Who's Who In The CBU Update 2009

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper, are the owners of Wicker Man Studios and of Gun Street Girl, its flagship project created by Barbara and artist Ryan Howe. Barbara has written for many websites, and served a one-year stint as Managing Editor of the multiple-Eisner-award-winning print magazine Comic Book Artist. Park is the Editor-in-Chief of indie comics company Septagon Studios, and of Comics Bulletin's sister-website MangaLife. Together, they also co-wrote the graphic novel Half Dead, published by Dabel Brothers Productions and Marvel Comics, and later picked up again by Desperado Publishing, and the New Media project The Hidden for manga publisher Tokyopop. They both also adapt manga and edit manga and comics for various companies.

Marvel Who?

By Park Cooper

Well, it must be clear by now that Marvel is the place where all the writers and many of the artists are going. But you're a humble DC reader, what're you going to do? How can you tell a mutie from a flatscan? Never fear-- my wife thinks Marvel's weird too. With her asking the questions for you and me being bilingual in both DC and Marvel (rusty though I am) we'll have you ready to sign right up for the only game in town in no time.


Barb sez: Scarlet Witch: Why is she a 'Scarlet Witch' Does she do magic or what? Did Magneto name her that? Isn't it sort of insulting to call her that if she doesn't do magic? What's that thing on her head? What's WITH Magneto's family, anyway?

Park: Uh...

I'm not sure why she has that dumb thing on her head.

As for the rest... Magneto's parents and siblings (one sibling, I think) were killed by the Nazis during World War II. I'm not sure if they were Jewish... I think they might have been Gypsies (not everyone realizes that besides Jews, the Nazis also practiced mass murder against families of Gypsies and homosexuals). (Side note-- I'm pretty sure that this theory on my part is correct, as it explains the Gypsy tendendcies of Magneto's daughter The Scarlet Witch. It also occurs to me that it's actually interesting to think about how many persons of Gypsy origin there are in comics... Magneto, Dr. Doom, Dick Grayson...)

Anyway, Magneto's first use of his power was to keep the bullets from hitting him, though he was unable to save the rest of his family. After being buried in a mass grave, he clawed his way out. Later, he married a human woman and they had a daughter. Later still, when he revealed his powers to his wife, she fled from him, taking their daughter.

I do know that she was pregnant with his twin children, who later grew up to be Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. I believe that the mother died in childbirth. What I am NOT sure of is what happened to the daughter who was already around. I suspect she may have died at one point... perhaps influenza? Perhaps not. When I have a gap in a story, I often make up a way to fill it without even quite realizing I'm doing it.

So. Let's refocus on the Scarlet Witch. As many of us know, she fell in love with the android known as The Vision. The Vision is someone I've often been murky about. I know that he was created by the same guy as made the Golden Age Human Torch. I also know that The Vision is a revamp in his own right of a Golden Age character of the same name. What I do NOT know is quite what the story is on the Golden Age Vision. The idea I've always vaguely had was that he was some sort of alien avenger of wrongs-- think of if the Martian Manhunter had a personality a little more like The Spectre, or perhaps The Shadow or the Phantom Stranger.

In any event, the Vision's brainwaves were stuck into him by Hank Pym's robotic creation Ultron-- said brainwaves being a copy of Avenger Simon Williams, a.k.a. Wonder Man.

Confused yet? So anyway, this Vision-Scarlet Witch romance goes on for a while... At one point, Wanda (that's the Scarlet Witch) learns some actual magic from witch Agatha Harkness, who was Franklin Richards' nanny for a while (for SOME damn reason)...

Okay. Then Wanda wanted children. She tried to use her probability powers and her magic to make children with an android possible.

It wasn't.

She made them bodies, but after a couple of years, it turned out that since she couldn't spontaneously give them souls, she had accidentally filled the twins with demon spirits.

Ooops. That was pretty much the end of THAT relationship. Wanda was insane for a while, and someone got hold of Vision and messed up his hard drive... he lost most of his humanity.

These days, Wanda is dating Wonder Man, who's basically sort of an energy being now... which almost makes sense, since the Vision's humanity originally came from this guy anyway... but it's... uncomfortable, since last I checked the Vision is ALSO still on the team...


Barb sez: What's with Illyana Rasputin/Magik? What IS her mutant power, anyway? Why do we have so many mutant women who do magic as their mainstay, which is so much more interesting than their real stupid power?

Park replies: Uhhhhhh...

Okay, it's like this. Little Illyana's power was the power to teleport. However, like Nightcrawler, to go from one place in space to another place in space, Illyana has to shortcut through someplace else. Nightcrawler apparently shortcuts through some dimension where all there is is a sort of gaseous sulphur (which is the brimstone smell when he teleports-- a little leaks through at his point of return.

Unfortunately, Illyana one day discovered that the place she was cutting though actually was Hell.

Or close enough. One day she got stuck there. For years. Found a magical mentor in the person of the demon Belasco. Became a demonological sorceress. Ooops. So much for sweet little Illyana.

For a while it was a joke that Illyana's real power was briefly (yet
repeatedly) returning from the dead. This reputation was greatly aided by Illyana's ability to travel in time as well as space, leading to any number of Claremontian time travel stories and complications.

As for why so many women at Marvel have weak distance-only powers that seem designed to keep them from getting down and gritty... Marvel's females just tend to be poorly concieved, is about all the answer there is to that.


Barb sez: What's with this Phoenix, by which I mean Rachel? What was that all about?

Park replies: Uh... in one way, it all has to do with the nature of the Marvel Universe. In the Marvel Universe, do we need careful boundaries between dimensions and timelines? Do we need Hypertime and long explanations about how someone from an imaginary story can be written into the real continuity?

No. In Marvel there are no imaginary stories. Everything you see in Marvel is just understood to really exist somewhere, sometime. As example, I cite the time that Nightcrawler visited the reality of one of Kitty's fairy tales. If you read it in Marvel, rest assured that whether by magic, Reed Richards, dimensional tears, or Pym particles, you can cross over with it somehow.

So! Claremont writes about a future timeline where the Sentinels have almost wiped out all mutants by taking over the world. But he finds it just so brilliant, he can't leave it alone. He brings in Rachel, the child of Jean Grey and Scott Summers from that future. (Later, he brings in Nimrod from that same future.)

Basically, Rachel was enough like her mother to be able to summon the
Phoenix-force to herself, becoming the new Phoenix.

A good question might be: so why was Rachel able to handle the Phoenix when in our reality, it drove Jean crazy? I think the best answer is: while this is presumably the same Phoenix-force, Rachel is the daughter of our same Jean. Her mother apparently had a better grip on the Phoenix, whether that's because her mother was stronger or because her mom's Phoenix was weaker. Either way, Rachel was born to be able to handle it...

A third possiblity is that Jean's death (as Phoenix) weakened the Phoenix a bit in such a way as that Rachel could handle it. Rachel-as-Phoenix never seemed quite as powerful as our Jean-as-Phoenix, who could snuff out stars etc.


Barb sez: Okay, so what's this Cable crap? Is he Rachel's brother?

Park: Oh lord.

For this I'm going to have to rely at some point on the online Handbook of the Marvel Universe:

http://www.sigma.net/ozbot/marvelhandbook/

O-kay.

First, Scott Summers and Maddy Pryor (She Who Was Not Jean) had a baby boy. Mr. Sinister, a villain once created by Apocalypse, infected Baby Nathan Summers with Warlock's techno-organic virus. Why did he do this? Hell if I know. The only way to save the baby from being totally turned into unliving circuitry was to send him into the far far far far future. So we did.

Later, Rachel/Phoenix sucked Scott and Jean into that far far far far future so THEY could raise the boy. And they did. Jean in particular taught him to use his super-telekinetic super-psychokinetic mental powers to forcibly keep his techno-organic virus from spreading. Somebody also cloned him while he was there, creating supervillain Stryfe. So when he was old enough to fend for himself more or less, Scott and Jean returned home. Stryfe and Nathan (Nathan is Cable, remember) fought a lot.

In their shoulda-been final showdown, Stryfe escaped in time to a few years before Scott and Jean got married. Cable followed.

That's right, Cable showed up BEFORE he was born, as far as I can tell. He hung around for a while being mysterious, then he made the New Mutants into the boring and overblown X-Force. Uh... the end, I guess.


Barb sez: Okay, now explain Bishop.

Park: Bishop is almost as bad. Fortunately, there's not much to tell. His power is to absorb energy and shoot it back out destructively. He's from a DIFFERENT future where he came back to chase a DIFFERENT time-travelling villain. What more, frankly, is there to know? His timeline was not quite as far as Cable's. Bishop's has a very old Gambit in it. That's about it. Bishop's really not that interesting... which is a shame.


Barb sez: Whatever happened to Betty Brant?

Park: She married Pete's rival in Bugle Photography, Ned Leeds. Then Ned found an old lair of Norman Osborne, the Green Goblin... He became the Hobgoblin.

Actually, it wasn't Ned who found the lair. It was some other guy. He
brainwashed Ned so fully that even I can't work out which of them was the idea man on this whole thing.

I think Leeds crossed the Kingpin and was strangled by assassins somewhere in Europe.

Betty is now a sad person... I think she's now nice and fully aware of how poorly she chose her man. Pete was a little good for her, anyway. I wanted Pete to date Liz Allen.


Barb sez: Okay, what ABOUT the Green Goblin? Is that a mask? What about Harry?

Park: It IS a mask, strangely enough. Every freakin' time. The Hobgoblin in all his identities, everyone who's been or posed as or worn the mask of the Green Goblin-- Marvel tried passing the identity off to a kid as a superhero identity for about 5 minutes... they've all been masks... EXCEPT that one time on the Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends show, where it was portrayed as being a Jekyll-and-Hyde chemical reaction... which made perfect sense, honestly.

Eventually, Harry went insane and died... but I hear now that Norman himself is back... which I frankly don't believe...


Barb sez: Okay, so what about the Red Skull? Is THAT a mask? WHY is he a Red Skull?

Park: The Red Skull was just this evil Nazi who felt that Hitler didn't go nearly far enough most of the time. He had this death gas that he could breathe out of his special cigs and cigarette-holder that poisoned his victims. As I recall, one day he got a small dose of his own gas and it burned and discolored his skin to match what had formerly been just a mask.

Find that implausible? The long list of the Skull's returns from death is far more so...


Barb sez: Mojo-- where's the rest of him?

Park: The Mojo race are clever invertebrates that are evolved to just be big fat blobs with arms and hands. That's the way nature made them. But their technology gave them techno-spider-legs and a techno spinal column. That's how I understand it.


Barb sez: Who is this dead woman named Jean DeWolff that all the fanboys seem to rave about?

Park: I've been wanting to read that saga myself, frankly. As far as I know, The Death of Jean DeWolff is a Spider-Man storyline written by slightly early Peter David (of course, it wasn't called that when it came out-- her death was, au contraire, quite a shock). Jean DeWolff and Spidey were on the trail of a regular non-powered psycho serial-killer. She was pretty cool-- imagine if Claude Rains' character in CASABLANCA was instead played by Marlena Dietrich/Greta Garbo in a beret and raincoat.


Barb sez: So is Storm a Goddess or what?

Park: Uh... not as such. Born in New York, Ororo's parents' plane crashed in Africa, killing them, as we know. She survived. For a while she was a street-thief in Cairo, but when her mutant powers kicked in at puberty, she hung around Kenya topless where she was worshipped as a weather goddess. Nice work if you can get it. I've never been terribly clear how Xavier got her to QUIT that free-and-unencumbered job and move to New York State and go to school and wear clothes. I suspect some sort of telepathic suggestion and meddling was involved? Or maybe he lured her with the promises of Rock'n'Roll, Coca-Cola, chewing gum and blue jeans. _I_ wouldn't have quit.

Anyway, it turns out that while Storm's mother was just a normal American woman, that way way back in her heritage was a rich magical heritage of Earth'n'Sky nature goddesses and magic shamanesses. Or something like that. It's probably part of what made her powers turn out that way. Unlike the Scarlet Witch, Storm has never really looked any farther into this heritage other than finding out she's got it... she already walks the walk every bit as much as she talks the talk, and that's all she needs, frankly.


Barb sez: Okay, let's try this-- is Namor, the Submariner, the same guy as was around in Golden Age, WWII Marvel? If so, how does that work?

Park: That's an interesting story, actually. The answer is yes, it's the exact same guy. As we know, Namor, the Avenging Son, ran around with Cap and the first Human Torch in the WWII period. Some time shortly after WWII, apparently, young Namor ran afoul of some badass sorceror. Said sorceror, Master Khan, whupped Namor and cursed him by taking away his memory and cursing him to Walk The Earth (a pretty bad fate for a guy who's supposed to live in Atlantis). Well, the bummed-out, mind-wiped Namor just hung around New York City all that time, I guess. He grew his hair long as well as got a beard and just went through life in a daze in flophouses.

One day, Johnny Storm stole Ben Grimm's last Eggo waffle and they had a worse-than-usual fight and Reed and Sue took Ben's side so Johnny left in a huff. He's flopping at some flophouse when some dip decides Namor's sitting in his chair. Namor kicks ass and breaks furniture without even coming fully out of his dazed state.

And for once in life, someone in the Marvel Universe has a bright idea. Johnny realizes that this is super-strength and that this grizzled guy isn't just anybody. Controlling his flame on a level finer than the human eye can discern, Johnny burns off this guy's excess hair and the Nimoy eyebrows and pointy ears tip off to Johnny, as it should any good comic-book reading youth, that this guy is the Submariner of WWII. So Johnny flies off with Namor and drops him in the ocean to shock him back to awareness of who he is. It works! Namor decides to wage war on every shmoe walkin' dirt out of revenge for his lost years (and the fact that he has trouble finding Atlantis at first), which is the way we likes it.