Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Heroes Case File #31: The Huntress

Offhand, I could not tell you which Huntress is in this picture.

Superheroes, for the most part, don’t age.  Marvel and DC have their superhero universes set in some sort of sliding scale timeline, where almost everything that’s happened since the superhero line was created somehow only occurred over a ten to twelve year period.  That means that even though there are Fantastic Four comics depicting Reed Richards and Ben Grimm in the trenches of World War II, today neither of those gentlemen are that old.  Aside from a handful of World War II era heroes and villains who have managed to stay active and keep their ties to the war (Captain America, the original Justice Society), or even the rarer other type (Frank Castle is a Vietnam vet), heroes are pulled from eras they existed in to avoid explaining how Batman swings through the streets of Gotham without a walker.

But there are ways to allow heroes to age, and one of them DC used to have was Earth-2.  Originally the home of the Justice Society of America, Earth-2 was the place where the Golden Age heroes did their thing.  And while none of them quite reached the state we’d consider “elderly,” some of them did marry and have children.  One of them was the Earth-2 Batman, and he had a daughter, and oh man, is this one messed up history.

Bad Movie. Great Movie Poster.

Ok, so the 1989 Batman wasn’t a bad movie.  I’m trolling you a little.  But it was a disappointment to me relative to how excited the poster above had me.  In an era before The Facebook, this was all we had to go on for our notice.

I remember walking into the theater one day and finding out there was a Batman movie because THIS teaser poster was on the wall.  This was back when there was still an element of surprise in geek movies.  The movie was a let down compared to the hype of the poster.

What other movies had really strong movie posters but missed the mark on delivering a good movie?  Fair warning.  These movies are ACTUALLY bad!

Slightly Misplaced Comics Hero Case File #22: Tasmanian Devil

In American comics, for obvious reasons, most superheroes are Americans.  If other countries even have superheroes, they tend to be few enough that you can count them on the fingers of one hand, and many are blatant weird stereotypes to boot.  Big crossovers will show teams of superheroes going all over the world, but local heroes often seem to be missing.

As a result, every so often, DC or Marvel will attempt to create more international heroes.  Some of these efforts are more successful than others. While the original X-Men line-up was entirely American, the “All-New, All-Different” team was composed of mutants from Africa, Canada, Japan, Ireland, Germany, and Soviet Russia. The two Americans there were a leftover from the original team and a Native American.  Half of those characters would stick around.  Marvel has also introduced a couple international superteams, most notably Alpha Flight and Excalibur, with special mention made to the Soviet Winter Guard.

One of DC’s attempts to follow suit was the Global Guardians.  They were a team of international heroes, most a stereotype of their native country, and among their number was the Tasmanian Devil.