Armagideon Time

Imagine you’re speeding down the highway in a souped-up Bugatti when the vehicle’s brakes suddenly lock up, vaulting you through the windscreen on a trajectory that takes your fragile body through a poultry processing plant, an ebola research facility and a tallow factory before depositing you headfirst in the local sewer treatment plant’s solid waste collection tank.

Not a pleasant image, but it does reflect the direction DC’s 1990s JLA series took after Grant Morrison’s departure.  Desperate to maintain the successful (and profitable) momentum established by Morrison’s three-and-a-half year run, DC dispatched a series of high-profile creative teams with a mandate of keeping the fires of high-concept storytelling burning….and in the process brought about some of the most excruciatingly awful comics of the previous decade.

If Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s “Tenth Circle” arc represented the final destination cited in my grotty little metaphor (thanks to the presence of Crucifer), Joe Kelly’s “Obsidian Age,” which kicked off in JLA #69 (October 2002), would be the tallow factory.  Overlong and underplotted, the Obsidian Age took an “everything including the kitchen sink” approach that attempted to ape surface elements of Morrison’s stories while missing the crucial details which made the source material work.  Time travel, zombie Justice Leaguers, and ancient Atlantean politics were thrown together in a clumsily handled knot of parallel narratives ultimately dedicated to setting up yet another (destined to fail) Aquaman relaunch.  While some knuckledraggers claim Morrison’s “Rock of Ages” JLA arc was a confusing mess, the Obsidian Age was the real deal – one of the most impenetrable trainwrecks ever to emerge from a major publisher.

Part of the arc’s parallel narratives involved the activation of a contingency team of Leaguers set up by Batman to carry on the good fight in the event of the main team’s demise.  The replacement JLA roster followed the tried and true rules for superteam stunt casting, featuring a mix of old hands (Firestorm, Green Arrow), wildcards (the Demon, Major Disaster), and the requisite “new kid” in the form of…

…the turtleneck rockin’ telekinetic known as Faith.

Nicknamed the “Fat Lady”  (due her secret superpower* not her waistline, because you don’t get rich by alienating fanboys with superchicks over size 4), Faith was a deep cover Batman contact summoned to active duty.  Her origin was presented as a work in progress…

…though it was soon revealed that she was the product of a secret black ops program who rebelled against her…..ZZZZ-ZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZZ… 

Whoops, sorry.  Nodded off there for a bit. 

Further details regarding Faith’s past involvement with a sinister organization of “Clockwatchers” led by some dude named Manson were doled out via some oddly blocked panels featuring some cyberpunk dominatrix bounty hunters in a hidden jungle lair and a poignant sequence where the heroine did a teary stiptease in front of Major Disaster.

Faith’s stint as a Leaguer was relatively low-key.  When she wasn’t haranguing her teammates with quasi-objectivist rants on morality…

…she found other empowering ways to occupy her time.

Her proudest moment as a JLA member came during the aforementioned “Tenth Circle” arc, when she sacrificed her last vestiges of dignity so that past-peak Chris Claremont could show the world that he was still “hep” to what “the kidz” were into in this “mod” and “groovy” new millennium.

Following the conclusion of the Tenth Circle, Faith was handed over (like a smallpox blanket, only with a deserving recipient this time) to John Byrne’s ill-conceived Doom Patrol relaunch, where she stood around in the background for a couple of panels before fading into the limbo of the unloved, where she has remained since.

As the misbegotten product of one the worst story arcs in recent memory, and for being forgettably generic even in her most aggressive moments of fanboy pandering, Faith has earned the distinction of being this week’s Nobody’s Favorite. 

*Pretty much her normal telekinetic abilities pushed to the max, which makes “long established genre trope” a superpower, I guess.

Evildoers and small rodents, beware!  The Owl is on the prowl!

Hoo…excuse me, “who” is The Owl? 

He’s police detective Dick Terry, a forgotten Golden Age “mystery man” dusted off by the folks at Gold Key in 1967 to cash in on the success of the live action Batman TV series.  Even better, they got Superman co-creator (and poster child for creative decline) Jerry Siegel to script the exploits  of the so-called “Prince of Avengers” and his shapely sidekick Owl Girl…thus insuring that The Owl would be to Batman ’66 what the Mighty Comics Group was to Silver Age Marvel.

Rocking a lavender unitard and fearsome google-eyed face mask…

…along with a squadron of robotic “Owlos” and some of the most advanced anti-crime technologies ever devised…

…the Owl went through the crimefighting motions with the demeanor and awful avian puns expected of a bottom-rung knock-off of a wildly popular character. 

Whether battling a legion of bird-headed dudes in business suits who used a giant pelican-shaped plane to rob banks, stopping some beatnik musicians in skull masks from stealing Mount Rushmore, or making reluctant kissy-face with a groupie while an enraged Owl Girl got ready to bash in his skull with a clawhammer, the Owl consistently maintained his expression of weary (yet goggle-eyed) resignation…making him the most self-aware Nobody’s Favorite selection to date.

This week’s column is going to deviate a bit from the established criteria for Nobody’s Favorite selections, but to paraphrase the great Swayze: “My blog, my rules.”

My years as a teenage fanboy revolved around the (fairly typical) twin loci of superhero comics and role playing games, and I spent a good deal of money, time, and effort in search of a geek grail that combined these two obsessions into one seamless package.

The key word here is “seamless.” While there were plenty of superhero-themed RPGs to choose from at the time, all of them fell well short of the mark when it came to capturing the true essence of the genre. There are some fundamental and irreconcilable differences between the two forms of media.

Comics, especially superhero stuff, tend to be elastic in terms of their narrative format, while role playing games operate in a realm of rigid codification designed to give structure to an open-ended collaborative experience. In comic books, the process of having Batman discover a clue to a murder, decipher it, and deliver a smackdown on the culprit can be handled in three (or even one, for pre-1970 stories) quick panels. In the context of a role playing game, however, that same process would involve at least a dozen dice rolls made across an hour of play time.

Emulating the superficial trappings of the superhero genre in the form of tables and saving throws is easy. Emulating the actual feel and flow of the source material is another matter entirely.  Over the course of my long (and ultimately fruitless) quest, I built up a rather large collection of superhero RPG rulebooks, modules, and supplements ranging from the relatively mainstream (TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes game) to mondo obscuro (an “indie” Australian effort with amateur hour typesetting and a staggering number of light-tabled boob shots).

While I was able to repurpose some of the material for my on-and-off Champions (a game based on the concept that superheroes + algebra = FUN!) campaign, most of the supplements ended up collecting dust in my grandma’s attic for nearly two decades…

…until the launch of the Thursday’s Table feature (which has been sidetracked by other concerns the past couple of weeks) motivated me to break the seals on the Rubbermaid storage bin containing the artifacts of my role playing youth.  Five minutes of crate digging turned up several items I either had no recollection of purchasing or — in the case of the 1987 Villains & Vigilantes module For the Greater Good — couldn’t believe I had forgotten about.

V&V was Fantasy Games Unlimited’s early entry into the superhero RPG subgenre.  Less complicated than Champions yet more involved than Marvel Super Heroes, it managed to carve out a niche for itself among gamers looking for a middle ground between the poles of complexity and sustained itself through the better part of the Eighties — and, like the Champions RPG, was the subject of a justly forgotten Eclipse miniseries.

Though I didn’t care much for the game’s mechanics, the official scenario modules tended to be a bit closer to (not to mention cheaper than) the superhero comics source material than those of its rival systems, making them ideal sources from which to cannibalize ideas.

On the surface, For the Greater Good appeared to be an unlicensed riff on the ”superheroes versus religious zealots” theme covered in the 1982 X-Men graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills (also used as the basis for the second X-Men film), right down to the gratuitously over the top crucifixion imagery. 

A glimpse at the module’s introduction, however, reveals that the the author has gone beyond Chris Claremont’s half-assed social metaphors and into the awkward realm of ham-fisted editorializing…

I have nothing but contempt for the forces of the so-called “Religious Right,” but there’s something a tad pathetic about reducing the very real threat it poses into a collection of straw men designed to be whomped by some social misfits gathered around a folding card table in a basement rumpus room.

Collective mythologizing aside, fundamentalists fulfilled the same function to role playing gamers as Dr. Frederick Wertham did for comics fans — provide an easy high-profile scapegoat to blame for a wider decline in the marketplace.  At worst, all they really did was loudly hammer a few coffin nails into a couple of fading fads.

For the Greater Good takes the straw man thing quite seriously, with a team of Christian fundamentalist supervillains led — with a touch of the subtlety geeks are renknowned for — by the Reverend Fairwell.

As laughable the book-burning 451 or Corporal Punishment were as two-dimensional caricatures, nothing can top the high concept hilarity of…

…AUNTIE PORN.

(I know, right? I have the book open in front of me right now and I can hardly believe it.)

Despite her matronly appearance, Auntie Porn was once “Lola Lipps,” a shining star in the skin trade’s firmament…until a sex-crazed photog kidnapped her and confined her in his secret darkroom.  During her frantic efforts to escape, Lola accidentally exposed herself to a toxic cocktail of emulsifiers and fixative agents which prematurely aged her while giving her superhuman power to — no lie — siphon away her victims’ precious bodily fluids.

Taking a code name that — let’s face facts — could suggest either a pro or con stance regarding adult entertainment, Ms. Porn embarked on a violent personal crusade against smut in all forms. 

So watch out, 99.9999% of the internet that isn’t funny cat pictures — you have been put on notice.

As clear proof that one needn’t actually be in a comic book to be an absurdly awful comic book character, the life-sucking, anti-fucking Auntie Porn has earned – via special dispensation — the honor of being this week’s righteously chosen Nobody’s Favorite.

This week’s entry in our parade of the unloved and forgotten dates back to the very dawn of the superhero era, a time when fresh-faced visionaries lined up to sell their dreams to shady publishers for short money. 

Behold The Ultra Man!

…credited to Don Shelby and who made just short of a dozen appearances in All-American Comics, starting with issue #8 (November 1939).

After losing both his parents in the First World War, Gary Concord dedicated his life and massive intellect to putting an end to armed conflict…by inventing a weapon so terrible that a resentful and fragile peace would be the only alternative (because that kind of thinking has worked out so well for us in the past). 

Unfortunately for Concord, the answer he had been seeking only appeared after the opening festivities of the Great War of 1950 (fought between the Orchestral Pop Alliance and the Cool Jazz Concordance) sealed him inside his secret subterranean lair and upended his stockpile of volatile chemicals…which conveniently combined to produce a soporific foam akin to NyQuil-flavored Cool Whip.

Trapped by the rising tide of somno-suds, Concord barely managed to jot down the formula for his “invention” before settling down for a foam-induced nap.  Upon awakening into the Art Deco futurescape of the 23rd Century, Concord discovered that his superhuman physique — a side effect of long-term foam exposure — and old-fashioned can-do attitude were in high demand by the beleaguered United States of North America. 

Got all that?  Good, now forget it, because the focus of the series was actually on Gary Concord’s lookalike son, Gary Junior, High Moderator of North America and the snappiest dressed world leader of 23rd Century Earth.  (In the be-short shorted darkness of the retro-future, there is only nepotism.)

As strange a decision it was to make Ultra Man a legacy character out of the gate, the actual stories – featuring Gary Junior and his anachronistically streetwise sidekick Guppy punching and blasting Future enemies who hate Future America for its Future Freedoms — aren’t that bad in a low-grade Alex Raymond kind of way.

The sci-fi “Rip Van Winkle” premise may have been a bit hackneyed even for 1939,  but Ultra Man was the product of a time when the superhero formula was still in embryo and very much beholden to outside influences.  In that respect, Gary Concord’s mix of Superman and Buck Rogers is a fascinating historical curiosity which approached the mark, but never quite arrived.  (That the series folded shortly after Green Lantern — a bona fide, by-the-numbers “superhero” — was introduced as All-American Comics’ flagship character is telling.)

While Gary Junior’s status as a forgotten historical footnote would have been qualified him in the most literal sense — barely remembered, much less beloved — his inexplicable return as a roided-up freak of nature…

…in 1996′s Legionnaires Annual #3 — where he led a team of Avengers analogues that included a regrettable slice of very metal absurdity…

– decisively earned the foam-powered fashion plate from the future the honor of being this week’s Nobody’s Favorite.

Howdy, young’us!  Come sit yourself down by the campfire and Ol’ Bitter Andrew will regale you with a story of the Great Chromium Rush of the terrible ’90s.

You might recall it began when a passel of young turks got into their heads — somewhat rightly — that folks were more interested in their doings than in the franchises they were doing them to on a work for hire basis.   Fortified with the dutch courage of bullheaded confidence, they departed Uncle Stan’s plantation in search of greener pastures where a man could profit from his own half-assed reiterations of X-Force, Batman, and Punisher.

The gettings were good at first, as these wildcatters tapped into the deep and lucrative veins of pre-adolescent fantasies and speculative greed.  Short-lived empires were built on the foundation of variant holofoil covers and squinty-looking dudes with big guns and even bigger shoulderpads. 

These were boom times, children, and soon it seemed like everybody and their granddam was tying to stake their own claims to the shared superhero universe windfall.  The old guard players — Uncle Stan’s kin and their Distinguished Competition — went a little round the bend in their efforts to keep up with the times, while folks who really should have known better spun  entire multiverses from little more than a handful of stale ideas and a lot of wishful thinking.

Heck, the folks at Dark Horse — a mid-range player mostly known for cruising on the back of some dated action movie licenses and a smattering of Japanese imports — attempted to break into the action with a massively ambitious scheme involving dozens of interlocking properties under the grandiose banner of “Comics’ Greatest World.”  They even roped in some quality talent to assist in the venture.  I’m not talking about some flash-in-the-pan one-trick-ponies, but well-regarded craftsmen such as Eddie Campbell and Adam Hughes.

It’s a pity, then, the results of that venture ended up being more tailings than treasure…

…if not outright slag like the travesty otherwise known as Rebel.

The power-absorbing hero was actually a pair of twin brothers, Matt and Mark Morissette, who were periodically required to switch off  in order to discharge any excess energy build-up…

…making Rebel a cross between Captain Triumph and The Patty Duke Show.

Rebel’s silly gimmick and off-brand Johnny Storm persona are reasons enough to roll one’s eyes, but the costume is what really tips the character into the realm of the utterly contemptible.

Rocking a hairdo which combines three separate styles — mullet, rat-tail, and fauxhawk — into a hat trick of douchebaggery and sporting an open chested bodysuit (complete with nipple-obscuring “fangs”) with a heart ‘n’ crossbones insignia-slash-tramp stamp, Rebel decisively proved that you didn’t need cross-hatching, tiny feet, or a bazillion pouches to win the award for ”worst superhero costume of the 1990s.”

Rebel and his ilk faded from the scene shortly after folks cottoned to the fact that bloom had fallen off the speculation-driven rose and that what they had mistaken for investment gold was hardly worth the paper it was printed upon.  (The last two hold-outs in the line went belly up after one bombed itself into oblivion and the other’s well of initial interest — sustained by boob shots — eventually ran dry.)

Well, that’s my tale for today, whippersnappers.  A tale of a epic time when a man could make a car payment by selling a mint copy of Spawn #1 and when it seemed as if the old order would be cast aside in favor of new gods and heroes. 

Not Rebel, though.  He was destined from the start to be Nobody’s Favorite.

When my wife and I divvied up the household chores, I ended up with trash duty.  I make sure stuff is bagged up before the kitchen barrel overflows (most of the time) and that the week’s accumulated garbage gets to the curb on collection days.  It might sound like a pretty low key chore compared to the laundry duty my wife got stuck with, but trust me when I say she got the better end of the bargain. 

There is nothing worse than hauling one’s ass out of bed at six on a muggy collection day morning to discover that the bastard raccoons  (scientific name: Procyon lotor bastardis) have foiled one’s latest refuse-related security measures and left fragrant piles of heat-kissed garbage strewn all over the patio.  The smell isn’t so much of an issue for me.  I did, after all, grow up in North Woburn during the early 1980s, where the greasy rancid tang wafting from the town dump was a much a part of summer as the scents of fresh cut grass and meat grilling on a barbecue.

No, it’s not the smell that makes me rue the day I chose what seemed to be an easy out in our domestic division of labor.  It’s the squiriming, squggling masses of maggots infesting the spilled trash.  I am not a squeamy guy by nature, but something about maggots’ waxy, wiggly segmented larval bodies triggers my gag reflex. 

I know I’m not alone when I state that I don’t want to look at maggots, I don’t want to handle them — even through a pair of thick work gloves — and I sure as Shinola didn’t ask for Marvel to create a fifth-string X-character based on the filthy little creatures…

…yet, somehow, each of those nightmares have come to pass. 

The Winchester House that is the X-franchise has no shortage of questionable inhabitants.  While embarrassments like Adam-X or Stacy X at least made sense from a mercenary, fan-pandering standpoint, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting — much less demanding – a dude named after a type of vermin known for feasting on shit…

…whose mutant power was the ability to summon a pair of omnivorous slugs from his belly and then absorb the “power” of whatever crap they ate, turning his skin blue in the process…

…and who talked (as per the Claremontean precedent for international characters) exclusively in an over the top form of South African street slang…

…and whose physique and appearance changed radically depending on which artist got roped into working on Uncanny (or “just plain”) X-Men that month.

Maggott (the extra “t” is for extra terrible) made his debut in a 1997 X-arc that involved his quest to track down Magneto or “Joseph” or whatever the heck that character was supposed to be at the moment.  To be quite honest, the X-books have been an impenetrable mess since 1985 (with the exception of all but the last couple issues of Grant Morrison’s run).   I tried to decipher what was going down during Maggott’s sojourn with the team, but was unable to work past the riot of recursive plot points, confusingly “kewl” art, and rampant font abuse.  Toss in dialect writing which comes off as more autistic than authentic (“HEY GUYS I LEARNED THREE BITS OF PRETORIAN SLANG AND I’M GOING TO USE THEM OVER AND OVER AND OVER”) and you’ve got a pretty good sense where my tolerance for lousy comics ends. 

It’s no mean feat to be the worst character in a late 1990s X-book, but Maggott pulled it off with wiggle-room to spare, which is why is why he was a shoe (fly) in as this week’s Nobody’s Favorite.

Today’s post marks the first anniversary of Nobody’s Favorites, proving that time does fly when you read a lot of crummy comics. I considered commemorating the occasion by taking on a certain character who has been the subject of several reader requests, but life (and my vacation) is too short to spend it sifting through the jagged debris of that high concept trainwreck.

Seeing as how I launched this weekly feature with a discussion of the unlovable Looker, it seemed fitting to kick off the second year of Nobody’s Favorites with a takedown of another Outsiders alumnus…

…the rainbow of awfulness otherwise known as Halo.

Though (briefly) successful in its time, there was something a bit…off…about Mike W. Barr’s work on the Outsidersbooks (with and without Batman), a weird melding of Claremontean X-tropes with an imperfectly realized “edgy” agenda in regards to political content and genre conventions.  The end results — rare moments of inspiration buried in a landfill of unintentional absurdity – had the ”second cousin, once removed” character of an unlicensed superhero role-playing game sourcebook, even more so than comics actually based on an unlicensed superhero role-playing game.

All the right ingredients were present, but — like cafeteria food or store brand cola – the preparation and presentation lent an odd and not entirely welcome flavor to the finished product.  The presence of top-notch artists like Jim Aparo and Alan Davis only added to the Outsiders‘ atmosphere of cognitive dissonance.

The telekinetic fashion victim Looker may have marked the nadir of the franchise’s original incarnation (though it has managed to sink even deeper with each subsequent relaunch…up to and including the Dan Didio-helmed present version which demonstrates that executive privilege overrides basic grammar skills and editorial oversight), but Halo — a founding member of the team who debuted in Brave and the Bold #200 — is a strong runner up in the “worst Outsider” stakes.

Found unconscious and glowing in a Markovian ruin by Batman, the amnesiac teen dubbed the girl ”Halo” was recruited by the Caped Crusader to assist in his flagrant violation of international law alongside the handful of other terrible new and fallow older characters who would go on to form the Outsiders, Batman’s very own “two-bit Justice League.”

Halo possessed the power to generate “auras” with effects keyed to a specific color of the visible spectrum (red for heat, green for stasis, and so forth), a bit like having the Mandarin’s entire set of rings wrapped up as some blond jailbait wearing a hideous unitard.

Halo’s amnesia ensured that her role as the team’s junior member could be played for maximum irritation via over the top naifishness and gratingly chirpy enthusiasm. That toxic cocktail of forced cutesiness was accompanied by a chaser of subplot-driving melodrama as ”Gabrielle Doe” (“Gaby” — rhymes rhymes with “Baby,” even though it’ll make you feel a bit stabby — for short) attempted to uncover the secrets of her mysterious past…

…when she wasn’t busy getting fitted for braces, rescuing the first chair trombone player of her high school band, and listening to vapid mid-Eighties pop music, that is.

The entire sad story of Gaby’s origin was eventually revealed in the “Truth About Halo,” a four-part story arc (which, adjusting for inflationary decompression, would equal 500 pages by current sequential storytelling rates) which was doled out in drips and drabs between tales of Superman beating up Geo-Force and Black Lightning battling a supervillain named “Ghetto-Blaster.”

When the dust finally settled, Halo was revealed to be a teen sociopath named Violet Harper whose dead body was inhabited by an Aurakale, a cosmic being resembling a cat’s eye marble which longed to experience life as a human being.  (It’s a sentiment I can understand, as I have often wished I could shed the mantle of advanced primatedom in exchange for the simple joys of amoebic life, devouring microbial scraps with my pseudopod and feeling the satisfaction of asexual reproduction.)

None of these shocking revelations had any effect on Halo as a character, apart from some weepy melodramatic spillover and possibly her later transformation into a boiler-suited Brigitte Nielsen clone.

Halo may not have been the greatest superhero, but she was the easily the best one of the top threeone of the top ten zombie Valley Girl superheroes who are actually a giant glowing superball slumming around with lower lifeforms because they were really envious of Dale Bozzio’s hairstyle.  Hey, at least she isn’t Geo-Force.

That’s got to count for something, which is why I’ve chosen Halo as our special paper anniversary Nobody’s Favorite.  (See you in fifty-two weeks, Geo-Force.)

Every mythology has its lesser lights, bit players of the divine representing highly specialized or insular aspects of pantheistic religion’s codified version of animism.  Most folks have at least an inkling about the general characteristics and symbolic roles of Zeus, Mercury, Aphrodite, and the like, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone outside of a college classics department (another beast which has largely passed into myth) who is familar with Convector (the Roman god of harvesting crops) or Epione (the Greek goddess of pain relief).

Even Marvel’s assortment of faith-based superheroes has its share of back-benchers who’ve never managed to reach the level of popularity or visibility enjoyed by the Odinson or Prince of Power — folks like the appropriately named Forgotten One…

…an off-brand version of Hercules from the off-brand version of the Greco-Roman pantheon that was Jack Kirby’s Eternals.

Immortal, super-strong, and possessing all the god-like powers of his genetically altered kin, the Forgotten One made his debut in Eternals #13 (July 1977),  where it was revealed that his excessive pride and propensity for Joseph Campbellian hijinks among mortals had led to a centuries-long house arrest by decree of the Eternals’ patriarch, Zuras (not Zeus, but a Kirby-credible simulation).  The Forgotten One’s internal exile came to an abrupt end after a cosmic threat manifested while the rest of his brethren were busy getting their gestalt on with the Uni-Mind, a from of town meeting in which the participants merge into giant golden brain. 

Forget it, Jake.  It’s Kirbytown.

Though it appeared that the Forgotten One met his likely demise at the end of that story, he returned a couple of years later in the pages of The Mighty Thor during Roy Thomas’s frenetic efforts to resolve the plot points left dangling when the Eternals went belly up.

Under the new and oh-so-innovative (if you’re Neal Stephenson, that is) moniker of “Hero,” the former Forgotten One tussled with Thor on behalf of the Celestials, the powerful space gods which underpinned the von Dänikenesque cosmology of Kirby’s Eternals material.  Though he decisively lost to the thunder god, Hero did manage to free himself from Celestial control and score a release from exile in the process, setting up the threat possibility of future guest appearances.  (It was also revealed that the character was afflicted with blindness, though that apparently fell by the wayside at some point.)

The Forgotten One’s most notable shot at the brass ring of marginal reader interest happened a decade later, when he donned a set of bovine-themed fighting togs plucked from an Eternian Planet Aid box…

. 

…and joined Steve “Just Plain Captain” Rogers, Thor, and a semi-retired Reed and Sue Richards as part of an ad hoc Avengers line-up in issue #300 of the World Mightiest Heroes’ ongoing series. 

Though the Forgotten One — rechristened “Gilgamesh” in honor of one of the ancient heroes whose identities he had stolen assumed — did aquit himself well against such epically memorable threats as Super-Nova (like Nova, but four times bigger!) and Nanny and the Widowmaker Orphanmaker (bits of Chris Claremont’s obsession with infantilism that had wandered off the X-ranch), his stint with the team was a contentious one that revealed the wisdom behind Zuras’s previous banishment order.

I once took an undergrad class in film and TV production and one of my classmates was a woman who had made a small appearance in Scarface as a child actor.  I know this — and of all the other bit parts in “big” films she had (unsuccessfully) audtioned for — because she constantly found ways to work that information into any class discussions in order to impress the rest of us slackers trawling for an easy A.  Not stated, though I was sorely tempted to ask, were the reasons why she was enrolled in a 100-level class offered by a tiny underfunded theater department at a not-so-small but equally underfunded state commuter college.

Gilgamesh was a lot like that classmate — only instead of Scarface insert “Greek and Sumerian mythology,” and instead of “a bunch of slackers trawling for an easy A” insert “folks who trounce Ultron and Doctor Doom on a regular basis.”

 Fortunately for the patience of his fellow Avengers, Gilgamesh’s penchant for incessantly mentioning how he once owned a pegasus and shared manscaping tips with Achilles came to abrupt halt after his other major character flaw — overconfidence — earned him a near fatal beating at the hands of the Lava Men.  The remainder of his tenure as an Avenger was spent being lugged around in a comatose state while his teammates worked out a means of dumping him on his doorstep without his parents seeing who did it.

Since that time, Gil has gotten better, died, gotten better again, and is still kicking around in some musty corner of the Marvel Universe waiting for his next chance to kick ass and drop names.  (And he’s all out of ass.)

If Thor is the Coca-Cola of Marvel’s pantheon of superheroic gods and Hercules is the Pepsi, Gilgamesh the Forgotten Hero is a case of lukewarm Faygo…and this week’s divine choice for Nobody’s Favorite.

Director Hal Needham struck box office gold in the spring of 1977 with Smokey and the Bandit, a film that successfully combined two tangentially related aspects of the prevailing zeitgeist — Southern chic and the perception of long haul truckers as modern day folk heroes.

The former was a confluence of various trends ranging from the emergence of the “New South” as a federally subsidized (via Nixon’s incentive-based approach to civil rights) force to be reckoned with to (depressingly) unkillable “rebel mystique” to the reactionary currents which gained strength after the 1960s counterculture burned itself out.

The latter was, by and large, a response to the end of the inexpensive petroleum that fueled (pun intended) America’s ill-considered love affair with automotive excess. In a era of lowered speed limits, long lines at the pump, and shrinking engine displacements, the wily trucker’s independent spirit and ability to put one over on the “fuzz” became the stuff of vicarious legends, especially after C.W. McCall’s novelty hit “Convoy” codified the myth for the masses.

Given the superhero comics genre’s penchant for co-opting prevailing trends for its own mercenary purposes, it was inevitable that readers would eventually be treated to a hastily prepared four-color response to Smokey and the Bandit‘s down home, fuel inefficient tomfoolery…

…although I don’t think anyone was prepared for Razorback, a burly good ol’ boy fitted out with an electrified pig mask and a teal boiler suit…

…who was excessively fond of CB lingo…

…and tooled around in a stupid-looking custom semi truck with an even stupider name.

The man behind the pig helmet was Buford Hollis (of course), a mechanical whiz out of Texarkana who headed eastbound and up to New York City after his sister Bobby Sue (of course), “the finest little chick in Texarkana,” fell in with Hatemonger (the Man Beast version, not the Hitler version nor the protoplasmic android version, of course) as part of the villain’s efforts to conquer the world with a weaponized version of EST.

The epic saga unfolded across the pages of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #12 through #15 (November 1977 – Feburary 1978) after which the living embodiment of the Toothpick State faded from the scene.  He  returned a decade and change later in a She-Hulk story arc which teamed Hollis up with the cast of Marvel’s other big-rig-o-centric franchise, US-1. 

Though the tale itself was pretty good, neither it nor Hollis’s subsequent handful of appearances (nor his reclassification as a mutant with the power of “driving real good”) were enough to mitigate the disappointment over the Super Jerry Reed: Master of Son-Fu, Son we could have gotten instead.

 As the embodiment of an ephemeral fad dressed up in porcine fighting togs, Razorback has run the hammer lane to the all-night choke and puke that is Nobody’s Favorites.

There have been numerous debates over whether the comic industry’s 1980s shift from mass market (newsstand) to direct market (comic shops) sales have ultimately benefited or hindered the industry.*

One thing is for certain, however:  The modest levelling of the distribution side of the playing field paved the way for a shitload of cruddy and forgettable comics by equally cruddy and forgettable publishers.  Spurred by the success of indie-published properties like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Cerebus, a slew of companies rushed in to cash in on the nascent boom while sowing the seeds of its inevitable crash.

Some of the firms did pretty well for themselves for a short time, as attested by the crazy money demanded for first printings of long-forgotten titles like The Adventurers in ads from various back issue retailers of the era.  The vast majority of stuff went straight down the memory hole, and for very good reasons.

Comics are unique among collector-driven products in that large segments of the consuming class harbor dreams of entering the production side of the business.  While philatelists have neither the means nor ambition to print their own “Inverted Jennys,” the barrier between “comics fan” and “comics creator” is a relatively easy one to cross, and there’s a widespread assumption that such transitions are the common goal of all comics enthusiasts.

Like most things in life, the devil in these lofty ambitions dwells in the details.  To rework an analogy by Evan Dorkin (who originally applied it to the retail end of the biz), having a huge collection of comics doesn’t automatically make one a talented creator any more than owning three hundred pairs of shoes makes one a skilled cobbler.  For every one genuine spark of genius that emerged from the direct market boom of the 1980s, there were barge-loads of painfully amateurish drek like this justly forgotten artifact of the era…

Launched in 1985, Next Man ran a total of five issues before the creators of the series had a falling out with Comico over “ownership issues.”  (“You own Next Man!”  “Take that back you filthy liar!  It’s all yours!”)

Next Man was David Boyd, a critically wounded solider who was declared KIA in 197o, so he could be spirited away by a sinister government agency named — wait for it — “The Agency” for use in ”Project Stepping Stone.”   The purpose of the program was to create an army of superhumans which would give the faceless cabal the muscle it needed to — need I say it? – take over the world.  (Those black helicopters ain’t gonna fly themselves, people.)

As Stepping Stone’s prototype, Boyd spent fifteen years in a catatonic state while the Agency’s scientists transformed him into the missing link between X-51 and Robocop.  Not only did the Agency’s upgrades grant Boyd the typical powers of superman strength and durability, buy they also threw a weaponized colonoscopy camera — ideal for long distance garroting — into the deal.

As per the usual protocols for the ”secret experiments on non-consenting subjects” game, Boyd eventually escaped from the Agency’s clutches with the help of Cubit…

…a geometric sidekick combining the aesthetics of Bit with the personality of Arnold Drummond — and the pair sets off to unravel the Agency’s conspiracy, get some payback, and zzzzzzzz-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Wha..huh…sorry, my cliche-induced narcolepsy kicked in again.

Next Man may have been a tangled mess of tired tropes and barely veiled references (Six Million Dollar Man, The A-Team, The Fugitive, Tron, footage from Uncle Tim’s prostate exam), but what puts it soles and floorboards below similar endeavors is the aura of overwhelming sloppiness…

…which radiates from the entire project.  It’s more than just the abundance of typos and other consequences of poor editing; it’s the conception and execution of the project in general, which superficially borrows from Jack Kirby’s art style and Chris Claremont’s narrative playbook while missing everything that made those creators’ efforts successful.

Next Man is the quintessential “comic book done by folks who have read/drawn nothing but comic books.”  In other words, it’s a cargo cult ritual translated into a rudimentary form of sequential art, which was reason enough to select David Boyd and his magical endoscope as this week’s Nobody’s Favorite.

*The correct answer is “Yes.”