I love it, you love it, and we can’t live without it.
Like I said, not many comics this week, especially since I’ve dropped both Aquaman and Catwoman from DC Comics. Catwoman was good, Aquaman was not, but neither of them held my attention all that well. Marvel put out some comics this week, with Comic Book of the Week easily going to Unstoppable Wasp again for a great follow-up issue.
It’s on!
Meanwhile, I watched Umbrella Academy on Netflix and it was really good. I highly recommend it. I never read the comic, so I can’t compare them. But it was a fun TV show.
Comic Reviews: Guardians of the Galaxy #2, Uncanny X-Men #12 and Unstoppable Wasp #5.
Strong Guy Watch: He’s Dead
Welp, Strong Guy is dead. Remember last summer, when I was worried that he would be sacrificed in that New Mutants mini-series? Only for him to survive? Welp, that didn’t last long. The moment he returns following that mini-series, he’s needlessly killed.
Strong Guy takes the brunt of a bomb in this week’s Uncanny X-Men issue.
The issue, of course, ignores any response from Wolfsbane or Havok to the death of Strong Guy
There didn’t need to be a bomb. And he didn’t need to sacrifice himself. Neither is intrinsically important to the story at hand. It just happens. Maybe to raise the stakes of the story? Maybe to underline how dark and gritty it is?
I don’t know and I’m starting to not care. Just kill everybody I love. Why not? What have you got to lose? Just kill’em all and bask in the awesome writing skill of killing characters!
That’s how you know it’s a good comic. If a lot of characters are killed, then it’s a good comic. That’s a rule of making comics. Right? Surely that’s right.
This isn’t the end of Strong Guy Watch. It’ll come back in a year or two when he’s resurrected. Because that’s the other god damned rule: characters don’t stay dead. Unless they’re Multiple Man, my all-time favorite comic book character. When he’s killed…no wait, hold off for a second. He’s actually been killed several times now. When he was killed the last time, he’s stayed dead, and Marvel has instead put a puppet in his place.
So no, my favorite comic book characters don’t get resurrected. They get replaced by a mocking simulacrum.
There is no joy in Mudville.
———————-
Henchman-4-Hire 