Episode 93 - The Amalgam Age of Comics with Mitch Punpayuk (Part 1)

Mitch Punpayuk is back to look at the 90s DC vs. Marvel (or is it Marvel vs. DC?) crossover and the ensuing Amalgam event where all of the characters of the big two were merged together!

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Meeting summary:

●      The Podcast Recording meeting discussed the Amalgam comic line from 25 years ago, focused on Marvel vs DC crossovers, and analyzed various character fusions such as Super Soldier, Dark Claw, and Spider-Boy. The meeting also reflected on Amalgam's influence on later Marvel and DC stories, praised the creativity of character designs, and announced future episodes covering the second wave of Amalgam comics. Action items included preparing for the next episode and editing the podcast episode.

Notes:

●      🎬 Introduction and Background (00:00 - 12:51)

●      Podcast hosts Case Aiken and J. Mike Falsen introduce the topic: Amalgam comic line from 25 years ago

●      Guest Mitch Pompa joins to discuss the event

●      Explanation of Amalgam as a crossover between Marvel and DC characters

●      Discussion of the publishing context: comic book sales were low, Marvel facing bankruptcy

●      Mention of legal hurdles preventing current Marvel-DC crossovers

●      📊 Marvel vs DC Crossover (12:51 - 21:12)

●      Overview of the Marvel vs DC crossover event preceding Amalgam

●      Discussion of character matchups voted on by fans: Superman vs Hulk, Spider-Man vs Superboy, etc.

●      Explanation of how fights were determined and illustrated

●      🦸 Amalgam Characters: Round 1 (21:13 - 31:35)

●      Detailed discussion of Super Soldier (Superman + Captain America fusion)

●      Analysis of Dark Claw (Batman + Wolverine fusion)

●      Examination of Bruce Wayne: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

●      🕵️ Amalgam Characters: Round 2 (31:36 - 39:48)

●      Discussion of Assassins (various character fusions)

●      Analysis of Spider-Boy (Spider-Man + Superboy fusion

●      Praise for Spider-Boy's design and concept

●      🦹 Amalgam Characters: Round 3 (39:48 - 47:38)

●      Examination of X-Patrol (X-Men + Doom Patrol fusion)

●      Discussion of JLX (Justice League + X-Men fusion)

●      Analysis of various character combinations and designs

●      ⚡ Amalgam Characters: Round 4 (47:38 - 57:10)

●      Discussion of Speed Demon (Flash + Ghost Rider fusion)

●      Critique of Speed Demon's execution despite cool design

●      Analysis of Magneto and the Magnetic Men

●      🌟 Amalgam Characters: Round 5 (57:11 - 01:07:04)

●      Examination of Amazon (Storm + Wonder Woman fusion)

●      Discussion of Bullets and Bracelets (Wonder Woman + Punisher fusion)

●      Analysis of various New Gods and Greek mythology fusions

●      🧙 Amalgam Characters: Final Round (01:07:05 - 01:17:05)

●      Discussion of Dr. Strangefate (Dr. Strange + Dr. Fate + Professor X fusion)

●      Critique of overcomplicated character combinations

●      Analysis of Access character and his role in the crossover

●      💭 Reflections and Impact (01:17:05 - 01:26:29)

●      Discussion of how Amalgam concepts influenced later Marvel and DC stories

●      Analysis of character popularity shifts since Amalgam's publication

●      Examination of how Amalgam tested creative teams before major assignments

●      🎨 Design and Creativity (01:26:29 - 01:35:23)

●      Praise for innovative character designs in Amalgam

●      Discussion of missed opportunities and overcomplicated fusions

●      Analysis of how Amalgam allowed for exploration of character archetypes

●      📚 Legacy and Reread Experience (01:35:24 - 01:43:50)

●      Reflection on Amalgam's impact on participants' comic reading experiences

●      Discussion of how rereading Amalgam reveals more references and connections

●      Analysis of how Amalgam fits into 90s comic trends

●      🏁 Wrap-up and Future Plans (01:43:50 - 01:55:57)

●      Announcement of future episode covering second wave of Amalgam comics

●      Sharing of contact information for hosts and guest

●      Promotion of related podcast content

Transcription

00:00
Case
Hey, everyone. This is case coming in before the episode to note that we recorded this several months ago. And so during the episode, because we're talking about Marvel and DC crossovers, we bring up the big release of JLA versus Avengers, which, of course, was drawn by George Perez. At the time when we recorded this, he was still alive. In fact, I don't think the book had been released yet. But of course, since then, he has passed away, as have several major people in the comics industry this year. Obviously, Neil Adams. We lost right before George. And I'm actually recording this on the day that they announced that Tim sale has passed away. So a lot of people who made their mark, and it's very sad.

00:38
Case
And I don't want anyone to think that weren't paying our proper respects to such a legend in the field. But this is a really good episode, and I hope you enjoy it.

00:46
Jmike
You're right. This is fantasy football. He's got all the names. Oh, yeah, totally. Yes, yes. Here we go. This is how we're going to do this. Give me all the names from all the superheroes that we have and put them together.

01:00
Mitch
Larry Hama had the first pick, and he's like, I take Wolverine.

01:04
Case
And Chuck Dixon's like, you guys know I'm Chuck Dixon, right? And they're like, oh, yeah. Okay, well, how about this? He can take Wolverine. You get Bruce Wayne.

01:10
Mitch
Boom. Look at that.

01:38
Case
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the men of Steel podcast. I'm case Aiken, and as always, I'm joined by my co host, J. Mike Falsen.

01:44
Jmike
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Glad to have you.

01:48
Case
Yeah, glad to have everyone here for this conversation, because today we're looking at a. At an event 25 years in the past that still resonates with us all today. We're talking about the amalgam comic line. And to do that, we are joined by Mitch Punpayuk.

02:05
Mitch
Hi, everyone. The fact that you said that it resonates with everyone is like, I remember this so well from back then. At least I thought I did until I reread it for this. And I'm like, oh, there's a lot in here that I don't remember. Not all good.

02:21
Case
No, no. There's definitely some clunkers in this all. It resonates because it's ideas. Like, I think we all are like, oh, yeah, that's a cool idea. Wolverine and Batman or dark claw. That's fun to describe.

02:35
Mitch
I feel like that's the biggest one that most people remember, too, is dark claw.

02:39
Case
Yeah, that and spider Boy. I think I see a lot of people talk about, I feel like I.

02:44
Jmike
Would have thought about this back then, because I think I was seven when this came out, and this is something that I would have, like, had in my head. Well, it was sort of been cool if Batman and Wolverine had gotten together, like, Superman and Captain America got together, made a new hero, that would have been right up my alley back then.

03:01
Case
Oh, yeah. Well, I remember back when these were coming out, like, before it came out, they announced that amalgam was coming, and there was, like, a little bit of a moment of, like, wait, is this going to be. Is this going to be a thing? Like, is this going to be a real thing? Like, because it was being presented as, like, oh, all the lines are merging and it going to be, it's going to be a Spider boy book instead of a Spider Man, a superboy book. And obviously, that was never really in the cards, but, like, I was, like, eleven, so it didn't sound impossible.

03:28
Jmike
It could happen.

03:30
Mitch
So I have to ask, case, since, you know, I usually go to you for, like, kind of comic book historian stuff, like, what was going on in the actual Marvel and DC universes at this time? Did these all come out in, like, in one month or I. Yeah, so.

03:46
Case
There'S the crossover that we'll talk about, which is the Marvel versus DC book, which most notably had everyone vote for the big lineup characters, like, six or seven matches that were considered the heavyweights in this all and that section. There was a lot of hype about it, and then the actual amalgam books were what's called fifth week events. So in months that have five Wednesdays, because of the distribution models that comics used to be under, and they're kind of shifting away now. But, like, used to be under a model of, like, every Wednesday, comics are released, and comics are actually set up to be on a four week month schedule, or, like, a four Wednesday schedule.

04:25
Case
So if there's a fifth Wednesday in the month, just by wit, by how the month is distributed, usually it causes a gap in some books publication cycles because it comes out on, like, the first Wednesday of the month or the second Wednesday of the month, not necessarily, like, every four or five weeks. And so there's all these oftentimes, there are events, and if you think about them, a lot of those, like, here's an event that has a mini series and then a bunch of one shots tied to it are usually fifth week events because it's a gap in the respective books coming out. So the amalgam stuff was fifth week, and then the following year, they did the return to amalgam stuff, and that was also, like a fifth week event.

05:06
Mitch
I loved fifth week's events. Like, Legends of the Dead. Earth was one of my favorites, too.

05:10
Case
Yeah, tangent we'll have to talk about at some point on the show, because in that series, the Atom is their version of Superman.

05:18
Mitch
True.

05:19
Case
Yeah, but, yeah, so this was a fun exercise at the time, and it's one that probably couldn't happen now with Disney owning Marvel. But at the time, it was like, all right, yeah, we'll have a lot of fans vote on a bunch of stuff. You know, it's the same summer as Batman and Robin coming out. We're all, like, excited about superhero stuff. It's all fun. And then we're going to do a bunch of one shots where all the characters are merged together in weird and goofy ways. And wizard magazine is going to love dark claw, and that's going to be the big thing.

05:47
Mitch
So speaking of, like, I'm going to say it's probably about five years ago now. When I went to the Comic Con in Phoenix, Ron Mars was there, and I had asked him some questions about this. And one of the things that he said was that this could never happen again unless comic books sales were going really down, because that's what it was back then. He said the reason why they did this or why they mandated him to do it was that comic book sales on both sides were just really low.

06:15
Case
Yeah, that makes sense. This is the time of the Marvel bankruptcy, and I imagine DC was also a little bit on a downswing because this is in the wake of the big boom surrounding the speculator market with things like the death of Superman and lots of people buying first issues, Image comic came out, and there was all these huge sellers. And then this is a couple of years later after a lot of people who are like, oh, yeah, I just put a bunch of money into these comics. Why aren't they worth the same amount as action comics number one? And we're like, oh, that's not how it works. Oh, shit.

06:51
Mitch
Damn.

06:53
Case
Although, weirdly, these books are now kind of becoming like that. Like, I have all the single issues, but, like, they're not doing a digital reprint of these because they're jointly owned by Marvel and DC. And it takes some pulling teeth to get them to do anything together these days. Like, you know, currently what just hit the shelves is the reprint or like the release of the Avengers Justice League crossover that George Perez did the artwork for which was done in light of him having a pretty lethal diagnosis and only at this point, a couple months left to live. That required so much pulling teeth and fundraising just to get this release of a book. It's not even new material. It's just print some more issues, print some more copies.

07:38
Case
It's just the legal hurdles and the competitive nature between the two companies is just really a big impediment for any of the sort of fun creativity going on here. I mean, this is why back in the day, the squadron supreme was created and why the heroes of Angor, also called the assemblers, were created where the editorial wanted to do a crossover, and then the higher ups were like, no, you can't do it. And they had stealth crossovers in the annuals for the Avengers and Justice League and that, you know, so it's not like these kind of things don't happen every day. And this period of the nineties when, like I said, marvel was, like, facing off bankruptcy and, like, was licensing off all their properties for movies and not getting any of the money for. For those, this is the.

08:25
Case
The beginning of that phase, you know, one that would come to a head by the time we get to Iron man coming out as a movie, like, a decade later.

08:32
Jmike
Feral man. I was like, did feral lad grow up in this continuity? And he became pharaoh man?

08:41
Case
Well, yeah. I mean, that's it. Yeah. So let's talk first about the crossover. Because the crossover, I think, is at least interesting enough to talk about, but there's not that much to it. Like, it's a pretty basic idea of, all right, we want to do this crossover. We'll represent Marvel and DC as metaphorical space gods, which they look appropriately kirby enough. I'm actually pretty happy.

09:09
Mitch
So Kirby.

09:13
Case
And we'll have a person who just bounces back and forth between the realities as the sort of herald of this whole situation. A character called Axis, who, for a little while after this book, would actually show up in random DC and Marvel comics.

09:27
Mitch
Ooh. Now, wasn't it always just Ron Mars books, though that might be the case.

09:31
Case
Because I'm thinking about Green Lantern issues that were definitely written by Ron Mars.

09:36
Mitch
Green Lantern and Silver Surfer, apparently.

09:38
Case
Yeah. And I think I keep saying Marvel versus DC, but it is actually listed as DC versus Marvel.

09:42
Mitch
I thought it was both.

09:43
Case
It might. I mean, I'm looking at the COVID for the first one, and it says DC versus Marvel. It might be that it flips between.

09:49
Mitch
Yeah, I think the second one says Marvel DC. And then they keep switching back and forth.

09:53
Case
Yeah. So the big thing and the thing they were hyping because they had, like, a little preview issue that had, like, your voting ballot for the big fights. So they had Superman versus Hulk. They had Spider man versus Superboy. They had Batman versus Captain America. They had Wolverine versus lobo, and they had storm versus Wonder Woman. And every single one of these fights brings up so many arguments online now, because this was a popularity contest. And some of them you're like, okay, yeah, Superman beats Hulk. Fine. I don't think anyone's too upset about that outcome. But notably, Wolverine versus Lobo. Like, Wolverine's a very popular character. Lobo is a parody of a very popular character. Not a lot of people know that Lobo can fight Superman to a standstill and has been kicked out of hell for being too much of an asshole.

10:44
Case
So they have WOlVerine get up from the fight, and all the fights that are voted on, the art has been released for the other outcome. And it's basically the same thing up until the last two panels where it's like, oh, yeah, HuLk gets up and beat Superman, or Lobo and WOLVerine go behind the BAR and, like, WOlVerine's the One that gets up. So he, you know, like, because they're. They were prepping these very close to AcTUAlLy getting the ballots. They had to have EverYthing kind of finished the SamE WAy with when they did the vote for the death of family arc. Yeah. For Jason Todd. Yeah.

11:21
Mitch
Can you think of any other situations where they did voting like this, other than the death in the family?

11:27
Case
And this death in the family was notable for being the first. This was, you know, many years later, I'm sure there. But I. This is the only other one that comes to mind.

11:38
Mitch
Yeah, I couldn't think of anything either. I tried to rack my brain without googling it, but, yeah, I don't know.

11:47
Case
I'm sure there are others, but, like, they probably weren't big ticket events. Like, they, you know, the vote was probably the thing to try to draw attention to it. And in retrospect, because the canonicity of a thing that the audience votes on feels suspect to begin with, probably a lot of people just kind of choose to ignore them or move on with their lives. You know, killing Robin's a big one. That's a pretty big event.

12:11
Mitch
Right.

12:12
Case
But these votes, like, no one acknowledges in terms of, like, who would actually win. Like, because obviously, Wolverine can't beat Lobo. Like, he's just. That's just not the scale that we're dealing with.

12:21
Mitch
So let me ask you this, the both of you. Like, if they were to have done this now, would these be the matchups that we would have saw for the first big five?

12:31
Case
These matchups are such weird, struggling ones. This is the time when the Avengers was not a popular book. None of these are what we would consider the major Marvel characters, aside from Spider, I mean. Well, I shouldn't say that, because Spider man. It just feels like weird matchups, though. Wolverine's popular. But would Lobo be the person you'd match him up against, necessarily?

12:54
Mitch
Probably not.

12:55
Case
I mean, you would imagine it would be like Captain Marvel against Wonder Woman if they were doing it today. Yeah, like, Storm.

13:01
Jmike
Storm would actually beat Wonder Woman, though.

13:04
Case
Well, like, why don't we talk about these fights for a second?

13:08
Mitch
Okay, let's talk about it.

13:11
Case
I think Superman versus Hulk. I think people being like, yeah, Superman would win. That makes sense. Like, that's fine. I. Spider man versus Superboy. This is, like, the one time where I'm like, yeah, I could see this fight going Spider Man's way because this is specifically an era of the Con el Superboy before he had any powers besides telekinesis. And he's very new at this point still. So I'm like, all right, I kind of get it. And I like this matchup because at this point, it's the Ben Reilly Spider man. So it's actually clone versus clone. And I dig that part, which makes.

13:42
Mitch
Me think that if they did it now, would it be Jonathan versus miles?

13:47
Case
I think that would be a cool fight to see. I think it would. I mean, I imagine they would probably do, like, static versus miles if they were really thinking about it.

13:55
Mitch
Oh, okay.

13:56
Jmike
Yeah, that'd be kind of cool.

13:57
Case
But just because he has a comic that is, like, currently running, I'm not actually sure if he would be considered popular enough to face off against miles.

14:04
Mitch
Like, you mean the son of Superman book?

14:06
Case
No, I meant static, but.

14:08
Mitch
Oh, static. Sorry.

14:09
Case
Yeah, that's a good question. Like, who would you pit son of Superman against?

14:14
Mitch
Sorry, didn't mean to throw a wrench.

14:15
Case
No, no, it's fine because, like, we're just kind of, like, spitfalling about this. That's a good question at the moment.

14:22
Jmike
We'll come back to that one.

14:23
Mitch
Yeah, I mean, I guess it would depend if it was young Jonathan or older Jonathan.

14:27
Case
Well, I feel like they would do older Jonathan now because that's the currently.

14:30
Mitch
That's the current book version.

14:32
Case
Yeah.

14:33
Jmike
I miss super sons. That was so much fun.

14:35
Mitch
Yeah, I haven't. I haven't read any of the son of Superman yet. Like, I just haven't been reading comics, though.

14:40
Case
I think it's a good book. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's actually trying to tackle the implications of Superman stuff with a more fallible Superman. And I enjoy that vantage point.

14:48
Mitch
Everything I've seen about it, like, tangentially, has been pretty awesome looking.

14:52
Case
So, anyway, Batman versus Captain America, honestly, the fight could kind of go either way. I personally think that cap would win in a fight, but I can also see Batman taking advantage of a situation to win the fight. And this is like, a stealthy, one in the sewer type thing.

15:06
Mitch
Yeah. And I would say to me, Batman is the. It's like the. It's all about the prep, right? It's the prep time with Batman. So he has to. He has to know who he's going up against. He doesn't know Captain America. How could he go up against him? Unless you're, like, saying, like, guardian does the same type of fighting styles and stuff that Captain America does.

15:25
Case
I think that Batman could theoretically come in with enough tools on him to take advantage of a situation. Like, the fight that they have is, like, perfectly tailored for Batman to have advantages. Like, it's a dark place with lots of hiding. Like, if it was a big arena. Like, he doesn't stand a chance against Captain America. Captain America's a super soldier. Okay, we know what happens when Batman fights a super soldier like deathstroke. He loses. That's just what happens.

15:50
Mitch
Yeah, yeah.

15:51
Case
And that actually would be the big comparison, because Deathstroke is really just an evil version of Captain America with a sword instead of a shield.

15:56
Mitch
Do we get a definitive winner out of that match? Because this isn't like the. The sewer fill up, and then Aksis shows up and interrupts the fight. Cap technically loses because of the Batarang.

16:06
Case
Yeah, the Batarang to the head. He's knocked out, and Batman saves him right before the end of the fight. Okay, then we get the Wolverine versus Lobo, which I've already said it's ridiculous. It's just the scale is so different between the two of them. Like, Lobo is intentionally. Like, here's the joke about the grim and gritty Looney Tunes character versus Wolverine. Like, well, yeah, he's pretty durable. It's just not in that same, like, category. And there's no, like, oh, yeah. Well, he. What if he got a lucky shot in? He can't. Lobo can regrow from a cell, and.

16:37
Mitch
It'S obvious that how unknown or unpopular. Like you said, that Lobo is in the second year of amalgams, that they throw him in, like, mix him with Howard the duck. Like, come on.

16:51
Case
And then we get Storm versus Wonder Woman. Storm wins. And that's because Wonder Woman was at a bit of a nader of her popularity at this point. And Storm is riding high on the X Men franchise, which the cartoon had been very popular. I think this fight, I don't think anyone's like, every now and then I'll see people being like, oh, Wonder Woman totally should have won. And I would think, I think generally, I'm like, at a range. Wonder Woman loses because Storm is, has so much stuff to throw at her up close. Like, Wonder Woman super fast and super strong. I think it could be a toss up and it could go either way. And if you're just being pelted with lightning bolts, eventually you're going to go down. Like, Storm's an omega level mutant. And nowadays we're really trying to emphasize that.

17:31
Case
So Storm of this era probably required that range. Storm of now, not so much. She seems to be able to do pretty damn well. Like anyone who's reading the current X Men books, where she just freezes the blood of all the people around her to destroy them or causes air pressure changes until their heads explode. She, Storm, she's the goddess of. So those are the big matches. And then they have lesser matches. Aquaman versus Namor, Electra versus Catwoman, the flash versus quicksilver, Robin versus jubilee, silver surfer versus Green Lantern, and Thor versus captain marvel. So these ones all count towards, like, the ultimate outcome, but it's perfectly designed to make it even split so that the votes actually count for who wins.

18:14
Case
I don't really have a lot of complaints about these ones because, well, because this one is Ron Mars and Peter David writing it and saying, who would win these fights? You're like, yeah. All right. Aquaman versus Namor. Namor is pretty tough, but the DC scale is just so big and hits him with a whale. Yeah, Electra's, she's an actual fighter. Catwoman's a thief. She does pretty well in a fight, but Electra's, yeah, sure. The Flash is so much faster than quicksilver. It's like, why are you even bothering?

18:46
Jmike
Why are you even here? Go for it.

18:47
Case
Like, the fair fight would be North Star, you know, or Macari or.

18:52
Mitch
Yeah, Makari.

18:53
Case
Yeah, those would be different scales. But, like, quicksilver's not even particularly fast in the Marvel universe.

18:58
Mitch
Northstar is faster than quicksilver.

19:00
Case
By a lot. Northstar approaches 99% the speed of light. Quicksilver just barely breaks the speed of sound. Wow, I didn't realize that silver surfer versus Green Lantern. It's Kyle Rayner, Green Lantern. And I love Kyle Rayner, Green Lantern, but he's not, like, the best green lantern in terms of, like, actual combat purposes. Like, he's really creative and whatnot. Versus the herald of galactus with power cosmic. Exactly.

19:24
Mitch
I mean, but that is such a good, like, power base to go up against, like, the. The Green Lantern, you know, ring versus the power cosmic. Like, two things that could possibly hold each other to a standstill, I would think.

19:37
Case
Yeah. Around this time, they were doing a lot of crossovers with. With Marvel, DC stuff. Like, there were a bunch of comics that came out, and one included a silver Surfer superman crossover where it was a team up of the impossible man and Mister mix of Spitlick. At the end of this all, silver Surfer reversed some of Mister Mixiospitalik's fifth dimensional magic, and Superman's like, you can do that? And he's like, the power cosmic.

20:00
Mitch
Yeah, that's pretty great.

20:04
Jmike
Where were you so many years ago?

20:05
Case
I could have used you.

20:07
Jmike
Keep it from showing up every three.

20:09
Case
Years, every three months or something like that. Robin versus Jubilee. I think this makes enough sense. Robin is actually trained on how to fight Jubilee. Like, Jubilee has good powers, and she's, you know.

20:21
Jmike
What? Armor powers.

20:22
Case
Exactly. Fireworks. Yeah, exactly. Hey, she could shoot explosives from her fingers. Like, that is a thing that I wish I could do.

20:31
Mitch
Yeah, but it's like, explosives to the point of fireworks that are really far away, but they're up close. It's more blinding than it is, hurt.

20:39
Jmike
More annoying than anything else.

20:40
Case
I mean, regardless, it is a projectile. She can shoot from her hands regardless, like, versus a human. So, like, sure, if she would like. And archetypally, she fits pretty well. Like she is at this point. She's thoroughly wolverine sidekick and works really well as being like, okay, yeah, it's the Robin equivalent. I think that matchup is fine. I think her finding Tim Drake cute is pretty fun. Like, this is a detail here. He is a cute boy. J Mike, shaking your head. No, he's president of so many clubs. But obviously, Robin is the better is going to win this fight because he's going to be able to take advantage of the tactical situations. Like, that makes so much more sense.

21:19
Case
And then Thor versus Captain Marvel, this being the Shazam, Captain Marvel, this makes enough sense to me that Thor, the trained several thousand year old God of thunder and master of war would do pretty well against Captain Marvel. It's a good fight, and if Captain Marvel was more experienced, I would say would have a chance of winning. Like, a serious chance of winning. But at this point, it's still 14 year old Billy Batson up against the God of thunder.

21:44
Mitch
Shouldn't that not make a difference if he's more experienced because he has the wisdom of Solomon?

21:48
Case
Yeah, I'm just saying, in terms of specifically, this version is the era of the Jerry Ordway power of Shazam, reinterpretation of the character. So it is a base human child that is being infused with it all and is constantly struggling to hear the correct thing, to, like, the correct voice of the different gods.

22:07
Mitch
Okay, I got you. So would the better matchup have been Thor versus black Adam?

22:12
Case
That would be an interesting matchup for sure, but I think it's a good matchup either way. And I think it's just, yeah, Thor has a slight edge by virtue of being a little bit more experienced and much older. Yeah, basically. I mean, like, you have to have a winner.

22:29
Mitch
Yeah, you have that winner. And Peter, like you said, peter, David and Ron Morris sat there and probably discussed it out.

22:34
Case
Yeah. Fun fact, this was my first actual encounter with Captain Marvel.

22:38
Mitch
Wow.

22:39
Case
Yeah. And this is what caused me to go and read the power Sam graphic novel, because I was like, oh, this character seems really cool. Actually. This character seems exactly like a character I made up in my head called Captain Lightning when I was five. See, I was like, holy shit, this is that character.

22:56
Mitch
And didn't at one time, they called him Captain Thunder.

22:58
Case
Captain Thunder is what they were originally going to call him. And then DC beat them out. DC beat Fawcett to the punch by having Johnny Thunder. So it was decided to go with Captain Marvel. And also, they were just trying to figure out the best name to sell it all under. And it was going to be Flash comics, but literally, DC beat them with flash comics, so they changed it to whiz comics and yada, yada. That's why the first appearance of Captain Marvel is whiz comics number two, because there's actually no whiz comics number one.

23:24
Mitch
I bet you that's a big seller on the resale market.

23:28
Case
But this whole mini is just like, yeah, the embodiment of Marvel and the embodiment of DC are like, fuck you. And they decide to just fight each other, and then they're like, well, maybe, you know what? One of us might die. What if we just pick representatives of superheroes from our worlds and pit them against each other. That's it.

23:48
Jmike
Like smash Bros. Meets Dragon Ball.

23:51
Case
Well, at the end of the third issue, axis is like, I need to put a pause on this. And he merges the universes together, and we get a fairly cool fusion dance version of the two. Or, like, now is like, one. Like, red and blue space God. And that's pretty cool looking. And then immediately coming back into the next issue, it's just like, yeah, that didn't do anything.

24:15
Jmike
It fights back on boys.

24:17
Case
They reveal the goodness and strength of character of Captain America and Batman to them. And the space guys are like, oh, shit. We did pretty good making these guys. We shouldn't fuck them up. Like, well done, brother. And that's it.

24:32
Mitch
Yeah. At the end of the fourth issue, when they're just like, hey, how's it been? Like, come on.

24:39
Case
But this whole thing was mostly an excuse for us to get to the Amalgam books because the amalgam books are such a fun idea. So why don't we talk about the first wave of amalgam books? We'll also talk about the second wave, but we're going to save that for the second episode on this one. We're not going to be talking about the All Access mini series that came out because I didn't want to reread those.

25:00
Mitch
There are some good more amalgams in those two volumes, the all Access and unlimited access. Just if anybody wants to unlimited access.

25:09
Case
They redo a bunch of them. And there's some fun moments. There's Captain America junior for Captain Marvel Junior or Captain America fusion.

25:16
Mitch
He screams out Uncle Sam to get his powers, which I think is pretty awesome. I want to know what that anagram stands, acronym stands for.

25:24
Case
If they had done actual, like, amalgam one shots for that one, I probably would like it more. But as it was just sort of like another event for the sake of doing an event. But, yeah, let's talk about the first wave of amalgam books, because those were a lot of fun, and I think the ideas are really cool, and this is a Superman show, so why don't we talk about super Soldier first?

25:46
Mitch
So would you. Would you have said these two of the characters, they should merge together if.

25:52
Case
You want to have, like, a seamless kind of fusion between two characters? I think this works really well, I think, like, weirdly. And this is kind of just zeitgeist y stuff, the amalgam super soldier and then his connection to Spider Boy actually kind of became what was used for ultimate comics with how Spider man was like, the formula, like the Oz formula that they use for Spider Man. Washington, an attempt at recreating the super soldier serum for Captain America, and likewise, the Hulk, which then bled into the MCU stuff, not so much with Spider man, but with the idea that Hulk was an attempt at recreating cap.

26:29
Mitch
That's literally all ultimate comics was. How many different people can try and recreate the super soldier serum? Because that's what giant man was trying to do. That's what Hulk was. And, yeah, there was a whole bunch of different people.

26:40
Case
Later, it was revealed. All the X Men too.

26:43
Mitch
They're all really. Yep.

26:44
Case
Yeah, yeah. Oh, no. Ultimate comics got real weird before. They were like, we gotta give this one up.

26:50
Jmike
Well, I mean, it's a good idea and a great way to start a universe, but I did not know the thing about the X Men.

26:56
Case
It got bloated and weirder than, like, it was not the streamlined book that anyone could read at a certain point. And once that happened, it was like, well, why are we doing this book anymore?

27:06
Mitch
And just combined it. Hey, the two brothers came together.

27:11
Case
Well done, brother. And now it's mostly. Mostly it's just Miles Morales is still alive, and the Maker, which was the corrupted version of Reed Richards from that reality, is now wandering around the multiverse as a villain.

27:24
Mitch
Oh, that's true. Those are the only ones that made it over. Huh?

27:28
Case
I mean, like, every now and then you see some allusions to stuff, like, apparently Wolverine's son from that reality, but we have yet to see him since that occurred.

27:36
Mitch
Since what? X men red or something.

27:40
Case
I forget. I forget the last time he was seen. Whatever that crossover was, it contest, was it contested, champ? Whatever. The one where they, like, actually brought miles over to 616. And then, like, in Al Ewings, the ultimates comic, which was not set in the ultimates universe, that was.

28:00
Mitch
It was just a name they gave to a team, right?

28:02
Case
Yeah, it was a team name that they had with America, Chavez, Captain Marvel Blue, Marvel Spectrum. I always have to check, like, what is Monica Rambo's current superhero name and Black Panther? At a certain point, they recreated the ultimates from the Ultimates book, but they were, like, constructs created by cosmic energy. It's a real good book, but it gets real trippy. And the captain, or, pardon me, the Iron man from that book, actually links up with this team and helps him save the world. It was a good scene. I liked it all. But my understanding is that they weren't necessarily the original ultimates so much as, like, recreations through the power cosmic, because the power cosmic does a lot.

28:47
Jmike
It does everything.

28:48
Case
But getting back to super soldier, I think that they did a really good job of streamlining all the things about the characters that work really well together. Having the alien base, having it be a solar ray base instead of, like, Vita rays, I think worked really well for activating his powers. You know, Captain America, truth just in the american way, fits pretty well. I think that worked really well. You know, the red Skull being fused with Lex Luthor as the green skull.

29:13
Mitch
Which goes with his kryptonite poisoning. Right.

29:16
Case
Yeah. So I think that worked really well. I think the. The stakes they set up of, like, there's so much kryptonite radiation in this modern era, making super soldier weaker is very fun. If you wanted to do, like, all right, well, how are. How are we going to do our man of steel story or our, you know, like, whatever? Like the. It's. It's the nineties. We have to power down Superman a bit because he had gotten too powerful. It creates a fun atmosphere for that. If you want to, like, have some stakes, have a character who's not as powerful as they used to be, but you could still do some of those, like, crazy stories and flashbacks. I like it all. I think it does a pretty good job of it. Like Jimmy Olsen sort of filling in sort of. I mean, Jimmy.

29:56
Case
Jimmy and Bucky kind of.

29:57
Jmike
Well, because, like, he had a sidekick, though. What was her name in one of the flashback scenes of he had a sidekick. American Bell or something like that.

30:05
Mitch
Liberty Bell.

30:05
Case
Well, that's a fusion of Liberty Bell and Miss America. So it's an american themed character. I don't know if I would call it a sidekick necessarily, but we don't see enough.

30:16
Mitch
Yeah, she was part of the all star winners instead of all star squadron and american winners, or anyways, some mix of the two.

30:24
Case
Yeah, yeah. So the main super soldier story, like the one in this run, as opposed to sentinel of liberty, the one from. Sorry, man of war. Pardon me, the one from the second round. This one we deal with super soldier having woken up in the modern era, Captain America style. And he gets a job at a newspaper because his old pal Jimmy Olsen is now the head guy and can hook him up real well. And I think that is right. Is nice. And then the robot he went down fighting re emerges. He has to fight him. Ultra Metallo, which I've seen people say that it's a fusion of Ultron with Metallo, but I'm like, I don't see it.

31:06
Mitch
That doesn't make sense.

31:07
Case
So I don't know. Maybe there's. I mean, I guess the Ultra. Is more like ultra humanite, but, like, also don't really get that.

31:12
Mitch
No.

31:13
Case
So I don't know.

31:14
Mitch
But ultra humanite, isn't that also DC?

31:16
Case
Yeah, also true. So, yeah, so I don't know. I don't know what ultra theme thing. It look. It thoroughly looks like a 40 style robot. Like, it looks like the. The ones from the Fleischer cartoons. Kind of, but chonky because it's got a lot of kryptonite in its. In its chest.

31:30
Mitch
I mean, super soldier definitely seems to be more superman than Captain America to me.

31:35
Case
You think? I mean, like, the. The frozen in time elements. Yeah, but, like, that. It was a four f soldier.

31:40
Mitch
He's. I guess. I guess that's true. Because you're using, what, kryptonite DNA to make the weak person stronger.

31:47
Case
Yeah.

31:48
Mitch
Yeah. Okay.

31:49
Case
I don't know.

31:49
Mitch
I mean, his name is Clark Ken. Yeah.

31:52
Case
But.

31:52
Mitch
And he's got powers. And he does have the shield, though, that's. Which is pretty cool.

31:57
Case
And he's got his costume. I mean, is mostly Captain America, but with trunks, and he's not wearing gloves. And then it's the nineties style. We're gonna have the hair exposed. Kind of true. Kind of look there.

32:09
Mitch
Okay.

32:10
Case
And then the shield is the s shield from, like, is it the one from the rocket? Like, is that where they get the. The weird shield?

32:17
Jmike
Confusing, because I didn't see that part in there. I was like, huh?

32:21
Case
I don't think they say where they get the shield from. I don't think it's like, he's got a shield. But I wonder, like, oh, what's the house of l emblem on the rocket? And they just pried it off. We're like, this is a pretty good protective thing for you.

32:33
Mitch
I mean, it lasted through space travel. It's got to be pretty indestructible.

32:38
Case
Yeah, I think it fits so seamlessly. I don't have a ton to say. Like, this is Mark Wade work writing it. Mark Wade is a great Superman and Captain America writer. It's Dave Gibbons on the art. Obviously, people know Dave Gibbons from Watchmen. You know, it's a good team. It's a perfectly fine story. There's the conceit of all these amalgam books that this is just issue, one of an ongoing series. And so they all have, like, little, like, bits of bait and, like, ideas for, like, oh, yeah. This is where the series is going, and never to be a thing or the whole.

33:08
Mitch
Don't you remember from Sentinel of Liberty number four? Like, all those little editors notes, that's always. I thought that was hilarious.

33:16
Case
Yeah. Why don't we move on to the one that everyone brings up every time you talk about this line, which is dark claw, specifically legends of the dark claw with Logan Wayne.

33:30
Mitch
Oh, man. When. I don't know if it's. I don't remember if it's the legends of the dark claw book or if it's a different book when, like, the person's break. Someone's breaking into. Is it Talia? Someone's breaking into the tower, and the first floor is a bunch of his art. And then, like, it keeps going further and further down.

33:49
Case
Oh, it's in this. It's when it's Carol Danvers.

33:52
Mitch
That's right.

33:53
Case
Because at this time, she was actually pretty closely related with X Men books at this point. Like, she was still binary. Like, at this point in the. Like, in Marvel Comics. So she hadn't become warbird yet and then resumed the Miss Marvel and then Captain Marvel names. So they fuse her with huntress in this.

34:12
Mitch
Yes, that's right.

34:14
Case
And. Yeah, so she breaks in, she finds all this art, and then eventually, she's lurking around, and she finds the dark claws stuff buried in there. It's very Bronze Age. Batman, when he was living in Gotham City proper, and he had a dope condo, kind of like in the Dark Knight, where it's, like, it's in Wayne Tower, and I've got. Down below, I've got subway access with my own cave.

34:39
Mitch
So, I mean, I've read a lot of Wolverine, but I know there's a lot of Wolverine out there, and I'm just not an expert. But is Wolverine, like, an artist? Is a painting, like, bunch of painting? Is that his thing? Is that one of his things?

34:51
Case
Not that I'm aware of.

34:52
Mitch
So where does the painting come from?

34:54
Case
I think they were just trying to justify him being rich.

34:57
Mitch
Oh.

34:58
Case
But I don't even know if that fully makes sense. I don't know, you know? Cause it's weird. Like, talking about super soldier, him working at a newspaper makes more sense with, like, Steve Rogers still, because Steve Rogers was, like, a cartoonist and, like, worked for publications at various points. Like, he was a comic book artist in his own comics at various times, and him, like, working as, like, you know, at a newspaper is, like, not that big a stretch, but, yeah, like, wolverine working on art. Like, the only thing I can think of is in X Men two, where it's like, what do you teach?

35:29
Mitch
Oh, wow. Okay.

35:31
Case
That's, like, a couple years later. So, like, that's. That's the weird part. Like, this comes before a lot of the conventions that we would see in movies. And I'm like, how much is the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog? I love the dark clock costume, by the way. Like, it's so fucking out there and crazy.

35:48
Mitch
It's so nineties too.

35:50
Jmike
Yeah.

35:52
Case
I love that his claws have, like, the little, like, cutouts in it to make them look more like batwings.

35:56
Mitch
Yeah, yeah. And then the skull mask.

36:01
Case
Yeah.

36:02
Mitch
Like, it's just where. I mean, where does that even come from?

36:05
Case
I think it's supposed to be more like, more of a proper bat.

36:09
Mitch
Kind of makes sense.

36:10
Case
It looks. It looks actually pretty similar to the just imagine Stan Lee. True, it does, but that's also a couple years later, so I don't know if it's, like an illusion. And they just wanted edgy nineties version of Batman combined with Wolverine so that it could be peak marketability.

36:26
Mitch
So was. Was Sparrow, was it Jubilee Drake? Or was it. Was she mixed with someone else, or was she just jubilee?

36:33
Case
I mean, she's clearly a robin hybrid. I don't know if they specify which, but Tim Drake's the only one that we don't really see in another book.

36:41
Mitch
That's true. We see Jason, Todd, and Grayson later.

36:44
Case
Yeah.

36:45
Mitch
Okay.

36:46
Case
So I'm inclined to think it's supposed to be Tim Drake, especially because they were matched up with each other and he was Robin at the time.

36:52
Mitch
Unless they pulled out Carrie.

36:55
Case
Yeah. It could also be a Carrie. Kelly.

36:56
Mitch
Carrie Kelly. That's right. Kelly.

36:57
Case
Yeah. But this is before, like, spoiler became Robin for a stretch.

37:01
Mitch
Right?

37:02
Case
We hadn't really seen an in canon, like, female robin.

37:06
Mitch
True.

37:06
Case
So I don't think it really matters too much beyond just like, oh, it's Jubilee plus a robin, and it's probably Tim Drake, but there's like. But the costume looks like the Dick Grayson costume, which is also the Carrie Kelly costume. So, I mean, there.

37:20
Mitch
There are definitely obvious times where they mix three people together in these books as opposed to just two.

37:28
Case
And I typically don't like those as much. The times that they do are usually the ones where I'm like, this is kind of clunky, and we'll get to those in a second.

37:36
Mitch
Oh, yeah.

37:37
Case
In a second. And then, because there's so many writers working on this and pulling ideas, you get weird spots where a character will be used. Then they'll be used again in a second. We'll talk about Bruce Wayne, agent of S H I e l D, because, like. But just to finish up on this one, I like hyena. I think it's fun. The actual Joker face part of it is a little weird without the rest of the costume having, like, those colors. But I think the idea is fun. The idea of a hyena villain being, like, the animalistic clown villain is fun. What a good name, too. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That part is great. And having him be using the Wolverine origin stuff and having it being like, okay, we're both part of the super soldier program, weapon X program, whatever.

38:28
Case
And the one that is the merciless killer was the success, which is their saber tooth in this scenario, but also their joker, I thought was fun. Something about being a crazy murderer just running around with an Uzi. And also claws, like, worked for me. Like, I just generally kind of dug this character.

38:43
Mitch
Yeah, great character.

38:45
Case
But I don't have a lot to say about the issue because it's just like, all right, yeah, we bring in a new team member, which is huntress, the Carol Danvers character.

38:51
Mitch
And, yeah, not much happens in the issue, does it?

38:54
Case
Well, they attack Air Force one, and there's, like, up until, like, one panel, like, almost at the very end, like, they're always showing the back of the president, and then it's like, oh, no, that's Bill Clinton.

39:03
Mitch
Yeah, right there. That was weird.

39:06
Case
I. They were, like, out of their way to, like, not show off his face until all of a sudden, they weren't. And it was a really strange decision.

39:14
Mitch
Because that's a common thing they do in comic books, to try and keep it timeless. Right. To always obstruct who the actual president is.

39:22
Case
Yeah. Especially because, like, the timing of things have been bad. Like, infamously, there was an issue that DC did where Superman had to be at, like, two places at once, and so he entrusted his identity to Presidente John Fitzgerald Kennedy junior. Or, pardon me, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Then the issue actually didn't hit the stance until after JFK had been killed. So I think just generally they're like, oh, we shouldn't do this too much more.

39:47
Mitch
Yeah, probably. Good call.

39:49
Case
Yeah. But, yeah, the issue ends actually, with, like, being like, all right, dark claw has saved the president. Now he has to go back and actually fight hyena.

39:57
Mitch
That's right.

39:57
Case
And it's like him hanging onto the side of the helicopter, being like, we have to go take him on. And that's the end of the issue. And we never see the rest because these are all one issues.

40:05
Mitch
This is all one issue. This is all one chest.

40:08
Jmike
Until next time.

40:10
Case
Yep. All right, let's talk about Bruce Wayne, agent of S H I E l D. Now.

40:15
Mitch
What a strange combination. Like, are you already doing dark claw? Logan's already, like, Logan and Bruce Wayne are already mixed together. Why throw in this Nick Fury kind of character? I mean, he's obviously not Nick Fury because Nick Fury is in the book also, right?

40:30
Case
I don't know. I don't know.

40:33
Mitch
Like, who is he supposed to be mixed with? Like, if it's not Nick Fury, some nameless shield agent, maybe?

40:41
Case
I mean, he clearly, from. From the standpoint of being, like, agent of S H I E l D, there is the Nick Fury ness to that. There's really no, hasn't been another book that was, like, blank, agent of S H I E l d up until we get into the, like, the late nineties, early two thousands, when they actually would do that every now and then with, like, Loki, agent of Asgard, or like, shit like that. But the classic is Nick Fury.

41:04
Mitch
Yeah, I mean, I do remember Wolverine, Agent of SHIELD too, at one point, right? No. Am I wrong?

41:09
Case
Maybe. No, it fully might be. I'm just, like, blanking on it. I don't know. I wonder if they were like, no, no. We have to do dark claw. But Chuck Dixon really wanted to do s h I e l d story, and that's.

41:23
Mitch
That's fair.

41:24
Case
Who wrote the dark.

41:25
Mitch
Yeah.

41:26
Case
It was Larry Hama, who is more of a Wolverine writer, who wrote dark law. And then Dixon is more of a Batman writer, wrote bruce Wayne, agent of.

41:32
Mitch
S h I e l d. That makes sense.

41:33
Case
Yeah. Well, so this was a weird book. We get a lot of characters in it.

41:41
Mitch
So many characters.

41:42
Jmike
Moon knight. Moonwing.

41:44
Mitch
Moonwing. Yeah. Black bat, which is black cat and Batgirl. Like, why mix those two?

41:52
Case
Yeah, sometimes the names are needlessly clunky. You're like, no, you wouldn't say the bat.

41:59
Mitch
But, like, I mean, I don't know, black cat. It's just. It just seems weird.

42:04
Case
Yeah. I liked Baron Zero as a fusion, particularly because, like, anything that can be, like a continuity nod for me, I love. And so, like, Mister Freeze originally being Mister Zero works so well here. And it's Baron strucker, but it sounds like Baron Zemo. And so it's like a lot of things that are like, I like how all of these are playing with each other. Like, it's nice.

42:25
Mitch
Honestly, if I hadn't read this right now, I would have thought it was Zemo. Nut strucker.

42:30
Case
Yeah. If you just hear it out loud, you're like, oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, Zemo. It's clearly strucker nuke as a fusion of, well, nuke and bane. Bane, yeah.

42:41
Mitch
Which makes sense. Both.

42:43
Case
That's. Yeah, that's a pretty good one.

42:44
Mitch
And then now Madam Cat is what? Selena Kyle and Madam Hydra.

42:48
Case
And I think Viper.

42:50
Mitch
Okay, well, she's viper at first, and then she changes her name to Madame Hydra during the EP issue. Right. Isn't that how it. Right, yeah, because she's now the lead because she kills her father or thinks she kills her father.

43:05
Case
Yeah, because it's Selena Luthor. Yeah. So it's a catwoman and viper, but.

43:09
Mitch
Then you also have Catwoman and the assassins.

43:11
Case
Right. Yeah, the characters get reused a bunch.

43:13
Mitch
Yeah.

43:14
Case
And then this gets weird. Cause we get, you know, moon wings and we get all the. I mean, we get multiple waynes. Like, is it. Is Bruce Wayne the brother of Logan Wayne?

43:25
Mitch
That's what I was thinking.

43:26
Case
That's sort of the implication. But, you know, it's just. It gets messy. Cause they're not all working together. Yeah, well, and, like, it's only for trying to, like, have a continuity between them all, which some of these books try to have continuity. They're like, my boss, Bruce Wayne is on the line. Do you want s h I e l d breathing down your neck?

43:47
Mitch
What do you think the editorial mandate was for using characters?

43:51
Case
I do know that there was a certain amount of if they claimed them, but that might only be for major characters because I know when I was reading up on X Patrol, they were trying to figure out what they could use with doctor doom. And then it turned out that no one had called Doomsday. And they're like, fuck, yeah.

44:10
Mitch
I mean, to me, it just. I imagine, like, a. Like a bunch of the dudes just sitting in a room and doing, like, fantasy football. Like.

44:21
Jmike
Oh, we'll take this one and mix it together with this one. Now we'll take that one.

44:26
Case
And then it gets so weird when you start doing team books and, like, all the. All the weird continuity shit with some of these characters. Because when you're just talking about the main character of a book, it's usually pretty easy. It's like, yeah, okay, yeah, we're taking Spider man and Superboy and we're consolidating them. And, like, if they've got their uni, like, they've got, like, a rich universe each that they can, you know, kind of bring together, but when it's like, X Men stuff, there's so many of them and there's no, like, clean. Like, this all belongs to Excalibur. Like, no, because, like, they're founded by people who are part of the Claremont era X Men, and then also marvel UK. And, like, they're all over the place. And this is the nineties. Let's be very clear about that.

45:06
Case
And both books or both companies were deep in the throes of some questionable design and character choices.

45:15
Mitch
So would we also say that this is the first appearance of a resurrected Jason Todd, like, even before DC also. Yes, several years before, because Jason Todd as deathlok seems pretty cool.

45:27
Case
Yes, I dig that one.

45:29
Mitch
But Nightwing and moon Knight, like, it just seems not good. Moonwing, could they not use Nightwing because it's used in generations?

45:41
Case
Oh, nightwing. This predates that, though, does it? Yeah.

45:45
Mitch
Oh, geez. Okay, nevermind then.

45:47
Case
Yeah. This is like two years before generations.

45:49
Jmike
Wait, when did generations come out?

45:50
Mitch
Generations in 2000?

45:52
Case
Generations, like nine. Yeah. So even more. Wow, this is 96. So generations 2000. That's four years.

45:58
Mitch
Okay. Yeah. All that, it just kind of mixed up together. Me.

46:02
Case
Yeah. Oh, all the Batman stuff in this in general, I was like, that's fine. Like, the nuke, like, well, but, like, the nuke bane kind of crossover is, like, cool. And like, some, I don't know, the Batman stuff being overlaid on S H I E l D stuff just felt like, yeah, let's put Batman theme things on, like, super spy stuff.

46:21
Mitch
And then Tony Stark is just there as I'll make things for you kind of guy.

46:25
Case
Right. Yeah. Because they had at this point, no intentions of what to do with Tony Stark because he wasn't a big enough name as a character to immediately justify an amalgam, you see?

46:37
Mitch
And that's what I'm talking about. If we did this today, it has to be completely restructured just because of how popular certain characters have become. Right?

46:45
Case
Yeah. Although I think Iron Lantern apparently was a huge write in. As soon as this was announced, people were like, oh, do Iron man and Green Lantern. That's a perfect fusion right there. And I think that works pretty well.

46:56
Mitch
Oh, that works great. Yeah, yeah. And the second run that, and then the history of it, like, when they throw in the human lantern. So it would be Alan Scott and Jim Hammond. Human torch. Right? Yeah. I like the history that they create just in the few panels that you could see.

47:14
Case
So why don't we jump over, let's knock out assassins while we're kind of in the Batman space?

47:20
Mitch
So I have to talk about dare the Terminator. Like, if you're. If you're mixing Slade Wilson and Matt Murdock, why does it come out female?

47:27
Case
Two x chromosomes.

47:29
Mitch
Oh, okay.

47:30
Case
I guess it works as well as anything else.

47:33
Mitch
I know, but I feel like there should be a third character that they threw in. They threw in there, like, but who would it be? Slade's wife, because she was a military person too.

47:41
Case
Well, so it's like the Electra daredevil thing is the pairing here. So really it would be more like who would fit with Catwoman being combined with Elektra.

47:50
Mitch
Okay, but if you're doing daredevil for that, why? Why Deathstroke? Is there no other assassins in the DC universe they could have combined with Daredevil? Who is the writer on this one?

48:01
Case
DG Chichester. I don't know.

48:03
Mitch
I'll go have a conversation with them.

48:08
Case
I mean, this is a book where they are given a lot of space to, like, fill out tons of characters because this is like, it's the raid or dread.

48:16
Mitch
Oh, it's so ism. You're right.

48:19
Case
And it's just like, how many combinations can we do? And, like, we open with Deadshot slash bullseye getting murdered immediately. And then they just, like, work their way through, like, fun combos of, like, lethal characters to get to the big question, which I think is a fucking dope amalgam, right?

48:35
Mitch
I love the big question so much. I wish there was more. Like, I could have read about him.

48:42
Case
Yeah. Like, it. He fits so well in either universe. Like, but especially Batman stuff. Like, man, like, this is such a good version of the same question theme of, like, the Riddler, but. But having its his own kind of distinct style and being more of, like, you know, a kingpin. Yeah. But Batman actually could use a character.

49:02
Mitch
Like that pretty well. And the fact that he didn't come up with a clunky, like, Riddler kingpin like name and went with the big question, like, I love that.

49:13
Case
Yeah. Also, I just want to point out he's mayor of Gotham City of New Gotham City, which now, like, the kingpin is the mayor of New York in comics currently. And, like, again, prescient stuff. Like they were testing out ideas in these books and seeing how they, like, fit and, like, seeing, like, what they could, like, kind of work with and play with as ideas. But, yeah, so then we get a cheetah craven the hunter mashup makes sense. Which. Yeah, that's fine.

49:39
Mitch
Jungle theme. That's all they needed.

49:41
Case
Yeah, we got manhunter slash cable. This is one where cable just gets, like, where a character just gets used a bunch of times. Like.

49:47
Mitch
Cause he's a next patrol. Yeah, twice, kinda.

49:51
Case
I mean, it is also cable, though, so it's like, well, different time periods of any character. He's the most likely to be all over the place. But honestly, strife would be the way to go because strife has the same kind of crazy shoulder pad shit that nineties manhunter does.

50:03
Mitch
That's true. It would have been better if it was strife instead of cable. I mean, I guess you could just say it is strife. I mean, I guess.

50:10
Case
Yeah, I guess you could say. But he's called wired, which I. Yeah.

50:16
Mitch
It was definitely lens to cable, not strife, but, yeah, I mean, other than the. I mean, the book just. I think it just kind of looks cool. There's not much else going on for it.

50:30
Case
They just work their way up and then dare kind of dies in this. Yeah, I don't know. I guess the reason they would have used Deathstroke the Terminator is because this was the era when they first tried to make deathstroke a protagonist. Like, he had his own book at this point, so maybe there was just a general desire to do that. And, like, they're like, assassins would be a fun name for a book. And we can do Deathstroke and Elektra, who merges.

50:55
Mitch
Doesn't she kind of look like the one warrior? A woman from Wildcats?

51:00
Case
Like, zealot?

51:01
Mitch
Is that what it's called? Is that what she. Her name? Yeah. Like, with the white hair?

51:04
Case
Yeah, yeah, white hair with. With a big sword and a red bodysuit? Yeah.

51:07
Mitch
Okay.

51:08
Case
Yeah. Which. That design, like, because it also looks kind of like glory, which is just, like, a slightly more Wonder Woman slash model version of zealot. That look just seemed to be really popular in the nineties.

51:19
Mitch
Very.

51:21
Case
But, yeah, I don't have a ton to say about assassins because it's just like, can they get to the top? They actually go deeper into their backstories than some of the other books do. Like, dare having, like, been blinded and the horns are, like, surgically attached to her head and whatnot. But I don't know. This also was an era, at least for me, when I was first getting into these books, I was coming as a Marvel fan, and so a lot of these books were how I found out about DC stuff and then, like, went and learned about it.

51:50
Mitch
Oh, wow. That's see, that's the opposite for me. I was more of a. At this point, when this came out, I was a DC person, so I learned more about marvel stuff.

51:56
Case
Hey, two great tastes. Tastes great to you?

52:00
Mitch
Where do you want to go to next?

52:02
Case
Why don't we talk about Spider Boy? Spider Boy is probably my favorite book in this run, partially just because I love Superboy lore stuff. And I also love Spider man. It's a good book. It's written. It's drawn by Mike Wieringo, who is an amazing artist and unfortunately has passed away. I just fucking, I love it. It's got so many nerdy references. It opens, like, with him fighting bazarnage, and it just never stops. Like, it's just crazy. From start to finish.

52:27
Jmike
With great power comes great possibilities.

52:32
Case
He's teaming up with the challengers of the unknown. So we get, like, them set up in this era, and then they later get their own book in the next.

52:40
Mitch
Series, which challenges of the unknown is definitely a fantastic four in. Challengers of, right.

52:45
Case
Oh, sorry. Challengers of the fantastic.

52:47
Jmike
Challenges of unknown.

52:47
Case
Yeah.

52:48
Mitch
And so the fact that they have so much of the, like, challenges because the challengers are known and Superboy don't ever really mix. But Fantastic Four and Spider man do well.

52:59
Case
And they've. They've had, well, you know what I was about to say, they've had, like, stuff with, like, the cadmus. But I'm like, no, I think actually, this is making me think that more than actual.

53:10
Mitch
I mean, this challenges of the fantastic definitely seems like, or at least this facility that they're at, it seems more like Cadmus. And what's the Baxter building kind of, like, thrown together? It's all the scientists of the world in this one building.

53:27
Case
Right? And actually, we see that in this. All the scientists are here. We get Ray Palmer, Hank Pym, the Otto Octavius. They're all around. This is written by Carl Kiesler, who was writing Superboy at the time. So, you know, I think there's a lot of, like. And also Carl Kiesel is a giant Jack Kirby nerd. Like, later with Tom Grumman. First of all, in Superboy, there's a whole, like, subplot where Superboy basically turns into commandy. And then later on, when they did the book, section zero, it's like a love letter to, like, Jack Kirby style Fantastic Four. So, like, they're big fans of, like, any kind of, like, Jack Kirby, man of science, you know, science hero type adventure stuff, which fits the overall vibe here. Speaking of Jack Kirby, the Spider Boy gun.

54:13
Case
That's a thing that Jack Kirby's original design for Spider man had that they didn't use because they went instead with Steve Ditko stuff.

54:19
Mitch
Oh, wow. Well, then they end up using a gun in Spider man noir. Right? Doesn't he have a web shooting gun, the original noir?

54:28
Case
That does not sound wrong. But also came after this.

54:30
Mitch
Yeah, no, exactly. But would both been inspired by Kirby's original design for using.

54:39
Case
He's got a gun. I'm not sure if it's a web gun. Mostly how I know noir, aside from into the spider verse is from the shattered dimensions video game.

54:48
Mitch
Yeah, that's right.

54:50
Case
Let's see. So we got, I have never been clear on why Johnny Storm has a tiny clone of Johnny Storm in this.

54:56
Mitch
I have to assume that's a challenge with the unknown kind of thing.

54:59
Case
It's gotta be. It's gotta because it's real weird. I love that Daphne Donovan's around because he's a fuckhead. And it's great. Oh, yeah. Kirk Connors is also here because all the scientists are here.

55:11
Mitch
All the scientists. So talking about clunky names, how do you two feel about Uncle Jen?

55:17
Case
So I. All right. There's so much I like going on with this that the fact that it is a weird way of phrasing things. It's like, all right, it's general thunderbolt Ross. All right.

55:29
Mitch
Yeah.

55:32
Case
It'S there for me, at least. It helps get to a couple of, like, really fun continuity nods. And the fact that it rhymes with Uncle Ben is like, okay. Yeah. So, like. Cause we get the origin story for him. And, you know, it starts, it's very superboy of the nineties where it's like, it's a clone to recreate the super soldier. And in this case, it works because super soldier's been gone for so long that they're like, how do we do this? And they decide on using gravity based powers, which is like the telekinesis of Superboy at this point. And that's why I really dig how he's got, like, thick boots and he can run along the side of buildings and so forth, unlike Spider man, where he needs points of contact and he can only use thin fabric and whatnot.

56:12
Case
It's like, no, he's actually just changing the angle of his gravity, which I think is such a cool element of that. It's the basic Superboy kind of story, except instead of him being freed and going off on his own, they actually take him in and we've got General Thunderbolt Ross trying to teach him to be a good boy. And then he, you know, then he dies the way, like the general always will. It's implied that the DNA base stock for him or for Spider Boy is the Peter Parker base stock, the scientist who dies in the creation of Spider Boy. So then when we get a secret identity, he has the last name Ross because of General Thunderbolt Ross. But he takes the name Pete and then he gets to be Pete Ross, Superboy's best friend.

56:57
Case
And I love that they thought really hard about making any time where you can get to these kind of byzantine architectures of comic book references. I'm all here for it. When it feels like that some thought was put into it and this felt like thought was put into it, I'm like, yes, bump it into my veins, guys. I love how they keep talking about the insect queen. I love that we get Rex Leach as a set up here with Betty Brandt, which is like, yeah, that makes sense.

57:28
Mitch
So I am not familiar with Rex Leech and Roxy Leach.

57:31
Case
So they were, it was his talent agent for the Superboy books in the nineties.

57:36
Mitch
Man, see, I remember reading those books, but I do not remember these characters. But makes sense.

57:41
Case
Yeah, like, they were just very scummy and kind of like, you know, every now and then they'd have moments of being, like, actually not bad people. But, like, it was always about, like, booking Superboy as a celebrity. Four things. They were the ones who, like, when Superman was dead, bought the trademark to the name Superman so that super, like, that Connell, like, the kid, the clone, could be legally Superman. And then, like, when Superman came back, they, like, tried to sue him and, like, there was a whole thing. And when Superboy figured out that he wasn't really a clone of Superman, they, like, worked out a deal and they sold the rights to the Superman name back to Superman for a dollar.

58:20
Mitch
Man, the nineties.

58:21
Case
It's so weird.

58:25
Mitch
I did love the whole, like, the anticipation of the insect queen and especially how that ends up being Mary Jane Watson because of how the first introduction of Mary Jane Watson was very, oh, you're gonna go on the date with my friend's daughter or friend's niece or whatever, right?

58:40
Case
Yeah. And like that's a fun element there, you know? And, you know, it being Mary Jane is great because, you know, it was Lana Lang. So we get the redhead kind of connection right there. King Lizard as a people need to remember that King Shark was a superboy villain first, before he was anything else.

58:54
Mitch
He's definitely everywhere now.

58:56
Case
Yes.

58:58
Mitch
I mean, it makes sense because Superboy was always on the beach and stuff. Right. So dusk, king shark. Okay.

59:04
Case
Right. And it was like a, like the, a demigod of a hawaiian shark God was the basic idea. And Superboy was, like, set in Hawaii and, like, actually dealt with, like, hawaiian mythology a lot.

59:15
Mitch
Okay.

59:16
Case
Yeah. At some point, we'll talk about the nineties Superboy Run and there's lots of characters that are references to it all and lots of things set around like volcanoes and stuff because it's all in Hawaii.

59:25
Mitch
I can't wait to listen to you guys talk to that one.

59:27
Case
We get the New York Special Crimes unit, which is just like a cavalcade of references for the different books. One of which is like kind of, sort of Dan Turpin combined with Bucky Barnese.

59:37
Mitch
Yeah, sure.

59:38
Case
Being called Brooklyn Barnes. Flash Thompson's there, Captain McCoagh, who's like the police captain in the Superboy books at this time. But, yeah, King Lizard shows up. He's been doused in Pym particles, so he's just getting bigger as they fight. And so Spider Boy grabs the white dwarf technology from the atom and shrinks him with that curse you spider or Spider Boy?

01:00:01
Jmike
Spider Boy. That's a super. Not super or the fact a name.

01:00:06
Mitch
The fact that his, like, extra nickname is the mall crawler. Like, I thought that was funny.

01:00:12
Case
Yeah. Lots of good fun puns. I haven't said this yet. I love the Spider Boy costume. I think it's really so good. I want that jacket.

01:00:21
Mitch
Yeah.

01:00:23
Case
Honestly, all the excesses of the Superboy costume are toned down at the appropriate levels. I mean, the Mike Rango art is also just like, makes it look good in general. But, like, it's so cool. And it is a nice fusion of specifically the Ben Reilly Spider man elements like the finger gloves and so forth, the way it was, individual fingers and then a blue hand base. If you look at the Ben Reilly costume, you're like, okay. I see specific spots where the differences are being applied here, which I think is cool. All the belts that Superboy had actually having function on this one are good. Instead of just random belts on his leg, it's like, oh, that's his holster. Okay. I love Spider Boy being friends with Doc ock. Like, wonderful setup right there.

01:01:06
Mitch
And then you had, was it this book? Yeah, it was this book where you kind of have a crazy Reed Richards. Right. Like he's been.

01:01:14
Case
Yeah. Yeah. So Dabney Donovan has manipulated him and it's implied that Dabney Donovan is also responsible for Peter Parker's death and for the release of Spider Boy prematurely.

01:01:24
Mitch
That's right.

01:01:24
Case
So, yeah, he's like, I've infected him with evil DNA. And I think that Dabney Donovan is like mad scientist who shows up and causes shit in the background all the time. And particularly, he was showing up a lot in the Tom Grummet and Carl Kiesel first the Superman books that they were working on, and then on the Superboy stuff. And I think that ties in a little bit with Paul Westfield, the original clone stock generator for Superboy, like, going crazy and bad, but I can't remember for sure. I don't know. Suffice it to say, a lot of this is, like, very similar to stuff going on in the Superboy books of the time because they really loved all the, like, all the Jack Kirby Superman stuff that was introduced in, like, Jimmy Olsen's pal and whatnot.

01:02:06
Case
All right, why don't we shift over to let's look at X patrol, guys.

01:02:11
Mitch
X patrol.

01:02:13
Case
X patrol.

01:02:14
Mitch
X Men and Doom patrol. Like, why not X Men and teen Titans?

01:02:19
Case
Well, it kind of has some of those elements, though, because they've got the X building, which is just like the t building from the true beastling, which is now we know him as beast Boy. At the time, he was still going by changeling as that one half of the beast. Like, all right, well, that's, you know, that's a team Titans member. And we got Starfire there. I'm gonna be honest. When this book first came out, I wasn't familiar with Doom Patrol because there was not a Doom patrol series at the time. And so I was like, I don't know where the patrol's coming from, but it looks like an X Men Teen Titans book. And then you find out more and you're like, okay, I see how it's not quite that bad.

01:02:54
Mitch
Now, feral lad, isn't he a Legion character?

01:02:59
Case
Yeah. There are some elements of the personality that match up to robot man.

01:03:04
Mitch
True. Okay, so there's a little bit of.

01:03:06
Case
A three person, but it's mostly feral lad and colossus. But feral Ladd doesn't really have a personality. Like, like pharaoh man in this. Like, that's. That's more the kind of curmudgeon y thing type personality that robot man has.

01:03:18
Jmike
Yeah.

01:03:19
Mitch
And then once again, with Nile's cable, you get kind of like three characters put together.

01:03:25
Case
Right?

01:03:26
Mitch
Because Professor X has used so many times in this, in these crossover, these amalgams. Like, he's used several times.

01:03:34
Case
Well, he has a professor X kind of vibe, but also Niles Calder always has kind of a professor X kind of vibe.

01:03:42
Mitch
Like, I guess that's true.

01:03:43
Case
People compare Doom Patrol and X Men a lot. Like, people have argued that one is a ripoff of the other. And, you know, Doom Patrol came first, technically, but it's like a really tight window, so it'd be very difficult for. To be like, full on robbery. But certainly, you know, they were all guys living in New York, working across the street from each other for a while. Like, a lot of ideas kind of floated back and forth between the hallways over lunche.

01:04:08
Mitch
That is true. They were all friends. They all talked to each other, and.

01:04:13
Case
In some cases were the same people.

01:04:14
Mitch
And we're the same people.

01:04:15
Case
Yeah. Shatter Starfire. As a fusion of Shatter Star and Starfire. That is a mouthful of a name.

01:04:22
Mitch
No kidding. Also with a can, with some type of connection to Spider Boy.

01:04:28
Case
Yeah. So in the letters, I think they say that at one point, well, actually in Spider Boy, he even talks about it in a previous adventure. He had gone down to, like, the microverse, which was like their version, or like, where the kingdom of Tojo Moran or whatever, like a fusion of the Mojoverse and Temeran, the place where Starfire is from. But it was inside, like, the microverse. Microscopic universe. Yeah. Like, that's where he encountered Shatter starfire and brought her into the full size universe.

01:04:58
Mitch
And you said Dao dial Husk or.

01:05:01
Case
Dial h for Husk, which I. H for hero. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's such a great opportunity to have all these references that aren't going to make it into the mainstream. And no one gives a shit about continuity because they're. They're literally one off. Like, okay, I'm going to turn into Mary Marvel girl. Fucking, yeah, I love it here for it.

01:05:21
Mitch
And then Polaris is Doctor Polaris and Polaris. Yeah.

01:05:26
Case
Then we get our, we got another trio with the elastigirl, wasp and domino hybrid. And I don't know why they put the domino part.

01:05:34
Mitch
Right.

01:05:35
Jmike
Yeah, just because.

01:05:36
Mitch
Just, yeah, just because they needed to stick it in somewhere. Oh, it's because domino and cable, I guess. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that kind of makes sense. And then the elastigirl and was just because they both change shape.

01:05:48
Case
Yeah, they're like, both size change.

01:05:50
Mitch
Yeah, size changers.

01:05:51
Case
Yeah. And, like, if it's. If it's doom patrol, the elastic girl part makes sense, so. And, like, yeah, it's obviously, it is obviously doom patrol. Like, there's no question about that. Even though there's a lot of like, teen Titan vibes going on here as well.

01:06:04
Jmike
A little bit of legion.

01:06:07
Case
Yeah, just that scosh, that feral lad. And the feral lad elements being incorporated into colossus uniform, aside from the mask, I think are actually really nice and subtle. It's the riveting that goes along and the fact that the stripe doesn't come to a point. It actually becomes like the stripe continues all the way down. Those are the legion elements. I'm like, yeah, put those in there. Yeah, feral lad's great. I love feral.

01:06:31
Mitch
And then I like that the change to be slings powers or beast boy's powers or changeling's powers of being. Was it mythological character or creatures instead of just animals?

01:06:41
Jmike
Any creature. Yeah.

01:06:44
Case
Yeah, I guess he only does transform.

01:06:45
Mitch
Into mythological characters or animals.

01:06:47
Case
I actually hadn't noticed that, but that makes sense.

01:06:49
Mitch
Yeah, I think, I think he says it in the book too at some point. But there's a lot of explaining of every character. Like every, all these books, half the book is just giving everybody backstory just so you could be like, caught up.

01:07:02
Jmike
Oh, that's what they do.

01:07:05
Case
I mean, it was helpful because again, like, I'm coming in. I had no idea who Fero lad was when I read this book.

01:07:10
Mitch
I had no idea because feral had been dead.

01:07:12
Case
And it was like two years later, Pharaoh shows up for like final night. The event where like the dc.com or where the, in DC where the sun is eaten by a sight eater and links up with legion of superheroes, I'm like, oh, that's where they get the pharaoh thing for expert. I mean, some of it is just fun trying to figure out how these link ups work. And then yeah, we get Doctor Doomsday and I fucking love it. It's so goddamn dumb, but it's great. And recently when they did the heroes Reborn event in 2021, the one where it's the squad and supreme characters and whatnot, they fuse Doctor Doom with juggernaut. And I'm like, it's the same thing where it's like, oh, yeah, Doctor doom becoming like a big physical threat. Like, all right, yeah, I'm here. I'm here for it.

01:08:02
Case
This one is like, he's got the tech armor stuff and he, at a couple spots, they sort of imply that it's like the doomsday body is like a carapace that he's wearing, but it's also, he apparently got infected with Doomsday DNA, which also works. I don't know, but as a name, as far as names go, Shatter Star Fire is a lot to say. Doctor Doomsday sounds like an actual supervillain name that doesn't take work.

01:08:30
Mitch
No.

01:08:30
Case
And his whole plot is he's going to suck in mind controlled versions of the non split up heroes that they make a point of being, like, second rate imitations, perhaps, but still powerful. So that's all fun. And then Doctor Doomsday punches Nile's cable real hard in the back and breaks his spine.

01:08:46
Mitch
Can't feel his legs.

01:08:47
Case
But again, we get a Mary Marvel girl thing there. And, like, I like when Jean Grey has elements that kind of make her, like, feel more like the Shazam Marvel family. Like the original Phoenix costume. If you, like, step back for a second and just think you're like, oh, yeah, I can see how that's like a. Kind of like a Captain Marvel costume.

01:09:02
Mitch
Oh, yeah.

01:09:04
Case
And I love it. I just want more of it. Like, I wanted to go by Marvel Woman in modern comics, and I wanted to have, like, a little bit of a nod to, like, the marvels. Like, ty hern. She's the first Marvel comics character to have Marvel in her name before they had a Captain Mar Vell and before they had a Miss Marvel, like, make her a flagship.

01:09:24
Mitch
Yeah.

01:09:24
Case
Anyway, and Randy, that makes sense. Why don't we jump into the other x book of this line, which is JLX. So this one intrigued me because it's Howard Porter doing Justice League stuff right before he actually does Justice League stuff. Like, this is right before the Morrison run with Porter doing JLA.

01:09:40
Mitch
Oh, that makes sense.

01:09:42
Case
And a lot of these books feel like test runs for creative teams before they would work on books, if it wasn't already the people working on books just coming over, like, Mark Wade's doing Captain America at about this time. I don't know what the timeline on it for which came first. So who can really say? Carl Kiesel was already doing Superboy, but then, like I said, JLA comes out right after this. So we're getting to see Howard Porter doing superhero stuff of that team style right before he actually goes on to take on the flagship DC superhero book.

01:10:12
Mitch
I mean, it's the era of JLA that I love.

01:10:16
Case
Yeah. And in the next wave, John Romita junior working on Thorion is right before he does a Thor run.

01:10:22
Mitch
Oh.

01:10:23
Case
So it's just like, moments where it's like, oh, are we testing? Yeah, we'll talk about that.

01:10:27
Mitch
Yeah, we'll talk about that.

01:10:28
Case
Yeah. So we get to see the judgment league Avengers showing up to deal with the mutant friends of the JLX. There's so many characters to talk about here, just for a moment, because there's just a bunch. Super soldier, not a big surprise. Dark claw being there, not a big surprise. Those are the ones we know about. I love the Captain Marvel look. Like the fusion of Captain Mar Vell and Captain Marvel. And apparently his magic word is kreeved.

01:10:59
Mitch
I mean, the green outfit does look pretty awesome.

01:11:02
Case
Yeah. Particularly the white bodysuit with the leg I think is really cool. I really dig that. All angel Hawk talking about names that are like, why would you go with that? Why would you ever pick that name? Why did you say that name?

01:11:18
Mitch
Yeah, I kind of feel like angel would have been just fine.

01:11:21
Case
Yeah. Or Hawk. One or the other.

01:11:23
Mitch
So if you're looking at the Wikipedia entry for this, you have Goliath and Hawkeye, which is Oliver Queen and Goliath mixed together, which is also Clint, and then Connor. Hawke and Clint mixed together for Hawkeye.

01:11:38
Case
Yeah. I mean, it might be that they went with Clint Goliath as opposed to the Hank as giant man thing. I'm not sure. Cause that's the Hank giant man costume, though, from the nineties. It's very close to what his then Avengers costume was as giant Mandev. Yeah. And then we get a mockingbird black canary hybrid, and then.

01:11:59
Mitch
So. So the whole gambit and obsidian mixed together. Like, I get it, because it gives you a way for runaway to be able to make out with her boyfriend, but, like, obsidian and gambit seemed like a stretch also.

01:12:17
Case
It's a weird choice. Like, honestly, if I was gonna mix anyone, I would mix obsidian with Quicksilver and then have jade be mixed with Scarlet Witch, but they did quicksilver with impulse here, and mercury looks cool. Like, impulse is a great costume, and to give him a blue and white color scheme is just fucking dope. There's nothing else you can really say about it. It was a good costume. The palette swap is still good. That one's just fine right there. I don't know. Obsidian was on the team at the time, so it may have made sense that it's like, all right, he's on the Avengers at this exact moment or not the Avengers, the Justice League at this exact moment. So use him, I guess. I don't know. I don't know if that's the best.

01:13:02
Case
And then, like, gypsy being combined with rogue is also, like, kind of a weird mashup right there. Rey being combined with Apollo. Er, Apollo being Rey and Cyclops, I think works well enough from a design standpoint. This is, like, the nineties. Rey costume is a very pouchy kind of look, which fits with X Men. Looks pretty well.

01:13:21
Mitch
And, you know, when I first read this all those years ago, I always thought that the ray that they were mixing with was the one. Was it light ray from the new gods? What's what? Oh, yeah. Is that his name? Light ray?

01:13:34
Case
It is light ray.

01:13:35
Mitch
Yeah. So that's why I always thought it was. And then realizing that it's the ray right there.

01:13:40
Case
Yeah.

01:13:40
Mitch
Yeah.

01:13:41
Case
Makes a nineties ray. It was taught to believe that exposure to sunlight would kill him. It was actually, like, no, it gives you superpowers. Oh, lying nuns.

01:13:53
Mitch
That's lying nuns.

01:13:56
Case
We got Firebird, which is Phoenix combined with fire. It's a pretty straightforward one. And that costume's a really good fusion of, like, the Phoenix design with the fire outfit, which was, like, the green with, like, a little bit of, like, white fire trim to it, so it looks pretty good. I'm surprised they don't have an ice maiden ice combined with ice man character.

01:14:20
Mitch
Oh, yeah.

01:14:21
Case
Like, that feels like a no brainer if you're gonna. Especially if you're gonna have, like, firebird there.

01:14:26
Mitch
Did they use ice later on? It might have been in the second, maybe a second. I thought I remember seeing ice somewhere, but it's definitely not with ice man, like you said.

01:14:34
Case
Yeah, it just. It would feel like a no brainer here, because, like, some of these are just, like, here's the really obvious one, like, the mariner, which is Namor and Aquaman together, and it's just blonde namor.

01:14:47
Mitch
Yeah.

01:14:50
Case
With a cool goatee and anchor axe.

01:14:56
Mitch
Oh, God. With the chains.

01:14:59
Case
Edgy nineties.

01:14:59
Mitch
Edgy nineties.

01:15:03
Case
I mean, I don't really have a big problem with his design. It's just, like, it's fine. You know? Like, I generally prefer either the Aquaman or Namor designs more, but this one is fine. You know? It's fine.

01:15:15
Mitch
It's fine. It's just fine.

01:15:19
Case
I mean, he's such. He's just namor. Like, it's just namor. Like, you barely care about any of the Aquaman stuff for this. For this character here. And it's namor with that tenuous connection of namor being a mutant, which I always find, like, a little bit weird.

01:15:33
Mitch
I always find that interesting that they keep throwing. They always throw that in there every.

01:15:37
Case
Time it comes up. It's like, all right. There are good moments planet size X Men with him being like, all right, so if you want an alliance of Krakoa and Atlantis, what are you gonna give me, Charles? I dig those kind of moments there and kind of acknowledging. I don't know, it's like, it's fine, but it's also like he's such a pre existing character. He never is going to feel like an X Men to me.

01:16:04
Mitch
True. Yeah, no, he's never going to feel like an X Men. Even when they tried to do part of the. What was it, the island that they had off of San Francisco, like, utopia. Utopia, yeah. He was there a lot when. At the beginning of that, wasn't he?

01:16:18
Case
Yeah. And then he was like part of the Phoenix Five and.

01:16:21
Mitch
Yeah.

01:16:22
Case
Which is like, yeah, let's have a character who is really fucking powerful become even more fucking powerful. Okay, cool. Lastly or not lastly, we've got night creeper, which is a pretty standard name, kind of combination of Nightcrawler and the Creeper. That's fine. We got the kind of color scheme of creeper. Sort of like, creeper is like red, yellow and green. Normally has yellow skin, making this one have blue. It's fine. The look is fine. And then he's.

01:16:51
Mitch
And as much as I love, like, the Kurt Wagner like personality, I love that they used the Jack rider like, the creeper personality in this. Like, it just fit so much better.

01:17:02
Case
Yeah. There's more to play off with because he's. He's a prick.

01:17:04
Mitch
Yeah.

01:17:07
Case
Also, he has, like, concern for self preservation. So, like, later on where it's like, I'm sorry, you want me to teleport? Where it's like. Yeah, that makes sense. And then we got Mister X, who is, I guess, kind of a Maxwell lord in this Persona. If I had to, like, throw out an idea there. He looks like Tony Stark, he's telepathic. And then we find out that he's actually Martian Manhunter and a Skrull and kind of bishop.

01:17:34
Mitch
Yeah. With the m in his. Yeah. Was the m just supposed to be for martian or. He's a scroll, so it doesn't make any. I don't know.

01:17:46
Case
Yeah. Or is he a mutant from the future? I don't know.

01:17:50
Jmike
You're right. This is fantasy football. He's got all the names.

01:17:54
Case
Oh, yeah, totally.

01:17:56
Jmike
Yes, yes. Here we go. This is how we're going to do this. Give me all the names from all the superheroes that we have and put them together.

01:18:04
Mitch
Larry Hama had the first pick, and he's like, I take Wolverine, Dixon's, like.

01:18:09
Case
You guys know I'm Chuck Dixon, right? And they're like, oh, yeah. Okay, well, how about this? He can take Wolverine. You get Bruce Wayne.

01:18:14
Mitch
Boom. Look at that.

01:18:19
Case
Anyway, so they go down to Atlantis, and they encounter. And this is one I love, Will Magnus and his sentinels. I fucking adore it. Because Will Magnus is such a. Like, at this time, like, who knows about the metal men? Like, they're not nineties cool. Like, they're barely talked about in the nineties. The only time it really ever comes up is in kingdom come, where, like, it's like, the metal man alloy is fighting the parasite. And that's, like, when the Kansas incident occurs.

01:18:44
Mitch
So at any time in the history of DC, was Will Magnus a bad guy?

01:18:49
Case
Not that I can think of.

01:18:50
Mitch
Okay, so it's just. It's just they needed someone to mix with ball Vertrask, and they came with Will Magnus.

01:18:56
Case
Right. But taking the fun part of him being Magnus, and then at this point, Magneto being Eric Magnus, making them brothers. Yeah. Like, I thought that was kind of fun. And so. All right, so here's, like, a weird part here. This issue is co written by Gerard Jones and Mark Wade. At some point, we'll probably have to do a book or an episode talking about prime, which is a character created by a Gerard Jones. Gerard Jones is, I believe, currently in prison for possession of child pornography.

01:19:24
Mitch
Wow.

01:19:25
Case
So, yeah, kind of uncomfortable talking about that part. And he wrote a bunch of stuff in the amalgam stuff. He also wrote Magneto and the magnetic men, which is one of the justifications for. All right, let's have the magneto stuff be around for all the mutant books here. It's real fucking gross. When I found out why prime is never used anymore, I was like, oh, God damn it.

01:19:53
Mitch
Oh, that's. Yeah, that's a. Yeah, it's the worst. That's gross. That's terrible.

01:19:58
Case
But here, he's the creator of the sentinels. That makes as much sense as anything. I like Jocasta being reframed as, like, a little human sized sentinel. That was cool. I don't know if she's a reference to a DC character.

01:20:12
Mitch
Besides, so it says that she's partly in the wikipedia. It says she's partly millie the model also.

01:20:20
Case
Okay, sure.

01:20:22
Mitch
And platinum from the metal men.

01:20:25
Case
I could see that. But then we have a much more direct platinum analog when we get to the magnet.

01:20:29
Mitch
Yeah. Magnetic men.

01:20:31
Case
Yeah. And, like, it gets so weird because then there's, like, all this, like, lore stuff that was put out there, like, trading cards and stuff that have contradictory information, which.

01:20:39
Mitch
Which also, like, has some of the only images of some of the characters that are mentioned. Right, right, yeah.

01:20:45
Case
Yeah. So, like, the whole line is. Is weird and not really meant to be, like, oh, well, but how does this work? Because it really doesn't.

01:20:54
Mitch
Don't think about it too hard.

01:20:56
Case
Even within individual issues, it doesn't always work, especially not if you're looking between different books, but there is a little bit of continuity, particularly between books that writers worked on together. So Gerard Jones writing this, and also Magneto and the magnetic men, they make a specific reference to the fact that Will Magnus is over in Atlantis at this point, because it's all being written by, you know, shared populations. So when you get too far afield and you have books written by totally different people who just didn't talk, that's where it gets, like, a little bit more like, wait, why is that Charles Xavier and also that Charles Xavier and that.

01:21:34
Jmike
Because we can.

01:21:36
Case
You get a professor X and you get a professor X. I mean, like.

01:21:40
Mitch
You were saying, though, that this is around the time of the X Men nineties cartoon. He's a super popular character, right?

01:21:46
Case
Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's talk about Magneto and the magnetic men, because they fight the Sentinels, and then Mister X reveals himself to actually be a martian, and then it's like, we're gonna go save mutantom. And that's the end of the show. Magneto and the magnetic men. So this is around the time that Magneto was being rehabilitated for age of apocalypse as a hero. People were actually trying to do stuff with him as a heroic character. Let's invert it. I liked it. I love the fact that the magnetic men are all based on the original brotherhood of the evil mutants. Like, it's so fucking fun.

01:22:15
Mitch
But then they throw in so many other mixes, too.

01:22:19
Case
Well, it gets really weird when you look at the second issue.

01:22:22
Mitch
It's true.

01:22:23
Case
But the first one, it's a fairly straightforward one to one. There's some weirdness. Cobalt is mastermind, technically, and they're like, you've got the best mind. And at one point, if I master my mind or something like that, there's lots of little line references like that all throughout everything to call attention to what thing that they're all coming from. But I really enjoy just going with this layout where they were going to do each metal was going to be a magnetic metal, and then they realized that there's only three base metals that are magnetic, so they're like, all right, what if we supplemented the ranks a little bit? Because, like, otherwise, you just have iron, nickel, and cobalt.

01:23:07
Mitch
What's the name of the thing that makes the metal men work? It's the something meter or something like that. It's the device that will magnus created that makes the metal men work, and then they gave it. They added magnet to it for this.

01:23:22
Case
Right.

01:23:23
Mitch
Oh, I just thought that was funny.

01:23:26
Case
Yeah. I mean, deep comic love. A lot of these spots here. And then you've got Sinestron, which is so much. It's a very nineties design for a character right there. Yeah, because he's Simon. Right. And combined with Sinestro, but then a robot.

01:23:46
Mitch
Right, but in a robot, because everything was robot.

01:23:50
Case
Yeah. I like. I love. I mean, I actually really like the metal men or the magnetic men designs. I really like antimony, as is clearly scarlet witch combined with platinum. Bismuth as a toad character is a lot of fun. I really like cobalt's design too. And me saying that, but also acknowledging that he's mastermind makes me mad. And you got a little bit with the collar. Looks like Mastermind's weird cloak that he would wear, but there's not a lot really going on that really feels like Mastermind. We've got a Psylocke and katana as a fuse character shows up at the. The very beginning.

01:24:26
Mitch
You know, I don't think I'm very familiar with the character of Mastermind.

01:24:30
Case
Well, so mastermind, outside of his initial appearances as, like, one of the founding brotherhood of evil mutants, his whole deal is that he creates illusions for people, and so his biggest arc is in the dark Phoenix saga. He's the one that convinces Jean Grey that she's part of the Hellfire club and that she should smack around her black handmaiden, who happens to be storm, and, like. Like, has this, like, whole, like, weird mind rape kind of story to him.

01:24:58
Mitch
Okay.

01:25:00
Case
There's no mastermind story that isn't, like, a little bit creepy.

01:25:03
Mitch
I mean, when he comes to powers like that, I would imagine not.

01:25:07
Case
Why don't we move on over to speed Demon, which is my least favorite of this entire run.

01:25:13
Mitch
Least favorite? What?

01:25:15
Case
Least favorite? It's the coolest design. Like, the design is fucking amazing. Like, it's a ghost rider and flash, and you're like, yep, that sounds awesome. He's got a flame trail. That sounds awesome. The Etrigan shit. It's too much. It's too fucking much.

01:25:29
Mitch
Honestly, I don't think I even remembered that it was etrichen. Until this read like, I always just remembered it being Ghost Rider. And flash, as soon as I saw.

01:25:38
Jmike
His dialogue, I was like, oh, snap.

01:25:43
Case
And that's how you get the sort of, like, spikiness to his face and whatnot, which makes him kind of look like, what was it? Vengeance. Like the spin off Ghost Rider character that had the spiky head, the edgier ghostwriter. I just think it's too much on that all. It's kind of fun. Having the design for the look of the character is great. Taking the Johnny Blaze style Ghost Rider costume and making it red and having it being a running theme, I think that's all really good. The rhyming stuff drove me kind of crazy. And I'm like, how does that even tie it all in? It just seemed like an extra detail, but more that. I just don't think the writing in this issue is very good.

01:26:26
Mitch
Who's the writer?

01:26:26
Case
It's gonna be someone I like. No, it's Howard Mackey.

01:26:29
Mitch
Okay.

01:26:30
Case
No, I'm allowed to say, you know, it's fun when we get to the circus that they're at and it's like it's blob combined with chunk and a. I don't know who miracle man is. Not miracle man. Mister Miracle is combined with. And then Oberon is combined with puck.

01:26:49
Mitch
Oh, it's such a good two one to one right there. And, I mean, then we get to. Speaking of speed demon himself, like, the blaze Allen. I like that name. Yeah.

01:27:01
Case
That's a good name.

01:27:02
Mitch
It's a good name. And then you get the Wally West Danny ketch character. The second.

01:27:08
Case
Yeah. Wally west, though. And they missed. Not like he. When he. When they. When he shows up later as a speed demon. Like, I'm here for the design of. We're gonna take the Danny catch ghost rider and put the Wally west color scheme on it. I think that's a good idea. Why the fuck does he have a motorcycle? Like, you're missing the point.

01:27:30
Mitch
Yeah.

01:27:30
Case
Like, this is. This is demons who run with fire.

01:27:33
Mitch
Well, the whole thing was that they don't know who the second demon is. Right, right.

01:27:38
Case
But I'm saying, like, if you're gonna combine it all, like, why would fair. Like, why. Why is he just Ghost Rider?

01:27:43
Mitch
I mean, he has a motorcycle throughout the whole book.

01:27:48
Case
I know. I'm just saying, like, if you're gonna do the combo. Like, if you're gonna do the amalgam.

01:27:53
Mitch
I get you. I get you.

01:27:54
Case
Commit to commit to the bit night spectre being nightmare combined with the spectre, I think, is fine. It's just nightmare. I love the silicon man. The Sandman plaster. That's a good name right there. Meanwhile, we got Harvey Osborn, and at various points, they call him Norman in the book. And that's when I'm like, oh, you didn't have answer?

01:28:18
Mitch
No. Get this book out real quick.

01:28:22
Case
Yeah, that was one of the more jarring moments for me. And also, if you're going to do two face combined with green goblinous, incorporate the two face into the goblin design and not just like, when he takes his mask off.

01:28:33
Mitch
Yeah, that would have been better, but it might have been a little too eclipso then, like, because if you had a goblin mask with two, like, a kind of disfigured face, it'd look a little bit more eclipso, wouldn't it?

01:28:45
Case
Maybe a little bit. Just from a, if you took literally the green Goblin face and just made it have, like, half a face, it would look like eclipso there. But I feel like you could, you know, be an artist and design. Like, he is just green goblin.

01:28:59
Mitch
True. You're right. You're right.

01:29:01
Case
Yeah. I mean, it would be really fun if you did, like, hobgoblin slash demo goblin for the two halves or something like that. Or, like half hobgoblin, half green goblin.

01:29:10
Mitch
Yeah, that would have been good. Yeah.

01:29:13
Case
I'm just saying you could do something to have the two faced part actually be part of that design and not just he's got a fucked up face. Like, there's nothing. No story stuff that related to the fucked up face either. Like, it's just like, oh, yeah, we needed. We needed.

01:29:25
Mitch
I mean, at one point in this book, they combined DC's scarecrow with Marvel's scarecrow. So it's not like they were working together. You know what?

01:29:32
Case
But that's also set up in the Marvel versus DC book because, like, they.

01:29:35
Mitch
Team up beforehand, they go running away.

01:29:38
Case
Together, and it's a bit character.

01:29:39
Mitch
Yeah, exactly. It's, you have Arrowcaster, which is speedy, and spymaster.

01:29:46
Case
Shouldn't it be, that makes sense.

01:29:47
Mitch
Shouldn't it be speedy and, like, swordmaster if they're at a circus?

01:29:51
Case
Or swordsman.

01:29:52
Mitch
Swordsman. Sorry. Yeah.

01:29:53
Case
If he was going to be part of the circus. But they don't deal with that circus.

01:29:57
Mitch
Stuff very much, I guess. I don't know Spidemaster all that well.

01:30:01
Case
Yeah, I don't either. But then we get the green Goblin gets possessed by night spectre, sort of. And the word effect that they use to illustrate him being possessed comes in and out, depending on which page you're looking at. And then we've got the kick this.

01:30:18
Jmike
Comic out as fast as you can.

01:30:22
Case
It's just like, I feel like you could have been so much more creative. The Green Goblin at the end where he has a cloak that's already starting to look more like a thing as opposed to just. It's just the Green Goblin.

01:30:33
Mitch
I mean, I like the idea of the Flash getting his powers from magic as opposed to science, what that means, what the. The world could mean from that. So I dig the idea, but the execution is obviously not great.

01:30:48
Case
Yeah. Like, again, the speed demon design, like, the COVID of this book is one of the most, like, eye catching things they put out there for this line. It looks so fucking cool. But it, like, the actual story is, like, a mess of weird, supernatural things. And I. They're just pulling from too many sources because they have Merlin shit and then they also have spirit of vengeance shit and also flash shit. You know, there's just a lot going on here to get to that point. And, like, he showed up by, like, having another speed demon show up at the end who is just, like, on a motorcycle. Like, if he ran in, like, full of fire and with his chain, like, I'd be like, yeah, okay, cool. We're keeping the flash part of it all.

01:31:29
Case
But, like, by the end, it's, like, barely a flash book in any real way.

01:31:33
Jmike
It just looks cool. Okay, just give me that.

01:31:35
Case
Just look cool. That the spirit of the speed demon of Etrigan was in a previous. Was, like, the Jay Garak character. I like. I think that was cool. Yeah, it just would have been, like, a little bit, I don't know, do a little bit more. And the fact that's Wally west. They didn't even call him Wally catch.

01:31:53
Mitch
Well, I think they called him Wally Allen.

01:31:55
Case
Or either way, it's, like, even less.

01:31:57
Mitch
Yeah, no, yeah, you're right. It's less. Less marvel in it.

01:32:01
Case
Yeah. It felt like they wanted to do, I don't even know, like, it felt kind of like more of an etrigandhenness speed or etch again ghostwriter book. And then with, like, random flash stuff thrown in there and then all of the naming is just, like, all over the place.

01:32:13
Jmike
Okay. With a cool concept that everyone thought.

01:32:16
Mitch
At this time in history. Was. Was ghostwriter a popular book?

01:32:20
Case
Yeah, there was a whole bunch of spin off books. There was spirits of vengeance. Johnny Blaze was back operating as his own hero. He would randomly show up and stuff. Like I said, there was the vengeance. The other ghost Rider character, the midnight sun stuff was going, was pretty big. Like, yeah, nineties marvel, like, embraced the dark, edgy books. So, like, Blade would also would often cross over with them and Morbius would show up the supernatural corner of Marvel. Okay, so let's see what I'm saying. I'm saving Doctor strange for last, so why don't we talk about Amazon next?

01:32:49
Mitch
So this book kind of really just upset me. Like, just in the fact that it's all just a recap of the history of this character. I didn't get anything. I mean, I understand that this all one shots and I'm not going to get any more story afterwards, but like, I just felt like there, I felt cheated. If it was a real book, if it was like, this is the, you know, you come in and they just rehash the origin of the character up.

01:33:18
Case
To the point where the antagonist is Poseidon. She has to, like, justify based on the history. Yeah, yeah. We should note that this is a John Byrne written and drawn book. And about this time is when he took over Wonder Woman, which you can tell from the design elements that are lifted from his specific Wonder Woman design, such as big stars instead of lots of stars on the underpants. I do like this merger, though. I think the idea of, I mean, in terms of power, it's kind of Thor power of grecian mythological strength combined with the control of weather. But I'm here for it. She's fucking powerful. Aurora kind of feels more like Donna Troy in a certain sense. Like she's an outsider brought in and made at Amazon.

01:34:06
Case
And the fact that we have Diana as a separate character who is rocking her nineties outfit for the amalgam books.

01:34:14
Mitch
Leather jacket and hot pants. Yep.

01:34:17
Case
That's the challenge of Artemis look that she was wearing when she had lost the mantle of Wonder Woman. Yeah. Because, you know, which this also kind.

01:34:24
Mitch
Of feels like this book definitely seems more storm than it is Wonder Woman. Right. Like, I understand she's got the princess of Themyscira going and shes got boosted strength. But that seems more like a bonus of being trained by the Amazons than being.

01:34:39
Case
Yeah, her base form is aurora being raised as an Amazon. So its storm. And then yes, she got a purple ray probably, I think they said on a training card at some point, but yeah, its storm in the role of Wonder Woman. But the book feels like a Wonder Woman book of the time. Like a John Byrne writing the greek gods kind of thing. I'm down for that. Take a character from one line and see how they could fit in a different type of book. And, like, storm, you know, she's had some minis, but she's never, like, it's never been like a storm book. That's just been an ongoing. So I think this is, like, a good opportunity to see, like, would this fit okay and, like, yeah, it does pretty well. I don't know.

01:35:22
Mitch
That's fine.

01:35:24
Case
Yeah, yeah, it's fine. It's sort of like the big thing on this one. Like, the look is pretty cool. Like, the storm version of the Wonder Woman costume looks pretty cool.

01:35:33
Mitch
Yeah, it does.

01:35:34
Case
Yeah. She's just as powerful as she would be anyway.

01:35:37
Mitch
Yeah.

01:35:38
Case
But that brings us over to bullets and bracelets, which has a lot more story going on in it.

01:35:42
Mitch
At least now, what they do with the whole Kanto character in this, like, is there a precedent for that in. Is that, like, cable being stolen from Scott as a baby?

01:35:59
Case
So the character that comes to mind for me is Validus from the Legion of superheroes, who was the son of lightning lad and Saturn girl and Darkseid sent back in time to raise as a monster.

01:36:11
Mitch
Oh, okay.

01:36:12
Case
So that's. That's the only time I can think of that specific use of the, like, of the Omega effect to raise a character as a villain kind of thing. But I can't say that it has never happened elsewhere. That's just the only time I'm aware of it because, yeah.

01:36:27
Mitch
The only thing I can think about is cable being sent to the future, little Nate being baby being sent to the future. Right.

01:36:33
Case
Yeah, but that's fine. So this is the other side of it. So we're seeing Diana. Like I said, she's rocking basically her nineties look, although they add skull effects instead of star designs to it to make her on theme with the Punisher, who is sort of Steve Trevor combined with Frank Castle. But it's mostly just the Punisher. Right.

01:36:58
Mitch
And honestly, it's mostly just Diana prince without powers. Right. There's no real marvel character.

01:37:05
Case
I mean, she even has powers. Just nothing. She's just not wearing the Wonder Woman.

01:37:09
Mitch
Yeah.

01:37:10
Case
Like, she's still, like, the blessed, created from clay by all the gods, building adamantium bracelets that was given to her.

01:37:17
Mitch
By the set of animazonian bracelets.

01:37:20
Case
And they go on this whole siege of Apocalypse. And so we get a lot of new God stuff. We've got war machine combined with the black racer. It's combined with monarch.

01:37:32
Mitch
Oh, wow. That's a lot of character, the black.

01:37:35
Case
Racer, is like a smaller. It's mostly war machine and modern monarch there. They get a boom tube to apocalypse. We get big Titania, which I love because it's big bar to combine with Titania. That's great.

01:37:46
Mitch
Agatha Harkness. Wow. All right.

01:37:48
Case
Yeah.

01:37:49
Mitch
So Granny Harkness and Granny goodness and Aga Harkness. That's interesting.

01:37:53
Case
That's a fun one. Thanoside, you know?

01:37:59
Mitch
Sure.

01:38:00
Case
Yeah, sure.

01:38:01
Jmike
Oh, man.

01:38:02
Case
As far as names go, all right, whatever. I love Punisher stealing the dead. Orion's Astro force weapons to fight. They're like, okay. Yeah. That's how you level the playing field right there.

01:38:14
Mitch
Now, is that Orion or Thorion? I know Thorion comes in the second rave, second wave.

01:38:20
Case
Yeah. I think this is just Orion. Like, they. I don't think they do anything to, like, really, like, combine the characters. Like, in Thorion. I think they allude to it a little bit in. In Thorion. We'll. We'll talk about that later, next time. But, yeah, we. I mean, we mostly just get a chance to, like, we're coming for our baby, and then Thanos side's like, fuck you. I sent him back in time, but find out what happens next time. We don't.

01:38:46
Mitch
That was their. The big reveal. Like, Diana comes to us, like, oh, no, that's not. He didn't kill our baby. He sent him in the past.

01:38:54
Case
Yeah. So there's actually, like, that's actually a story as opposed to, like, in Amazon, where it's just like, I'm mad at you, Aurora. I'm Poseidon, and that's it. Like, they. You know, they encounter a bunch of characters. We get, like, we get, like, a high father Odin character here showing up, even though he's a bit of a different design the next time we see him. But most of the things, like, are pretty straightforward. This is what the new gods kind of look like. You know, Thanos side's a little bit different. You know, Granny Harkness has, like, some Agatha elements to her, particularly. Particularly her hair. But most of, like, the female fairies just look like themselves. Yeah. There's not, like, a lot of, like, real craziness going on in terms of the combining elements.

01:39:35
Mitch
We did have bronze Tiger and Black Panther to make the bronze Panther. Once again, not. Not what it would be if they did it today because of Black Panther being so much more popular.

01:39:50
Case
Yeah, I mean, all the. It's so weird looking at this time. Like, the snapshot of, like, what characters people cared about or they were trying to push which brings us to the last book of this line, which is Doctor Strange. All right, this is what I'm saying when I say that. Like, it's too much sometimes there's too many things that they're putting together sometimes. I'm sorry.

01:40:18
Mitch
Some.

01:40:18
Case
Some of these books are like, this would, like, the premise is fine when you're like, it's Doctor Strange and fate, but when you're like, can we also make him Professor X or Jade Nova?

01:40:28
Mitch
Why does it need to be Frankie Raynor? Why not just Jaden Nova? Why does Kyle Raynor have to be thrown in there?

01:40:34
Case
Right. Yeah. Especially because then they want to use Kyle Rayner later. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot.

01:40:40
Mitch
And then the servant of Doctor Strange, fate being Wong and I. Mister mixespoon. I'm never gonna say that name, right. So I always leave it for you to say, like, why would mix. Yeah, why would he be a servant.

01:40:58
Jmike
This doctor strange, fate? That's why.

01:41:01
Case
Yeah, he's so powerful.

01:41:02
Mitch
And he's like, he's even more powerful.

01:41:04
Case
Powerful than he forced the genie to serve him. I mean, that works well enough, actually, with, like, Morrison's take in JLA, but this precedes that, where, like, the, like, all the genies that we see in DC are all fifth dimensional.

01:41:19
Mitch
I have to assume that this is Ron Mars and Peter David Wright in this one. Right, because it ties back into the whole marvel versus DC so much.

01:41:28
Case
It is Ron Mars.

01:41:29
Mitch
Okay.

01:41:29
Case
It's also Jose Luis Garcia Lopez. That's crazy.

01:41:34
Mitch
So maybe Ron Mars just wrote the axis stuff.

01:41:37
Case
No, he's the. He's the artist on this one, which I say is crazy because he normally, he's best known for doing, like, the promotional art for DC stuff, especially in the eighties. Like, not a lot of, like, single issues.

01:41:47
Mitch
Oh, okay.

01:41:49
Case
Like, if you. If you can think of, like, any, like, any, like, retro style t shirt of Superman or Wonder Woman, you can imagine that was done by. By Jose Luis Garcia Lopez. Like, it's a. I know that mostly because there's so many names, it's stuck in your mind. Yeah. So this is where we actually pick up with Aksis. Who? My memory of Aksis as a character. I was convinced he was black until I reread the story. And I was like, wait, no, what's going on? I don't like the access costume. I'm just gonna say it.

01:42:24
Mitch
I mean, it's so nineties. It just is. I mean, it's got the almost same kind of jacket that eventually Superboy Connell has. But just with giant shoulder pads.

01:42:37
Case
It's the giant shoulder pads.

01:42:39
Mitch
And the giant shoulder pads is what is weird now. Do you think they decided to do that because of the Kirby design of the brothers?

01:42:47
Case
I think that was also just kind of in. Like, it's also, like, a vest and not a jacket, per se, is it? With the giant shoulder? I think that's just the look of the time. Like, there, like, nineties. Like, early nineties comics. Just, like, loved those big ass shoulder pads. Fair and fingerless gloves, and symmetrical patterns. Anyway, so we do get a lot of combinations here. We get abominate, which is helgramite and abomination combined. Cool.

01:43:17
Mitch
Sure.

01:43:17
Case
He teleports away, so not important. We already mentioned mix who. I enjoy skulk, which is Solomon Grundy, combined with Bruce Banner.

01:43:26
Jmike
Yeah.

01:43:27
Mitch
How do you feel about that one? Like, I kind of just on the fence. It makes sense because they're big. They're both big and super strong. But, like, the. I don't know, the intelligence of Bruce Banner, but then the non intelligence of Solomon Grundy. Like, I just feel like there's. There could have been something better to mix the two characters or not those two characters.

01:43:46
Case
I feel like they use salmon Grundy with the whole, like, as a placeholder.

01:43:49
Mitch
For the Hulk a lot, especially. Yeah, yeah. I get that.

01:43:54
Case
But I'm not sure if this might have been the first time that actually occurred. Like, I'm not sure it's been used in stuff. And then shortly after this, we get James Robinson's run on Starman, where Solomon Grundy has a pretty transformative kind of portrayal, where you see different facets of him, including good ones and smart ones. I don't know. I think this was so quick that Solomon Grundy wasn't really on my radar when this comic first came out. So I was like, who is this thing that's the other part of the Hulk? Because it just reads like the Hulk. Yeah, just white all the time. Wanda Zatara as white witch. I love as a design element. Like, I think it all looks pretty good. But again, we're getting more, you know, characters are being reused all over the place.

01:44:40
Mitch
Yeah, it's another scarlet witch character.

01:44:41
Case
Also, her being, like, super horny is, like, a little uncomfortable of them. I actually like Jade Nova the best in terms of personality. Like, she's, like, cool.

01:44:51
Mitch
Frankie. Frankie Ray is usually a pretty cool character, I think.

01:44:55
Case
Yeah. And then when she, like, powers up, she's like, fire.

01:44:58
Mitch
Maybe that's where I thought fire was also being used, maybe. I thought fire was. Was part of this character.

01:45:03
Case
Yeah, because she looks just like fire when she's, like, in her power form, but it's because. It's because it's Jade.

01:45:08
Mitch
Nova and Nova. Yeah.

01:45:09
Case
And then. But green.

01:45:11
Mitch
Yeah, no, you're right. That's. That must have been where I thought it came in.

01:45:14
Case
Yeah. So then we get this whole thing where it turns out it's actually Doctor. Doctor Strange. Fate is actually Charles Xavier. That's a lot of names in there.

01:45:22
Mitch
So where does this fall into onslaught? Like, is this before or after this is. Because at that point in time, that's when you, like, the push for Xavier being the biggest threat in the universe. Right?

01:45:37
Case
This is the same year.

01:45:39
Mitch
So is that why he's. So. He's Doctor Strange? Like, he's the most powerful being in the amalgam universe.

01:45:44
Case
He is already an amalgam of Xavier and Magneto combined with Doctor Strange.

01:45:49
Mitch
And I guess that's true.

01:45:53
Case
I'm not sure. Like, is that why Xavier's mind is everywhere? Because his mind is everywhere and yada, yada. I don't know. I don't know. This is the other one where I'm like, it's just not a very fun book. I know it was important to do a book that was talking about access at some point to be like, where is he during this whole thing?

01:46:14
Mitch
I mean, I do have to say that I like the idea of there's one character that realizes that there's someone trying to split the two worlds, make them back into two. Two different worlds, and he's like, well, yeah, what happens to me then? What happens to me in my world? Like, that. I like that idea. But yes, the rest of this book is not fun. It's not.

01:46:32
Case
Yeah, the Tuviks part of it is cool. Like, asking audiences, like, if we split us up to Tuvok and Neelix, is that murderous? But. But I don't. You know, I don't really like Doctor strange fate. So, like, him pleading, like, don't destroy my world doesn't really, like, resonate. And, like, it's. It makes sense that the magic guy would be the guy to figure it out. But, like, yeah, like, I don't know. Part of it is I just don't like access.

01:46:59
Jmike
Not just the magic guy, the all powerful magic guy.

01:47:02
Case
Yeah. And then, yes, the fact that he's also Charles Xavier, why the fuck just have it be Doctor Strange and Doctor fate? Like, why?

01:47:08
Mitch
Yeah, the power levels in just those two characters alone and then adding in Xaviers.

01:47:16
Case
Before I was so cosmically powerful that I could understand the nature of our universe, I already was the most powerful psychic on the planet. But this issue, like, if you're reading it in any kind of order, this is probably the last one you should read of the Amalgams, or the first one you should read the amalgams. It doesn't that much, but it's the one that picks up either from the end of issue three or right before the beginning of issue four. So this is the one where it's just like, oh, yeah, where is Aksis during the amalgam event? And that's it. Yeah, it's another one where the concept sounds so cool. Like, again, like, it's really cool. Like, cover, like, fun ideas, but it's just not as fun as some of the other issues.

01:48:00
Jmike
It's got a lot going on.

01:48:03
Mitch
A whole lot.

01:48:05
Case
But that wraps up the first run of amalgam books that came out. So, J Mike, what were your thoughts? When did you read these for the first time? Was it just for this or just for this?

01:48:15
Jmike
Yeah, once again, I was seven, and this is something I would totally thought of when I was seven. What happened if we made Wolverine and Batman the same person?

01:48:26
Case
Were you familiar with it at all? Like, had you heard of them?

01:48:28
Jmike
I had heard about them, but there was always like, hey, that's a really cool concept of too bad no one ever done this before. And then I found out it actually happened.

01:48:41
Case
Yeah, it is really popular online to see people talk about, like, oh, wouldn't this be a cool mashup of characters? And then every now and then, you'll see, like I said, it's interesting to see how elements that were played around within these books then got bled into the mainstream books of the time, like, Spider man having any connection to Captain America never happened before this, and having now Spider man being, or at least ultimate Spider man. And you could probably argue MCU Spider man, although they've been intentionally vague about that, having those kind of ties, and even the first Spider man movie, the Tobey Maguire first one, the fact that it's the Oz formula and so forth, that all feels like parts of this idea of tying back to military research on super soldiers, that is.

01:49:27
Jmike
I had a. We had a conversation. It was. It was a long, drawn out exposition with a couple of friends talking about, like, how the concept of having the super soldier serum be the whole basis of having the Marvel Cinema or the Marvel universe that everyone was trying to recreate the Captain America thing, and it led to all, like, all these different things happening in their universe. That's always been a cool concept and it's kind of cool to see they came from here.

01:49:54
Case
Yeah.

01:49:54
Jmike
Like all the ideas came from this amalgamation of ideas and things they put together.

01:50:00
Case
Yeah. And taking those ideas like, kind of from the Superman books, like, you know, doing the clone and seeing how that those, like, pieces fit together and then like, when you come out, you're changed for having.

01:50:10
Jmike
Yeah. Tying into that conversation, it was like having, like, you could, if you could have like an event like that happen in a DC Universe where like Superman coming to Earth, like having him crash and having a piece of like the kryptonite thing that came off of his ship be the metal that caused Joe chill to shoot Bruce's parents. And it all ties together like some big elaborate, like, question theme board thing. It's all part of the same thing.

01:50:44
Case
Yeah, lots of red strings.

01:50:48
Jmike
It's still a really cool concept and I'm really glad to see that it all eventually went somewhere beyond Doctor Strange fate being Doctor Xevir, now all time.

01:51:02
Case
Mitch, had you reread these since back in the day? What was your exposure?

01:51:06
Mitch
I don't think I had reread them until now. Since when they first came out. I might have, I might have did it like five years after they had first come out, five or six years after. I just remember like when I first saw that amalgam comics poster after, you know, seeing the Marvel versus DC poster and just being like, yes, this is what I've always wanted. I want the characters to become, you know, new designs and new stories and stuff like that. So I, because this was literally like when I, Marvel versus DC is right when I started reading comic books. So it was definitely a big influence on me going forward.

01:51:50
Mitch
And then to hearing like, what you said about like, the people that were writing these one shot books in the amalgam go on to be the writers and artists of the books not too long after this. It definitely shows that people were thinking ahead and like, oh, let's see what they can do with this.

01:52:09
Case
Yeah, it definitely was like a chance for people to test out archetypes and things that like, were big story elements that had sort of parallels between them and see what, like, kind of clicked appropriately. You know, all these characters, like the biggest thing they're trying to do is like, fit the archetypal nature of some of these roles. So, like, super soldier, being a Captain America Superman hybridization makes sense because he's your moral, upright character. So, yeah, give it to Mark Wade. He can write the shit out of that.

01:52:40
Case
But this first wave of so, rereading it, I was like, oh, I am surprised at how much more of small references I got, the little name things and so forth, that they allude to a story arc and so forth, because I was just better versed at this time now than when I first read these. I had started reading DC. It was really around zero hour where I started coming over because Superboy and Impulse and Robin were books that I started picking up and then getting into larger DC stuff with Death of Superman and all that. That's a couple years before this, but this was a big way for me to find out about things that were DC stuff being paired up with marvel stuff, because it'd be like, all right, so what's that side of it? What's the DC side of it? Cool.

01:53:24
Case
Now to see that there's even more that I'm like, oh, I know about that thing now because either it's come back into popularity or I actually read the book or whatever, but it's, you know, also a lot of ideas are really cool and, but there's a lot of ninetiesisms going on in here and, like, some of it doesn't hold up that well. And that's just the thing. But I am really glad to reread it. We should wrap this up, though, because we've been talking about this for a while. Matt is going to kill us. Yes, sorry, Matt, I. And we definitely don't have the ability to do in the same episode the rest of the amalgam books that came out the following year. So we're going to take a break here. Next time, we'll be back to talk about the rest of amalgam.

01:54:07
Case
Mitch, what do you got going on? Where can people find you?

01:54:10
Mitch
You can definitely come and talk to me on Twitter. I am very active there. I am Hepedia. It's all one word.

01:54:18
Case
And J Mac. Where can people find you?

01:54:20
Jmike
You can find me also on Twitter. I am not that active, but you can find me at jmike 101. I post funny pictures in gifts when I get a chance to.

01:54:28
Case
As for me, you can find me at case Aikin. You can find the shown in Steelpod. And if you aren't down for the whole Twitter thing, check out certainpov.com, where you can find more episodes of this show. You can find a link to our discord server. Come interact with us. Chat. We're nice. We like talking to people, but next time we're going to be talking about the second half of the amalgam line, but until then, stay super man.

01:54:55
Jmike
Men of Steel is a certain pov production. Our hosts are J. Mike Folson and case Aiken. The show is edited by Matt Storm, our logo is by Chris Bautista, episode art is by case Akin, and our theme is by Jeff Moon.

01:55:13
Mitch
Video games are a unique medium. They can tell stories, immerse us in.

01:55:17
Case
Strange, fantastic worlds, blur the very boundaries of our reality. But at the end of the day, video games are fun.

01:55:25
Mitch
Whatever fun is to you.

01:55:27
Case
I'm Jeff Moonan.

01:55:28
Mitch
And I am Matt, aka Stormageddon.

01:55:29
Case
And on fun and games, we talk about the history, trends, and community of video games.

01:55:35
Mitch
It's a celebration of all the games we play and all the fun we find within them.

01:55:39
Case
And there's so many more games out there, so we hope you'll share in that conversation with us.

01:55:44
Mitch
Fun and Games podcast with Matt and Jeff find us on certainpov.com or wherever.

01:55:49
Case
You get your podcasts and happy gaming. Cpov certainpov.com.