if given the job of EIC, what would YOU do?

[jjreason]

Snigtad, it's obvious that you're still holding on to a lot of baggage surrounding your memories of that dumb kid tossing your dad's salad so many years ago. Seek help - and by that, I don't mean keep bleeding out your pain by whacking off to gay donkey porn 4 times a day.... talk to someone. Seriously.

[Zero]

GAY donkey porn?!? Dude, if somebody is really watching donkey porn 4 times a day, I don't care if its gay porn or not. It's disturbing. Like "I was watching some donkey porn and it wasn't really making me hot, until I realized it was two GAY donkeys, then I blew my load EVERYWHERE..."

[jjreason]

Imagine my chagrine - there I am at the petting zoo with my kids, when this poor, skinny looking burrow (with a stupid-huge dangling dong) "psssts" at me and asks me if I'm a cop. I whisper back that I am, so he proceeds to tell me this story about how the "farmer" likes nothing more than to nail him in the ass - but it could be worse because he gives him the courtesy reach-around & plays with his donkey balls from time to time.

Well, I told the donkey this wasn't appropriate and that he should go to the authorities (with my agency in Ontario, we always have to stand aside so that the coppers with jurisdiction can take over).... he looked at me and asked me if he should bring the videotapes as evidence. I nearly shit my drawers.

[Zero]

How did these tapes get into Snigtad's posession? And how is the occasional reach around "inappropriate"? That sounds like a decent thing to do.

[jjreason]

Sorry, the donkey said things could be worse as if to suggest the farmer might stop doing the reach/stroke - not because of it. The only theory about Sniggins getting a copy of those tapes includes a personal ad seeking an "Open minded, pubescent she-male who enjoys the taste of donkey shit when slurped off my old, wrinkled cock and hairy ballsack. Must not be camera shy!" and an old $5 bill with traces of animal tranquilizer on it.

To be honest, I'm not sure how all the pieces fit together - the donkey's braying got very tough to understand at about the 20 minute mark of his statement. I'm going to try and arrange for a donkey-statement specialist to come up from Mississippi - they have a lot more exposure to these types of cases down there.

[Zero]

Have you considered using a Universal Translator Tomato (UTT)? I'm not sure what the import laws are, but I hear they are very effective.

[jjreason]

Since I'm not "directly involved" in the investigation (I have to keep this type of shit on the dl, or my bosses get pissy - chain of command and all that), so all I can do is make a "suggestion" they go ahead and get the UTT up here to help. It wasn't pretty seeing the donkey break down like that.... I don't know how he's going to come through all this. It's a tough job some days.

[jjreason]

Hot post on post action.... eeeeyeah, that doesn't sound so good.

If I was given the job of EIC I'd consider running this, in light of the upcoming huge Skrull storyline.

Valeria Richards starts to express her powers in an interesting manner - she's basically got all 4 of the regular teams powers and can mix & match at will (like absorbing Johnny from the 2nd movie). Nothing new there.... but when she expresses, Ben notices faint lines forming on her chin and points on her ears.

Turns out, y'see, she's half Skrull.

Investigation bears out that Susie Richards is in fact a Skrull - and has been the whole time, the first Space Shot was in fact a Skrull planned event, highly calculated, and worked like a charm, giving her the extra powers and a highly influential position in the Earth's Superhero community. Certain decisions that have been made by Reed over the years about places the team has gone, battles they've fought, inventions Reed has made.... have all been influenced by Skrull-Sue, to benefit her own race.

So Sue is the one who triggers the pending Skrull invasion, and she fights alongside them. Reed, of course devastated and totally withdrawn, is pretty unable to participate in the fray. To top it all off, Franklin winds up having to kill her at the climax, to save Johnny & Valeria. Crisis abated, but the lasting effects would be interesting.

If they want to bring her back, they can easily pull a Jean Grey - finding the real Sue Storm in stasis somewhere on earth.

To make this different and more intersting - she'd of course be powerless (and possibly still at the age she was when the first flight was made).


Lots of possibilities because it frees up a roster spot (for Franky?) and opens up some plotlines: What does Reed do? Try to get her the powers back to save the team? Try to woo her? Leave her alone? Retire?

[anarky]

As EIC for another company, I would make the TMNT not suck ass anymore.

Beyond the first ten or so Mirage books, the series has been a fucking joke ever since. And it's not the characters. It's the editorial decisions and writing. The characters are pure gold. Hell, they can still keep a cartoon audience, but no one gives a rat's ass about the comic, nor has since about 1989.

Howsabout this:

Since the new movie sets up a sequel, but didn't do spectacularly well and the sequel may not materialize, just dump everything from the comic continuity. Set up a new status quo, and the backstory is the three movies, and the "prequel" comics to TMNT. Bring the Mirage adaptation of the first movie back into print (the graphic novel version I recall being far more solid than the movie), possibly combined with less sucktacular adaptations of the next two. (Imagine the basic plot of Turtles 3 without all the kiddie elements. Turtles fighting samurai in feudal Japan? Fuck yeah!)

Maybe write a short epilogue piece (if it's not covered in the TMNT prequels) about how the Turtles wound up back in their original hideout again.

The beauty of this: not only can you do new stories set after TMNT, you also have the gap of a few years in between Turtles 3 and TMNT.

Focusing solely on the post-TMNT stuff, obviously Shredder's coming back. But what if Shredder has been back for several years? We know he created mutants. Perhaps the Shredder from the first two movies was a clone, or a bodyguard, or something. Shredder has been manipulating a lot of stuff from behind the scenes, and no one knows it.

Perhaps Shredder has built an army of mutants. In any case, Bebop and Rocksteady need to fucking show up. Baxter and the Mousers have never shown up in the movie continuity, nor have dozens of other supporting characters and villains.

What if Shredder suddenly struck out of nowhere and killed Splinter and beat April nearly to death? I know death is a cop-out, but Splinter's apparently dead in the comics as they stand now, and something truly serious happening to him would put the Turtles in full-on battle mode as never before. And imagine Casey if the Foot Clan put April in a coma. You think he's nuts now?

Or... what if someone else has been monitoring the Turtles for the past few years and does this? Whatever happened to Tatsu? He just sorta vanished. Maybe he's running a splinter group of ninjas. What if Tatsu led the sneak attack that kills (or cripples, or seriously fucks up Splinter) and nearly kills April... and the other group of Foot Ninjas, led by a reborn Shredder and Karai, come to the aid of the Turtles?

Man, there is really no end to what you could do with these guys. Like I said, the original comic versions were only good for about two years worth of stories (had it shipped on a regular schedule). The Archie version was ultimately better, which is pretty pathetic.

This would, of course, have to involve killing Peter Laird or putting him into an institution where someone can give him the help he needs.

[anarky]

Back to JJ's post: that would also mean that Franklin is a Skrull! Maybe he doesn't know it. That would make the most powerful mutant in the universe a Skrull.

I'm sure that, given their lackadaisacal approach to past continuity of late, they've forgotten it, but whatever happened to Lyja? If she doesn't play into the Skrull invasion, they're missing a golden opportunity.

Here's another one of my decisions that would result in lower sales numbers at first, though I think the series would be better for it and would recover:

Trim all the X-Crap to one team. And Wolverine ain't on it. Doesn't matter the reason. Replacing him as the token bad boy would be either Cable or Bishop--done properly, for once, whichever of them it is.

Here's the cinch: there are still two X-Men titles, shipping once a month each. One is full-on superhero fare, fun yet not childish, kinda like the golden era of Claremont. The other focuses on things going on in the mansion or with less "traditional" adventures, kinda like Morrison's run. However, unlike the way Marvel seems to do things now, these books are very tightly interwoven. Not necessarily in chronological order (as maybe Beast gets killed in the middle of a story in one book while he's still in a story that hasn't wrapped up yet in the other), but they'd never get too far apart. Kinda like two halves of one whole, each adding to the other yet enjoyable on its own. It would take two really talented writers who work well together to pull it off. But the result would be amazing, done right.

Actually, I lied. Keep a third X-Men book, which is an anthology of stories featuring the other characters. Otherwise X-Men have a tendency to completely vanish for years at a time when not on a team, only to show up totally out of character with no explanation for the change.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Riffing on jj's idea. They find out Susie is a Skrull when the Hulk KILLS her in retaliation for the Illuminati killing his wife (eye for an eye mentality).


I think the X-Crap trimming down to one or two books is a good idea, but how about this. Since there are only a few hundred mutants left, have two teams, but with different sets of ideals and goals. Since Professor X has pretty much become a douche in the past few years, you could tweak that and ramp it up very slightly while at the same time toning down Magneto's megalomania. Still make him the hard ass, and Xavier the softie but since they are on the edge of extinction, Magneto's ideals are looking better to a lot of mutants. And if a bunch of the X-men defect, they would temper Magneto even more.

So you have two teams who aren't entirely right or wrong, but with differing viewpoints at odds with one another. It would mix up the teams ( good guys and bad guys working together now) and have a lot of conflict between long standing teammates who came down on different sides ( much like the New and Mighty Avengers/Civil War). And conflict is always good for story.

[anarky]

That sounds pretty cool. Kinda like what the intent for Mutant Genesis should've been (two X-Men teams, a government-sponsored X-Factor, and loose cannon X-Force).

It would actually, I think, be even better if the teams got away from the leaders' methods. Meaning Professor X is the leader of the group that wants to live peaceably with humans, but a lot of the more hardass characters like Bishop and Wolverine wind up there. On the other hand, Magneto's team that wants survival at any cost winds up with more "nice guys" like Storm, Beast, and Iceman. So you not only have two teams with differing goals and a mix of formerly good and bad guys, but the teams wind up having methods that don't seem to match the goals on the surface. Like Magneto's team wants to be left alone, but the team rule is that they don't kill; whereas Professor X's team wants to live in peace in the long run, but they're willing to step over a few bodies to get there.

One thing I'd definitely do, even though I'm no fan of retcons: make the characters not be fucking douches anymore. Depth of character is one thing, but when all the team leaders are monstrous assholes (or dead), it's hard to really call them "superheroes" anymore. Spider-Man's the only real hero they have left now that they've made everyone else a dick. These guys need to realize that they're not writing the fucking Sopranos, but stories about guys who can lift buildings while wearing their underwear. It's goofy. You can't get around that. Not to mention that alienating kids isn't a really smart thing to do, since it virtually ensures that there's no next generation to step in a decade from now.

I'd streamline continuity, too. Make it 616, Ultimate, and that's it. If you can't make your story fit into one of those two worlds, it doesn't happen. Period. It's ridiculous that not even the guys at Marvel know anymore what's happening in the universe and what's in its own universe.

Another thing I'd do at Marvel: I'd pick two of the seemingly dumbest villains ever, Stegron and Sauron. They would take over the Savage Land. Then they would lead an invasion of the rest of the world. Because how fucking cool would it be for Spider-Man to be fighting Velociraptors in New York? I'm baffled as to how they've never done this before. I'd definitely make this a full-year, intensive crossover. I think that, if you're doing one of these epic crossovers, you should go totally balls-out and really make it encompass everything. Give the baddies a way to seemingly indefinitely clone warriors so the fight goes on for a long time, so that the entire world gets drawn into it, and suddenly Spider-Man saving the bank doesn't seem as important. Definitely focus on the rank-and-file villains, too. Just picking two at random, maybe Electro sees this as his opportunity to gather a shitload of loot, while Abomination decides that he needs to support the greater good.

Crossovers tend to be done too often to have any impact, and be too piecemeal.

Yeah, Stegron is my least favorite Marvel villain, and Sauron's not much better, but A) they fit the storyline, B) I can conceivably see them working together, and C) it's the mark of a good story that it makes you hate a stupid character a lot less.

[anarky]

I think they could make a pretty good story about Cap dying too, but I don't know if the Marvel Universe could make do without him.

Yeah, you're probably right. It could be a cool story, but they just wouldn't be able to do it.

[/goldenshovel]

Reason I dredged this up: I actually had some ideas at various times for existing characters that I never brought up at the time, either in the vain hope they might actually come to pass, or because they were hopelessly outdated by the time I started the thread.

I'm not exactly seeking validation; more like criticism (be it positive or negative). If I post some of them here, would those of you reading this forum offer any criticisms one way or the other?

I refuse to waste my time on fleshing out "fanfic" stories, but maybe if my general ideas on existing characters need serious work, it would be valuable to have input to put toward my own.

(I normally wouldn't post these in an open forum, but, like I said, these will be ones that there's no possibility of happening.)

[jjreason]

What are you wanting to do with them?

I'd hate to think that you'd take our opinions here as worth something other than what they are - opinions of friends - when what you possibly should be seeking is those opinions of the companies themselves. What's the worst that can happen, they say no? Who gives a fuck!

You've read a bazillion comics, Chux, and you have a ridiculous recall for the happenings therein. Submit your shit to the companies themselves for review, and if they don't like your stories maybe you could get on as an editor (or as I like to call them a "Steward of the Status Quo") and work toward a writing gig.

But to answer your first question, of course I'll read it and provide honest feedback. Just remind me if you're posting something so I don't leave it hanging there forever.

[Diabolical]

I'll read 'em and tell you how much they suck.