Heroes Reborn #1: Whatever Happened to Earth's Mightiest Heroes?

[superboyprime]

Comments

[mistersandman]

Jason Aaron sure loves his character mashups, doesn't he?

[scorntx]

He also really seems to like using "all" as a prefix.
(Just waiting for the terrifying rampage of the All-Goat.)

[viridian5]

But maybe we really do need to fear the All-GOAT.

[scorntx]

Quoth the All-Goat: "Bleeeegh."

Though now I just have this image of a giant goat, some giant evil looking thing, and Thor just trying to give it food, while Loki's just standing there shaking his head at a plan gone terribly wrong.
"No, no, you're not keeping the goat..."
"I so am!"

[viridian5]

"Brother, it is truly the Goatest Of All Time!"

[mistersandman]

"Not the All-Time All-GOAT!"

"Verily! Behold! The all-being combining the might of...

Count Nefaria, the All-Gangster!

Nightmask, the All-Oneiromancer!

NFL-SuperPro, the All-Athlete!

US Archer, the All-Trucker!"

[viridian5]

...words don't even mean anything anymore, especially not the word "all."

[arilou_skiff]

There are plenty of goats in norse mythology!

[scorntx]

You thought you were getting a new version of Heroes Reborn, but actually, it's more like House of M mixed with Infinity Warps instead!
Mwa-ha-ha!

Confession time: By Aaron's standards, and going by a cursory skim through rather than the whole text, it doesn't seem to be... that terrible. The hyper-violence aside, the jingoism is at least supposedly to be intentionally over the top, and the premise silly.
It's just when the actual plot gets going it falls down.


And just wondering here, but... does Jason Aaron just really hate Agent Coulson or what?
Because bringing him back as a shadowy, dog-kicking (figuratively speaking) manipulative mastermind and flunky to Mephisto is... just such a bizarre thing to do.
Not even sure it'd qualify as character assassination because that sort of suggests something quick and clean. Not... whatever this is.
(Did Clark Gregg take his parking space one time or something?)

[leahandillyana]

Man, large corpos are living in another world. Here I am, having to visit a police office for saying I wish I had a death note, and there Marvel is writing a DC story, and what can you do to the power of Disney?

[lizard_of_aus]

These things don't seem to equate.

[silverhammerman]

Well, Marvel has been doing this since long before Disney acquired them, the Squadron Supreme have been around since 1971, and Marvel's been doing DC riffs and parodies since its inception. Plus, while this is heavily derived from the Justice League, these characters are also different and parodic enough that I don't think you could make a really good faith reading that they're trying to knock-off DC, since the whole thing is that the Squadron are a bunch of jingoistic nuts working directly for the evil President Coulson and Mephisto.

As to why DC's never tried to lower the boom on them for this, who knows? I think at some point it just became pure pragmatism of: does anyone really want to get into relitigating something like National Comics v Fawcett Comics' Superman vs Captain Marvel, taking years and millions of dollars but this time over relatively minor characters like the Squadron, when doing so will probably get you a lot of bad PR and ill-will from people working in the industry for very little reward? So many employees cross back and forth between Marvel and DC, and cross-pollination has been so creatively fruitful, that busting their asses over writing Batman jokes in an issue of Spider-Man (or vice versa) wouldn't be productive or helpful. It would probably be a different story if Disney announced tomorrow that they were doing a Squadron Supreme movie and really pushed it as them basically taking the JLA from DC, but as it is, I don't think it's worth it for anyone involved to sue.

Moreover, opening that Pandora's box would basically gut the entire superhero market, because it's just riffs all the way down. If you held modern Marvel or DC or Image to the same standards applied in Fawcet v National, whole swathes of characters on every side would be ruled out. If Captain Marvel was derivative of Superman, then surely Omniman is too, as are Invincible and Supreme, Batman Beyond and Sideways and would be called derivative of Spider-Man, Swamp-Thing is a knockoff Man-Thing, etc. etc. The fact that the major comics publishers are shockingly cool with each other parodying or even largely ripping off each other's characters is a minor miracle, and honestly kind of a good thing, imo.

I would even note that it's not just the major publishers either, Michel Fiffe's incredible series COPRA is overtly a Suicide Squad homage complete with very obvious stand-ins for both Marvel and DC characters, and lesser Image Comics series also riff endlessly on the major superhero characters without getting sued. With these smaller series, again, I think it's a case of the possible benefits of winning a lawsuit are outweighed by the fact that it's not worth spending time and money on those small fries when all it'd get you is bad PR.

[cainofdreaming]

Re: Swamp Thing and Man-Thing. Both came out around the same time, so both were in production before either company had seen the others creation.

So they're both actually knockoffs of the Heap.

[silverhammerman]

Perfect illustration of my point! It's knockoffs all the way down, even deeper than I knew! Though part of me would love to see DC and Marvel/WB and Disney endlessly scrap over the nitty gritty of, say, Swamp-Thing vs Man-Thing or Doom Patrol vs X-Men, where it's arguably just convergent thinking that happened.

[donnblake]

That part of you might be amused at the Arthur Conan Doyle estate's recent attempt to claim that while Sherlock Holmes might be public domain, any depiction of him liking dogs is still totally locked down, money please.

[silverhammerman]

The ongoing story of the Doyle estate trying to claim that any depiction of Sherlock Holmes possessing humanity or warmth isn't actually in the public domain is both extremely funny and horribly aggravating. It's great.

[arilou_skiff]

Also even beyond that, DC does the same thing rather frequently. There is an avengers knockoff in DC; that has been used a few times, and didnt they recently reboot some character that ended up very much like Spider-man?

[silverhammerman]

Oh yeah, the "New Age of Heroes" initiative basically created/retrofitted a bunch of DC characters as Marvel stand-ins. Sideways = Spider-Man, Damage = Hulk, The Terrifics = The Fantastic Four (which was quite amusing because it came during the recently concluded era when Marvel was refusing to put out an FF book), Brimstone = Ghost Rider.

I think that overall DC hasn't spent as much time riffing on Marvel as Marvel has riffing on DC, but both companies have done this sort of thing for ages.

[laughing_tree]

DC did threaten to sue Marvel over the Squadron Supreme in the 80s, when their first actual series was going to come out. Before that they'd just been guest-stars. But it turned out the statute of limitations had passed, so DC couldn't do anything.

https://www.cbr.com/comic-book-legends-revealed-558/

[karmakaze]

If anyone's interested in more history of pastiches, I recommend the DC Does Marvel (And Vice Versa!) episode of Explain This! Comics Guys
https://explainthis.podbean.com/e/dc-does-marvel-and-vice-versa/

There's a lot of good history on how so many homage/crossover characters happened and why nobody's lawyers seem to mind.

[mazway_75]

I oddly like how it captures cheese of 1970s tales and such so not a bad start.

And I do love the look for Silver Witch.

[thezmage]

I have some Thoughts about this series. First of all, it's a setting story rather than plot one. Every main issue past the first one is simply a character study on one of the Squadron, slowly revealing just how wrong this world actully is, a journey which the tie-ins actually seem to be doing as well just with the more traditional Marvel characters.

It's a little ham-fisted and a little antiquated, but the contrast of the silver age DC storytelling style with the Marvel style from the same period as a way to underline the Squadron's fundamental lack of humanity is something I really like, even if I have to ignore the indications (mainly the usage of Coulson as a stand in for comics fans) that Aaron intends for the metaphor to go the other way.

And of course for some reason (I suspect I know the reason) the whole thing seems to go completely out the window when it comes to the Nighthawk issues this week, but I'm not sure I expected more from Aaron

[numeronone]

Sigh. I remember when I was 11 and "The Amalgam Age of Comics" was one of the coolest if also the most bewildering things I'd ever seen.

This feels like...a very watered-down version.

[beeyo]

This is some comic book-y ass shit right. I like it

[beeyo]

Someone explain this to me, mostly the part about not-Batman

[scorntx]

By "this" do you mean the event, or the Squadron Supreme as a whole?

[karmakaze]

Heh, I know a Comics Guy who will explain it...

https://explainthis.podbean.com/e/dc-does-marvel-and-vice-versa/