Daredevil Villains #13: The Gladiator
DAREDEVIL #18 (July 1966)
“There Shall Come a Gladiator!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: Frank Giacoia
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
Early Daredevil doesn’t have a large supporting cast. It’s just Foggy Nelson and Karen Page. And the heart of the book is the romantic triangle between Foggy, Karen and Matt.
Today, Karen has been out of the picture for many, many years. She was killed off in the late 1990s. Foggy’s established role for decades now has been the solid, dependable, long-suffering best friend who’s stood by Matt all through the years. And to be fair, that’s basically how he was set up in issue #1.
But in the early Silver Age, Foggy Nelson’s main function is to get in the way of Matt and Karen. Foggy loves Karen. Karen loves Matt, and she’s quite keen on Daredevil too. Matt loves Karen, but thinks she just feels sorry for him because he’s blind. Matt thinks Foggy is better husband material for her, and she’s willing to entertain him as a fallback option.
This role isn’t a promising starting point for Foggy. To make matters worse, he spends a lot of time in the early issues bitching about Daredevil whenever Karen mentions him, or even privately hoping that Matt doesn’t get his sight back, because it’d ruin his chances with Karen. Foggy does at least feel guilty about such things crossing his mind. From time to time he gets to show some decency and integrity. But fundamentally he’s a blocking character, not a supportive rock.
At some point, this storyline – if you can call it a storyline, because it’s really more of a static state of affairs – had to come to the foreground. And so in issue #17, Spider-Man bursts into the offices of Nelson & Murdock, intending to confront Daredevil. In a remarkable piece of plot contrivance, his spider-sense tells him that Daredevil is in the room, and tells him that Matt is genuinely blind (!), but doesn’t tell him that Matt is Daredevil. And since Daredevil couldn’t possibly be a blind man or a girl, Spider-Man briefly concludes that it must be Foggy, and accuses him in full view of Karen. Sensing his chance, Foggy keeps hinting to her that he’s Daredevil, and because it’s the Silver Age, she takes him seriously.
That brings us to this issue, where Foggy decides to get his very own Daredevil costume. And this is where we meet the Gladiator. Later on, he’s given the real name Melvin Potter, but for the moment he’s just a weirdo running a costume shop.
The Masked Marauder didn’t come to much as a long term Daredevil villain – he dominates the book for a year or so and then vanishes. The Gladiator fares rather better, eventually. He appears in four issues over the next six months, before vanishing from the title for a good long while. By the time he finally becomes a regular, after issue #100, his original premise has long since fallen by the wayside. In fact, it’s pretty much fallen by the wayside by the next issue, because it’s entirely bizarre.
Melvin debuts as a looming, ominous figure, who runs a costume shop that specialises in surprisingly convincing hero and villain costumes. When Foggy shows up as an actual paying customer, Melvin’s first reaction is to grumble about being disturbed. Foggy describes him as “a creepy-looking character” with “the blazing eyes of a real fanatic”, so naturally he decides to buy a Daredevil costume from him anyway. Melvin explains that he doesn’t do Daredevil costumes in Foggy’s size, and perhaps sir would prefer a costume more befitting his waistline. But Foggy explains that he needs it to impress a girl, and so Melvin agrees to alter a costume into Foggy’s size.
But Melvin is angry about superheroes. According to him, superheroes are “nothing but overrated, conceited, swaggering braggarts” whose appeal lies entirely in their “colourful costumes”. Without those costumes, he says, they’d be nothing! Anyone could be a hero or villain if they had a good costume with the right powers. And that’s why he’s been building his Gladiator suit. That’s the original high concept. Melvin wants to prove that anyone can be super if they have the right clothes.
You can sort of see how Melvin’s worldview makes sense when it comes to Daredevil or Captain America. But Spider-Man? The Fantastic Four? The Hulk? Leave aside the shared universe thing – it doesn’t make sense in terms of the parameters of the genre, even in 1966. Yet Melvin specifically gives Thor as an example of what he’s complaining about.
For his debut as the Gladiator, Melvin offers to pose as a villain so that Foggy can pretend to be Daredevil and beat him. In fact, the Gladiator plans to kill Foggy. The plan is that, somehow or other, this is going to lead him into a fight with the real Daredevil, which is going to prove something, somehow. Stan doesn’t seem to have thought it through much more thoroughly than that.
Melvin proudly shows us his creation. Despite living in a world where Iron Man exists, he regards it as “the greatest fighting garb of all”. After all, he says, “it is the costume, only the costume, that gives these egotistical braggarts the respect of the whole world”. How is the Gladiator costume going to achieve this for Melvin? Why, thanks to its “specially constructed footwear”, made of “tough nylon”, and studded with blades. “My boots alone,” he tells us, “assure me of victory.” He also has what he curiously describes as “wrist shields”, perhaps for Comics Code reasons, because they sure look like circular saw blades. And he has a helmet, with a respirator. “It has taken me years, and every cent I have, to create this costume,” he says.
Naturally, when the Gladiator tries to kill Foggy, the real Daredevil steps in. Daredevil describes the Gladiator as a clumsy but powerful lunatic, so there’s no suggestion at this stage that he’s even a trained fighter. The big lug even gets confused about whether he’s still fighting Foggy. What’s more, he keeps rambling on about his costume, to the point where Daredevil concludes that the guy is just some sort of oddball obsessive. And so Daredevil beats him up and leaves him to the cops.
There’s a weird meta idea in here, trying to get out. The Gladiator is a guy who hates the superhero genre, and he’s built his own supervillain costume in order to prove that it’s all silly. And he’s going to make his debut in some sort of parody of a superhero fight. It’s the sort of thing that might have worked for Peter Milligan. But Stan doesn’t really know where to go with the Gladiator’s obsession with costumes. In his debut, Foggy is an idiot pretending to be a hero, while Gladiator himself is an amateur in a home-made supervillain costume. But even if he’s not exactly Iron Man, his costume works well enough for him to be a real supervillain too. It’s all a bit confused.
Stan obviously thought so too, because Gladiator gets heavily retooled the very next issue. The Masked Marauder breaks him out of jail, intending to pressgang him into service as a new henchman. The Gladiator is having none of it. The costume obsession has been ditched. He’s now a guy too powerful and strong-willed for the Marauder to keep under control, and the Marauder grudgingly has to accept him as a partner. The two then form an enjoyable bitchy odd couple pairing, until issue #23, when the Marauder dumps him as part of a failed attempt to take over the Maggia. By that point, the Gladiator has become a blue collar bruiser and a thorn in the self-important Marauder’s side.
The Gladiator will eventually wind up with a different gimmick, as a supervillain who wishes he hadn’t got into this job in the first place. That comes into play remarkably early. He was already regretting his criminal career when he appeared in Iron Man #7 in 1968. In a roundabout way, his debut plays into that set-up – the feebleness of his motivation for becoming a supervillain, and the fact that he forgets about it almost instantly, becomes the point. Instead, he’s a guy who drifted into the supervillain life in a moment of madness.
The other thing he keeps from this story is his costume. It can’t live up to his hype for it, of course. But he’s still a large angry man coming at you with two circular saws. By the standards of the mid-60s it’s quite brutal, and for a street-level character like Daredevil, it has an intimidation factor. It’s perfectly pitched for his eventual role, as someone who’s just about managed hang in there as a minor supervillain. None of that was the original idea, but Gladiator’s debut leaves him perversely well suited to the role.
I think Melvin may be the first of these villains to have made it into the MCU, albeit modified.
Ah no, I’m being dense. At least three of the previous villains have also been adapted.
I’ll get my coat.
One element of his character that’s hinted at here becomes a major element in his later appearances- the Gladiator is actually mentally ill. This is depicted tragically in later appearances.
It’s more than hinted at – the Gladiator is pretty clearly mentally ill in his “obsessed with costumes” incarnation but this gets dropped along with the gimmick, and he becomes simply a bruiser who refuses to be impressed by the Masked Marauder.
I suppose someone could play the initial costume delusion a s a vague problem telling fantasy from reality as a whole, but that’s fudging things quite a bit.
Weirdly, the Gladiator in Stan Lee’s run is kind of…successful in career terms. The Masked Marauder gets rejected by the Maggia, but the Gladiator gets hired on and even manages to avoid getting beaten up and thrown in jail at the end of issue #23. he does fly back to the U.S. to get trashed with the Emissaries of Evil in the first annual, but then Archie Goodwin has him back as a rising star in the Maggia in Iron Man.
This also means that the Gladiator also has the distinction of being Daredevil’s first bespoke villain to turn up outside the Daredevil title, and — I think — the only one who managed to turn up elsewhere during the 1960s. He paves the way for…uhm…the Owl, the Ani-Men, and the Jester?
Later writers are much more direct about the Gladiator using blades as weapons. By the 1970s, he’s shown explicitly slashing his victims up, and he even gets to kill fellow minor villain the Eel in an odd issue of Ghost Rider. You could almost imagine him fighting a less-powerful version of Wolverine as a sort of foil to both the berserker rage and the notion of “honor.”
But instead, the Gladiator eventually gets the additional gimmick of being a truly, mentally unwell person often exploited by other criminals. That takes all the way until, of all places, Spectacular Spider-Man #77, during his “reformed” period.
The Gladiator’s reform lasts a really, really long time, too. Bendis decides to have Melvin dragged back into villainy over what seems to be a never-before-mentioned child, who is then not really mentioned afterwards (at least that I can remember). And then Brubaker has him driven permanently insane by the Larry Cranston version of Mister Fear.
@Omar- Technically the first Daredevil villain to appear outside of Daredevil was the Plunderer, who showed up in Tales to Astonish 95-98 to defeat Namor. (Which has to be Namor’s second most embarrassing defeat, after the time Llyra defeated him with leeches.) Aside from the Plunderer, there’s the Masked Marauder, who appears in Iron Man 60-61. And Leap Frog. who appears in Defenders 64 and Iron Man 126-127. And then there’s the weird case of Machinesmith, who shows up in Marvel Two-In-One and later gets retconned into Starr Saxon.
The obsession with superficial aspects of superheroes makes me think of Grant Morrison’s Beard Hunter.
Maybe the Gladiator was the proto-Punisher and the Beard Hunter was the pomo-Punisher.
Come to think of it, there’s also the Man-Bull, who appeared in Cat 4 and Iron Man 72, Death-Stalker, who appeared in Ghost Rider 20 and Doctor Strange 29, Purple Man,who appeared in Marvel Tales 100 and Stilt-Man, who appeared in Captain America 191,Black Goliath 4, Champions 11-12 and Thor 268-270.
@Michael: I didn’t think fo the Plunderer, probably because I associate him entirely with Ka-Zar. But he does predate the Gladiator managing to make it into another comic.
The Ani-Men, in their Unholy Three iteration, also managed to turn up in Marvel Team-Up v.1 #25 prior to getting super-powers so they could fight the X-Men. But both stories were plotted by Len Wein.
I think it’s worth noting that most Silver Age DD villains who turn up elsewhere usually get played as ineffectual (like Leap-Frog and the Jester) or get powered up through some kind of radical transformation (a la the Ani-Men and Saxon).
Saxon-as-Machinesmith is a really odd case. His original storyline goes off in a couple of weird directions, partly because of Stan Lee leaving and Roy Thomas coming aboard, and then the Machinesmith retcon from Roger Stern’s and John Byrne’s Captain America seems designed more to write out the mysterious Machinesmith and a bunch of other odd villain appearances by tying them to a mostly forgotten DD rogue and then killing him off (again).
He’s almost unrecognizable as the same character who fought Daredevil in most regards. But there’ll be a lot more to say about that when Paul covers Starr Saxon in full.
The Masked Marauder is really odd, since he just stopped turning up in Daredevil at all, but was sporadically revived as a villain by other writers in other titles.
But then, the Bronze Age fans-turned-writers tended to try to revive just about any supervillain from Lee’s time as a scripter, even the characters that the Marvel creators of the 1960s abandoned as failed ideas.
It’s why the 1970s — and, to a lesser extent, the 1980s — give us revivals of losers and one-offs like the Miracle Man, the Looter, and the Impossible Man.
So here is the thing: Gladiator sucks.
His costume is unappealing, his abilities are not credibly a threat to anyone, his backstory and motivations are uncompelling. There is no reason he should last longer in a fight than thug with a knife #1. And yet he is undeniably the early Daredevil villain that became a real mainstay in a way that Leapfrog and Matador and even Purple Man (for a long time) simply did not. Gladiator gets used in both silver age style swashbuckling stories and Miller-esque gritty crime stories; and unlike the Owl or Stilt-Man, he tends to be presented as a real threat in either mode.
Why is that? Is it simply because Miller chose him out of all the old silver age villains for that rehabilitation story, so future writers, all of whom had read Miller, were inclined to use him? Or maybe Melvin was right all along: you don’t need any ninja training or powers to fight Daredevil; all you need is a goofy costume and self-confidence.
I think it’s the fact that Gladiator does work as a mentally unhinged serial killer as why the character appealed to Frank Miller.
The fact that Miller chose to do something with Gladiator is the hook that makes later writers still use him.
The other characters you mention don’t have the appeal (to someone like Miller) of dressing up like an ancient historical figure and using buzzsaws on his wrists.
I have a soft spot for those fake quotations they used to put on comic covers. “THERE SHALL COME A … GLADIATOR!” It sounds all biblical and foreboding, but it doesn’t actually mean a thing. I don’t know if Stan Lee invented it, but it was around for a long time.
@Skippy- it’s worth noting that, as Omar pointed out, Gladiator was retired for a long time. In fact, Gladiator only had five appearances between Born Again and Bendis’s return to villainy storyline- Amazing Spider-Man 287, Marvel Comics Presents 98, Daredevil 8, Daredevil: Yellow 6 and most of these were cameos. There was a new Gladiator that made a few appearances during that time but please don’t ask about him.
And after Bendis and Brubaker got done tearing apart Melvin’s life, he’s had only four appearances- Civil War: Kingpin 2, Daredevil Annual 1, Iron Man 3 and the Ziggy Pig Infinity Comic 8. All of those were cameos except for the Daredevil Annaual. The Daredevil Annual featured a backup story written by Roger McKenzie, who hadn’t written for Marvel in 30 years. In it, Gladiator is driven mad by the murder of his wife and children. So apparently Potter had ANOTHER child that wasn’t mentioned and whose only purpose was to drive Potter to return to villainy.
So no, writers don’t use him a lot, even after Miller.
Well, true, but “a lot” is comparative, right? Basically no classic DD villains show up under Nocenti. Chichester uses a few, but his run is mostly the Hand and Hydra show. Kelly uses *a* Gladiator who is not Melvin but has the same design.
Did Denny O’Neil use him, in between Miller’s stints? I seem to recall so, might be wrong.
It is certainly true that he hasn’t been used much in recent years. I think Brubaker kind of broke him.
Yes, O’Neil wrote him in Daredevil #226. It’s a sort of sequel to Miller’s Gladiator arc, and the plot is similar to the earlier Spectacular Spider Man story. It’s a nice story using Gladiator though.
@Skippy- Sort of. In Daredevil 226, the last issue before Born Again, Denny O’Neil and Frank Miller are credited as writers and Gladiator appears. It’s not clear whose idea Gladiator was.
But my point is that Stilt-Man and Owl were used far more often than Gladiator. Again, in between Born Again and the end of 2004, Owl appeared in Spectacular Spider-Man 127., Daredevil 264, FF 336, Alpha Flight 79-80, Daredevil 301-303, Amazing Spider-Man 396, Spectacular Spider-Man 219, Daredevil- Spider-Man 1-4, Daredevil: Timeless 1, Daredevil 41-42 and 44-45.In the same period, Stilt-Man appeared in Iron Man 225, She-Hulk 4, FF 336, Avengers Annual 19, Marvel Comics Presents 97, Captain America 411-413, Alpha Flight 121, Daredevil 317-318, She-Hulk 59, Avengers Unplugged 4, Code of Honor 3, Cable 56, Daredevil 377-378, Daredevil-Spider-Man 1-4, Spider-Man Tangled Web 13, Get Kraven 1 and Daredevil 41. My point is that Owl and Stit-Man were used far more often than Gladiator, even if Stilt-Man was often portrayed as a joke.
Melvin is just a perfect character concept for a named henchman-type. He has the good sense to use a bit of protective clothing, including at least a helmet (and perhaps armor) while making good use his build and strength. That makes him versatile and useful as a break from the boring roomfuls of goons in identical costumes or office suits that Daredevil, Spider-Man and Captain America so often ran over without as much as a second’s hesitation from the 1960s to the 1980s. There is no obvious reason why he can’t give street level heroes a run for their money or be hired by boss types for muscle and intimidation. As a bonus, his appearance is not goofy to the extent of even many mastermind’s. And pretty soon he becomes relatable as a blue-collar type that accepts money for jobs, but does not want to pretend that he is enthusiastic about the boss’ vision and goals. A bit of secret fantasy for many, I figure.
It makes sense that he was used fairly often and wide (as he was).
I’d like him a lot less if he was not in that costume and dressed like a Roman gladiator or looking like Hercules.
I’m genuinely surprised at the folks who hate the Gladiator’s costume. While the yellow color for the chestplate isn’t great, I always liked the overall design, and I think he’s a better iteration of “street-level villain in armor” than, say, Stilt-Man.
I’m not sure that a historically authentic or mythological look — mostly bare-chested? — would work all that well for him. He’s more of a lunatic who’s cobbled together something in between fetish gear and a suit of powered armor than some well-informed, historically minded type trying to embody a gladiator persona.
Yellow torso, bare arms, blades on the ends? Never catch on. Bring on brown and tan Gladiator, says I.
Impressive visual, but how does he scratch his own nose?
I’ve always been amazed/impressed that Marvel have never brought Karen Page back.
It doesn’t surprise me so much, in the sense that she was largely a nothing character who most of the writers over the past 50 years have had little use for and her death was suitably tragic but, particularly during their mid-late 2000s period of resurrecting dead characters, she remained dead.
In general, civilian characters who die to motivate — or torment — the heroes tend to stay permanently dead. At most, you’ll get a clone or a robot or an alternate universe counterpart who shows up for a while before fading away.
So the Gwen Stacys, the Dormas, the Karen Pages, the Jack Murdocks, and the Ben Parkers stay dead. (As Gail Simone mem orably noted, it’s striking how many of the longer-lasting supporting cast who get killed off for good in this way are female love interests of male heroes.)
So do the really, really minor ones: Franklin Storm Janice Cord, Gloriana O’Breen, Heather Glenn, and the like are not just dead, but largely forgotten.
Anyone who’s ever so much as glanced in the direction of a costume or superpowers, though, can come back eventually.
Thus Harry Osborn, Flash Thompson, Bucky, and Sharon Carter come back eventually. Happy Hogan might not, though, if only because it throws a wrench into any Tony-Pepper romance a writer might want to dredge up.
At least Karen Page got a standout live action version thanks to Deborah Ann Woll’s excellent performance.
@Omar- Aunt May seems to be the exception that proves that rule, though.
@Michael: I nearly just said Spider-Man’s supporting cast are the exception, since it’s the book that — more than any other — seems to get writers who want to reset to some nebulous Silver Age status quo by hook or by crook.
Or I could’ve pointed to Aunt May’s stint as Golden Oldie, Herald of Galactus.
Yeah, but aren’t there are currently two Gwen Stacies running around the Marvel Universe?
I always figured Bucky would stay dead, along with Ben Parker. It’s funny that I used to think that about the Waynes, silly me.
Matt is never short of romantic options, so Karen doesn’t really need to come back.
@Taibak: There’s Ghost Spider, the alternate Gwen Stacy “if she were Spider-man,” and there’s Gwenpool, who isn’t actually Gwen Stacy, just someone named Gwen who knows she’s in a comic book.
Maybe there’s a Gwen clone running around somewhere, too, though I thought the last Gwen clone died in the “dead No More” storyline.
But no one has resurrected actual Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s love interest who died. We’ve had clones, alternate universe “What If?” characters, and a weird pseudo-reference, but they’ve all been used more as references to the Gwen Stacy the Green Goblin killed, not as de facto resurrected versions.
And Peter is never written as thinking of these characters as original Gwen — the one Norman Osborn killed, the one Peter was in love with — come back to the land of the living. It wasn’t treated like “Captain America learns Bucky was alive all this time as a brainwashed Soviet asset” or even “Harry Osborn was saved from seeming death by Goblin juice and took a really long secret European vacation.” (Well, before he turned out to be…uhm…soulless? A demon? A soulless clone? I haven’t read the Nick Spencer run yet.)
The one story that did have that bit in it, the 1970s Clone Saga, per Gerry Conway’s own explanation, was expressly about the reveal that no, this wasn’t really Gwen back from death, and Gwen has no place in Spider-man stories any more anyway because the series has moved on.
Original Gwen was never an interesting character, whereas Karen did become an interesting character after Born Again; Nocenti and Kesel both made great use of her. That’s why Conway was more interested in using MJ in the first place, right?
Gwen ended up serving as basically a second Uncle Ben to re-centre Peter on his mission statement after Stan left the book. If she was still around, modern writers might have to grapple with the fact that her most memorable storyline while alive was when she campaigned for a white supremacist.
Recent writers (maybe just Ewing) have established that Peter went through a Libertarian phase in college, and I find it interesting to think of Gwen as an element of that phase as opposed to his great love.
Going back to Karen – Guardian Devil is in no way as pivotal a DD story as The Night Gwen Stacy Died is to Spider-Man, and it doesn’t even require her death to function as a story. To me it comes across more as part of the status quo clearup that came with the reboot (see also: the departure of Roz Sharpe) than an actual attempt at tragedy. In that respect, it’s kind of surprising it hasn’t been undone. On the other hand, one of the recurring themes of Daredevil is that Matt is incapable of being faithful. Breaking them up at some point made sense, but keeping them broken up might have been tricky, and then the book is stuck in a rut.
To state the obvious, that’s where Spider-Man is right now, which I think is also why supporting characters like Harry and Ned keep coming back – writers can’t seem to agree which previous era they want as their status quo, but it’s definitely one of them.
Karen appeared as a ghost in MacKay’s Man Without Fear and Cates’s Marvel Knights 20. We’ll probably see more of that kind of thing. Can’t date a ghost.
Even if all the other Gwen Stacy’s are not 616 Gwen, there are still enough versions of her running around to dilute the death. One of the many reasons I dislike all the multiverse stuff in modern comics.
Imagine if DC had just grabbed a Barry Allen from Earth- ## to replace him after Crisis instead of Wally assuming the mantle. Or plucked Barry from the timestream. Although Waid did a great swerve on that idea with 5:15 to Hell.
Skippy-It probably would have been interesting to see Gwen Stacy turn into an Ayn Rand figure in later Spider-Man stories. I’m sure Ditko wanted Gwen to be like Ayn Rand, which is why she was able to see the misunderstood genius of Ditko’s Objectivist college-age Peter Parker, but Stan scripted everything completely differently than how Ditko wanted the characters.
There’s a scene in one of the Ditko college issues where there are anti-Vietnam War protestors in the background with Peter looking disgusted. Ditko wanted the scene to be about how Peter looked down on the rabble, but Stan hilariously completely ignored what Ditko drew.
I know the original Gwen Stacey was interesting. All sharp angles and peircing stares, she was smart and clever, and spent a lot of time annoyed at Parker’s antics. While all the other Marvel ladies were simpering employees of the hero, Gwen was Parker’s superior.
Then, probably after the artist changed, I’m not sure, she grew shorter, softer if face, her moviestar hair strapped down with her trademark black band, and she became just another pining love interest. Even if it’s because she ceased being directed by a Libertarian, it was unfortunate.
And of course, Ghost Spider is sassy and independent, but she’s still more like weak Gwen.
Yes. Lee was interested in writing Spider-Man as Archie with superpowers, so Gwen simply turned into competition with Mary Jane. The two were, basically, Betty and Veronica after Romita replaced Ditko. That version of Gwen wasn’t much of a loss because Mary Jane was the more interesting version of Lee/Romita Gwen.
EDIT: I seem to be misremembering the anti-Vietnam War protest scene, if the only one was from Ditko’s final issue. Looking it up, Stan does have Peter ignore the protestors, but Stan certainly doesn’t ignore the scene. He uses the opportunity to mock protestors…What could college-age kids possibly have to protest in the mid-‘60s? What a bunch of sillies. He also does have Gwen point out that Peter is not joining any protests. So, it seems he does hew close to (what I imagine was) Ditko’s intent with the scene.
Not that I felt the Cold War Liberal Stan Lee of that period would have had a problem with Ditko’s portrayal of anti-Vietnam War protestors. I just (mis)remembered it as an example of Stan steering the stories in a direction against Ditko’s intent. Ignore the second paragraph of my above posting.
Mark Coale said: Imagine if DC had just grabbed a Barry Allen from Earth- ## to replace him after Crisis instead of Wally assuming the mantle. Or plucked Barry from the timestream. Although Waid did a great swerve on that idea with 5:15 to Hell.
Ghost Spider is more like “they grabbed Barry Allen from Earth-Whatever, but this Barry Allen got a green lantern ring, not super-speed powers, and on his world Hal Jordan was mutated into Gorilla Grodd and died, and Bruce Wayne is a Lex Luthor-style crooked executive who isn’t Batman.”
And Gwenpool is more like “Some other person named Barry who has blond hair, but isn’t Barry Allen, turns up and does jokes that are somewhere between Ambush Bug and Deadpool’s more meta moments.”
You know, I honestly thought Gwenpool was another version of Gwen Stacy, not someone literally named ‘Gwen Poole’.
I believe they literally make a joke about how people think she’s Gwen Stacy in the Gwenpool comic.
I think it likely that the variant cover where Gwenpool first appeared was intended to be a version of Gwen Stacy who was Deadpool. But when they decided to make her an actual character inside the comics, they gave her her own identity.
Yes, there were a series of variant covers, with Gwen Stacey dressed as various superheroes. Her distaff Deadpool proved so popular, including among cosplayers, that they decided to make Gwenpool an actual character. She first appeared in Howard the Duck, which had the “knows she’s in a comic” shtick, but I don’t think she was identified as Gwen Poole at that point.
Later in her own comic, Deadpool pointed out that she can’t beat him because he has a hit movie and people think she’s Gwen Stacey.
It occurs to me that Gwenpool could fit as a kind of indexical figure for character creations.
Superman is the Golden Age, the guy two teenagers made up on their own and then got into publicaton by taking peanuts for the concept, which was then homogenized and commodified by others while they got bupkus and then got booted from their own character as soon as they caused some trouble.
The Silver Surfer is the Marvel Age: Jack Kirby invents a wild concept, which Stan Lee takes ownership of, disregarding Kirby’s concept, rewriting the character with his own script regardless of Kirby’s intentions, and then handing it over to other creators.
Gwenpool is the social media age: Going off of an image and their own creative culture, fans go wild for something, which is then monetized by the publisher with plenty of metacommentary winking at the online fandom culture’s work witht he concept.
“Yellow torso, bare arms, blades on the ends? Never catch on. Bring on brown and tan Gladiator, says I.”
🙂
Nice one, Skippy.
This was one of the first, if not the actual first, comic book that I ever owned, passed down to me by my brother-in-law. So I have a certain fondness for it, and was really excited to see Melvin in Miller’s Daredevil after I’d started collecting comics years later.
“her trademark black band”
This is the dumbest thing about Gwen Stacy. There was a page in Sins Past where her clone is shown in flashback as a crawling baby and a young girl, and both have that damn hairband. So I photoshopped one onto her fetal clone floating in a tank on the same page. It turned out pretty crap but the idea amused me.
@Skippy: If you mean Sam Bullit, his radical ties were a secret. Jameson also supported him initially.
Also, during Me Too, no writer brought up Warren stalking Ali in her own series or Sam Wilson using his position as a social worker to pressure the father of an attempted rape victim into dropping the charges because the attempted rapist was poor and drunk. These things tend to be forgotten about unless you’re Hank Pam.
@Michael: I think comics generally avoid revisiting those kinds of moments, which weren’t portrayed as wrong at the time of publication and sadly fit within social norms of those earlier eras. They just get written to fit the times in which they’re now published.
Hank Pym, on the other hand, was in a story that was explicitly about how what he did was wrong at the time fo publication. The whole arc is him taking his insecurities out on Jan through domestic abuse.
Now, some of the patronizing Silver Age team leaders — Professor X, Reed Richards, Niles Caulder — *do* get called out these days, but it’s just as often done by inventing new awful things for them to have done as by calling back to unreflectively toxic moments from their older appearances.
@Omar Karindu: If you believe Jim Shooter, that was all because of artist Bob Hall’s error, but that’s an obvious lie.
Ironically, Mary Jane has gone from being a wild child to more like Gwen Stacy as she became Peter’s main love interest.