Daredevil Villains #38: Angar the Screamer
DAREDEVIL #100-101 (June-July 1973)
“Mind Storm!” / “Vengeance in the Sky with Diamonds!”
Writer: Steve Gerber
Pencillers: Gene Colan (layouts #100) & Rich Buckler (#101)
Inkers: John Tartaglione (finishes #100) & Frank Giacoia (#101)
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourists: Stan Goldberg (#100), George Roussos (#101)
Editor: Roy Thomas
We’ve skipped issue #99, which doesn’t have a villain. Instead, it has Daredevil and Hawkeye literally fighting over the Black Widow as part of a loose crossover with Avengers. Natasha is so unimpressed by this display of 1970s machismo that she sticks around in Avengers for an extra month and skips Daredevil #100 entirely, despite being billed as co-star on the cover. So, in her absence, Daredevil has an anniversary issue all on his own.
In trying to find an approach to the book that works, Steve Gerber’s first thought is to play up the location. If this is Marvel’s only comic set in San Francisco, then surely it’s got to be about the counterculture, right? And so issue #100 guest stars Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, who spends a good chunk of the book interviewing our hero. Daredevil endorses Rolling Stone as a quality publication, but “didn’t think the counter-culture was interested in anybody who works with the police.” Wenner assures him otherwise: “Of course they’re interested! You work with the cops, but you’re fair! You want the system to work justly, up-front – and even people who oppose the system can respect that!”
You get the idea. Still, product placement aside, Gerber’s instinct is sound. All Daredevil’s previous writers have focussed on his love life, which, after all, was the driving engine of the book that Stan Lee created. Steve Gerber is more interested in the idea of Daredevil as a character who’s a believer in teh system but open minded about the counterculture. This will ultimately lead to the idea that Daredevil is a book about a character with a foot in both worlds, both lawyer and vigilante, and it’ll work better when Foggy Nelson is brought back to serve as an establishment foil. For now, without Foggy, Matt has to be the establishment representative, and so he often comes across as a centrist dad.
The Rolling Stone interview is cut short when Daredevil and Wenner suddenly have a shared hallucination. Since it’s an anniversary issue, this scene is principally an excuse for a parade of old Daredevil villains to make cameo appearances. The result is hardly a testament to the quality of the books’s rogues’ gallery: the pickings are so slim that Gerber resorts to giving Dr Doom a prominent role, because at least you’ve heard of him.
It turns out that similar incidents have been happening across San Francisco for the last couple of days, each time preceded by a terrifying scream. This is Angar the Screamer, in his original incarnation – a man in sixties hippie garb with the superhuman power to give people LSD trips by yelling at them.
And let’s be clear: That is not a gloss on the story. It’s not even a case of the drugs angle being implied so blatantly that nobody could miss it – although, yes, the story is called “Vengeance in the Sky with Diamonds”, and the hallucination sequences echo psychedelic posters. But there’s no implication here at all: Daredevil tells us, very directly, in dialogue, that Angar is a drug reference. “His power goes beyond hypnosis,” Daredevil explains. “He’s like a living LSD factory. If he can sustain the effect – well, who knows? He could ‘freak out’ the world!”
You might be wondering how on earth this got past the Comics Code. By 1973, the Code allowed drug references as long as they were negative. And Angar’s illusions are presented as disorienting and nightmarish. There are maybe a couple of points where some San Franciscans seem slightly less bothered about it than you might expect, but even the Rolling Stone characters seem to agree that at a bare minimum it’s an enormous nuisance. So far as we see, Angar only gives people bad trips. Any subversion here lies in taking a Code revisal that was presumably intended to allow instructive tales about heroin addiction and plots where Batman beat up drug smugglers, and using it to introduce an expressly psychedelic villain. But the story complies with the letter of the Code, and you could at least argue with a straight face that it complies with the spirit too.
Angar is easily the most dated-looking character in the 1980s editions of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, with his facial hair, headband, waistcoat and medallion. But even when he was created, he was meant to look out of date. Angar is an acid casualty who hasn’t come to terms with the end of the sixties – he looks nothing like the Rolling Stone staff who are presented as the contemporary counterculture. He was a peace-and-love flower child who saw the dream crushed by reactionary crackdowns. He hates the Man for destroying the dream, but hates his fellow hippies too for giving up on it. Really, he hates everyone, and yet he’s convinced himself that he’s the last bastion of a philosophy of love.
Angar got his powers from the same mystery man who created the Dark Messiah a couple of issues previously; we establish here that he’s a rich guy, and Angar literally calls him “the Man”. It’s at least strongly implied that whatever procedure he went through didn’t help his sanity. Angar’s instincts are to run wild and cause chaos with his new power. He talks about the world being at his feet, though it’s never entirely clear what he’s planning to do – holding the world to ransom doesn’t really seem to fit with his overall personality. At any rate, his shadowy mentor turns out to have an electrode implant that can keep Angar under control, and so Angar reluctantly agrees to stick to his actual mission of targetting Daredevil and the Black Widow.
This leads to a bizarre fight scene between Angar and the heroes in a psychedelic landscape, during which Angar protests that he doesn’t want to be there and wants to build a world of love. Eventually, Angar backs down when the Black Widow threatens to shoot him in the head at point blank range.
Angar shows up again for the climax of this storyline, as Daredevil finally reaches the Man himself. By this point, Angar seems to be completely out of his mind. But he does finally get to side with the heroes and defeat the Man, thanks to Moondragon telepathically channelling his powers into a targetted hallucination of unspeakable existential horror. Or, if you prefer, some black stuff coming out of an egg. Angar is supposed to have exhausted his powers for good at the end of the arc, but that’s a passing line of dialogue. Later writers apparently just didn’t notice it, or figured that readers would have forgotten it. Really, it completes Angar’s arc: he betrays his sixties dreams precisely because he clings on to them so obsessively, but ultimately switches sides to do something that actually helps.
Despite this, Angar went on to make a fair number of appearances over the years, as a minor villain with an unusual power that became less drug-themed over time. A connection with Screaming Mimi justified a few more appearances once she moved into Thunderbolts. He even has a Marvel Cinematic Universe version, though with defanged powers that cause catatonia. But Angar has largely wound up as a low level petty criminal, losing most of the garbled dreams that makes him distinctive in his early appearances. Gerber’s Angar isn’t a bank robber. He has bigger dreams than that. Incoherent dreams, to be sure, but bigger ones.
Even so, Angar is lucky to have stuck around as long as he did. He’s a character locked to the time of his creation – tied to the sixties, and intentionally behind the times from the start. He’s a very difficult character to adapt to the sliding timeline because there’s no obvious modern equivalent of the demise of flower power. A disillusioned Occupy Wall Street activist is just not the same character. And shorn of his context, Angar was inevitably going to become a blander gimmick villain as the decades went by.
At least Angar left more of an impression in the Marvel Universe than most of the 37 villains on your list before him.
The story I’m most associating with him is Iron Fist (vol.1) #5-7, when he controlled Colleen Wing via his hallucinations. At the end of which she deliberately stabbed him with her katana. He was later shown to have survived, but the issue made it clear that Colleen’s intent was lethal, and in 1976, a hero intentionally killing a villain was still quite unusual.
Angar just showed up in the latest volume of Spider-Woman, where he was defending a community of outcasts from corpo-cops evicting them (with the evil corporation turning out to be a Hydra front). He’s thus portrayed rather sympathically, and his scream is instrumental into de-brainwashing the “corporate superheroes” working for the same baddies.
Then the book got cancelled, but the storyline might get picked up in the next volume of West Coast Avengers.
Angar suffers from different views of what the hippies were. In Gerber’s story he is a disillusioned but ultimately well-meaning idealist. In his next appearance,by Claremont, he’s using his powers to try to force Colleen to murder Iron Fist ,with Colleen describing how violating the experience was. Partly, this is Claremont’s writing style. But it also reflects different views of the hippies- were they well-intentioned idealists or horrible men pressuring women into things they didn’t want to do? (They were both, to a degree.)
Angar became Screaming Mimi’s lover and partner during Acts of Vengeance. He was shown to have died in a flashback before the original Thunderbolts series and Mimi’s grief after is death led to her letting out a violent scream and damaging her vocal cords. The Fixer restored her vocal cords and implanted technology used by Klaw, leading to her Songbird powerset.
After his death, he showed up in Thunderbolts as having somehow been turned into a being of pure sound energy called Scream. Songbird killed him as an act of mercy and Scream thanked her before dying.
And he stayed dead for 13 years after that, before inexplicably returning in a backup story in a Spider-Man Annual.
Al Ewing had him fight Songbird in a New Avengers story after his return. (The same story where Vermin’s rats meet Squirrel Girl’s squirrels and Vermin’s rats go on strike.)
@Claus: Those Claremont-scripted Iron Fist stories is are Angar’s next appearances, and, more generally, it was Claremont who brought Angar back and kept using him in he 1970s and 1980s.
Claremont explains his restored powers. Angar was apparently found by Master Khan, Iron Fist’s extradimensional sorcerer villain, and he’s working for Khan in his later 1970s appearances.
Claremont writes Angar as a total sociopath, someone who greatly enjoys warping minds, brainwashing people, and gloating about it. He also drives a couple of people to their deaths in is Claremont-penned Spider-Woman appearances. It’s difficult to see him as the same character Gerber wrote.
After that, Angar showed up just a couple more times before he was killed off in a flashback in Thunderbolts Annual ’97. He was partnered with Screaming Mimi during the Acts of Vengeance against Hawkeye and Mockingbird, and then shows up operating as part of a superhuman HYDRA strike force in the mediocre later issues of the revived early 1990s NIck Fury, Agent of SHIELD series. He’s a generic minor-league baddie in all of those stories.
It’s really Thunderbolts that brought him back as something more like a proper character, tying him in to Screaming Mimi’s storyline and suggesting that he still had some of his 60s ideology left.
As to Gerber’s stuff it’s also worth noting that Angar turns on “the Man” partly because his girlfriend Janis is killed by his boss, and she’s portrayed as the only person Angar still cares about. The name seems like a Janis Joplin reference to me, but whatever Gerber was getting at with that isn’t all that clear to me.
Is t that Angar is forced to rwecognize what really killed the ideals he believed in? Is it his realization that it’s partly his fault, forcing him to move forward and away from the drug culture and the sourced counterculture stuff that kills his friends and actually empowers the establishment?
Gerber’s statements on politics are often a bit hard to follow, outside of his general point that there’s a rot of self-justification, exploitation, and directionlessness at the center of American life that cuts across the establishment and the counterculture ideologues alike.
@Michael: What issue of Ewing’s Avengers work has the Squirrel irl/Vermin stuff? I gotta read that one!
@Omar- It’s in New Avengers 16.
I wish Angar wouldn’t have been used after Gerber. As has been pointed out multiple times already, most writers scripted him as a generic villain with nothing to say about the original theme and little resemblance to the original presentation.
See also: The Solarr character by Steven Englehart, although that character wasn’t exactly as nuanced. Still, all his later appearances were written as simply a generic third-tier supervillain.
@Chris V: In Solarr’s case, I think we can directly blame Engelhart, who was the writer who used him next as a generic partner of Klaw in an Avengers story.
None of the hazily implied Carlos Castaneda stuff from Solarr’s debut story was there, just his characterization as a casually murderous sociopath. And that was already kind of hard to connect to the psychedelia-to-superpower angle in Captain America v.1 #160.
That’s true. I forgot it was Englehart who used Solarr after his debut, and he butchered his own character. That makes Solarr even that much less nuanced than Angar in that his own creator decided he was generic.
I’m just glad that I’m not the only person who remembered MCU Angar.
And whatever happened to Songbird anyway? It seemed like she was being set up as one of the breakout characters in Thunderbolts, but nobody’s been all that interested in using her since.
@Taibak- What happened was Abe was seemingly killed in Thunderbolts 12 during Secret Empire and no one has known what to do with Melissa since- she’s only had a couple of cameos since.
It certainly seemed like she was getting elevated especially when Kurt put her in Avengers Forever, after a babyface turn.
Part of me wonders if her spot got taken by the big push Carol got in the last 20 years.
Any idea of what the real Jann Wenner’s involvement was? Given that it was an extended scene, not just a 1 or 2 panel cameo.
And what are we to make of the swastika on Angar’s forehead? It’s drawn to evoke the older religious depictions, but does put one in mind of Manson. But nothing else is Manson-like.
@Mark Coale- No, that’s not it. She still appeared extensively between New Thunderbolts 1 and Secret Empire. And Carol was being pushed extensively in that period. It was only after she got yanked out of Ewing’s New Avengers and got put in Zub’s Thunderbolts instead of following Sunspot into US Avengers that she got put in limbo. She was moved into Thunderbolts to celebrate the team’s 20th anniversary but the book got cancelled three issues later.
Zub apparently intended the ending of the last issue to be a temporary cliffhanger- he thought the book would be relaunched after Secret Empire. But by the time Thunderbolts was relaunched, it was in 2021 and it was a completely different concept. The ending was bizarre- Abe is apparently dead and Jolt is shrunk and stuck in the Ghost’s pocket. I don’t think Jolt was ever followed up on.
The entire thing was just bizarre. I can’t think of another instance of a character being yanked out of a book that was about to be relaunched to be dumped into a title that would be cancelled three issues later, resulting in her major love interest killed off and her left in limbo.
All this Songbird talk makes me miss the classic Thunderbolts. They haven’t gotten a lot of love as of late and the MCU version seems to be excluding them entirely.
I was wracking my brain trying to remember an MCU Angar, thought it might be in one of the new ones I haven’t summoned up the courage to watch.
He was in Agents of Shield, a show I started and stopped watching twice?
I’d have bet he was in one of the shows that likes to make fun of old school comics, like She Hulk.
@Mark Coale: as a matter of fact, Angar showed up in the MODOK series that was on Hulu, along with Armadillo and a few other villains I don’t remember.
In my head, Angar now makes a fortune recording ASMR tracks for Silicone Valley tech bros. He hums very softly, giving them the effect of an LSD microdose.
ASMR=Angar the Screamer Murmuring Reassuringly
I thought that Al Ewing wrote Squirrel Girl (and Tippy-Toe!) quite well, but she really only had a few scenes. The curse of large ensemble teams.
Uncanny X-Ben: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Minor villain whose powers were changed so that his scream just induces catatonia.
Songbird should’ve popped years ago. She had everything going for her. Reformed villain with a streak through her hair. Worked for Rogue. She could’ve been that character for the Avengers. Pity she got swept aside like that.
I don’t know, songbird has Green Lantern powers. Even Green Lantern himself has trouble staying popular in modern comics. I don’t know if she’d ever make it as a major character.
To me, her powers were the least interesting thing about her.
Post-Thunderbolts,I think Songbird also had the problem of being a character whose arc felt “finished,” like she’d become a hero and gained sone confidence, but…now what?
I’m not sure anyone came up with a new hook for her, and regressing the character back to her anger, desire to be protected, and willingness to bend morality might have been tough.
Rogue, in contrast, always had her angst about her powers, her guilt about Carol Danvers and split mind, and more recently her relationship to mutant causes.
Songbird, in contrast, ends up a fairly general superhero type in motivation. Her moral struggles and shady past made her interesting as a Thunderbolt.
But once she’s actually an Avenger, at a certain point her moral development and level of acceptance feels finished and a writer would have to add on a whole new hook…or regress the character. She got written as a conflicted double agent more than once, but that’s always a plot hook with a time limit. Eventually she has to be found out and picks a side, and it can’t be repeated indefinitely.
Also, Green Lantern isn’t really a fair comparison. I wasn’t suggesting Songbird could’ve carried her own franchise. I do think she had the potential to be a popular Avenger, though.
@Omar – Characters far less interesting than Melissa are almost in constant publication. Timing is everything. Had Thunderbolts come along five to ten years earlier, I think we’d have seen Songbird in an Avengers film by now. Maybe some writer might have come up with a new angle for her, or maybe not. I doubt it would’ve mattered much. To me, it’s where Songbird came from– her journey that was the main appeal. From trailer trash to D-list villain, to reformed villain to hero. She could’ve coasted on that just like almost every other damned hero that are coasting more on their popularity than how they’re being written at this precise moment.
@Omar Karindu- I think that part of Songbird’s problem was that part of her original hook was that she got out of the criminal life and became a hero while her lover Angar and her partners Letha and Titania died as a result of their criminal lifestyles. The problem is that Angar, Letha and Titania were all brought back outside Thunderbolts. And once they were brought back they stayed the same Z-list villains they were before they died. Songbird had one confrontation with Letha anon Titania and one confrontation with Angar and that’s it. So it’s the worst of both worlds- on the one hand, Melissa doesn’t have their deaths to motivate her, on the other hand, they’re not major villains who she has to often confront, like Rogue with Mystique for example.
I’m not sure Songbird needs villains to work. I think there might still be a story to tell in her building confidence. Yeah, she grew over the course of Thunderbolts, but she seems like someone who would come down with a serious case of imposter syndrome if she found herself as an Avenger. Think something along the lines of Kyle Raynor when he first joined the Justice League or Cannonball when he joined the X-Men only written well.
Think about it. You say that Angar, Letha, and Titania are Z-list villains. Lean into that. Songbird might still care about them, but they would also represent a side of her that she’s trying to move beyond.
Problem is, I see with that is that she’d need a writer with a long run to really make her blossom, and that doesn’t seem to happen much these days. It also eventually sets her up as a female hero with a slightly odd power set who doesn’t really work well outside the Avengers – and they already have the Wasp. Even the social relationship between her and her former partners in crime is a tough sell since that seems like the kind of smaller scale storytelling that modern superhero comics don’t always do well any more and I’m not sure it’s what people want from an Avengers comic.
But put her on a team with, say, Captain America, Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Wasp, Justice, and maybe Storm and she just might work.
Well, the answer might be what Ewing was already doing. Put her on an Avengers satellite team that would have the space for the smaller scale storytelling.
Granted, Avengers satellite teams don’t hold their books for longer than an arc or two these days, but who knows. And it’s not like Marvel doesn’t have a history of trying again what has already failed five or ten times.
Songbird would play off great against the current form of Storm. They have a lot to teach to each other.
But character writing is rare these days. Even traditional, major books such as Spider-Man and Avengers are now relaunched once a writer’s run finishes with little regard for characterization continuity.
“Problem is, I see with that is that she’d need a writer with a long run to really make her blossom, and that doesn’t seem to happen much these days.”
Precisely. Characters need time to cook, and that just doesn’t happen anymore. It also seems like ensemble cast writing has become something of a lost art. Say what you will about Chuck Austen, but he was, for the most part, competent when it came to juggling a large cast. With the possible exception of Jubilee, every X-Men character he touched was given the opportunity to be completely butchered by him.
“It also eventually sets her up as a female hero with a slightly odd power set who doesn’t really work well outside the Avengers – and they already have the Wasp.”
I don’t see a problem there. The Avengers has been home to a number of male heroes who have never been strong candidates for solo books, and you can have more than one of those guys on a team at the same time (eg Beast and Wonder Man, Vision and Wonder Man, etc), so why not women? There’s room for more than one female character like that on an Avengers roster. If we can have the Wasp and Wanda, or the Wasp and Tigra on a team, we can have the Wasp and Melissa on a team. Besides which, Busiek already the groundwork for Jan and Melissa to become BFFs at some point when he wrote Avengers Forever. Granted, having AF Songbird refer to the Wasp as her best friend may have just been a throwaway line to emphasize the point to readers that this wasn’t the present-day Songbird, but whatever the case, I rather liked the idea (one from rags, the other from riches).
In retrospect, it sounds like Songbird would have made a good addition to the Avengers Assemble mini series. Yes, it does fit the model of “secondary Avengers books not lasting beyond 1-2 arcs,” but the solicits make it seem like it will feature 2-3 stories across 5 issues, with a linking subplot. Steve Orlando and his editor, though, apparently thought that Living Lightning, Lightspeed, and Night Thrasher were more worthy of panel time.
This discourse seems to prove the fact that it isn’t just rising prices and/or bad stories which cause long-term fans to walk away. It is the lack of consistent character support and progress which makes reading long runs, or many runs, seem worthless in the end.
I imagine fans of Songbird may get especially frustrated when Marvel sinks their teeth into other characters and never lets go. Moon Knight was DOA after his volume in the 90s ended. For a decade he was a sporadic guest presence at vest. Then in 2006 the Charlie Huston run began and for the next 18 years Marvel doggedly kept him in print, even when many volumes crashed in a year or so. And then eventually the right writer came along and bang, now Moon Knight is a B-Lister involved in crossover events.
Yeah, ever since that Thunderbolts #12, Songbird’s last appearance was in an issue of The Marvels in 2022 — written by Kurt Busiek. In a lot of ways she really does represent a character on an progressive trajectory which got derailed and has never recovered.
I like Songbird. Why isn’t she a more popular character? The Marvel Universe is crowded with great B-Z level characters that just aren’t super popular. Songbird’s powers look good enough on page, but aren’t super unique. She was great on a team comprised of villains posing as hero’s, but Thunderbolts hasn’t been about that in a while. Or, maybe it has? I haven’t read an issue of T-bolts since the Jeff Parker run. Neither have most people, judging by the fact that the book hasn’t been published regularly for years.
Come to think of it, Moonstone, Atlas, Mach-1, Techno, and Jolt haven’t been too busy lately…
That said, if the right creative team at the right time takes an interest in her, I’m sure Songbird could gain some traction with fans. It happened with the aforementioned Moon Knight, Magik, Captain Marvel, and a handful of others. I’d like to see her become an Avenger, or lead a Thunderbolts team that finds a stronger fan base.
Moonstone has teamed up with villains again lately. She was last seen as one of Count Nefaria’s Lethal Legion in last year’s NEW MUTANTS: LETHAL LEGION mini series. Before that she was doing things at Ravencroft and snuggling up to Norman Osborn.
Atlas reteamed with Baron Zemo during Secret Empire but was on the side of angels united with other Pym particle using heroes in 2019’s WAR OF THE REALMS: GIANT MAN. He had a couple of cameos in some Gwenpool comics around 2020.
Techno was seemingly killed by the Punisher during Matt Rosenberg’s run in 2019. He was part of a team trying to do Castle in on behalf of Zemo and Kingpin.
Mach-1 (now Mach X) was killed off at the end of Jim Zub’s fateful THUNDERBOLTS #12 in 2017. Jolt was shrunken to several inches tall and stuck in Ghost’s pocket. And Songbird has only made one non-flashback cameo since then. That volume was in many ways her last hurrah, and the last hurrah of the original T-Bolts. There was a mini that ended last year which was just mayor Luke Cage running a NY based team led by Hawkeye and featuring some random characters like Persuasion, Miss America, Photon, Power Man/Victor Alvarez, and some new characters (including Gutsen Glory, a deliberate knockoff of Cable).
But yes, in theory Songbird is laying in wait for some writer to pick up the pieces and put her on an Avengers team or some other series. The challenge is her getting long enough to catch on with a stable cast around her.
For the record, Titania has mostly reformed. She and her husband the Absorbing Man earned some kind of amnesty serving on Gamma Flight chasing after Hulk during Al Ewing’s IMMORTAL HULK run. She’s since come to an understanding with She-Hulk in her last series, which just ended last month, so she’s not a villain anymore. In theory she and Songbird could talk and Titania could mention being inspired by her old pal. Assuming an editor cared.
@AMPR- Sorry, if it wasn’t clear- the Titania we were all talking about was the original that Songbird was partnered with, who was killed and brought back to life. She got seduction powers from the Hood and Dormammu and changed her name to Lascivious. Songbird hardly knows the Titania that’s married to the Absorbing Man.
@Michael — Yes, you’re right. I for about that one. Yeah, Davida DeVito was renamed and she hasn’t turned up beyond a quick cameo in Nick Spencer’s run on Cap in 2016.
The more I think about it, the more I do think it would have been cool if Songbird was part of that Avengers Assemble mini if only to remind people that she still exists. I mean, did the world really need more of Night Thrasher or Wonder Man?
Aww, I like Night Thrasher, and Wonder Man’s always been one of my favourites (probably because of the name, but his costume is great too, and his movie star angle is cool.)
I don’t know if Titania-Skeeter is reformed really. In Hulk she was at best not actively doing crime, and in She-Hulk she’s just in it for the fighting. You could have her robbing a bank next week and it wouldn’t be jarring.
And good lord. Titania’s a pretty good name if you can keep Shakespeare and slang for breasts out of your head, but Lascivious would make more than a few “worst name” lists.
That is to say, I like Wonder Man because we’re both named Simon.
And I think writers have deliberately left it ambiguous whether Titania has turned a new leaf or simply hasn’t been seen on any murderous rampages lately, and I like it.
Speaking of small-scale character work over a period of time, I hope Rainbow Rowell gets another book from Marvel soon. Her Runaways and (both) She-Hulk series were full of that.
They were, maybe, not great on the superheroic part of superhero comics, but there’s more than enough other books full of popcorn blockbuster action scenes.
I think Omar Karindu has it right on Songbird. The engine of Thunderbolts was always will they/won’t they reform/recede, and for the majority of the original cast, that question has been definitively answered: yes Abe and Mel will reform, no Karla and Norbert won’t.
The only one remaining where you can do a convincing divided loyalties story is Atlas. I think he’d be the most interesting one to put on the Avengers.
I agree about Rainbow Rowell. Both RUNAWAYS and SHE-HULK/SENSATIONAL SHE-HULK by her were excellent. She practically deserves an Eisner for making Jack Of Hearts a compelling character alone. She was announced as the next writer of Action Comics in April, slated to begin in July, on a back-up strip arc focused on Lois Lane. That should be ending soon, but she might wind up staying there like a few writers who’d been at Marvel for years. For example, Kelly Thompson was a Marvel exclusive for about 5 years, and now the only thing she writes for them is ITS JEFF for Marvel Unlimited. I’ve never seen Rowell write more than one comic at a time.
Erik Josten/Atlas remained something of a wild card after the core volume of Thunderbolts ended in the 2000s. In LAST DEFENDERS he remained something of a mercenary, albeit one willing to take money from heroes. He’d been rejected by the Avengers Initiative, which had to be depressing since they accepted or considered nearly everyone. Ever since then he’s either reteamed with Zemo (either willingly or after being manipulated) or occasionally winds up teamed with heroes. He’s something like Sandman in the late 80s/early 90s, at least before that stretch with Silver Sable’s Wild Pack. Maybe Sable should recruit him? It’s hardly the worst thing in the world that Erik is fine with being a hero, just not one who does it pro bono. I mean, who does? Even cops get paid. The Avengers used to have a stipend paying members about $52,000 if they needed it. Even with inflation, that’s not a bad salary in the U.S. (teachers typically earn less).
Songbird’s arc may have been completed, but she still never made the transition into being an accepted hero post-Thunderbolts. The only Avengers squad she was on was Ewing’s New Avengers, which was linked to AIM (and Sunspot’s bombastic personality), so there was always that air of suspicion there. It was never really a core group. I don’t disagree about the angle that she could be akin to the Avengers’ version of Rogue. And let’s not forget the primary thing which helped Rogue; being a lead heroine on the most popular cartoon on FoxKids for 5 seasons in the 90s. I sincerely doubt 80% of her fans even knew who she was before 1992 (albeit because some weren’t born yet or were too young to read, but still).
I mean, Gambit was the newest character on that show when it debuted. He was so new that the comics and the cartoon did his origin almost at the same time. His continued popularity, arguably, can be traced back to that more than anything else.
In a parallel universe where, say, Songbird was a compelling character on AVENGERS: UNITED THEY STAND and it was actually a good cartoon that lasted 5 seasons, she’d have been in a movie by now. So sometimes it really is up to circumstance.
If the T-Bolts are not viable anymore, and the MCU version has totally different characters, than Songbird’s hope really is landing on a team book somewhere. I almost suggested a B-team where the Avengers roster is made up of former crooks or those with shady pasts, but these days that includes half the roster. Maybe the next time Clint Barton leads a team on an ongoing, she would make an ideal member.
Instead, Marvel is relaunching WCA with the big “member who needs to reform” being…Ultron.
And it still is wild how Angar has kept in print regardless, and even has an MCU version. I still recall when Wizard magazine used to routinely mock him.
New stories about Songbird’s divided loyalties wouldn’t be about right vs. wrong but rather right vs. loyal. The goodness in her character will spur her to forever help her former associates if she believes they can be redeemed. There’s ample room for stories about toxic relationships available to be written involving her former ‘friends’ abusing her concern for them and exploiting her insecurity about her upbringing and background to try to drive her back to the dark side.
“I need your help, Mel” / “Of course! Oh, crap–I thought I was doing good by trying to help you but you just made me do a bad thing.” / “Your goody-goody friends won’t want you now. See how quickly they turn on you? Don’t you know where you belong?” etc.
Oh, sure. I’d dig a story about Mel getting involved with UCW again to help the Grapplers out or something like that. I don’t think there’s an ongoing series in that, is all.
A team book is probably the place for her, but I don’t think Marvel is publishing a team she’d fit on right now. She’s neither powerful nor iconic enough for their current approach to the Avengers.
She’d have been a good fit for Occupy Avengers, for the five minutes that book existed.
“Instead, Marvel is relaunching WCA with the big “member who needs to reform” being…Ultron.”
God, I hate it when they do this. Reforming hired-goon villains is one thing, but Ultron, just like Juggernaut and Magneto, were conceived as villains formidable enough to pose a threat against an entire team of superheroes. Putting them on the good guy teams inevitably means having to water them down substantially. What’s next? Galactus subbing for one of the FF?
You jest, but around 2017, Al Ewing tried to do a babyface turn for Galactus in THE ULTIMATES, even calling him “Lifebringer” at one point. Sure, it didn’t last, but the attempt is still recent.
It’s possible that this ties into the “good” version of Ultron, Mark-12, returning in the swiftly cancelled AVENGERS INC. But it might not. In theory there could be two Ultrons running around, one good and one bad. It would be a little absurd, but I’ve paid to read worse.
But by and large, I agree, I am not a fan of big villains turning “face” the moment they get popular. That just dwindles the pool, especially since most writers who actually create new villains kill them off almost immediately. Now, not all of them are gems. But neither was Stilt-Man, yet he’s endured because he kept popping up so darn much.
Just look at the knots the X-Men books are in now that 80% of their villains haven’t been villains in ages.
That said, of course, Songbird’s shift was done over a very long period of time, across several writers. And she was, at best, the tag team partner of a C-List Daredevil villain. That’s like if Batman reformed the sidekick to Killer Moth. It doesn’t do the franchise any harm. But make Joker into a member of the Justice League? You bet. But making the sidekick of the Joker into a sexy anti-heroine, and suddenly Harley Quinn is formed.
Songbird’s love interests were not what made her interesting
But without her relationships… she’s
I dunno.
Thunderbolts was an ensemble… so…
@AMRG- it’s simply not the case that the primary factor in Rogue’s and Gambit’s popularity was that the Animated Series.
It’s meaningless to say “I sincerely doubt 80% of her fans even knew who she was before 1992 (albeit because some weren’t born yet or were too young to read, but still).” The fact is that most people who were reading Marvel inn 1991 knew who Rogue was.
Rogue had been a member of the X-Men for almost a decade when the Animated Series premiered. During this time the X-Men had been the best selling series at Marvel. X-Men 1, which Rogue played a significant role in, was the best-selling comic book ever. By 1992, her mother, Mystique, was one of Marvel’s two most popular villainesses (the other being Enchantress.)
As for Gambit, he was immediately a hit when he debuted in 1990. He was also in X-men 1. Before the Animated Series hit, it was announced that he would be getting a limited series, the third X-Man (after Wolverine and Nightcrawler) to get a solo limited series.
It’s simply not the case that an Animated Series guarantees a comic book character popularity. It’s true for certain characters. particularly DC characters like Mister Freeze. Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. But Firestar remained in limbo for years after her limited series ended until the New Warriors debuted.
In short,Rogue and Gambit were put in the Animated Series BECAUSE they were popular, not the other way around.
It’s not a matter of circumstance in the way you claim- Rogue benefited from years in a popular title.
And that’s exactly what Songbird needed. Jessica Drew seemed destined to be a D-lister until Bendis wrote them in New Avengers. Carol Danvers spent years in limbo until Kurt Busiek wrote her in Avengers. That’s what Songbird needed- to be written for years in a major book.
Those characters in BTAS weren’t guaranteed success without the writing and voice acting being so good.
You had 3 different guys playing Mr Freeze on the TV show and that wasn’t enough to even make him a B lister until BTAS.
Ivy was at best Bats’ #3 villainess behind Selina and Talia and was loaned out to SSOSV/IJ groups that needed a heel for WW or BC to fight. She maybe got elevated a little by getting tied into the Green continuity with Swampy, Woodrue and Black Orchid before BTAS.
If only Dino and Timm could have elevated Count Vertigo.