The House of Ideas. Talking Time's 50 Favorite Marvel Characters!

[Adrenaline]

#15 (tie): Storm

AKA: Ororo Munroe, Weather Witch
Powers: Flight, weather control
First Appearance: Giant-Size X-Men #1, 1975
Created By: Len Wein, Dave Cockrum
Portrayed By: Halle Berry, Alexandra Shipp
6 votes, 147 points (Top voter: Estragon (#1))

Ororo Munroe was born the daughter of a Kenyan princess and an American man. She was orphaned at a young age, and spent her childhood as a thief in Cairo, having a chance encounter with Charles Xavier during this period. As she reached adolescence she developed the ability to control the weather and used it to help people in need, coming to be worshipped as a goddess by some. Xavier explained she was actually a mutant and recruited her into the X-Men. She proved to not only be a powerful combatant but a strong leader as well, with some believing she was better suited to the role than Cyclops. She was depowered for a while but remained with the team, at one point temporarily replacing Thor as the thunder god of Asgard. In addition to the X-Men, she has been a member of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four.

While she kept her powers after the "no more mutants" debacle, she moved to Africa to assist the mutants there, and reconnected with T'Challa, whom she soon married. This gave her direct political experience, but as previously mentioned things ended badly. Her later reconnection with him led to a story where she apparently achieved true godhood in Wakanda, but I'm not sure of the extent of the implications of that. Back with the X-Men, Ororo continued to be a leader among her peers, and took a seat on the council in Krakoa. Recently, the mutants terraformed Mars and relocated the many mutants from the alternate reality of Arrako there, and Storm took the role of regent of the new civilization. With the intergalactic community now recognizing Mars as the capital of the solar system over Earth, she is its most important political figure.

While early superhero comics often had a problem of making female characters weak and submissive, I don't think that was ever really a problem for Storm. Her powers and strength of character both make her an extremely powerful and impressive figure, and she is pretty much always treated with respect. She is one of the most loved characters in the Marvel universe, which makes it such a shame that yet again the X-Men movie franchise never really figured out what to do with her. Halle Berry was a flatline in the role, and the big thing I remember from Alexandra Shipp's performance is the time she was beaten with a guy whose power was he could control his hair. She was served better in the 90s animated series, where she was one of the regular characters and got to be a badass most of the time.

 

[jpfriction]

My favorite part of Storm from the 90s cartoon was the twenty minutes of magic the gathering card style color language she’d yell out prior to making it super windy or whatever. Own it girl.

 

[Octopus Prime]

If you called yourself “Storm” and you could conjure hurricanes and lightning bolts, you’d make a production out of it too.

I’m sure she had the most fun of anyone in that show, screaming what she was doing as poetically as podsible

 

[Peklo]

There is no other character that embodies as strongly and comprehensively all the good, bad and everything inbetween about Chris Claremont as a writer than Ororo Munroe. He would feature women prominently in major starring and narrative-driving roles; the spotlight would always walk hand-in-hand with a kind of fetishization and weaponization of womanhood and its power. He would conceptualize characters and depict race through non-white casts and so interrogate casual and big issue topics; the same overreaching passion would lead to awkward rhetoric and propagation of harmful stereotypes. Whatever unkind criticism or lauded hyperbole there is to credit to his work, it's likely that Storm sits at the fulcrum of any such examination because she was the vector through which so much of Claremont and thus X-Men as a whole--not just the book, but the franchise it would become--expressed, developed and codified its wider voice.

Jean Grey was there, and was grandfathered in as the nominal leading woman, but would always suffer from shaking off the residues of Stan Lee plotting and characterization of women, even when she was textually the most powerful member of the team and the focal point of several of the most celebrated stories the series would go on to tell in the post-revival years. Ororo walked in and didn't knock Jean off her perch--she made friends with her. Those early "Claremontisms", as they would be coined, in addition to comprising character vernacular and recognizable catchphrases, included storytelling novelties like "women who aren't automatically rivals for male attention and have mutual friendships and relationships of their own." It's not something that was necessary or possible to "invent", but it was something that had to be popularized, at least within a publishing line that few paid attention to and that could exist in its bubble and rock conventions mostly undisturbed. When Jean died, and died again, Ororo remained and the seed that had been planted would only begin to bloom, as the cobwebs of Silver Age "one woman per title" stylings were shed for good and the series became increasingly defined by women, always with Storm at the center.

Jean being gone also drew Scott away from the stories, toward his supposed happy ending and retirement, so Storm rose to the team leader role after playing strictly competent and somewhat low-key support for the first five or six years of her publication existence, both narratively and team dynamics-wise. The early '80s necessitated Storm adopting leadership in the text, and it's when she becomes functionally the book's main character; the POV is on her, her interiority and her complex relationships. The shifting organizational duties are mirrored with her internal development, the shakeups of which are massive for the character in the attitude she holds toward herself and how she ultimately outwardly presents; this was a character who had a series of sexually charged lesbian encounters and whirldwind romances on the page as a by-then mainstream--most popular, even--cape comic's lead character, and visually transformed herself under very clearly observed and coded euphemistic semiotics to reflect her unrepressed personhood and newfound identity. It would be enough for all of that to land her as an unforgettable anomaly in the medium's history, but it's really only the midpoint in her arc.

Storm famously loses her weather-manipulation powers in a mid-1984 issue of Uncanny X-Men. The circumstances are purely a matter of tangled continuity, but the effect on the character was enormous: despite being a focal woman thus depowered of her defining powerset, Storm didn't go away or adopt a more ancillary role--she became more central than ever. The issue directly after the incident is solely dedicated to her reaction to the loss she's experienced; it's presented like an event with Barry Windsor-Smith's art setting it apart from the current house style of the book, underlining the textual gap from the norm and its significance to the wider narrative. Storm's story goes on under her new default, and she stays the X-Men's field leader, framed every bit or more capable as when she could command the elements; she duels Cyclops for team leadership during his many attempts to get back into the life he feels secure and needed in, and soundly bests him. Windsor-Smith gets to do another Storm solo issue during this period to complete the duology, with Ororo on a solitary journey to reclaim and rediscover parts of her self that she'd violently discarded and rejected, told through a story of her reconnecting with the Serengeti and Kenya of her youth in an issue that has no superhero fights and no clear villains to punch, just the ramifications of colonialism and one woman's cultural liminalism in her lived experience of the African diaspora.

That could be argued as the character's peak in the role that she grew into, but strictly factually Storm regained her powers significantly later on, in early 1988. When she does, she again does not disappear from the book, but the shift into more of an ensemble form is immediately felt, to the benefit of the larger story, depending, but with her defining role in shaping it mostly over. When I think about what period of Claremont-penned X-Men--a staggering 17-year run necessitates such compartmentalization on some level--I hold dearest, I sometimes make the distinction through artists: Smith, Romita Jr., Windsor-Smith, provisionally even Silvestri. The realization that arises is that these artists were the ones that were there to tell Ororo's story when she was the book; they depicted when she reincarnated as an interdimensional space whale; when she stabbed Callisto in the heart in the sewers; when she swept Kitty up in the sky to sort out their mutual emotional baggage (if there is one singular scene that defines X-Men for me, it's probably that one); when she gave shelter to a pregnant woman in need; when she took back the storm in the Adversary's world. The character existed before this period, and has existed since developing into directions I haven't witnessed as closely, but this long, gradually developing portrait that Storm was afforded is also the root cause of why adaptationally the character is rarely treated well or captured to satisfaction: she is too complex, too multifaceted and thematically too misaligned from the conventions of big-scope pop culture to ever be reflected in all the ways she once was. Glimmers of her shine through, but never the full person, and to feel the absence of something so raw and real is the best testament to the character I can think of.

 

[Violentvixen]

I'm re-reading the older issues and the biggest problem is how the sexism/racism of having a black female in there shows up. Storm just takes off her clothes to "enjoy the rain" or the water all the time, something that was unfortunately seen as okay to have a black character do at the time but would never have happened with a white one. Seeing her straight up described as nubile is just gross.

That being said, yeah, she's a badass and was part of my shuffle for #1. As noted she really should have been the leader instead of Cyclops. It's very cool how the villains have just straight up said she's the most powerful X-man.

 

[Peklo]

The portrayal of team leadership is a consistently interesting one because it supports Ororo's continuing development through the disparate eras. In the Cockrum/Byrne years, Cyclops is the task leader while Storm is often the one who takes up the responsibilities of a morale-centering social leader. When Scott is gone, Ororo has to adopt his role because no one else can, which informs the back and forth between her sense of self and obligations; Kurt is the one who in turn rises to the occasion of shouldering the social leader role she can't fulfill anymore (a brief period when the team is at its thinnest forces Kurt to try and be the goal-oriented, strict team leader; he can't do the job at all). When Kurt and others are put out of commission and the book post-Mutant Massacre, Storm and Wolverine take up the role of co-leaders, but it's not any kind of dynamic they've had before, reflecting the new status quo of them actively being hunted down and pushed to the brink; in absence of any kind of uplifting force in this era, the team and Ororo are ready to come apart at the seams. There are so many permutations to the seemingly simple "who's #1" organizational question, always informed by and informing characterization. The iconic Jim Lee relaunch Blue and Gold teams lead by Cyclops and Storm seemed a throwback to past status quos, but like so much in that era, only captured hollow lip service of those dynamics.

 

[estragon]

There is no other character that embodies as strongly and comprehensively all the good, bad and everything inbetween about Chris Claremont as a writer than Ororo Munroe.

This is what it came down to for me. Great explanation of the character and how she is developed over the course of the run.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Sorry for lateness even though we've moved on.

#18: Galactus

AKA: Galan, Lifebringer, The Destruction
Powers: Cosmic omnipotence
First Appearance: Fantastic Four #48, 1966
Created By: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
7 votes, 137 points (Top voter: Falselogic)

The being best known as Galactus is not native to the current iteration of the Marvel universe. He was originally called Galan, a humanoid born near the end of the previous iteration. As things were coming to an end, he merged with an entity known as the Sentience of the Cosmos. This made him powerful enough to survive the destruction of his reality and the birth of the new one. Unfortunately, it also gave him an immense hunger that can only be satisfied by consuming the energy of entire planets. He has chosen a number of different Heralds to seek out worlds for him, the most famous of which being the Silver Surfer. While most Heralds prefer to offer him uninhabitable planets, his hunger sometimes causes him to pursue populated ones like the Earth. Galactus has attempted to consume the planet multiple times, but he is always thwarted by the Fantastic Four or another interested party, such as Squirrel Girl. Since he is nearly indestructible, he is usually stopped not through force but clever manipulation.

Despite his power, Galactus has been seemingly killed or changed a number of times. He has returned to his humanoid form and spent time with the FF, and a few years ago a team known as the Ultimates managed to transform him into the benevolent Lifebringer, seriously disrupting the order of cosmic entities. While being pursued by the apocalyptic force called the Black Winter, Galactus was killed again by Thor, who used his destruction to put an end to the threat. He was then revived and merged with the Asgardian armor known as the Destroyer, giving rise to his new form and name of the Destruction.

While his unconquerable hunger makes him a terrifying and unrelenting enemy for the planets he targets, there is a certain tragedy in the character and his inability to avoid the destruction he causes. Just like predators must kill other creatures to feed, Galactus cannot survive without eating planets. Those planets of course have the right to defend themselves, but does he not himself have the right to live? When stories bother to address the question, it usually leads to interesting things. Unfortunately, the one attempt to bring the character to film in the second 2000s Fantastic Four movie was a failure. The studio chickened out of depicting a giant man in a purple suit trying to consume the Earth's energy, so instead we got a vaguely scary looking cloud. Maybe the MCU won't be afraid to give it another try in the future.

Galactus is a great visual but he's a sort of unique figure. While an antagonist, "villain" doesn't really describe him any more than any predator would be described as. He's just this big massive force that does what he does. If you are flying by his ship? He won't blast you out of the sky. He'll ignore you. Heck, he cares so little, you need to work hard to directly engage with you, like maybe be his servant. Some servants worked to find only worlds with non-sentient life for him to eat but his hunger will drive him toward being a terrifying threat once more.

There is a tragedy that he's a being that just wanted to survive all things and now has turned himself into this passionless horror beyond morality. He has a mind and a voice but everything is directed into resolving his hunger, albeit except when he encounters a curious entity. There is a god in the Marvel Universe, the One Above All, but his first appearance is basically "Fantastic Four vs. God" and they only squeak that one out by threatening all things.

There's no shortage of cosmic threats and Marvel is always making badass villains who can "even kill Galactus" but it usually rings false and his killers are generally forgotten about by fans. Meanwhile, Galactus remains a favourite; often a threat but rarely a "villain" (he can be persuaded to back off with the right bargaining chip) and despite being a super-threat, he's more "true neutral". He doesn't have any cruelty or ambition or plans. He continues. He's a natural disaster of cosmic proportions.

 

[Adrenaline]

#14: Captain Marvel

AKA: Carol Danvers, Car-Ell, Ms. Marvel, Binary, Warbird
Powers: Flight, Super strength, energy absorption and projection
First Appearance: Marvel Super Heroes #13, 1968
Created By: Roy Thomas, Gene Colan
Portrayed By: Brie Larson
6 votes, 150 points (Top voter: Issun (#1))

The streak of extremely powerful female characters continues. Though she didn't know until well into her adulthood, Carol was born Car-Ell, the daughter of a Kree warrior and a human man. She was raised as a normal girl, and after joining the air force coincidentally met Mar-Vell, another secret Kree, who was also the original Captain Marvel. Her latent Kree powers were later awakened when she was exposed to a strange machine called the Psyche-Magnetron. After discovering her new powers, Carol honored her friend by taking the name Ms. Marvel, and becoming a superhero herself. She later joined the Avengers. She subsequently left the team in one of the worst Marvel stories I've heard of. To keep things brief, she was kidnapped, brainwashed, and raped by a man from Limbo, and when she decided to return to Limbo with him, the rest of the team thought that was fine and let her go. After regaining control of her faculties, she returned to Earth and admonished the Avengers for their inaction.

Her bad times continued when she lost her powers in a battle with Rogue. She became associated with the X-Men for a while, a rarity for non-mutants. During this period she regained her powers and got a new codename as Binary. She eventually rejoined the Avengers, and has also been with teams like the Starjammers and Guardians of the Galaxy. She sided with the pro-registration side during the Civil War event and became a team leader, but left when Norman Osborn took control of the team and joined the New Avengers team she had previously opposed. A few years later, she finally took the name of Captain Marvel, being the seventh person to do so. She led the new space-based Alpha Flight program, and became a bit of a fascist during Civil War II. After a new Inhuman emerged who could seemingly predict future crimes, Carol led the side who thought arresting people before they actually did anything wrong in the first place was a good idea. You know you've gone wrong when Iron Man is the one with the better ethical and moral position in an argument.

After that unfortunate period, Carol has continued to be a heavy hitter against interplanetary threats and a regular member of the Avengers. She's a character who I think has been an unfortunate victim of a series of misguided and outright bad decisions by the writers and editors of Marvel. Nonetheless, she has become one of the publisher's most popular female characters and when written well is a good one to have around. She's complicated and has flaws, but Marvel is no stranger to that. While many characters used the name before her, she quickly became THE Captain Marvel to a wider audience in the MCU. There was a mixed reaction to her first movie, which seems to happen a lot with mega budget films that happen to center women, but I thought it was good fun, and Brie Larson gives the character humanity while also selling her extreme level of power.

 

[Peklo]

Carol's history is intertwined and inextricable from the X-Men not just because of the on-page association but what motivated it in the first place. Despite having origins a decade or so earlier, it was Claremont taking over the character's solo title from early on that granted Danvers her first significant amount of characterization of her own. It was the late '70s, and so constitutes a sort of less read parallel history to an era in X-Men that's often venerated as the most foundational--gestating themes and writing styles align, and characters such as Mystique originate from the book. For having an explicitly feminist set of thematics, and because of having an author with a for once sincere intent to portray those themes (many Marvel publications, stories, and characters aimed to mock and exploit feminism), the aforementioned Avengers story in which Carol is raped and impregnated with the narrative never portraying it as an act out of consent wasn't just an injustice to the character's prior portrayal in the text, but a callous and potentially malicious strike against everything she could be construed to stand for. There are a lot of compromising bargains to be made when you read Claremont closely; there is always some wild curveball that can offset an otherwise effectively conveyed message or concept. For his part, the follow-up and functional dismantling retort he wrote in response to the abominable story he had nothing to do with is one of the most powerful of his career, not allowing the infraction to retreat into the mists of continuity and back issues without holding it accountable in the moment, through the words of the character who was most affected by it.

Carol's existence after this period is fragmentary but always memorable, from her integral part in setting up Rogue's entire character for more than a decade to come, participation in the Brood Saga and transformation into Binary, and always delightfully, the times when she gets to flex her Air Force military background when she's paired up with Wolverine, the two of them forming a partnership of absolute trust and respect for the other's abilities whenever and wherever they're needed--it's a dynamic that neither character gets to enjoy often with others, or expressed with the same chummy camaraderie. When out of Claremont's hands, Carol's been best served by Kelly Sue DeConnick, whose voice made her distinct and compelling for the first time in a long time, and should serve as the modern model on how to develop her further.

 

[Violentvixen]

I have never seen this page and it's so powerful then GOD DAMMIT the last panel just ruined everything.

 

[Issun]

Carol became my fave about halfway into the movie. It helps that Brie Larson is insanely charismatic and she lent the full force of that charisma to Captain Marvel. It's a damn shame they couldn't figure out how to utilize her better in Endgame.

 

[estragon]

Carol's history is intertwined and inextricable from the X-Men not just because of the on-page association but what motivated it in the first place.

One thing I'd like to add to this excellent summary is just to draw attention to the nature of Carol and Rogue's relationship (or, more specifically, the relationship between Rogue and the version of Carol that lives in her mind). The animated adaptation that it seems like more people here are familiar with pretty much just devolves into a lot of screaming whenever this comes up, but in the original story there's a long period where the Rogue and Carol personalities both share the body in a way that's obviously tense but not just about histrionics.

Sometimes this means Rogue takes a backseat to Carol to let her handle something she can't deal with in an action moment, but other times it just means that Carol and Betsy (Psylocke) go out to eat and talk about how she's feeling about this whole shared body situation:

So, for a while, the Carol/Rogue incident doesn't take Carol Danvers out of the story, but instead essentially creates two separate Carols: There's Binary, who gets to go around doing Cosmic Marvel stuff, and then there's another Carol, who sticks around for a long time as a second personality in Rogue's body. (Not enough writers took advantage of Binary, but they should have, and the cosmic Marvel level power-up does eventually shape the modern day conception of the character.) Carol physically leaves the X-Men when Rogue joins the team because she doesn't want to be around the woman was attacked by, but the character of Carol is around for a long time after that.

 

[Peklo]

Yes, Carol as manifested by Rogue really shines particularly during the Australia era or thereabouts when so much of the narrative focus is on the core octet spending time in isolation and getting a little cabin feverish with each other, but also clicking together like team configurations before or since rarely have. The above scene of her and Betsy interacting is difficult to have conceived of happening under any other circumstances, since the two characters rarely have much to do with each other, and here because of the intimate interpersonal emphasis even the unusual character combinations got room to be explored.

 

[Adrenaline]

#13: The Thing

AKA: Benjamin Grimm
Powers: Permanent rock form grants super strength and agelessness
First Appearance: The Fantastic Four #1, 1961
Created By: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
Portrayed By: Michael Chiklis, Jamie Bell
5 votes, 159 points (Top voter: Johnny Unusual)

Talking Time's favorite member of the Fantastic Four is also its most tragic. Benjamin Grimm met the brilliant Reed Richard in college, where they were roommates. After spending time in the Air Force, Reed later asked him to pilot a spaceship he had built. When the project was in danger of getting shut down, the two ended up launching the ship in secret with Reed's girlfriend Susan and her brother Johnny. Unfortunately, it was improperly shielded, and the four were bombarded by cosmic rays. On returning to Earth, they were all transformed, but they were soon able to keep their changes under control. All except for Ben, whose body had been changed into a rock-like form that was impossible to hide. Reed has tried repeatedly to find a cure for Ben, but the best he's managed is a formula that allows Ben to return to a human shape for one day a year. His failure to find a permanent cure led to some resentment, but they are still best friends and members of Marvel's first modern superteam.

While he is stuck in his new body, it does grant Ben incredible strength, which he relishes using to protect his friends and innocent people from the many deadly threats the Fantastic Four encounters. In addition to being a regular member of the FF, he has also been a member of the Avengers, and when his original team was separated after Secret Wars, he joined the Guardians of the Galaxy for a while. In addition to his physical strength, he has a lot of heart and mental toughness, willingly putting himself in situations where he's the underdog and refusing to back down. He's known for his sometimes-friendly rivalry with the larger Hulk, and anyone who underestimates him in a fight is probably making a mistake. Stories set in the future often make note of the fact that the Thing ages extremely slowly, leaving him the last surviving member of the team, but still unwilling to give an inch. The Thing is also known for his many catchphrases and favorite references, which to me suggest he does a lot of work to put in a fun-loving attitude to mask over his inner pain.

Ben is married to Alicia Masters, the blind daughter of the villainous Puppet Master. While at first glance it might seem like a cliche that a physically deformed character can only find love with a woman who can't see him, Alicia is an expert sculptor like her father. With her hands, she knows exactly what Ben looks like, and she loves him because of the person he is inside, which she can see perfectly. The Thing appeared in the two different versions of the Fantastic Four in movies. I thought both Chiklis and Bell did a decent job of representing the character but didn't dig too deep into it, and both the practical and digital effects the studio tried for his look didn't work terribly well. It's a hard character to get across in live action and I'm curious how it's handled in the upcoming MCU version.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Aunt Petunias Favorite Ever-Lovin’ Blue Eyed Nephew is on my short list of favorite comic characters, easily my favorite member of the FF, and one of those characters you can just slot into any story and it works just fine. He’s possibly the single most personable and relatable character in Marvel despite being a giant rock man, and he’s the only person Reed listens to and respects (much more so than his actual wife).

Also he is just completely impossible to keep down;

 

[Adrenaline]

There's plenty of good pages about a bloodied thing refusing to quit.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

The Thing is one of those perfect heroes. Deceptively simple but so much can be done with this rocky curmudgeon. One of my favourite things in his mythos is his poker games.

This issue also has Kingpin crashing the game to play just to get bragging rights over the superheroes.

 

[estragon]

 

[Adrenaline]

#12: Rogue

AKA: Anna Marie LeBeau
Powers: Touch absorbs the powers, memories, and psyche of others
First Appearance: Avengers Annual #10, 1981
Created By: Chris Claremont, Michael Golden
Portrayed By: Anna Paquin
7 votes, 160 points (Top voter: Beta Metroid)

After being raised in a hippie commune, Anna Marie ran away from home and discovered she was a mutant when a boy she kissed ended up in the hospital. She can drain the very life essence out of others with a touch, and unfortunately she had no control over the power. She was taken in by Mystique, who brought her into the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. During an early encounter with Carol Danvers, Rogue absorbed her powers and personality permanently, a condition which led to her leaving the Brotherhood and joining the X-Men, believing Professor X could help her. While the other X-Men distrusted her at first, she won them over in time and became a reliable member of the team. The Danvers personality would take over at times, leaving Rogue in a confusing position with her own identity. She was eventually separated from the alternate identity, but she continued to struggle with her power for years. The danger of physical touch made her personal life difficult, and she feared accidentally doing something that couldn't be undone.

Over the years, Rogue has come and gone from the X-Men, with her powers and her relationship to them changing frequently. She currently has Wonder Man's powers absorbed on a permanent basis, and is also able to control her absorption ability, which has enabled her successful marriage to her longtime beau Gambit. Besides the X-Men, Rogue spent time as a member of the Avengers Unity Division, an attempt to mend ties between different superhero communities after the Avengers vs. X-Men event. She was a member of the new Excalibur team led by the current Captain Britain until she was chosen to join the revamped X-Men roster at the first annual Hellfire Gala.

Rogue is the highest-ranking member of the core X-Men lineup from the 90s animated series to appear on this list. That version of the character had the absorbed Ms. Marvel powers, with full flight and super strength. Rogue was also a central character and audience surrogate in the first three X-Men movies, played by Anna Paquin. Paquin's a good actress, but she doesn't get a ton to do after the first movie, and her arc is entirely focused around the difficulty of being unable to control her power, without really giving the character the opportunity to overcome it and become a real superhero. I prefer the version in other media who has struggles but can still find a way to be a confident and capable member of a team.

 

[estragon]

i love 80s rogue, before all the will they won't they happens

we've just touched on the carol danvers business, so i'll just drop in one of my favorite bits of 80s rogue whimsy, sleeping in the clouds and using a susan b anthony dollar to infiltrate the shield helicarrier

 

[Adrenaline]

This hits harder knowing they were never allowed to make Ben canonically Jewish until years after Jack Kirby's death.

 

[Octopus Prime]

For the most part, the 90s X-Men cartoon cast every character perfectly, and every one of those voices lives rent free in my brain whenever I read an X-Men comic.

Except Rogue…

I… do not care for that vocal performance.

Also Megneto, but that’s because I hear Ian MacKellan with him

 

[estragon]

Another thing I like about Rogue is that she sets up stories where they're on the brink of losing but then she gets to become the X-Men's Voltron/Captain Planet style fused totality of the team:

This hits harder knowing they were never allowed to make Ben canonically Jewish until years after Jack Kirby's death.

I like this card a lot both for that reason and also because I just love the borderline cubist quality of Kirby's Thing. I think the flatness of old comics coloring techniques and black and white sketches are when The Thing looks best.

 

[Peklo]

I… do not care for that vocal performance.

Lenore Zann's performance is a standout among the cast, expertly embodying that era and incarnation of the character, all sassy bravado and ridiculous idioms. No one gets into their role as much as her in that show.

The idea of villain reformation has long traditions in X-Men, from Banshee and Sunfire in the Silver Age, to even the second genesis team featuring minor Hulk pest Wolverine. There have subsequently been more major redemptive arcs in a line-shaping sense, like Magneto, or total evolutions and lasting shifts of previous status quos like with Emma Frost, but Rogue remains the iconic face turn for the line, decades and decades after she came at that decision. It's not like villain Rogue of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants had very long to establish herself on the page as a dastardly adversary--she played the Maximoff twins to Mystique's Magneto--but first impressions stuck for both the characters and readers alike, further cemented by the gravity of her violence toward Carol Danvers, defining both characters for a long time to come. To have this brief and turbulent an antagonistic history that defined her role and to immediately pivot into a sincere plea for help from her enemies threw again both the fictional people and readers for a loop in the plain desperation and necessity of that plea, and the X-Men's unwillingness to answer it. Rogue has rarely been a "villain" even when she was, but as her colour-coding in the superhero colour theory tradition signals, she has always complicatedly navigated that moral line emotionally and ethically in relation to her powers and what they might do--what she has done--and her introduction to the line heralded a new kind of major piece of the evolving narrative and its storytelling style: someone whose interiority wasn't retroactively patched in piece by piece, but whose complex feelings about her own role and how others regarded her defined her from the start. She was, in my estimation, one of the first "modern" characters of the book--distant from the superficialities of the '60s, and removed even from the caricatures of the '70s.

 

[Olli]

It's weird to read Rogue's dialogue in English and see she has a strong Southern accent; in the translated Finnish comics I read in my youth, there was nothing of the sort present (which makes sense - it's not easy to translate a dialect, if it's possible at all).

My favorite Rogue moments are when she absorbs the powers of Wolverine, Colossus and maybe some others to hit someone _really_ hard.

 

[YangusKhan]

Lenore Zann's performance is a standout among the cast, expertly embodying that era and incarnation of the character, all sassy bravado and ridiculous idioms. No one gets into their role as much as her in that show.

"You look nervous as a long-tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs."

 

[Octopus Prime]

The performance and dialogue was all aces but the tone of her voice when she got riled up always really grated on me.

And she was frequently riled up because this was X-Men and ain’t nobody allowed to be mild

 

[Adrenaline]

#11: Iron Man

AKA: Anthony "Tony" Stark
Powers: Armor suit allows flight and has a variety of weapons
First Appearance: Tales of Suspense #39, 1963
Created By: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Larry Lieber, Don Heck
Portrayed By: Robert Downey Jr.
7 votes, 161 points (Top voter: Issun)

Anthony was born the son of a SHIELD agent and an undercover Hydra agent. The Hydra agent ended up dead and the SHIELD agent gave up the child for adoption. He was adopted by the wealthy industrialist Howard Stark and his wife Maria, who wanted a healthy child, partially to help protect their natural, sickly child Arno. If you didn't know about any of that, don't worry, it's a whole thing. Unaware of his secret brother's existence, Tony inherited the company when his parents were killed in a car accident. While visiting another country for a weapons demonstration, Tony was wounded and kidnapped by terrorists. With fellow captive Ho Yinsen, he developed a device that protected his heart from shrapnel and powered a suit of armor he used to escape the terrorists. Yinsen was killed and Tony became the superhero Iron Man. For many years, he told people that Iron Man was his personal bodyguard, and for periods of time the suit was worn by his friend James Rhodes before he took his own identity as War Machine, but it was usually Tony wearing the mask. Over time he saw some of the problems with being a weapons manufacturer and redirected his company efforts toward other future technologies. He often was fighting off corporate takeovers as much as supervillains, as there's plenty of money to be made in weapons, and a lot of rich men wanted his money.

Iron Man is a founding member of the Avengers, and one of the team's most consistent members, and occasionally its financial backer. He joined the Illuminati, representing the interests of the Avengers in the group. Tony can generously be described as pragmatic, often willing to do questionable or unsavory things in the name of protecting the most people. You can easily see an alternate history where he became even more megalomaniacal and closer to a villain than a hero. Probably his darkest period is the Civil War, when after an unfortunate incident caused the deaths of hundreds of children, he fought for a national database of superheroes to help accountability and prevent similar tragedies. There are obvious questions about privacy involved, but the biggest problem was not the goal but his tactics. Among other things, Tony authorized the creation of a secret prison in the Negative Zone, build a robotic clone of his apparently dead friend Thor to be an enforcer, and hired "reformed" villains to hunt down and capture unregistered heroes. He became the director of SHIELD, and if it wasn't for his downfall by Norman Osborn during the Secret Invasion, he might have gotten even worse. He has continued to make some troubling decisions since, but his personal troubles (he was infected by a techno-virus which necessitated a complete rewrite of his brain, and a deadly injury required the rebuild of his entire body on a cellular level, leading to him questioning if he was even human anymore) have prevented him from making too much trouble for others.

While at the time the first Iron Man movie felt like just the other big superhero film from the summer of 2008, it's hard to overstate the impact it had on both the character and cinema on a whole. Iron Man was a second tier superhero at best, but the MCU turned him into an icon and the face of the biggest film franchise of all time for over a decade. Everyone knows who Iron Man is now. Robert Downey Jr.'s performance, especially in the first movie, was a complete joy, bringing humanity to a character who could be very easy to despise, and he was also just funny as hell. It's a performance that has completely shaped the depiction of the character in other media, for better or (mostly) worse. Pretty much every animated rendition of Iron Man since has been snarky and irreverent in the RDJ mold, and most of them just can't pull it off successfully. Also for better or worse, the first Iron Man movie changed what superhero movies could be. I remember the scene at the end where Tony casually announces at a press conference that he is Iron Man, and the post-credits scene with Nick Fury talking about the Avengers. Superhero movies didn't always have to be standalone stories about guys with secret identities anymore. They could have character development and storylines that played out over the course of years and several movies. You can argue about the actual results and their effect on the film industry, but it was a big change.

 

[Olli]

I kind of feel Iron Man is similar to Wolverine in that he works best in a team; his solo stories often end up being some variation of "Tony is too smart for his own good and causes trouble. External challenger forces Tony to shape up and improvise a solution. Tony barely wins due to thinking outside the box. Tony acknowleges he must do better (start from the beginning)"