Slightly Misplaced Comics Hero Case Files #16: Triathlon

He’s the new pushy hero nobody was waiting for!

Kurt Busiek and George Perez had a fairly epic run on The Avengers starting in the late 90s.  They had the team take on Ultron and Kang.  They had a mix of old and new characters.  They made Carol Danvers interesting (yes, Jenny, I said it, and she’s been interesting ever since).  There was beautiful artwork, stories that showed great understanding for everyone on the team, and a silent issue where Washington D.C. got destroyed, but the Avengers managed to get George W. Bush out, and only George W. Bush out, before everything went boom.  I did not make that up.

They also put a new character named Triathlon on the team, and he was fairly lame.  I only recently learned why.

Slightly Misplaced Comics Heroes Case Files #4: Tyroc

This may not end well.

I’ve never been much of a fan of DC’s Legion of Superheroes.  I couldn’t begin to tell you why.  I do enjoy DC’s black-and-white reprints of various older books.  The Showcase Presents series gives the reader usually around 500 pages or so of old stories for a low price, and are a good way for the fan of Silver Age silliness to find the old stuff without breaking the bank.  This was how I was able to write columns in this series on both Captain Carrot and the Unknown Soldier.  But I have limits, and one of them is old Superman stories where Superman often saves the day using deception.  The reader will think Superman is in a bind of some kind (never a physical one), only to discover he was aware of the problem the whole time and had already beaten it and was just waiting for the end of the story to tell everyone.  My one attempt at a Legion Showcase was done by Superman’s writers and artists and the stories were about the same level of jumping out at the reader and shouting, “Psyche!”  But the Legion lasted a good long time, and has been rebooted tons of times since then.  One of the legendary runs was by writer Paul Levitz, who wrote the book for 15 years and during that time he managed to include every member of the Legion at some point, even the dead ones using flashbacks.

The one exception was Tyroc.