![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Jan. 2nd, 2016
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
informationgeek
"I’m a believer that all science fiction is really satire. Everyone who writes about the future is really commenting on the present. If I could reduce Prez to a single message, it would be that the single greatest problem confronting the human race is our utter waste of brainpower. We have seven billion of the most creative, complex problem-solving brains in the known Universe, and we put them to work making corndogs" - Mark Russell
Writer: Mark Russell
Penciller: Ben Caldwell
Inker: Mark Morales
Colorist: Jeremy Lawson
Warning for violence and for sensitive subject matter.
( Read More... )
alschroeder3
The oldest character from Timeley/Marvel that doesn't have a "legacy" replacement, like Jim Hammond/Johnny Storm as the Human Torch is---or was--Namor, the Sub-Mariner.
Aquaman was a direct imitation of Namor, and became much more like him as time progressed. (The early Aquaman was the son of an explorer of Atlantean ruins whose secrets made the young Aquaman--Aquaman. It was only in the late fifties that Aquaman was made the son of a lighthouse keeper and a water-breathing woman, only in the early sixties that he became king of an undersea city.)
Namor was in many ways the prototypical Timeley/Marvel character. Unlike DC's heroes, he was not loved by the public at large, but feared (with reason) and often accused of crimes he didn't commit--and others that he did. (Like X-Men or Spider-Man.) Like Wolverine, he would kill when necessary, and was the first antihero in comics. Like the X-Men, his birth, his genetics, made him different--a hybrid of two different branches of hominids, homo sapiens and homo mermanus. The first comics crossover was not a super-team of like-minded individuals a la the Justice Society, but a fight between two heroes/protagonists--Sub-Mariner and the original Human Torch...foreshadowing many similar superhero first encounters at Marvel, and duos who couldn't stand each other, like Spider-Man and Johnny Storm, Hulk and Thor, etc.
If he had to die, he deserved better than to be beheaded by a Superman rip-off like Hyperion in SQUADRON SUPREME#1.
I'm going to look at some aspects of Namor's impact on Timeley/Marvel. The Kirby stuff is pretty well known. Let's look instead at Daredevil #7, by Stan Lee and the masterful Wally Wood...and see why this character was such a great foil to other heroes.
( Read more... )