This week's collection of whimsical and curious stories will once more come as a book review. As usual, we will dive into the silly and obscure and make sure to keep the educational value of this episode to a minimum to balance last week's history lesson on the South Sea bubble.
The Legion of regrettable superheroes - The Marvel universe is home to a library of over 7000 characters covering more than 80 years of comic books and ensuring a steady flow of blockbuster movies each year. However, as should be expected with so many unique heroes, villains, sidekicks, and henchmen, the bottom of the barrel is vast and filled with some obscure and strange humans, animals, aliens, and "others". Jon Morris, today's featured author, is an expert on comic books and has gifted us with a look at the most obscure characters populating the nether regions of this vast universe. In "The Legion of regrettable superheroes", he pays tribute to them and (re)introduces us to long forgotten heroes and villains who each in their own special way have failed entirely to stand the test of time. This newsletter will highlight some of the most regrettable among them:
The heroes - Along with all characters in Morris' book, the superheroes all come with great powers (but were crafted with questionable responsibility). An exception to this rule is Red Bee, a district attorney in cape who dispenses justice courtesy of a single trained bee called Michael living in his belt buckle. This being the 1940s, he naturally fights gangsters and Nazis. He is, of course, not to be confused with Bee Man, a character more akin to Batman, but with bees. Naturally, there are also more conventional heroic tandems along the lines of Batman and Robin. Enter: Barry Kuda and his sidekick Algie who, rather unsurprisingly, fight criminals and Nazis underwater. However, every Achilles has his heel and Morris notes that Algie's vulnerabilities are mostly related to "liquid chlorine" and "a firm and vigorous brushing". In this vast array of superheroes, even Australia fields an entry with the obviously named Kangaroo man (Wombat woman was apparently not an option in 1941 when the comic book first appeared). Though the character seems unlikely, the plot is rather predictable (the explorer Jack Brian tours the world with his pet kangaroo, "Bingo", to fight Nazis).
The villains - No respectable hero could earn his living without preventing a villain from achieving world domination. For unknown reasons, bees also feature prominently on the antagonist side. However, in keeping with the general theme, these are Nazi bees called the Swarm. While "the Swarm" would make a great title for a Marvel movie, the other villains in this list have not been gifted with cinema-ready names (e.g., Generic Man, and The Dude). The same is probably true for Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, a supervillain from the DC Universe and antagonist to the Doom Patrol. As hinted at by his name, his superpower is the ability to change any part of his body into the form of any animal, vegetable, and mineral (including all at once). In the same vein, it is worth drawing attention to Brick Bat, a villain who dresses like Batman but has opted for bricks as his exclusive weapon of choice.
Finally, there is Ambush Bug, who appeals with a rather interesting back story: He (it?) is an alien facing the destruction of his home world and resorts to sending his clothes across the galaxy hoping they might survive. As you would expect, his travelling wardrobe soon thereafter collides with a giant radioactive space spider and only his suit and socks survive the crash and tumble down to Earth. On Earth, they are picked up by unsuspecting Irwin Schwab giving him an array of perplexing super powers (from invulnerability to confusion).
Although we might laugh at some of these characters and their exceptional back stories, Morris might be offering us a glimpse into the future of superhero movies once we have all been saturated with the Avengers A-list.
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Here are links to the books:
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