"For all my powers, I could not save _____": An image thread

^^^^ the alpha and the omega

LOL Gil Kane really loved this pose:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj2tJO7kdXiAhVJURoKHfehAV8QjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdc.fandom.com%2Fwiki%2FDC_Comics_Presents_Vol_1_56&psig=AOvVaw3h5zmiBqtJArZw8Soug0YI&ust=1559920113591120

https://www.google.com/urlsa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj2tJO7kdXiAhVJURoKHfehAV8QjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdc.fandom.com%2Fwiki%2FDC_Comics_Presents_Vol_1_56&psig=AOvVaw3h5zmiBqtJArZw8Soug0YI&ust=1559920113591120

Sorry!

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/c/c5/DC_Comics_Presents_56.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20081219165634

there's a whole page for pieta-style covers
https://www.cbr.com/i-cant-cover-what-i-am-the-best-pieta-covers/

(although i think that one isn't the original)

ah, apologies...

"For all my powers, I could not save _____": An image thread

https://i.annihil.us/u/prod/marvel/i/mg/6/d0/57d951da7236f/clean.jpg

I mean, if I was him I'd be quite keen to get my normal body back too.

Good lord, is that Angel in the top right? That costume...

It's Nighthawk. He was a Batmanesque character iirc, rich dude fighting crime.

From the Squadron Supreme, an alternative reality superteam who were deliberately created as takes on DC heroes, no?

Yeah, Gerber goes to some weird places w that character

Valkyrie’s boob armor is really... something.

The Kyle Richmond/Defenders Nighthawk is an interesting character in that he is a bit of a loser. He wants so bad to be a hero and the "leader" so bad and really just does not have it down. I know one of the endings of the Defenders is that everybody quits and he cannot get anyone to rejoin with him. I can't remember when that story happened, it might have been a newer one.

That character died at the end of Gruenwald's original Squadron Supreme miniseries. I don't know how Marvel brought him back, but I'm sure it was stupid.

it was.

grim and gritty:
http://i.imgur.com/B7gfq2d.png

gave way to grim and grittier:
http://i.imgur.com/BLhnnhx.png

Sometimes I think Marvel went roughly 40 years w out making a decent comic. I kinda hate everything between 1980 and Immortal Hulk.

I found the JMS super-gritty Supreme Power comics to be pretty amusing actually

That character died at the end of Gruenwald's original Squadron Supreme miniseries. I don't know how Marvel brought him back, but I'm sure it was stupid.

The Nighthawk who was a Defenders member was from Squadron Sinister, not Squadron Supreme. Squadron Sinister was introduced first by Roy Thomas as an parallel universe evil version of JLA, and later on he decided to create a heroic parallel universe version of them called Squadron Supreme. But Squadron Supreme mostly stayed in their universe (until it was destroyed), while the evil Nighthawk stayed in ours, reformed and joined the Defenders. He actually died before the Squadron Supreme Nighthawk, who impersonated him for a short while. I can't blame anyone for getting confused by all this.

Was Squadron Supreme an influence on the original Watchmen series?

The 1970s version? No. The 1985 version, published after the earliest Watchmen promotional material? Also no.

(possibly very very faintly inasmuch as they were an earlier example of filing the serial numbers off a bunch of characters, but Moore very obviously had the examples of Kurtzman and Anglo imprinted on his creative psyche before Roy Thomas even entered comics.)

I was thinking more along the lines of "We are the heroes! But are we? Or are we fascists?" plotline, but it's been a decade since I last read Watchmen, and probably two or more since I read Squadron Supreme.

we have a thread for that
Squadron Supreme (Mark Gruenwald) - C or D?

xxxxp Thx, Tuomas -- I missed that distinction

stevie -- besides my great Squadron Supreme thread (thx, ulysses!), see also Alan Moore's comments in this 1987 interview:

MOORE: I think that when Watchmen was first announced everybody assumed that it was going to be Squadron Supreme, the superheroes take over. We never said that. We said that we were going to try to treat them realistically. (...) I think that while people expected that, we’ve not investigated the idea of superheroes as fascists the same way that Frank Miller has in Dark Knight, or the same thing they’ve done in Squadron Supreme. It wasn’t really our intention. Our intention was to show how superheroes could deform the world just by being there, not that they’d have to take it over, just their presence there would make the difference. It’s what we try to show in Watchmen #4. From the point where Dr. Manhattan appears, it slowly starts to go downhill from there — everything starts to change. He doesn’t take over the country or make people subservient to him, but just his presence there makes everything begin to change. Yet on another level, if you equate Dr. Manhattan with the atom bomb, the atom bomb doesn’t take over the world, but by being there it changes everything. That was more the idea that I was trying to explore. (...)

Ah! Thanks Morrisp... Reread that thread this afternoon and your overview of the series reminded me why I've never reread SS. Watchmen is definitely an infinitely subtler and more effective book.

also that thread gets kind of steamy towards the end, doesn't it?

"Towards the end"? Nothing ends, stevie. Nothing ever ends.

SAD BUT TRUE

Also - I’ll grant you that Watchmen is “subtler,” but I think Squadron Supreme has a brute “effectiveness” of its own.

It’s like saying you prefer, I dunno, Solaris* for being “infinitely subtler” than Alien... I’d rather watch Alien!

(*NB - I’ve never actually seen Solaris)

tbh all i remember clearly of SS is how Tom Thumb's death is announced in a little black panel at the very bottom of the page!