The Gold Standard #10

Columns

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Got to thinking last week about wasted potential. Let’s not get into the origins of the thought, because nobody needs to hear that, trust me, but it shifted onto me reading and shaking my head at some things I saw. Understand, I love the concept of bringing a new, original character. It strengthens the industry, and it adds to the universe. At the same time, existing characters don’t need to be cast aside in favor of them. There’s room for everyone, you just need to know how to treat them. The names Carter Hall, Jason Todd, Ray Terrill, Captain Atom, Jade, Gypsy, Aztek, Captain Ultra, Dane Whitman, The Slingers, X-Statix, and so many others all come to mind immediately, but I’ve decided to settle on just five of them for the time being.

So what would I do to revitalize some existing characters to make them work in the current product?

5. Hank Pym – With the reveal of Skrullowjacket Hank Pym is left in a precarious position. He’s technically been off the radar for almost four years now since he was replaced, and it’s not impossible to assume that one of the last minute things to happen in Secret Invasion will be his phoenix like return to save the day (that one’s for you Digits!). So what if that wound up being the case? What can you do with Hank Pym right now that wouldn’t have worked a few years ago?

He’d be a legitimate world saving war hero, which would be enough to push him over his usual hump of “I slapped my wife around once in the eighties and nobody has ever forgotten it”. Sure he wouldn’t have been the man that came up with the Fifty State Initiative, or the hundred ideas with Reed and Tony, but he’ll still be Hank Pym. One of the greatest, and most under rated, scientific minds in the Marvel universe.

His time with the Skrulls will be explained to have given him a grander understanding of their science, which would allow him to push human science forwards decades, if not centuries, as he reproduces it on Earth. Suddenly space travel and colonization become the present instead of the future, terraforming worlds a possibility instead of a dream. Earth would finally grow into super power throughout the galaxy, as opposed to a world that births super humans that occasionally take down extra terrestrial armys.

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Take a nice long look, I’m throwing your ass in the lab

Something else that comes out of this is that Hank will return and NEED Jan. She’ll have been his whole reason for wanting to survive and come home. His new status as the hero of the Skrull War will be openly driven by his love for his ex-wife. A driving motivation for the man, not the hero. Keep in mind that these are two characters that were quite literally made for each other, so a world without the two of them together just wouldn’t be right, especially if we’re trying to reach Hank’s full potential. It would supply the perfect backdrop for the next stage of my plan.

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Ultron: About the only bad guy I’d put High Pockets back in the spandex for

There is no Giant Man, no Ant Man, no Goliath, no Yellowjacket. From now on there would be just Dr. Henry Pym. One of the ideas from Countdown that I actually liked was that there was an Earth out there where Ray Palmer was just Ray, not the Atom. I’m going to cop that idea for Hank. After all he’s been through, he has no problems with heroes, and his best friends and allies are all in that line of work. But not him. He’ll retire his Pym Particles to make way for new heroes to take his place (Eric O’Grady and Cassie Lang immediately come to mind), and take up a place in the Marvel universe where he’ll strictly handle science.

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The Ant-Man name is in good hands

You might call that a waste of a hero, but I think it’s a much needed reinvention of a classic character. With the momentum he’d gathered in the past few years being attributed completely to a Skrull, it’s going to take something totally different to help him get it back. This is the perfect idea as it would bring him to the forefront of the Marvel universe in a much more modern way. Play on his strengths and take full advantage of them, and leave us with a repaired Hank Pym.

4. Dazzler – Yes, that’s right, Dazzler. The disco diva that turns her music into light shows while roller skating around. Mrs. Longshot. Ali freaking Blaire. But she’s perfect, right Amy? Not really. She has her moments, but as far as a total package goes? Not even close. She’s been revised too many times over the past few years to even be considered close to it. So what would I do?

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First off, Bendis had it right. In House of M, she was more or less that world’s Oprah. She was the premier TV personality in the entire world. Everybody watched it, everybody wanted to be at it, and she was beloved by the entire world. Well, why not carry that over? Right now Brubaker and Fraction are trying to rekindle her former rock star persona in their run on Uncanny, and there’s talk that Warren Ellis is going to use her on Astonishing. Well, what about the spring board effect?

A little attention paid to her right now could be enough to boost her popularity over the long haul, to develop her more believably into a mass media crossover celebrity instead of just some rock diva. She’s not a super hero, which is key to remember when revamping her, as it’s something that would be detrimental to the character to shift her into. She’s a pop culture icon, a phenomenon. She’s Ali Blaire.

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Make her into every female celebrity rolled into one. A focal point of the media, a role model to kids, a complete PR crossover star. A mutant completely beloved by humans and mutants alike. Baby steps.

But as a friend of mine was quick to remind me, this doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do the super hero thing, just that she would continue the whole ‘reluctant hero’ thing she had going during her disco days. Her powers give her a near unlimited amount of power, and that could be abused constantly. In fact, a recent title that could set a good thematic example is Dan Slott’s She Hulk. It was about a super hero who was doing what she wanted, what she was best at, and the super heroing just kept falling into her lap whether she wanted it or not. Same thing would happen for Dazzler.

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Sure she’s not the most important character in the world, but she has potential to be so much more then she is, and that alone makes her worth nothing.

3. Victor Stone – Vic is in a spot where it’s not so much that something is wrong with him as a character as the problem is that he’s still treated as one of the Teen Titans. And worse than that, he’s not even treated as the smart one; he’s treated as the one that can get blown up and not die. That’s hardly an endearing spot for any character to be in. The expendable immortal. He’ll always have a purpose, but his true potential will stay just out of reach.

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How do you fix that though? What hole can he be fit into in the DC Universe where he would be able to thrive without stepping on toes? Well, that’s actually quite simple. Meltzer tried to establish in his first few issues of JLA that Vic was ready, yet he didn’t get the call. What if he did? What if he got that chance call about Justice League membership? He would immediately become the tech guy of the team, refitting their computers and defenses, and could quite literally become their computer system. Much like he did during Teen Titans.

At the same time, it would be entirely possible for him to take on the role of the team strategist. Despite not having the experience of Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, or even the Black Canary, Vic has something at his disposal that the others lack. A clear and calculating computer mind, one that’s meshed perfectly with the human portions of it. He can run scenarios and break down every situation they might come across to a degree that the mere mortal mind can’t. Also, you know, he’s expendable and immortal. That does come in handy.

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Contradict myself? Moi? Not at all. It’s a great ability, you just can’t base his entire existence around it. Yet seemingly every Titans re-launch, or reboot, or time skip of the past ten years has featured Vic getting blown up, or posessed, or more or less just fucked up or over in some way. Think I’m kidding? Check the list.

JLA/Titans had Vic show back up on Earth with his personality dormant, abducting other Titans to give them peace. It ended with him in a gold body that he remained in until getting back his human form a few years later. He would up stuck in his classic form during a Flash story where he co-starred.

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Young Justice/Titans: Graduation Day featured yet another maiming of Vic after Indigo linked up with his system. When the new Teen Titans series launched with him as leader/mentor, he spent the first few issues in a robo-wheel chair and getting put back together.

During Infinite Crisis he was fused with Firestorm, and didn’t wake up until One Year Later where he had to help this new Titans team pull it together despite having just lost a year.

Eventually he left to form Titans East only to, guess what, BE BLOWN UP THE FIRST DAY! This led into the current Titans series.

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I bet you this would happen maybe a third as often if he were on the JLA

Come to think of it, putting Vic onto the JLA might do wonders for his repair bills. Red Tornado might get slagged left and right, but he’s more death prone than anything else. Vic has a survival instinct……actually, maybe getting off the Titans would be the cure to that problem.

2. Ben Reilly – In the post One More Day world, there are few things in 616 that make Spider-Man worth a damn. That said, now is when we need the return…..the return of the clone. Although it’s not for the reasons that people would think.

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A little history lesson for those who need it, but about thirteen years ago Marvel had a problem. See, they wanted to wipe out Peter and Mary Jane’s marriage but had no idea how to do it. Editorial felt that Spider-Man had been aged too far and was losing his mainstream appeal, that people were losing touch with the aging, darkening hero. So they came up with this idea that the clone from the 70’s had survived and that he was actually the real Peter Parker. They’d do the reveal, do some shuffling, and bam, we have a single Spider-Man with no drama.

Sound at all familiar?

I thought so.

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The reason Ben didn’t work was not because he was a clone of Peter Parker, it was because he was being used as a reset button for the character. Nobody wanted to see Peter get reset, nobody wanted to see the writers retreat away from all of the growth the character had seen, they just didn’t know how to accomplish the goal they wanted. Ben just happened to represent the thing people didn’t want to see happen, and he wound up being the failed One More Day of the 90’s.

Thing is, Ben as a character? Absolutely nothing wrong with him. At all. He was a Spider-Man that loved his job, who accepted his place in the world for what it was. He knew he was a clone, and yet he still tried to go on with his life. He ran away to give Peter the rights to their life, and even when he was revealed as the ‘one true Peter Parker’, he still maintained his Ben Reilly identity. Make sense? They used him to reboot Spider-Man, and didn’t make him Peter Parker. One of the reasons it didn’t succeed. Ben was deemed a failure and killed off and hasn’t been mentioned since the late 90’s.

Ben deserves more than that. He was a great character in his own right, used for the wrong reasons, and slagged as the blame for the failure of the execution.

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Bringing him back is simple, to be completely honest. Due the typical Norman Osborn reveal where we find out that sometime between him beating Ben, and him showing up with the beaten body in front of Peter, that he swapped the body with another clone. Just to get under Peter’s skin more when Ben sacrificed himself, after all, that’s the kind of villain that Norman is. Lock Ben away as a weapon to be used against Peter later on, bide his time. Just like with Gwen’s twins. This is the kind of fucked up shit Norman does.

Kaine would have to play a part as well, seeing as how he just sorta vanished off-panel one day never to be seen again. We bring him back, and he’s the one that finds Ben. Hell, have him find Ben AND the Spider-Baby. Kaine releases them, informs Ben of what’s happened in Peter’s life and how despite the rest of the world not remembering, he does. Ben does too, he remembers everything to happen up until Norman dangled his beaten body over New York, which is when he was put in the tube. Told that he is the last hope his niece has for a normal life, he does the one thing he knows how to do.

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He takes the baby and moves out West, as Kaine vanishes back into the shadows. Ben becomes the single dad super hero, dealing with a two year old niece that no one else knows even exists, one that he would name Gwen and pass off as his own daughter. He’d find work as a school teacher and fight crime in his off time as the Scarlet Spider, or even as Spider-Man using his suit made of pure unadulterated awesomeness. We’d see the creation of a new rogues gallery, and returns by old characters seemingly long forgotten. It could have a 90’s feel, and a classic Spider-Man feel, and it wouldn’t impede on anything happening in Brand New Crapfest.

And it would bring Ben back with a purpose, which means everybody wins.

1. Nate Grey – Now, more than ever, mutant kind needs a savior. Someone that represents hope, the future. Nate would make a miraculous return that would immediately boost him to messiah levels of popularity among both mutants and humans, “The Church of Grey” becoming huge over night as Nate’s death and return is almost Christ like. Aged to about 25, and returned to his more classic long haired look (of course, with a pair of jeans and a black t shirt with a big white x on it, his new look). Nate would pave the path towards the future as he returns to a world he once made his own, who he died saving, that is no longer what he remembers of it. He wouldn’t enjoy his popularity, mainly for the reasons behind it, and just wants to get reacquainted with the world he left.

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For real

First four issues would cover his return to life. The first issue would be a look at the mutant race as a collective, a narrarator speaking of individuals and groups, of hopes and dreams, of lives breaking and mending. The latter half of the issue would show the X-Teams in various meetings, eventually coming to a fight scene between the Astonishing X-Men and a group of Sentinels (if Sentinels are around at the time, if not, use Purifiers, Reavers, or other mutant hating group of humans. Must be human.), during a moment of weakness the X-Men find themselves almost defeated, seconds from death. The narrator would say that this is the last straw, and this one action must be the sign that it is time to once again get involved. In a flash of light and power, he would return to save the day. A last page reveal of Nate standing in the air, looking lost.

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“And now I am returned……but where have I been? How long has it been? Scott? Where’s Jean?”

The second issue would consist of him freaking out and running away from the X-Men, not recognizing the majority of them and fearing he’s fallen into another dimension. He’d find out about the Avengers, the Mutants, the Skrulls, all of the events to occur since 2003(?), and would even seek out his friend Peter Parker only to discover that somehow Peter doesn’t remember him. This would, of course, be because Nate remembers Peter and his wife, and the time he spent with them.

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Third issue would be the public discovering his return and reacting to it, after all, Captain Marvel proved that people react to this sort of thing. Nate would do an interview and say exactly what has happened to him, and it would resonate his celebrity status.

Fourth issue would be his confrontation with a figure from his path, Xavier. Given Xavier’s status in Legacy it wouldn’t be hard pressed to figure that these two would have a knockdown, drag out fight over the astral plane, The conclusion of which would set Nate’s new status quo as a figure head in the mutant community, as Xavier had been before,

The next handful of issues would be him making his place in this new world and dealing with his growing legion of followers, a group he’s not too fond of. Keep in mind, he doesn’t think that he did anything special. He saved the world, died, and was able to come back. He doesn’t see the religious angles of that (as he grew up in the AoA), and is dumbfounded by the churches popping up. Rather than let his ego go to his head though, he just keeps doing what he knows is right, and does his best to save the world from itself.

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The new standard outfit, minus an X

So come issue eight we’re seeing a very different Nate then we had when he first returned in issue one. He’s once again the lost boy, which is huge for him. He has a following that spreads like wildfire, completely out of control, and despite their worship of him, he holds no power over them. Villains (Magneto) would seek to guide him along their path of choice as the X-Men attempted the same thing. Nate would be torn between being left alone and choosing a side, not so much the good and evil. Just a twist of his ever evolving character, given his experiences; the time in the Age of Apocalypse for the most part, Nate would have a very different concept of right and wrong. Not to the degree where he’ll start killing people, but that he’ll understand that sometimes the ends justify the means. That sometimes bending and breaking the rules that stand between you and your goals isn’t always a bad thing.

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In then end though, he’d just be Nate. A stranger in a strange land, where the faces are all the same, but the people are all new and different. He’d pave his own path through life as the most powerful mutant in existence, trying his hardest to discover just who he is supposed to do, and how to pave his way to his own destiny.

……and maybe have him hook up with Boom Boom. Just maybe.
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And then I said what?

Superman is far and away the best he’s been in years thanks to the help of several of the writers to pass through his office in the past few years (Greg Rucka, James Robinson, some of Busiek’s), but a large part of that has been Action Comics under the pen of Geoff Johns. His love of the character radiates from every page, and while he suffers the most from the Silver Age revival I mentioned not too long ago, he makes it work. Looking over the plots of his stories at their most basic is enough to make eyes roll as it just feels like he’s telling stories from his younger years….well, actually, he’s doing just that. Superman has returned to a very classic feel between the return of HIS Legion, evil scientist Luthor, and Supergirl at his side, and yet, the book feels modern. That’s hard to do, and most creators fail, but Johns has managed to take concepts that shouldn’t work in todays continuity according to some writers and editors, and make them work flawlessly. That said, the highlight of this book is the art of Gary Frank, who was absolutely born to draw Superman.

Also, who else saw the death of Pa Kent coming the second they read the solicit? With everything that’s been done to make the book feel like the old movie (Superman and Lois look like Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder for fucks sake), was it any wonder that Pa’s death was far behind? I’m not sure how I feel about it yet, but I’ll give Johns the benefit of the doubt. Always loved Pa though.

Finally got Invincible! And loved it, as usual. Absolutely love how the Mark and Eve romance is playing out, and it feels so much better for the sake of the book then Mark and Amber did. Not only are they best friends in their personal lives, but also in their costumed ones. The relationship works on so many fundamental levels that I just know Kirkman is going to do something to screw with it just for the hell of it. I just hope it lasts, they’re a fun couple and comics doesn’t have too many of those these days.

Picked up Original Sin this week and thought one thing about it was kinda funny. Daniel Way is writing the book about telling the secrets in Wolverine’s origin, and yet the Mike Carey written part of the book did a better origin reveal for Wolverine then I’d seen Way do during my entire time actually reading the book regularly. And Carey had limited page space since he was sharing it with Way and a back up story. You go Mike Carey!

I’m sitting here right now watching X-Men: The Animated Series on Toon Disney. I remember watching this every day after school, and every Saturday morning. I loved this show and it helped mold me as an X-Men fan. I watched a few bootlegs during college and never really managed to get back into it, but now? I remember watching Spider-Man a few years back and not being able to sit through it, it was just that horrible. But X-Men? It’s still good. It’s actually aged well, and I’m glad. Kinda like Gargoyles. Come to think of it, release X-Men on DVD, and finish collecting Gargoyles.

Speaking of Gargoyles, I’ve spent the past God only know how many months checking Diamond every week waiting for the next issue of Gargoyles only to find out a few days ago that the license lapsed. No new issues, maybe a trade collecting the last few issues of the run. Drives me nuts, I mean, the book was great. It felt like the show, it looked like the show, and I enjoyed every issue. I hate saying that I don’t like the smaller publishers, but it just drives me mad. It’s rare that I venture outside of Marvel, DC, or Image, so it kinda bummed me out that my first experience with SLG ended like this.

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Speaking of revamps though, Green Arrow and Wally West are in dire need of appropriate work done to them before they need them. Green Arrow has been needing one since the current book launched, as Winnick more or less slaughtered momentum and good story telling, oddly enough, two things I thought he handled nicely during his run on the previous Green Arrow title come the end. Flash, on the other hand, recently had a good story by Tom Peyer who was suddenly pulled off the book? He was doing a good job, his arc was fun, why couldn’t he just have stayed?

Two weeks in a row I’ve had to deal with not having one of my favorite books having a shipping delay, so no Spider-Girl. Expect a future column on her though. After all, May’s my girl.

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Almost bought an issue of Legion of Super Heroes in the 31ST Century this week because I saw Booster Gold on the cover. Was a very hard choice, I mean, you have to understand. I impulse buy everything with Booster in it. Hell, I pre-ordered the DC Universe Classics 7 wave because it comes with TWO different versions of Booster. Of course, Captain Cold, Blue Beetle, and the Atom Smasher build a figure helped.

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You know what show needs to either be back right now or just start having longer seasons? The Venture Brothers. It’s got this amazing way of doing deep long term story telling without leaving you completely lost. Very well written, obviously thought out far in advance, and easily the best show on Adult Swim. I might love Harvey Birdman, but GO TEAM VENTURE!

What I read last week:

  • Action Comics
  • Detective Comics
  • Final Crisis Revelations
  • Green Lantern
  • Green Lantern Corps
  • Secret Six
  • Invincible
  • Deadpool
  • Invincible Iron Man
  • X-Men: Original Sin

My pick of the week: Green Lantern and Action Comics

What am I watching?

  • WWE Raw
  • South Park
  • Entourage
  • Dexter
  • Family Guy
  • American Dad
  • Chuck
  • Heroes
  • Knight Rider
  • The Amazing Race
  • Venture Bros

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The Gold Standard

A lifelong reader and self proclaimed continuity guru, Grey is the Editor in Chief of Comics Nexus. Known for his love of Booster Gold, Spider-Girl (the real one), Stephanie Brown, and The Boys. Don't miss The Gold Standard.