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Robert Bradley
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Posted: 12 August 2018 at 10:35am | IP Logged | 1 post reply

JB drew Marvel Chillers #6, we might ask him what he was going for when he drew her-


 


Edited by Robert Bradley on 12 August 2018 at 10:36am
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Tim Cousar
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Posted: 12 August 2018 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

"Werewoman" bothered me from the first time I saw her. I knew from werewolf movies that the "were" part meant "man."
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Brian Hague
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Posted: 12 August 2018 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

You're welcome, William. Will Meugniot had an eye for the ladies, as his later work on the DNAgents and Vanity deftly displayed. He's gone on to have quite a career in animation apparently.

Tim, I agree that "were-woman" tag is unfortunate. Just a case of someone rushing into print without checking their facts, I assume. Even allowing for shifts in definition and the plasticity that comes with the prefix "were-"'s heavy use in popular fiction, the term still translates into "man-woman." Maybe there's something Marvel isn't telling us about Greer Nelson...

Joe, you're a braver man than I for trying to navigate the choppy waters surrounding Spider-Man's current continuity. I gave a graphic novel featuring him and Miles Morales a try recently and threw in the towel pretty quickly. It wasn't impenetrable, but it was too uninteresting to continue reading. 

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Rob Ocelot
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Posted: 12 August 2018 at 4:32pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

The good thing is no matter what they do to characters in the here and now or even the future it can't un-make the stories where you first encountered and fell in love with them.   Whether that's 1939, 1963, 1976 or 2018.   Every comic is someone's first.  It's probably more relevant nowadays than it ever was.

Though, the way some fans react you'd think they'd rounded up every available copy of those stories and had a big bonfire, and then wiped the minds of everyone who ever wrote or read those stories.

Don't take my word for it.   Get up from your computer, take a deep breath and go and open a box of comics or an omnibus collection.   

Yep, still there.


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Nathan Greno
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Posted: 12 August 2018 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply

"Unusual Features: Tigra has the vertically slitted pupils of a cat and orange fur all over her body."

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John Popa
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Posted: 12 August 2018 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

All this thread has done is remind me how much I hate Tigra, easily my least favorite character in Marvel Comics (at least of my vintage.) 
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Brian Hague
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Posted: 12 August 2018 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | 7 post reply

"Hate Tigra??" Cheese and crackers! You should know, John, that she always speaks very highly of you whenever your name comes up... 

Rob, I appreciate your point of view, but something is still lost in the transaction whenever a character is definitively altered in the fashion discussed here; the possibility of a next issue.

As much as I like Moore's re-interpretation of Swamp Thing and what he did with the character afterwards, we did lose that shambling, muck-encrusted mockery of the man who was once Alec Holland in the deal. Wein and Wrightson's issues still exist, but we really can't have a "next issue" featuring the character that doesn't somehow touch upon notions of godhood or Earth Elementals. Those smaller scale horror stories featuring a vagabond Alec Holland who only seeks to restore his humanity are more or less relegated to the past. While creators can play with the idea of bringing the character back, the imprint left by the Parliament of Trees and Swamp Thing's vast ecological powers still comes up again and again, regardless.

One of the best things about finding a cool character like Dr. Fate as a kid was the promise that next summer, when the JSA meet the JLA again, you'd see more of him. That's not the case so much anymore.

What's more, if you really liked that period of time when Fate was split between a mom and her disabled son, then you're almost certainly never getting that version again. Comics seem very comfortable these days with offering disparate, almost random, versions of characters and then yanking them back again, either in favor of a forced return to form or some other flavor-of-the-month approach which casts the series and characters into a bizarre new paradigm. At that point, "regular" readers are pretty much just fans of the logo and the name. 

Even those get mangled pretty severely in some of these switch-ups and changeovers. "Kymaera," anyone?

Revisiting the past by re-reading past favorites is fun, without question, but there's also something to be said for that anticipatory thrill that comes from wanting to see more of a given character.

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Andy Mokler
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Posted: 13 August 2018 at 1:40am | IP Logged | 8 post reply

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Stephen Churay
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Posted: 13 August 2018 at 9:56am | IP Logged | 9 post reply

Not to derail the current conversation but
my issue with drastic changes to major
characters has been one of duration. I
thought the Jane Foster as a Goddess of
Thunder is a neat one. But it went on for
OVER THREE YEARS. Doc Ock Spider-Man is a
cool concept. But it went on for OVER A
YEAR. Facist Captain America-ALMOST TWO
YEARS. The problem isnt the ideas, its the
decompressed storytelling that drags them
on for way too long. So yeah, a new reader
couldve read Thor for over two years and
NEVER GOT THOR.
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Andrew Bitner
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Posted: 13 August 2018 at 11:02am | IP Logged | 10 post reply

Running with a fairly radical concept isn't always decompression, though it's true that the biggest change of this sort that I can recall--Steve Rogers quitting as Cap (Captain America #180) in December 1974--only lasted FOUR issues.

Nowadays it probably would be a years-long thing.

It's a tough call to make. And the deciding factor is probably when sales start to slide back down to where they were before the story started. It's hard to argue with a durable bump in sales, after all.

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Andrew Bitner
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Posted: 13 August 2018 at 11:06am | IP Logged | 11 post reply

To me, the trick is not losing the original character while giving readers this new version. Jason Aaron had "the unworthy Thor" (aka Odinson) kicking around in the book (side note: why in the heck did Jane Foster get to be "Thor," anyway? That's not a job title, it's the guy's actual name! Rant over.)

SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN skirted this by having a fragment of Peter's psyche in Doc Ock's mindscape for a long stretch.

As long as you have the original (or some representation thereof) around, I'm not sure that a new reader would be totally confused by the "new" Spider-Man or what have you. (And as I'd said earlier in this post, there are so many versions of these characters around, the "real" hero is most likely whichever one you encountered first.)
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William Ferguson
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Posted: 13 August 2018 at 11:57am | IP Logged | 12 post reply

Why not keep the original hero and instead of doing a knock off of that hero, create a new character? 
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