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Olav Bakken
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Posted: 29 May 2015 at 6:02am | IP Logged | 1  

Readers were used to see villains like Doctor Octopus and the Owl having a lot of minions and henchmen around. Then someone probably asked "where do they find all their employees?", and decided to make a story about it in Avengers, where we in issue 196 meets the Taskmaster and the Solomon Institute for the Criminally Insane. He is the leader of a whole industry that recruit and train people for future employment amongst criminals.

Marvel and DC differs from other present comic book publishers because of their long history and dominant position through the years.

During all the stories told, there have been villains who have been prisoned, heroes and vigilantes who have ended up dead or at hospitals where they have been given medical treatment, and alien invasions and other incidents where someone would have to clean up the mess after their failed plans.

It would be logical if they took blood and other tissue samples from all the beings with superhuman powers. And after all that time there should be a considerable collection of material from numerous specimens which geneticists and other scientists can work on (in addition to various forms of technology).

In Civil War there is a Thor clone, but who says everything has to be about clones? If we pretend there is an organization or a branch of the government that has all this genetic information stored somewhere, they could story the DNA and come up with some creations on their own.

There should even be genetic information from individuals that have gone through major transformations during the years. Take Hulk for instance. He has had so many incarnations it's getting hard to count, but in issue Hulk #151, from the time when there was only Bruce Banner and the traditional green Hulk, a blood sample from Hulk was taken (and part of his blood injected into a cancer sick guy who was then transformed into a blob like mass). So what if it's still around?

I have not read all the comics from the publishers, so I don't if the concept has been explored, but I have not heard about anything like it yet. The closest thing I can think of when it comes to creating superhumans on a large scale is The World in the X-Men universe, where time goes so fast inside that a combination of eugenics, mutations and nanotechnology fused with human cells eventually produced very powerful individuals.
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Kip Lewis
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Posted: 29 May 2015 at 6:16am | IP Logged | 2  

Yeah, they dealt with this after Seige in Marvel. Bendis
wrote about it in a forgetable story in the Avengers.
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Olav Bakken
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Posted: 29 May 2015 at 6:35am | IP Logged | 3  

I suppose you are referring to The World? I seem to remember talk about a story some years ago where Norman Osborn made use of its time altering technology.
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Jack Bohn
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Posted: 29 May 2015 at 6:44am | IP Logged | 4  

There was Project Pegasus (Potential Energy Group, Alternate Sources, United States) that studied superpowers, but that seemed mostly the physics side.  Remember, even super-villains are human beings, and there is a certain squeamishness about medical experimentation.




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Kip Lewis
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Posted: 29 May 2015 at 6:51am | IP Logged | 5  

uppose you are referring to The World? I seem to
remember talk about a story some years ago where Norman
Osborn made use of its time altering technology.


No. We were introduced to a SHIELD?/HAMMER agent whose job
included collecting samples from super hero battles. She
gave Norman and Hydra the samples. Then... Well spoilers
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Olav Bakken
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Posted: 29 May 2015 at 6:58am | IP Logged | 6  

Experimenting directly on the superhumans themselves could add some useful info, but it also means limitations and other problems. I suppose also blood samples were taken during the medical experimentations, samples that can be studied decades into the future even long after the villains themselves are gone. And it should take very little space. Perhaps one could even store all the genetic information in the form of computer storage, which would allow them to recreate new material whenever it's requited.

(A little off topic, but I have noticed in some comics the kind of prison certain villains are kept in. A few are even wrapped up like a mummy. No wonder some of them goes insane.)

"We were introduced to a SHIELD?/HAMMER agent whose job
included collecting samples from super hero battles."

Sounds like the concept referred to in the original post. But was that something more recently, or something stretching back decades, and not just restricted to battles, but also included hospitals and prisons?

Edited by Olav Bakken on 29 May 2015 at 7:04am
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Brian Miller
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Posted: 29 May 2015 at 7:58am | IP Logged | 7  

Bendis wrote about it in a forgetable story in the Avengers

***********

Ah, but you remembered it.

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Kip Lewis
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Posted: 29 May 2015 at 9:30am | IP Logged | 8  

Bendis wrote about it in a forgetable story in the Avengers

***********

Ah, but you remembered it.
.........

One of the negatives of a good memory, you remember what
you don't care to remember. Though I can't totally blame
Bend is for that. The artwork was between dull and bad. A
good artist could have saved that story. Well maybe not,
by then his writing had gotten stake and Norman Osborn
story had been dragged out all beyond its expiration point.
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Olav Bakken
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Posted: 01 June 2015 at 9:05am | IP Logged | 9  

In other words, its full potential was ignored, or at least not fully realized. Too bad.

A secret national archive full of genetic info collected from numerous sources from the past to the present could for instance be used as an explanation from where new superheroes came from.
(Alternatively it could be a science version of Warehouse 13.)

As already mentioned, Hulk could benefit from it, depending on which incarnation you prefer. I heard Byrne's original intention when separating Banner and Hulk was to restore Banner's genes to a pre-Hulk state and let him become the original Hulk once more. But since that procedure has already been used, another technique would have to be used instead.

Should you wish to reintroduce the Hulk from the 70s, then give him a genetic disease that makes his cell division system to gradually shut down and the remaining cells die. Use the genetic info extracted from blood samples taken only a few years after he first became Hulk to produce stem cells, inject them into his body and let the new (old) cells replace the existing damaged ones and flush them out of his system or something. That way you could kind of forget what had been done with the character the last couple of decades. But it all depends on what Marvel's intention with their characters are.

(Also, if some prefer a specific incarnation of Hulk like Joe Fixit, you could just come up with a new character with similar personality and body trait, and a different origin, but not too similar like the Red Hulk.)
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Stephen Churay
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Posted: 01 June 2015 at 11:24am | IP Logged | 10  

I've never really thought about this. It's always been
enough to know minions just exist.
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John Byrne
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Posted: 01 June 2015 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | 11  

Readers were used to see villains like Doctor Octopus and the Owl having a lot of minions and henchmen around. Then someone probably asked "where do they find all their employees?", and decided to make a story about it in Avengers, where we in issue 196 meets the Taskmaster and the Solomon Institute for the Criminally Insane. He is the leader of a whole industry that recruit and train people for future employment amongst criminals.

•••

This is the kind of question that used to be asked and answered in fanzines, and that was where such questions and answers belonged, NOT in the books themselves.

Unfortunately, some of the people who worked in those fanzines started working in the comics and, unfortunately, proved unable to check their fan mentality at the door.

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Olav Bakken
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Posted: 01 June 2015 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | 12  

"Unfortunately, some of the people who worked in those fanzines started working in the comics"

I was an eager comic book reading kid when those kind of answers/questions started to appear now and then in comics. And it has been there ever since.
It appears it was that sort of "what if" question which became the foundation for Civil War: "what do the taxpayers have to say about paying for all the damage on public property when superhumans clash together, what does the politicians think about them flying around in the city like that without any given permission to do so, what happens if innocent people are killed when buildings are accidental demolished?"

Still, I'm pretty sure there are some of the old blood samples taken from Hulk in his early days still laying around in some lab.

(I also seem to remember that the death of Gwen Stacy was explained as a broken neck years later because it had been pointed out by fans in the letter column or something)
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