…even though she would hate me.
Okay, I’ll explain, but first I should mention that I’m not at all happy about Zod being the villain in the new Superman movie.
Not that I have any sort of inherent dislike for Zod, it’s just that he’s already been done, and I’d like to see director Zack Snyder steer things away from the Donner movies.
Honestly, even though he’s been done multiple times in the movies, I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with Luthor being the villain, provided it was a good representation of Luthor, not the buffoonish, real estate-obsessed moron of the Donner (and Donner-inspired) movies. And when I say “good” I actually mean evil.
Anyway, Zod is going to be the villain (Really? Zod? Again? Why not Brainiac? Or Metallo, or Darkseid, or Mongul….ooh, Mongul. That could make me happy: an adaptation of For the Man Who Has Everything.*), and early casting rumors mentioned them bringing in Ursa as well.
Blech. Ursa sucks.
For one thing, she’s not a “real” Superman villain. That is to say, she was invented for the movie, and had no history in the comics. (She does now, because Geoff Johns loves him some Donner)
Worse, Ursa was actually based on an existing Superman villain, a woman named Faora Hu-Ul.
Faora was condemned to the Phantom Zone after she was discovered to be a serial killer. A serial killer who targeted men exclusively. She actually imprisoned men in a concentration camp, where she tortured them to death. When the Kryptonian authorities apprehended her – after getting their asses soundly kicked, as she was proficient in an especially deadly form of martial arts – they found row upon row of her victims hanging from hooks in a freezer like slabs of meat.
Faora…not a fan of men.
Faora is one of my favorite characters simply because she's so viciously, coldly evil.
She’s just such a marked contrast to Superman, and when she’s out of the Phantom Zone, on Earth, with all of the same powers as Superman…yeah.
My very favorite scene featuring Faora took place in the early 1980s mini-series The Phantom Zone, written by the late, lamented Steve Gerber.
The premise: the inhabitants of the Phantom Zone conspire and find a way to be released onto the Earth while simultaneously sending Superman himself into the shadowy netherworld from which they escaped. Most of them being very bad people, who are now very powerful and have no one who can successfully oppose them, they run amok.
Ultimately, Superman finds a way out of the Zone, and, being Superman, saves the day.
In any case, there’s a scene during the amok-running in which some poor, lonely shepherd somewhere hears the sound of a woman off in the distance singing in a strange language. Naturally, he follows the enchanting sound, which leads him to a small stream, where he sees a beautiful, naked woman bathing. She opens her arms and beckons him to her, and – presumably having grown tired of the company of sheep – the entranced man wades out to her and the two lock in an embrace.
A very firm embrace. A vice-like embrace. A completely inescapable and unyielding embrace.
The woman, of course, is Faora, and she proceeds to use her superhuman strength to crush the life out of the hapless sheep herder.
It was, for a young Jon, and even for an adult Jon who re-read it decades later, a very powerful scene, demonstrative of the vicious, pointless cruelty of the character.
And it’s why, as a villain – as an embodiment of pure, unmitigated evil – she’s awesome.
Seriously, can Ursa, who never really did anything in the movies, even hold a candle to that? I think not.
So I was very happy to see that Latino Review reported the rumor that Faora, not Ursa, will be appearing in the new movie.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s true, nor does it mean that Faora will be as nasty as she wants to be, but it does make me at least a little bit hopeful.
I don’t want Zod, but if it means I get Faora…well, that’s a pretty good trade off, I think.
*Sorry, Alan Moore. I know you don’t like seeing your stuff translated to film, but that could really be awesome.
Showing posts with label geek nostalgia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label geek nostalgia. Show all posts
Friday, April 15, 2011
Monday, December 27, 2010
Found It!
A lot of the comics I got as a kid came in those bags that contained two (or was it three?) comics for like 49 or 50 cents.
You tended to find them on the magazine racks at little mom and pop grocery stores, gas stations, and department stores.
The contents of the bag tended to be a surprise, since the bag was sealed and you could only see the comic that was in front, and even that didn't help you much, as the cover of the comic was either missing entirely or at least torn at the top* and there was printing on the bag that obscured most of the cover anyway.
Fortunately it didn't much matter what was in the bag because, as I often say, there's one thing that can be said about my taste in comics when I was a kid: I didn't have any.
Sure, I liked some comics more than others, of course, but, in general, as long as it was a comic book at all I was happy.
(I developed some discernment and critical faculties as I got older, but up until the time I was around 10 or so? I'd happily read anything.)
In any case, there were certain comics I read when I was younger that left an indelible stamp on my brain - typically because they were disturbing in some fashion - and throughout the years there's been one story that I've often thought about.
It had been in one of the horror anthology books that DC was still publishing in the early 80s, but, since it came in one of the grab bags, it didn't have a cover, and while I'd probably read the indicia on the front page, I couldn't remember what comic it appeared in.
I did, however, remember the story, though I was a bit fuzzy on some of the details. It involved a young peasant girl in the 18th Century who lived in a small village somewhere in Italy who was engaged to a military officer who had been stationed in her village. However, when the day of the wedding came to pass, she learned that the officer had been stringing her along, had no intention of marrying her, and was, in fact, moving on to a new assignment, where he would no doubt seduce some other naive village girl. The young woman did not take this well.
Which is to say that she jumped off a cliff to her death (the panel showing her battered and bloody corpse is one of the things that burned itstelf into my brain. In part because it was surprisingly graphic, but mostly because it was just so sad, as she had been such a beautiful young woman.).
Her younger brother vows revenge on the officer, who is amused by the childish threat.
Several years pass and the officer is once again stationed in the village and is engaged to a wealthy woman. The now-grown brother, who never forgot his vow to avenge his sister, confronts the officer. However, he isn't up to the task, and the officer runs him through with his sword.
With his dying breath, the brother tells the officer that his sister is waiting for him.
At that moment, the village is rocked by an earthquake. The officer and his intended flee for their lives as the village crumbles and bursts into flames, and they soon find themselves in the cemetery, and, most disturbingly for the officer, in front of the grave of his jilted lover. Another tremor causes the ground to open, and the officer falls into the grave and into the waiting - and skeletal - arms of the woman he betrayed, who is clad in the tattered remains of her wedding gown.
The ground closes on the screaming officer, and the poor peasant girl is at last reunited - forever - with her beloved.
Somewhere along the line I figured out that it must have been in an issue of Ghosts, but, having no idea what the cover looked like, I was never able to say for certain.
Until now, that is, as, at long last, I've found it!
Ghosts #105, October, 1981.
So, yay!
*It was because of the damaged/missing covers that the comics were packaged in the bag and sold at a reduced price. Of course, if I understand it correctly, distributors were actually double-dipping, in that they'd been reimbursed for the cost of the damaged books by the publisher - which they were supposed to destroy, yet they went on to sell them at a reduced cost. In some cases, it was clear that the damage was inflicted after delivery. Every once in a while you got a comic that had no damage whatsoever, in which case the distributor just straight-up lied about the books being damaged, got reimbursed, and then sold it anyway.
You tended to find them on the magazine racks at little mom and pop grocery stores, gas stations, and department stores.
The contents of the bag tended to be a surprise, since the bag was sealed and you could only see the comic that was in front, and even that didn't help you much, as the cover of the comic was either missing entirely or at least torn at the top* and there was printing on the bag that obscured most of the cover anyway.
Fortunately it didn't much matter what was in the bag because, as I often say, there's one thing that can be said about my taste in comics when I was a kid: I didn't have any.
Sure, I liked some comics more than others, of course, but, in general, as long as it was a comic book at all I was happy.
(I developed some discernment and critical faculties as I got older, but up until the time I was around 10 or so? I'd happily read anything.)
In any case, there were certain comics I read when I was younger that left an indelible stamp on my brain - typically because they were disturbing in some fashion - and throughout the years there's been one story that I've often thought about.
It had been in one of the horror anthology books that DC was still publishing in the early 80s, but, since it came in one of the grab bags, it didn't have a cover, and while I'd probably read the indicia on the front page, I couldn't remember what comic it appeared in.
I did, however, remember the story, though I was a bit fuzzy on some of the details. It involved a young peasant girl in the 18th Century who lived in a small village somewhere in Italy who was engaged to a military officer who had been stationed in her village. However, when the day of the wedding came to pass, she learned that the officer had been stringing her along, had no intention of marrying her, and was, in fact, moving on to a new assignment, where he would no doubt seduce some other naive village girl. The young woman did not take this well.
Which is to say that she jumped off a cliff to her death (the panel showing her battered and bloody corpse is one of the things that burned itstelf into my brain. In part because it was surprisingly graphic, but mostly because it was just so sad, as she had been such a beautiful young woman.).
Her younger brother vows revenge on the officer, who is amused by the childish threat.
Several years pass and the officer is once again stationed in the village and is engaged to a wealthy woman. The now-grown brother, who never forgot his vow to avenge his sister, confronts the officer. However, he isn't up to the task, and the officer runs him through with his sword.
With his dying breath, the brother tells the officer that his sister is waiting for him.
At that moment, the village is rocked by an earthquake. The officer and his intended flee for their lives as the village crumbles and bursts into flames, and they soon find themselves in the cemetery, and, most disturbingly for the officer, in front of the grave of his jilted lover. Another tremor causes the ground to open, and the officer falls into the grave and into the waiting - and skeletal - arms of the woman he betrayed, who is clad in the tattered remains of her wedding gown.
The ground closes on the screaming officer, and the poor peasant girl is at last reunited - forever - with her beloved.
Somewhere along the line I figured out that it must have been in an issue of Ghosts, but, having no idea what the cover looked like, I was never able to say for certain.
Until now, that is, as, at long last, I've found it!
Ghosts #105, October, 1981.
So, yay!
*It was because of the damaged/missing covers that the comics were packaged in the bag and sold at a reduced price. Of course, if I understand it correctly, distributors were actually double-dipping, in that they'd been reimbursed for the cost of the damaged books by the publisher - which they were supposed to destroy, yet they went on to sell them at a reduced cost. In some cases, it was clear that the damage was inflicted after delivery. Every once in a while you got a comic that had no damage whatsoever, in which case the distributor just straight-up lied about the books being damaged, got reimbursed, and then sold it anyway.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Ladies Of The Legion Part 1
Inspired by a few things, most notably the first issue of Legion of Super-Heroes written by Paul Levitz, my favorite Legion writer, I've been feeling kind of nostalgic for some of the comics of my youth.
So I ordered a bunch of old comics, including an old Legion mini-series.
As part of that wave of nostalgia, I've decided to do a series of pictures of the Ladies of the Legion.
So I give you the first in an I-don't-know-how-many-part series of images based on the distaff members of the Legion: Shadow Lass.
I've always found Shadow Lass - AKA Tasmia Mallor of Talock VIII - whose power is to generate impenetrable darkness, to be the sexiest Legionnaire (it's the blue skin that does it, I think).
So I ordered a bunch of old comics, including an old Legion mini-series.
As part of that wave of nostalgia, I've decided to do a series of pictures of the Ladies of the Legion.
So I give you the first in an I-don't-know-how-many-part series of images based on the distaff members of the Legion: Shadow Lass.
I've always found Shadow Lass - AKA Tasmia Mallor of Talock VIII - whose power is to generate impenetrable darkness, to be the sexiest Legionnaire (it's the blue skin that does it, I think).
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