Below is the Bonus Chapter (or if you will, the regularly scheduled chapter that got preempted by April Fool’s Day). Be here Friday when we return to the regular schedule, and next Tuesday, the return of Extras. Really.
As we left off last week in recapping Lewis Coates’s (aka Luigi Cozzi’s)Â 1979 Italian homage to/rip-off of Star Wars, Stella Star (Caroline Munro) was freezing to death on an icy planet while her longtime partner Acton (Marjoe Gortner) lay dead on the floor of their spaceship.
But Police Robot Elle figured out that he could place Stella in a state of suspended animation, enabling her to survive the deadly cold. And it turns out Acton’s not dead. There’s a really bad fight scene which Acton wins mainly by making goofier faces than Thor… Continue reading
Okay, as you might have noticed, yesterday was April 1, so yes, The Chosen One was an April Fool’s Day joke, and no, Hero Go Home is not cancelled. I’m going to try to get a bonus chapter up this week, but I ran into some time sinks that may push it back to the normal Friday slot.
But since in the climax of Part 2, I finally unveiled Bugs under his preferred name, I thought I’d visit some of his origins. And as a small teaser to that, what better start than with the Secret Origin of DC’s Phantom Stranger?
The Phantom Stranger has been a fixture of the DC Universe for decades, sometimes battling supernatural horrors on his own, other times pointing heroes like the Justice League to impending dangers. But neither his origin nor his true identity had ever been addressed. He would just show up in his long cape and funky amulet, hat shrouding his eyes in shadow, and deliver a cryptic warning, then disappear.
Until 1986 (cover date Jan 1987), when as a tie-in to the Legends miniseries (which helped DC reboot things after the Crisis on Infinite Earths stripped away decades of alternate Earth rigamarole), the Phantom Stranger received not one, but four origin stories in Secret Origins #10.
In the first story by Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo, he started out as a loving family man named Isaac, whose wife and son were killed when King Herod tried to kill all the infant sons in Israel in an attempt to destroy the Messiah. Isaac later committed an act of revenge against Jesus that led to his being cursed to become the Wandering Jew. The Stranger relates all this to a priest in the modern-day.
The Voice of God says the Stranger has learned his lesson and offers to end his punishment, but the Stranger volunteers to stay a while.
In the second origin by Paul Levitz and Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, a righteous man named Joshua is living in a wicked city not named Sodom. An angel appears and tells Joshua that the city is to be destroyed down to the last man, woman and child. Only he shall be spared. Joshua demands that either the city be spared or he allowed to die with it, but the angel refuses. So in despair…
The angel declares that Joshua will live forever, but forever apart from the people he lives among. He will be a force for good and righteousness, but always a stranger.
The third origin, by Dan Mishkin and Ernie Colon, actually breaks away from the biblical stuff and posits a science-fictional origin for the Stranger. He is a researcher on a project to look back through time to the Big Bang and siphon off just a little energy to avoid the death of the universe in the present. The Phantom Stranger appears and warns him tha this course of action will not save the universe, but destroy it. So in the course of stopping the destruction, the scientist actually travels through the wormhole, and…
He is reborn as a creature of pure energy, immortal, awaiting the day when life will once again arise on the Earth.
The final story was by Alan Moore and Joe Orlando. Orlando was an EC Comics artist who had spent several years as an editor and vice-president at DC as well. In the fictional world of the Watchmen, Joe Orlando was credited as one of the artists on Tales of the Black Freighter, the story-within-a-story that mirrors Ozymandias’s own story arc.
Moore and Orlando return to the Biblical milieu and posit the Stranger as a fallen angel who refused to commit to either side during Lucifer’s rebellion, choosing instead to wait on the sidelines to see who came out on top. When the battle is over, he is cast out of heaven, but when he attempts to join with his fellow fallen ones…
Ouch. This is also notable in that it is the only origin story for the Stranger in which he already possesses his trademark white hair.
Well, the end of the month is approaching and the great experiment has not gone as well as hoped. It’s been a big month, content-wise. Fiction reviews, game reviews, Superman comics reviews, the climax of the big battle to end Part Two of Hero Go Home, and the opening of the final section. There was even the basketball-themed surprise I promised with the Shaquille O’Neal movie Steel.
But traffic has actually gone down, and all the extra work got rid of the cushion I’d built up at the beginning of the month. So this will probably be the final post of March. Be here on April First for the next chapter of Hero Go Home or something.
Okay, as I warned you last week, this is not a superhero film, nor is it based on a comic book. But Starcrash is heavily influenced by Barbarella, a comic that was itself made into a movie starring a young Jane Fonda. Barbarella also starred a young John Phillip Law, who later went on to star in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, which also featured the sultry star of Starcrash, Caroline Munro. So it’s all connected, see.
Anyway, in mid-1977, a young Italian director named Luigi Cozzi was hired to make a science-fiction film to cash in on the success of Star Wars. One problem: Star Wars hadn’t been released in Europe yet. So Cozzi’s script bears only the slightest resemblance to the storyline of Star Wars, while also drawing heavily on other influences. A lot of other influences. Continue reading
So in the aftermath of the huge Death of Superman event, DC Comics then unveiled the Reign of the Supermen. If you read last week’s Vault, and the entry on the Shaquille O’Neal movie, Steel, then you know that DC introduced four substitute Supermen in the four monthly Superman titles.
Action Comics featured the Last Son of Krypton, who looked like Superman, but was sensitive to light and merciless. Adventures of Superman featured the Metropolis Kid, a teenaged clone of Superman whose adventures continued later in Superboy. Superman: The Man of Steel featured Steel, actually John Henry Irons, the brilliant engineer who constructed a suit of armor with the Superman shield as a tribute to the original hero who had inspired him. And Superman featured the Man of Tomorrow, a cyborg whose metal half was built of Kryptonian metal and whose DNA matched Superman’s.
The four titles formed one continuous story, with the ongoing question, “Which one is the real Superman?” It was obvious that Steel and Superboy were not the original. But the Last Son of Krypton and the cyborg both had legitimate claims to being the real deal. Which one was he?
As it turned out, neither. In Superman #80, we found out that the cyborg was actually the Big Bad. How bad? He had the super-master-villain Mongul working for him, that’s how bad.
Meanwhile, the Eradicator lost his power source, which took a Kryptonian warsuit to Metropolis and was revealed to be…
Badass long-haired Superman. And since it was the 90’s, he ended up not only having guns in each hand, but superfluous leg straps and ammo pouches as well. The Supermen have to stop Mongul and the cyborg, who is revealed to be a guy named Hank Henshaw. Who?
Yeah, the big bad of this 30-part story is a meta-joke on Marvel, a pseudo-Reed Richards! Damn it!
The only thing worse is that I apparently have every chapter of this story, through all four monthly Superman titles, except the very last one. Seriously, I can’t find it, which makes me suspect I never owned it.
Shit. But the other Supermen each have their moment to shine. Superboy stops a missile from destroying Metropolis, the Eradicator sacrifices his existence to give his power back to Superman and Steel saves the Earth by shutting down a giant engine meant to send Earth out of its orbit.
You could say that the Death of Superman and the Aftermath which ended up returning everything to mostly status quo ante was nothing but a mercenary marketing strategy on the part of DC Comics, but Dan Jurgens, Karl Kesel, Louise Simonson, and Roger Stern, along with artists Jurgens (again), Jon Bogdanove, Tom Grummett and Jackson Guice managed to turn this nakedly moneygrubbing event into an actually tense story with lots of interesting twists and huge scope. If only they hadn’t turned everything on a huge meta-joke, this could have been a truly classic story.
Continuing March’s look at Other People’s Books, I’d like to feature a change of pace for Hero Go Home. There’s really no connection at all, either thematically or even proximately, between Digger, or superheroes in general, and Eilis O’Neal’s debut novel, The False Princess. But she’s a friend, and if you can’t say nice things about your friends’ books (especially when they’re true), then why even have a blog?
Okay, so this may not be pleasant, but think back to Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (sorry). Senator Padme Amidala (nee‘ Princess Amidala) gets off her shuttle on Coruscant when a bomb goes off, killing her. Only she’s not really dead. It was a double who got killed in her place while the real Amidala was posing as a common member of her retinue.
This kind of thing happens in fiction all the time: the commoner suddenly discovers (s)he’s a noble and sets off on a rollicking adventure. It’s a cliche by now.
So Eilis O’Neal in her debut novel from EgmontUSA turns the cliche on its head. Her book is about the decoy, the False Princess. Nalia suddenly discovers at the age of 16 that her entire life is a lie; she’s not really a princess. She’s a commoner actually named Sinda, substituted for the princess to foil a dire prophecy given at the princess’s birth. Her parents aren’t really her parents, and the future she has spent her entire life preparing for won’t be happening. It’s a lot to take.
So Sinda has to adjust to life as a normal peasant, only she’s not very good at it. Luckily (well, lucky for her, I guess), there really is a secret plot against the throne that only she can unravel.
Two comments:
Number one, the book is mainly a coming-of-age romance written for teenage girls. As an almost 50-year-old man who writes about comics and superheroes and shit blowing up, I am obviously not the target audience.
But number two, O’Neal is a good enough writer that I still enjoyed the book. Some of the twists are a bit predictable, but there’s a really good one about halfway through that really caught me. O’Neal captures the confusion and contradictions that bedevil teens wonderfully. I plan to give (okay, lend) this book to my daughter and see how she likes it.
And as a side note, this book taught me an important lesson about writing. If you’d like to know what that lesson was and you have a blog, Â let’s cross-post or something. I would love to discuss writing with someone other than my screen.
There’s one more Thursday left in March, and I’m not sure what to discuss next. If you have a suggestion, let me know in comments or by writing tonyfrazier@herogohome.com.
So I mentioned that I used to play City of Heroes and City of Villains. Well, not long after I started playing, the studio that developed the game, Cryptic Studios, sold off City of Heroes to NC Soft, the publisher. Not long afterward, they produced this awesome teaser video featuring their next big game, Marvel Universe Online.
It was supposed to be produced in conjunction with Microsoft for the X-Box 360, but Microsoft and Marvel apparently couldn’t come to terms, so the game was shelved. But a couple of years later, I found out that Cryptic was working on an MMO featuring Champions instead, and was thrilled. I even applied for a job with them, but never interviewed.
And then, last year, Champions Online debuted, and I was simultaneously thrilled and upset, because I had entered my present broke-ass phase of life and couldn’t play. But now comes Champions Online: Free For All, a free-to-play version of the game, so I can play the newest version of my favorite pen-and-paper RPG (back in the day, at any rate–I’m having a hell of a time playing Sargon’s home-brew Chaosium variant right now).
So yes, one reason updates have been a little slow in coming is that I’ve been playing a lot (so much that I’ve developed a little Repetitive Motion Injury in my mouse hand). But the chapter week before last would have been delayed in any case. So how does Champions Online compare to my previous gaming experiences?
Strangely, almost exactly like City of Heroes. The one biggest change from Cryptic’s previous game was Champions allowing you the same sort of freeform character development that the pen-and-paper game did. But in the free version, they constrain you to archetypes with prescribed and limited power progressions, just like City of Heroes, only with fewer choices.
Mission structures and zone layouts feel a lot like City of Heroes, too, as does the gameplay. This is enhanced by the fact that you can map the keys to match either a popular fantasy game (obviously WOW) or City of Heroes, so you don’t have to learn a whole new game from scratch.
There are some improvements. Power recycle times aren’t as long, so combat is fast and furious. And there is no arbitrary wait for either a cape or proper movement powers (in City of Heroes, you couldn’t get your real movement power until level 14, and you couldn’t get a cape until you had reached level 20 and completed a special cape-unlocking mission).
Also, the enemies feel a LOT like City of Heroes enemies. For instance, in City of Heroes, part of the backstory was an alien invasion that had left parts of the city devastated. The Champions Online training missions involve an alien invasion which leaves parts of the city devastated. In Westside, you fight a martial arts society called the Cult of the Red Banner that is very reminiscent of City of Heroes‘ Tsoo, down to the teleporting, helmeted sorcerers.
There don’t seem to be as many zones as City of Heroes, but the zones are big and very detailed, with lots on interesting locations that you will probably visit eventually in the line of some mission or other. And just like City of Heroes, flying is an absolute joy, and you can find special awards for exploring out-of-the-way places. I didn’t get an award for visiting this rooftop, but I enjoyed the view.
One thing you do more of in Champions Online is fight signature villains. Most of them are drawn right out of the Champions sourcebooks, so when you visit the desert, you might encounter Grond (who has been awesomed up from a goofy four-armed mutant to a gigantic Hulk-stand-in).
Go up in level and you visit Monster Island, where you can help a giant gorilla fight a dinosaur.
One other neat innovation in Champions Online is the Nemesis System. Basically, you can design your own archenemy at level 25, and the system will send you on customized missions against that nemesis. Here, my hero Double Sol squares off against archenemy Antigen (the evil babe on the left) and her henchman Gargoyle.
I don’t really notice a real difference in graphics quality between the two games, but that’s more a reflection on the fact that I’m still playing on the same old computer that couldn’t wring full performance out of the older game, let alone the new one. So don’t judge the game’s graphics on my obsolete system’s screencaps. My biggest frustration with the game is the poor camera controls; I’ve died a lot of times because I couldn’t get the camera rotated around in time to target an enemy.
In some ways, I miss City of Heroes and City of Villains. It was a mature game with tons of content and lots of neat features like your own customized headquarters, multiple costume slots so that your characters could change uniforms (Metatronic had both a Super-Saiyan style variant and an armored angel variant, as well as civvies for when I wanted him to assume his secret identity), and multiple character slots. Champions Online has at least some of these features as well, but not for the freeloaders like me.
But I’m enjoying the hell out of Champions Online: Free For All. Â My big regret right now is that there is one more Wednesday in March, but I don’t have a fifth game to slot in there. One of the ways I spend my fantasy lottery winnings on is to buy a big-screen high-def TV with a PS3 and DC Universe Online, but obviously, even if a miracle happened between now and Wednesday, I wouldn’t have enough time to get the money, get the system set up, and play enough to write a proper review. So next Wednesday must stay undecided for now.
So, finally at the end of our months-long journey through the films of Superman on the big screen, the final crappy truck stop meal before pulling into home. I promised you the “forgotten” Superman movie, and I give you… Steel, starring Shaquille O’Neal. Continue reading
On Monday, I promised to bring you a “forgotten” Superman film to wrap up our months-long look at all of the big guy’s big screen appearances, and that is definitely going to happen. So I figured to give you a small teaser here which, while not being directly connected to the film in any way, will probably serve as a spoiler for those of you familiar with the storyline in question.
Back in 1992, DC Comics got national headlines when it decided to publish a storyline in which Superman was killed in a brutal battle with a mysterious monster known as Doomsday. “The Death of Superman” led into a storyline in which Superman’s friends were grieving while the rival forces of Luthor and Cadmus scrambled to steal Superman’s body to get access to his DNA.
And then, in issue #500 of Adventures of Superman, Jonathan Kent, Superman’s foster father, suffered a heart attack and had a Near-Death Experience in which he pulled Kal-El’s soul back from beyond with him. At least, he thought he had. By the end of the issue, four new heroes had appeared. We met the first one for real in Action Comics #687.
One of the cool gimmicks in the introduction of these four new heroes was the covers. Each of the four Superman titles that month had a double-cover–an outer cardstock cover with a cutout to show the Superman shield (slightly different for each of the four pretenders to the throne), and an inner cover featuring a portrait of the character to be featured in that book. For instance, underneath the cardstock cover above, we got this…
A couple of scientists near the North Pole see an unusual aurora, different from the normal Aurora Borealis, and in the process make an obscure in-joke.
I’m not sure who started the trend of naming things in the DC Universe after past creators–my gut wants to say Frank Miller, though Steve Englehart will probably claim credit–but here we have an example. Whitney Ellsworth was the editorial director of DC Comics during the Golden Age and went on to become the producer and script writer on the Adventures of Superman TV series starring George Reeves.
Anyway, that final panel is taking place in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude (which in the comics has never been a crystal cathedral), where a strange humanoid figure made of energy appears, claiming to be reborn. He travels to Metropolis to find “the body,” which has been returned to its coffin in the aftermath of… well, just a whole lot of weird crap that went on between various factions after the funeral. But then we see…
Could this in fact be Superman, risen from the grave? The coffin is open, and it sure looks like him. But he doesn’t really act like what we’re used to from Superman.
That threat to send the thug to hell? Not idle. This “Superman” kills the thug, then meets with Lois Lane, where he tells her Clark Kent is gone, and that only Superman, alien avenger in weird shades, remains.
I’ll talk more about the storyline next week, but first, on Monday, be here for the big reveal.
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