30 Days of Winter: Day 2 - Cosmic Heroes

[angelophile]

Because I'm choosing to interpret "cosmic heroes" as "mechanoid bounty-hunters who were constructed to house the life-essences of extra-dimensional techno-mages and who fought a demi-gods who consumed the universe on the astral plane before being tossed through the time stream by mischievous Lords of Time."

Sounds pretty darn cosmic to me.

However, most of the time, he just wants the cash, yes?

9 scans from the 28 page What If? #56 beneath the cut.

First up, some introduction. In the 90s, Marvel UK decided to launch a line of US styled comics starring new characters. It was decided to revamp the Death's Head character as Death's Head II, under the pens of Andy Lanning and Dan Abnett (currently masterminding Marvel's cosmic titles). They had the original Death's Head killed in the year 2020 by a cyborg named Minion, who was created by A.I.M. to prevent a future apocalypse brought about by a being named Charnel. Minion's trick was to bump off and then assimilate the personalities and knowledge of numerous powerful beings.

With me so far? Me neither.

Anyway, Minion killed Death's Head, then went on to try and assimilate Reed Richards. This was prevented by the original Death's Head's personality taking control of the Minion cyborg. Simple!

This storyline, however, didn't go down too well with Simon Furman, the creator of the Death's Head character. Thus, this story, which saw the original Death's Head getting his revenge on Minion, with a nice line in parody of the 90s excesses that DHII was so fond of.

IE: Really big guns.





In this reality, having failed to kill Death's Head, Minion moved onto his next target - Reed Richards - and this time succeeded in killing him. Death's Head gathers a group of heroes from the present time who are understandably peeved about this when he's hired to stop Minion after he goes rogue, possessed by Baron Von Strucker and calling himself Charnel now. Then watches them all heroically get themselves killed before deciding to step in.

Comments

[misterbug]

As DH's own peculiar cod-stereotype-European dialect is so complex already, you have my gratitude for not further complicating your description with a 'Simples!'.

[angelophile]

The temptation is always there, when talking about Death's Head, to end every statement with a question, huh?

Apparently the speech pattern was based on someone Furman worked with at Marvel UK, but I've never been able to pinpoint who, right?

[icon_uk]

I've never thought of DH's accent as that odd, just heard it as generic Britishness.

[greenmask]

Geoff Senior.. come back to us. Comics need you. :'[

[pyynk]

I have to think that Simon Furman had some serious fun writing this story. I miss Death's Head.

[q99]

I like that as-of SWORD, he seems to be back.

[psychopathicus_rex]

I'm not sure I'm wild about the notion that Death's Head could take him down when a whole platoon of the MU's best and brightest could not - it smacks of author favoritism - but this is still a pretty good fight. I especially like the fact that he obviously admires Richards and his ideals, but is determined not to actually admit that he does.

[angelophile]

Oh, I don't think there's any doubt about the favoritism, but that's kinda the fun of the thing - Furman's tongue seemed to be planted firmly in his cheek and it was presumably cathartic to put his criticism of the DHII character reboot into the mouth of his pet character and bump off a bunch of Marvel characters he didn't particularly care for. That's pretty much all any What If? seem to be anyway, but in this case, I'm happy to go along for the ride and see the original DH owning this one.

[psychopathicus_rex]

I don't know about the latter point - I've read a bunch of 'What If?'s that play very fair with the characters. It's not every one of them that ends with everyone dead, by any means.

[valismedsen]

Is that the same Dr. Necker that appeared recently in Nova as a main scientist on Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S? I thought she was a new character. Her characterization seems different from the one in Nova.