What If... Iron Man Lost the Armor Wars?

Armor Wars is more or less when I started reading Iron Man back in the day, but has it become a "classic"? I guess it must be, since Marvel has lately published the all-ages Iron Man & the Armor Wars and Warren Ellis' Ultimate Comics: Armor Wars. All I know is that it gave me a grand tour of the armored heroes and villains of the Marvel Universe, which looked very shiny when drawn by Bob Layton and inked by Mark D. Bright. What If? #8 comes out a year and half later, not with a "OMG EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT" story, but with an alternate take of how the storyline might have played out. Writer Danny Fingeroth simply looks at David Michelinie's original premise and goes off in a different direction. There is no doubt in my mind that Iron Man would have survived these particular changes and gone on from there.

What If vol.2 #8 (Mid December 1989)
Based on: Iron Man #225
The true history: Justin Hammer once stole designs from Tony Stark, designs sold to supervillains to incorporate in their armors. Stark sent Ant-Man Scott Lang to infiltrate Hammer's security and get the names of everyone using his stolen tech. Though Ant-Man had to zap a poison gas-spewing countermeasure with his helmet, he succeeded in sending Stark the info, and Iron Man proceeded to fry everyone's related tech.
Turning point: What if Ant-Man's helmet misfired when dealing with Hammer's countermeasures?
Story type: Civil War
Watcher's mood: Guillotine victim
Altered history: In this reality, something goes wrong and Ant-Man is incapacitated by the gas, though not before he's able to send the list of names to Tony Stark. But now captured by Justin Hammer, he's forced to give up his employer in order to save his daughter.
Harsh lessons in keeping a secret identity. Hammer now knows who and what he's up against, so he takes the offensive. He adapts the technology he used in Iron Man #124 to remotely take control of the Iron Man armor and forces Tony to unmask and put on a control collar. He then makes him spill the beans on all his wonderful tech, and keeps him in his underwear until needed for something bigger.
That something bigger is using the Iron Man armor to blow up both Avengers HQs and Stark's holdings (Rhodey winds up in a months-long coma), and then surrender to the authorities. A.I.M. gets wind of all this and figure you can do a lot more with a puppet Iron Man than Hammer's little revenge scheme. They take him out and attempt to take control of Stark themselves. However, the short transition time between masters is enough for Tony to rip the collar and armor off. He's free!
Tony goes into hiding, dies his hair blond and nooooooooo, shaves his mustache. Meanwhile, A.I.M. want to be the only ones with Stark tech so they start attacking armored heroes and villains and fighting their own "Armor Wars". Tony teams up with them seeing as they all have a vested interest in stopping A.I.M.
They all get jammers installed so that they can't be remotely taken over, and Tony hopes to fritz their armors after it's all over. For now though, they attack Hammer's mansion where A.I.M. is holed up, and even Stilt-Man gets to kick ass.
Stark manages to free Ant-Man and his daughter and also finds the Firepower armor (the ridiculous-looking nuke-powered big bad from the end of Armor Wars) and uses it to put an end to the "Wars". The baddies of course turn on him as soon as A.I.M. is routed, but the West Coast Avengers swoop in to save the day. Stark accepts responsibility for what he's done and agrees to have his day in court.
Books canceled as a result: None. Tony survives this, much as he has survived events much more damaging to his character (i,e. Civil War). At least this time he can plea "remote controlled".
These things happen: Iron Man would have to fight the Armor Wars once again in standard continuity, but being on the run from the authorities and shaving off his mustache would have to wait for the more recent Dark Reign storyline.

Next week: What if the New X-Men Died on Their First Mission?
My guess: That's what made them "All-Different".

Reign of the Supermen #51: Superman Inc.

Source: Superman Inc. (1999)
Type: ElseworldsBefore Batman Inc., there was Superman Inc. Well, on a parallel world, at any rate, where we ask...

What if the Kents Hadn't Found Kal-El's Rocket?
Based on: Action Comics #1
The true history: The Kents find Kal-El's rocket and raise him as their own. He grows up to lead a double life as both journalist Clark Kent and Earth's premiere hero, Superman­.
Turning point: What if the Kents didn't try to find the UFO they saw crash to Earth?
Story type: Deviated origin
Watcher's mood: Psych ward
Altered history: For whatever reason, the Kents never found baby Kal-El's rocket, so Super-Baby went out wandering and got himself run over by a car. Good news, it was sunny that day.
The traveling salesman who did the deed gave up boozing and became a lifestyle guru, leaving the baby at the next town's police station. Soon adopted, Kal-El grew up in Mays City as Dale Suderman. His adopted father died when he was small, and his distraught mother fell down the stairs and killed herself when he took up flying around the house. Dale wound up bouncing from foster family to foster family, thereafter blocking out both his powers and memories of his parents' deaths. The troubled teen found his first taste of happiness when he discovered he was a good athlete, getting quickly signed to the Los Angeles Talons basketball team. The public loved the triple-threat athlete and dubbed Suderman "Superman".
The Metropolis Monarchs' owner, Lex Luthor wanted to sign him to his team, bur Suderman had other plans... starting his own Metropolis franchise, the Spartans (S, meet Shield). From then on, Lex became obsessed with this man who elicited to much jealousy from him. While the Superman empire rose, with superhero cartoons Suderman designed based on his dreams, product endorsements and more, so did Luthor's ire. He sent both sports reporter Lois Lane and a private eye after Dale to find any dirt on him. The P.I. followed Dale's trail to Kansas, and to the salesman-turned-guru who told stories of a miracle baby. Soon, the rocket and its kryptonite heart were in Luthor's hands, and he used the Daily Planet to expose Suderman as an alien. In short order, Dale is in Lex's face, but gets thrown out of a window for his trouble.
It unlocks his powers, and the public's ire when Lex spins the story in his own favor. "Superman" is branded as a cheater and a danger and is shot by a kryptonite bullet at his next press conference. Between that, the death of a friend who acted as his conscience and a visit from fellow illegal alien J'onn J'onzz, Suderman flees the hospital to find himself. In the corn fields of Kansas, he is struck by lightning and knocked out. Fate attempts to reassert itself as the Kents find him and nurse him back to health. They have no idea who he is because they don't own a television, which makes their farm the perfect refuge. As Dave Sullivan, he works the fields and comes to think of the Kents as family. Meanwhile, Luthor is jailed for his part in the Superman shooting. With the lessons he's learned, he leaves Kansas once again after sending a video to the media telling the world he has left Earth to find his home planet. In reality, in enrolls in Lois Lane's journalism class at Metropolis University under the assumed name of Clark Kent. Could destiny soon find itself back on track?
Books canceled as a result: Perhaps all of them, though one could imagine Superman eventually coming on the scene in the heroic identity created for his animated series. This would in turn inspire other costumed heroes to come out of the woodwork. This DCU may be late, but it's coming.
These things happen: The Byrnified version of Clark Kent donned glasses only late in life and was a veritable football hero at Smallville High. His athletics career never went any further for ethical reasons. Still, Smallville owes Kansas' other schools an apology.

Movie Marquee Friday: Many Happy Returns

Our pack of rogues is introduced...
The blade is but the extension of the arm...

In orange scratches, they write their name and it is not Crippled Avengers...

Anything can be used to martial your arts...

Beware generational spikes as trumpets herald your origins...

The land is what creates the men...

There was a demon that lived in the air...

It is darkness that lies before us...

Waves wash in and out, the pavement wet...

Year 4

Yep, Siskoid's Blog of Geekery is celebrating its 4th anniversary today. 1461 days, 3085 posts, and thousands of comments (thanks all), and I've no wish to stop anytime soon.

Year 4 Highlights
-I suppose the biggest thing is the end of daily Star Trek reviews. The feature started at the same time as the blog as a way to make sure I blogged every day (I shouldn't have worried), and outlasted the various television series by two years. 50 days ago, I got through all the comics and am now doing new IDW issues or, as time permits, novels only from time to time. I'm glad for the break, honestly.
-Taking the daily slot is Reign of the Supermen, which attempts to give you a different version of Superman every day, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. I have absolutely no doubt that I won't run out of Supermen before Year 5 closes out.
-What If? did indeed become the regular Saturday feature, replacing Rom Spaceknight, and I've already gone through all of the original series and have started on the second. Other new and more recent features include examinations of Dial H's throwaway characters, the return of Amalgamondays in which DC and Marvel characters duke it out, and a sudden obsession with Battle Shovels (and shovel battles). Retro-Comics, which looks at contemporary comics done up in an older style, need me to do follow-ups; I haven't abandoned them.
-Though I've neglected the role-playing side of things lately, Year 4 had plenty to offer, both through generic articles, and thanks to my running three different games over the course of the last 12 months - Doctor Who, Savage Worlds/Evernight, and DC Adventures.
-According to Google Analytics, my daily hit count went up dramatically this year, from the low 300s to the low 400s, much of it thanks to traffic going to a post entitled "Who Is River Song?". I understand a lot of Doctor Who viewers are asking or trying to answer that question, and the comments are still growing. 57 (and counting?) is a personal best, well ahead of the thirtysomething that is the previous record.
-Not to say that the series of Sexiest Women in SF postings didn't up the hit count, because it did. Those are the kinds of posts that keep on giving. For example, I still get at least a dozen hits a day about the Topless She-Hulk FF story I reviewed in 2008.

What's Next?
-Reign is still in its relative infancy, so that's certainly going to play a huge role at the Blog of Geekery for the next year at least.
-What If? has enough issues to carry us through Year 5 as well, though format changes in the book during the 90s might make me drop out before the end of 2011. I plan on sticking it out, but you never know.
-Otherwise, I pledge to do more of the features you liked and fewer of those you didn't. It's always hard to gauge what new obsession I'll fall prey to over the course of an entire year (shovels? really?), but you'll know when it happens.

So thanks again for stopping by on occasion during the last four years, and here's to a productive Year 5! Starts tomorrow!

Reign of the Supermen #50: Golden Age Superman

Source: Action Comics #1 (1938) to Superman #121 (1958)
Type: The real deal (since retconned)Not to be confused with the Superman of Earth-2 (who'll get his own entry), Kal-L, the Golden Age Superman, was technically written out of continuity when the Silver Age hit, but that continuity had been eroding away for years. In the first stories, Clark Kent worked for the Daily Star, but by 1939, it was already becoming the Daily Planet. Similarly, though we now identify the Golden Age Superman's S shield as having the definite border, the costume was evolving throughout that era's two decades, from a triangle to a pentagon, and from a stylized S to the designed fish shapes of today's "Kryptonian" S shield. Superman's stories progressively grew from fairly standard Golden Age fare - beating up on organized crime and Axis agents - to the almost EC-esque science fiction stories with a final twist that we identify with the Silver Age. It didn't happen overnight. The Earth-2 Superman is an invention that puts all the disused concepts into the same character, though his adventures may not correspond to those told in Action and Superman between '38 and '58.

The original vision of Superman just vanishes at some indeterminate point in the era.

At the end of the first Crisis, when the redundant heroes were phased out of the timeline completely and all other Golden Age characters restored to DC's mainstream history, Roy Thomas wrote a really fun issue of All-Star Squadron that told us how those "lost" Golden Age stories might have gone. He could just have said that Superman's early stories just never happened. It's not like there was much of a crossover between books at the time, except in JSA stories. But that would have been too easy. Consider the Case of the Funny Paper Crimes from Superman #19 as retold in All-Star Squadron #64.
Classic Superman artist Wayne Boring does a good job recreating Dobrotka and Sikela's original comic strips, though this time, they're read by Johnny Quick instead of Clark Kent.
As in the original story, these various strips come alive and attack the world under the direction of supervillain mastermind "Funny Face".
The All-Star Squadron story doesn't make them all giants, but it's a great homage to Superman that an entire team is required to solve the "Case" where just one man was enough. Just as the Daily Planet becomes the Daily Press, someone had to play Lois Lane's part in the story, so poor Firebrand ends up trapped inside a piece of paper in her stead.
Superman did have help at the end of this caper, as the hero characters liberated from the comic strips wanted to return to their duo-dimensional worlds. In the new version, it's the All-Stars that do all the work. It's good to know that thought the Golden Age Superman is essentially gone, all those two-bit crooks still got what was coming to them. And though gone, his legacy lives on in today's version of the character. Superman is still out there stopping muggings, arresting mad scientists and lifting cars over his head.

Cat of the Geek #91: Le Chat Botté

Name: Le Maistre Chat/Le Chat Botté (AKA Puss in Boots)
Stomping Grounds: Perrault's fairy tales (has a cameo in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty)
Side: Good
Breed: European shorthair
Cat Powers: Rabbit hunter. Ogre killer. Royal manipulator.
Skills: Eat 7, Sleep 6, Mischief 9, Wit 10, Intimidating peasants 9
Cat Weaknesses: So why wasn't the original owner (the miller) filthy rich already?
Other versions: Puss has been a media darling since he came on the scene in 1697, and there have been many versions of the classic tale. The one closest to my experience is a version from the French-speaking part of Newfoundland (it's not big, but it's there). When I worked at the Acadian Museum back in the day, we used to show a short film (well, slides with voice-over) of it. From what I remember, it was pretty much the same thing, except the King of Newfoundland wore bluejeans. I kid you not.

Reign of the Supermen #49: DC Heroes' Supermen

Source: Mayfair's DC Heroes RPG (1985-1993)
Type: Role-playing gameMayfairstivus compells me! This is the last day of that grand festival, as heralded by my prophet, Firestorm Fan's Shag (and his prophet Frank Diabolu). Many blogs are participating, so check it out.

But what is it? Well, it seems a good number of us remain fans of Mayfair's DC Heroes RPG, and though I'm trying out Green Ronin's DC Adventures right now, DCH remains the best superhero game I've ever played. To me it's still the most elegant. I thought I might show off Superman's stats in that system, but which version? 1st edition is the clunkier, with Superman's stats wayyyyy out of control. Click to get a closer look:
Keeping in mind that each numbered increment in DCH represents twice the previous value, that Strength of 50 is moon-shattering! My first copy of DCH was 2nd ed., where most high-end characters top off at 25 (which benchmarks at nearly a million tons for Superman's Strength), so in getting all those old sourcebooks and modules, I couldn't believe how inflated the numbers were. Does he really need Flight 45?!? But in retrospect, it's perfect. The 1st edition Superman was clearly the pre-Crisis model, that Silver Age wonder who could literally move planets.

2nd edition and 3rd edition Supermen are near identical, so here's 3rd (again, click to make it bigger):
The first thing you notice is that the stats are way more manageable... Well, actually the first thing you notice is that Superman is "deceased". Talk about being topical! 3rd edition also features the Reign of the Supermen replacements, so that's pretty cool. But I digress. The point is that even with reduced numbers, Superman is still the most powerful hero out there.

On Siskoid.com, I still have a pile of stats for DC characters I made or adapted. There are 13 discreet versions of Superman, as well as Superboy (pocket dimension), Superboy (Connor), the Eradicator, Steel and the Cyborg-Superman. I keep meaning to do more, but the project was insane to begin with.