“Nova” means “explodes and dies”

In writing about webcomics and the development of superhero characters through use, I had a weird flashback to 1976.

So we’re cuttin’ alllll the way back to my tween-teen transition and the siren call of a new title at Marvel: The Man Called Nova, by Marv Wolfman and John Buscema. I bought it, and if memory serves, stuck with it for about a year.

Batpulp

I encountered Batman oddly.

Doctor Venn’s circle strike

image by Alexandra Petruk

It’s true that a lot of Venning is nothing special, an unnecessary display of things that do just as well in a comparative table. It also risks reifying, thereby generating categories as “things” when none exist just because you depicted a circle or box.

But here I am working on a game system which lets people make their own superhero groups for their own creative purposes, rather than aping existing ones, and yet also which relies on inspiration from and appreciation for the comics. How does one describe and inspire superhero groups without just skinning existing ones? I started thinking about what superhero groups were and why they existed – not the in-fiction reasons, but reader and publication reasons.

The smoking guns

Just about a year ago, Steve Long and I concluded a series of posts about comics vigilante heroes, and I’ve realized what we left out: the Shadow and the Spider. I plead two things: the usual blindness of comics readers regarding anything but what passed directly under their noses as customers, and conversely, the overwhelming prevalence of the characters such that we regarded them more as the surrounding air than as something you see or talk about.

Super money

Rich people, right?

Super good

There’s a whole subculture of scholarship looking into comics and religion, very broadly, by nearly any imaginable definition of both “comics” and “religion” and how they might interact. Who knew?

70s and 80s, ladies

So, me & women. For better or worse, lots of them, and a lotta cultural blast-furnace for much of it.

Actions have consequences

After a long and winding road of comic book commentary, we come at last to the character who’s likely to be the final subject in our discussion of vigilantism in comic books during the Seventies and Eighties: the Foolkiller.

STEVE SAYS “KILL THE FOOLS”

Lurking everywhere

Steve Long and I are gearing up for our showdown to conclude the jointly-written series on comics vigilantes, or at least a particular cultural wave of them, but I decided I was just not feeling done. Here’s one more – that is, before the finale – for a brief look at other strong contributors, responses, and alternatives within the 80s-90s more-or-less mainstream comics vigilante scene.

We got this

I guess I’ve been doing an emergent series on the “super man” topic for a while,

Round-headed kid

Actually … hero? Maybe anti-hero, but no … OK, protagonist? I’m not even sure about that.

I like him anyway

This was my favorite character in the exact mid-1970s, age 12-13. Why? That’s a question that gets more interesting the more I try to answer, and also less and less easy to answer,