The Redemption of Miriam Sharp? Fear Itself - The Homefront #2

[icon_uk]

I found these uninked, unlettered pages from "Fear Itself - The Homefront" over at Mike Mayhew's CAF page and thought it'd be interesting to share them. Besides I LOVE seeing pencil art.

A new team of villains, who look like some sort of revamp of the Force of Nature, or at least some form of elemental loons (I don't recognise them, but that might be Whirlwind leading them, and one of them might be the Living Laser) arrive in Sanford and start laying waste to anyone who gets in their way. It's a rather blatant murder-fest, and given their powers, no one dies easy...

Robbie Baldwin, being the upstanding guy he is, switches to Speedball in front of Miriam Sharp and goes out to confront them. Given their powers include fire, ice, lightning bolts, lasers (Is that Living Laser?) and superspeed spinning, he does well against them, up to a point, but when they all attack at once...



Oh that's nice, some good Samaritans come to assist the exhausted hero who just saved their asses...

Oh wait, of course they're not, these guys are MU civilians, and so decide to take revenge on Speedball for the criminal act of Nitro... but I'd rather not go down that rant-laden path again on a Friday evening...

After some minor beating the crap out of him whilst he's down (I'm guessing he used up his power reserves fighting the bad guys) they decide to move on to the next step, a bit of lynching....

Now given Speedball's powers, ways to kill him aren't easy to come by, since most forms of assault require kinetic energy and his powers tend to trigger if enough energy to harm him comes into contact with him. Clearly though, these guys have been pondering how best to murder him should the chance arise, which is a deeply bloody disturbing thought.



Speaking personally, deliberate asphyxiation would be one of the most horrible ways to go I can imagine.... Looks like Robbie agrees.



Mr Generic Angry Faces 1 2 and 3 are enjoying themselves a little too much, and then....



Now I'm not a fan of the character for the most part, but damn if that ain't a badass way to make an entrance.

I'm hoping this is her coming to realise that Speedball is NOT the embodiment of all evil that she's been presuming him to be all along, and that trying to save strangers from being murdered is actually kind of a noble and admirable thing, especially since, in her own way, that's just what she's doing here herself!

Comments

[thanekos]

Fire and lightning're Ember and Aftershock of the Bastards of Evil, who thought themselves the children of Pyro and Electro (they weren't).

Ice is Icemaster, who came from a Hostess ad and ate all the fruit pies they stole from a gas station.

[starwolf_oakley]

That's actually referred in the comic.

[icon_uk]

I just looked up "Bastards of Evil" and got as far as Warhead then blew himself up on the former site of the World Trade Center, presumably killing himself and thousands other innocent bystanders. before actually stopping and blinking in appalled shock.

[misterbug]

Looks more like "I want the pleasure of shooting this man myself!" to me...

[icon_uk]

Perhaps, though note that she's pointing the gun at the lead thug, not Speedball.

[darkknightjrk]

I doubt my Marvel-Fu will ever be that strong, so I have to ask--who's Miriam Sharp again?

And yes, those are AMAZING pencils.

[icon_uk]

Miriam Sharpe is the mother of one of the kids killed when Nitro exploded himself when fighting the New Warriors at the start of "Civil War". She became the foremost self-appointed public spokesperson for the Superhuman Registration Act (The media loved her) and in this story has been seen expressing her dissatisfaction with what she sees as the heroes apparently deciding they didn't want to be responsible any more and Cap and Iron Man being buddies again.

[cyberghostface]

IIRC isn't whatever is going on in Fear Itself causing the public in the MU to act crazier than usual? I'm not following the titles though.

[crinos]

Considering I don't see a difference between this and how they acted during civil war, I think that may be too optimistic.

[baxter2814]

It's moments like these when I wish the Spectre or some other omnipotent being from the DCU would just randomly throw open a portal to 616 and yell to all the Marvel superheroes to come over and crash in their nice homey possibly-still-badly-Anti-Monitor-decimated-but-still-wonderfully-cheery-and-soothing-in-comparison-to-616 universe until the inhabitants of 616 beg them to come back to rescue them from the next Skrull invasion. Getting your timeline randomly retconned at intervals is pure heaven compared to putting up with this kind of shit.

No, seriously, I usually get a kick out of MU civilians' assholery, but this kind of stuff literally angers me.

Ditto

[roguefankc]

You're not the only one. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to literally punch a MU civilian.

And if you think about it, they're attacking heroes, and the MU civilians know that the heroes will not strike back because they're better than that. It's not a matter of people like Cap and Spider-Man are scared of them; it's that their morals and sense of responsibility make them choose to not resort to it.

So MU civilians are beyond assholes. They're absolute cowards and bullies because they're attacking people who they know won't fight back.

[stolisomancer]

Yeah, ah ha ha no.

Any universe that has Geoff Johns sitting behind the steering wheel doesn't get to be the "nice homey" place. The last major Marvel crossover had one neighborhood in New York go crazy for a little while, and in the one before that, the casualties were confined entirely to Asgard, and the one non-powered fatality was that guy Daken shanked in the neck. Everyone was explicitly evacuated before the Hulk landed in World War Hulk. Fear Itself is lookin' pretty mean, sure, but a surprising number of Marvel's big meta-arcs seem to get resolved with a minimum of actual impact on anyone who isn't in tights.

Blackest Night had a body count measured in the tens of thousands, all of whom specifically were driven into the depths of fear and despair before their hearts were physically ripped from their chests. That's not even getting into the Crises, the multiple high-impact alien invasions (keep in mind, in the DCU, Australia has been leveled by an occupying alien force), that time the sun nearly went out, the concept of living in Gotham City at all...

In Marvel, people are dicks to the superheroes. In DC, the entire universe is waiting for its chance to kill you and everyone you know just because you're there.

[hyperactivator]

I would love it if her son wasn't dead and he was in some lab somewhere because the explosion gave him super powers and now he's being trained to kill superheros.

Then Speedball has to save Stamford when her crazy monstrously mutated son tries to "make mommy proud".

That would be something worth reading.

So bored with this plotline...

[glprime]

At this point with her terribly written character, I'm just re-writing Miriam as the following: she was a neglectful or downright abusive mother, and the guilt of her behavior mixed with her son's tragic death is basically driving her into deep psychosis, where she projects all her dark behavior onto the actual "shiny perfect heroes," because that's easier than looking at herself in the mirror.

Re: So bored with this plotline...

[crinos]

That was close to my original idea; That she was neglectful of her kid because she got pregnant as a teenager and blamed the kid for her not doing anything with her life, and when he died she used it as an excuse to strike back at Super heroes; people who DID do something with their lives.

Re: So bored with this plotline...

[stubbleupdate]

What?

[sindra]

If you have a family member that dies of cancer, do you blame the radiation treatments that made them sick or their hair fall out? No, you blame the DAMN CANCER, because if it wasn't for it being around you wouldn't need the radiation treatments in the first place.

That's exactly how I equate this absolutely idiotic blame-game the MU civilians play with super heroes.

[starwolf_oakley]

That's exactly how I equate this absolutely idiotic blame-game the MU civilians play with super heroes.

It's like Marvel took J. Jonah Jameson's hatred of Spider-Man and Bolivar Trask's creation of the Sentinels and decided to make it Standard Operating Procedure for the entire MU General Public.

Now, a distrust/dislike/blind hatred of Superheroes *can* work. People can envy superpowered people and how they are so irritating moral, or people can worry superheroes might subjugate those they protect.

[baxter2814]

SO much motto!

[arilou_skiff]

I always figured the analogous situation was blaming the police for a hostage crisis that ends with all hostages dead.

[flint_marko]

This issue is already out.

[silverzeo]

Is it wrong for me to see how "civilians" be on trail for murdering superhero in cruel and unusual manner? Though I am sure somehow, some higher society Marvel villain would use them as a campaign against superheroes and blah blah blah blah, and blah. The wpman with shot gun is a nice touch.

But seriously, half the nation of America in the Marvel-verse were like those 3 douches bags...

[espanolbot]

It'd be amusing if the heroes decided that they'd had enough of the general public's crap and went all Justice Lords on them.

Admittedly wouldn't happen, because that required severe emotional trauma inflicted upon the League before they even considered that course of action.

[proteus_lives]

Shitty art on the Living Laser.

[icon_uk]

Like Speedballs power FX, I imagine there might be a chunk of post-processing work on the colourists part to improve his appearance. (Though I agree the Viking helmet horns are a little out there, compared to his usual helmet crest)

[proteus_lives]

The reality of a civilian reaction to superhumans would somewhere between the Marvel: HATE/FEAR THEM! and DC's: WORSHIP THEM/HERE'S A MUSEUM OF YOU!.

[espanolbot]

I don't know, unless they're actively causing massive amounts of property damage while being an asshole, I'd have thought that the DC outlook would be more realistic.

I mean, there's someone who risks their life on a regular basis to save the world, hero worshipping them a little doesn't seem that unreasonable.

But then you get jerks like that woman from the start of Superman's Grounded arc, who targetted the one hero who'd feel the worst about her crazy rant, who blamed Superman for her husband dying of cancer whilst Superman was off saving the world in the War of Krypton arc.

Although it does set up that nice scene later where Superman is walking through a neighbourhood, sees a guy on the verge of a severe heart attack and tells him to seek immediate medical attention, if she's approached anyone else they'd have given her a hug and started a charity in her husband's name, provided her children with university tutition or something.

But nope, she goes after Superman the one guy on Earth that is pretty much unanimously liked by everyone (except for that time when that corrupt businessman who wasn't Lex when all Glen Beck on him).

[nezchan]

Hmm, I'm not seeing any of the images.

[icon_uk]

That's odd, not doing anything different from my norm with these pics that I can see, same host as usual (my lj account)