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How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Yeah, her leg got wounded by Cameron Hodge in the profoundly forgettable Second Coming event, just shy of a decade ago, then amputated and replaced.

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Air Skwirl
May 13, 2007

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed shitposting.

How Wonderful! posted:

Yeah, her leg got wounded by Cameron Hodge in the profoundly forgettable Second Coming event, just shy of a decade ago, then amputated and replaced.

I read Second coming just a couple months ago (that's where Nightcrawler dies and it's revealed Scott had been running a murder squad lead by Wolverine, right?) and have no memory of that. Has she died since then (a fair question for any of the New Mutants) because she might not still have the false leg since then.

Lobok
Jul 13, 2006

Say Watt?

Beerdeer posted:

Where's the line between cyborg and prosthetic, because Karma's leg.

If it's not purely mechanical then to me the prosthetic makes you a cyborg. Peg leg, no. Pacemaker, yes.

muscles like this!
Jan 17, 2005


Madkal posted:

Wasn't Lex Luthor's personal bodyguard (I want to say Marcy) a woman cyborg?

Mercy Graves has been a cyborg but I don't know if it is a regular thing for the character.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Skwirl posted:

I read Second coming just a couple months ago (that's where Nightcrawler dies and it's revealed Scott had been running a murder squad lead by Wolverine, right?) and have no memory of that. Has she died since then (a fair question for any of the New Mutants) because she might not still have the false leg since then.

This is from X-Men: Second Coming #2 which I guess was kind of a bookend to the entire thing. It's kind of buried in the middle of some other stuff:

Beerdeer
Apr 25, 2006

Frank Herbert's Dude

Skwirl posted:

Karma has a prosthetic leg?





I don’t know if it’s been fixed, but Hodge cut it off during Second Coming.

Wow, beaten

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


How Wonderful! posted:

This is from X-Men: Second Coming #2 which I guess was kind of a bookend to the entire thing. It's kind of buried in the middle of some other stuff:


She should really go to HR about that outfit. I can see her navel.

Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer

How Wonderful! posted:



I'm not sure if you'd want to count Omega Sentinels as cyborgs or robots or what but you also have Karima Shapandar (mentioned by Skwirl already), last seen in HoX/PoX I think, and the former X-Force villain Ekatarina Gryaznova, who I, as a child, thought was Girl Deadpool.

If that counts, than so do all the female members of Livewires. I think they just appeared again this year in a Deadpool issue? I really enjoyed the Warren miniseries.

Madkal
Feb 11, 2008

I believe in all the ways that they say you can lose your body
Fallen Rib
I mean wouldn't Forge be considered a cyborg at this point?

TwoPair
Mar 28, 2010

Pandamn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta
Grimey Drawer

Skwirl posted:

I read Second coming just a couple months ago (that's where Nightcrawler dies and it's revealed Scott had been running a murder squad lead by Wolverine, right?) and have no memory of that. Has she died since then (a fair question for any of the New Mutants) because she might not still have the false leg since then.

She definitely still has it

Rhyno
Mar 22, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
More heroes should do a victory dance.

Knives Amilli
Sep 26, 2014
Has there ever been a prominent shonen manga/anime that features a protagonist who doesnt become the most powerful fighter/ninja/alchemist/card gamer/etc. ever? Like someone who by all metrics is powerful and competent, just not the best or most powerful practitioner of their art?

SonicRulez
Aug 6, 2013

GOTTA GO FIST
Hunter x Hunter. Izuku Midoriya isn't the best in My Hero Academia either.

TwoPair
Mar 28, 2010

Pandamn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta
Grimey Drawer

SonicRulez posted:

Hunter x Hunter. Izuku Midoriya isn't the best in My Hero Academia either.

Technically, neither of those are finished though. Even though HxH will probably never be finished at this rate.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Yu Yu Hakusho also counts, so Togashi has at least one in the bag.

muscles like this!
Jan 17, 2005


Even in Naruto he isn't really the best ninja. His whole thing is that he's really good at bringing people together and his successes are due to team ups.

thetoughestbean
Apr 27, 2013

Keep On Shroomin

Knives Amilli posted:

Has there ever been a prominent shonen manga/anime that features a protagonist who doesnt become the most powerful fighter/ninja/alchemist/card gamer/etc. ever? Like someone who by all metrics is powerful and competent, just not the best or most powerful practitioner of their art?

You’re kind of limiting it by saying “prominent” but I can think of a couple right now. Tanjiro in Demon Slayer is never considered the “best” swordsman, just a very very good one. Emma in The Promised Neverland is one of three very smart young children. The main character of MHA: Vigilantes isn’t the most powerful by nature of it being a spinoff.

I can think of more but I’m not sure what counts as “prominent.” Kekkaishi, one of my favorite manga, ran for 35 volumes but it’s not exactly Shonen Jump levels of popular

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Knives Amilli posted:

Has there ever been a prominent shonen manga/anime that features a protagonist who doesnt become the most powerful fighter/ninja/alchemist/card gamer/etc. ever? Like someone who by all metrics is powerful and competent, just not the best or most powerful practitioner of their art?
The super-competent ultra-efficient ultimate warrior dude in One Piece is the first mate and often wanders off to get lost and/or horribly mutilated. The main character is a goofy rubber man whose power-ups include "biting into his thumb and inflating himself" and "stretchy arm distance punch."

Luffy has learned some super karate, but the one specific rare thing he seems to be able to do is also something several other characters have in their toolbox.

I do not think there are more prominent shonen mangas than One Piece.

muscles like this!
Jan 17, 2005


The standard cliche in shonen manga is that the main character is more of a genial gently caress up with some talent while the rival is the technically skilled one.

Air Skwirl
May 13, 2007

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed shitposting.
At least in the anime the main character in Robotech was absolutely not the best fighter pilot. Was that a manga first?

xK1
Dec 1, 2003


Skwirl posted:

At least in the anime the main character in Robotech was absolutely not the best fighter pilot. Was that a manga first?

No, Robotech/Macross was an anime first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macross

thetoughestbean
Apr 27, 2013

Keep On Shroomin
So uh, why the hell does Marvel keep The Punisher around? You’d think that they’d retire a guy who’s whole deal is “heroic” slaughter

Air Skwirl
May 13, 2007

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed shitposting.

thetoughestbean posted:

So uh, why the hell does Marvel keep The Punisher around? You’d think that they’d retire a guy who’s whole deal is “heroic” slaughter

Because people buy his comics.

Random Stranger
Nov 27, 2009



thetoughestbean posted:

So uh, why the hell does Marvel keep The Punisher around? You’d think that they’d retire a guy who’s whole deal is “heroic” slaughter

They sell a lot of auto decals to police departments.

(Just kidding, police use trademark infringing ones so Marvel doesn't get a dime from that.)

Madkal
Feb 11, 2008

I believe in all the ways that they say you can lose your body
Fallen Rib
Punisher works best when other heroes constantly beat him up.

Rhyno
Mar 22, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
The only good Punisher is Netflix Punisher.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
One of the only nice things about Secret Empire was that it felt totally believable that Frank Castle would just buy in and join Hydra without any armtwisting or trickery. I really hope that someday he only ever shows up as a villain.

MH Knights
Aug 4, 2007

Was the Punisher originally meant to be an outright villain? I seam to remember something about the Punisher being inspired by Death Wish and its derivatives and was supposed to be a commentary about murderous vigilantism. However like the white vigilante movies that inspired the Punisher a certain demographic latched on to the character and he was made an "anti-hero."

Madkal
Feb 11, 2008

I believe in all the ways that they say you can lose your body
Fallen Rib

MH Knights posted:

Was the Punisher originally meant to be an outright villain? I seam to remember something about the Punisher being inspired by Death Wish and its derivatives and was supposed to be a commentary about murderous vigilantism. However like the white vigilante movies that inspired the Punisher a certain demographic latched on to the character and he was made an "anti-hero."

I haven't read it but in his first appearance he tries to kill Spiderman and I think he is definitely set up as a villain, not a simple hero fights hero misunderstanding.

Zachack
Jun 1, 2000




I think the last Punisher comics I read were Rucka and Remender so I can't speak to the recent runs, but the character feels much less like a solidified character and more of a springboard for types of stories that a given writer wants to tell and where the marketing cache makes sense to use him. Ennis had him both as a sort of ridiculous semi-anti-MU and as a vessel for Ennis' love of war stories and interest in cold war poo poo/"realism" with MAX. Aaron took MAX to its logically grim end, I'm not certain as a reflection on Ennis's MAX, but definitely something. Remender wanted to play in the Monsterverse and try another variant of Daddy issues. Rucka did spy stories. Fraction was... zany Michael Bay action? 2099 was Dredd. Netflix was PTSD. Space Punisher.

There just isn't any seeming coherence outside of the core attributes of crime hatred, dead family, Vietnam, and high body count, and the last one is all that really matters. And I think because of that, if you retire him you'll just wind up resurrecting him in some other nearly identical form because someone will want to tell a spy story or a war story or a special forces story or whatever and while the look may change it's still just some character that will gun down entire militias, whether they're made up of mafioso, nazis, or space vampires, because someone wants to tell a story where that happens and hews more "realistic".

Madkal posted:

I haven't read it but in his first appearance he tries to kill Spiderman and I think he is definitely set up as a villain, not a simple hero fights hero misunderstanding.
IIRC it's more that he's set up as a threat and "other", not as a hero/villain. Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye I think were more "bad" at first, too.

Zachack fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Jun 6, 2020

muscles like this!
Jan 17, 2005


IIRC his first appearance he was being mislead by the Jackal, which is why he was after Spidey.

Edge & Christian
May 20, 2001

Earth-1145 is truly the best!
A world of singing, magic frogs,
high adventure, no shitposters
I think the issue here is that there are a lot of different Punishers, so trying to line it up to what the character was "originally meant to be" is kind of a fool's errand.

Gerry Conway has been pretty consistent in saying the inspiration was The Mack Bolan, Executioner series of novels. I'm not that familiar with them, but I don't think he's ever portrayed as a villain, secretly or otherwise.

Death Wish (the novel) came out a couple of years before Death Wish (the movie), and the author of the novel hated the movie (he wrote the book to show someone's "descent into madness", not to lionize the protagonist) so much he wrote a "sequel" book where the lead character is turned (justifiably) into Public Enemy #1.

The character might have been influenced in part on The Jackal (not the Spider-Man villain who Punisher is hired by, but the Jackal from The Day of the Jackal novel/movie), as a sort of amoral master assassin. The cover to ASM #129 looks a fair bit like one of the movie posters that would have been everywhere not long before Punisher debuted.

He seems to have always been pegged for the "antagonist turned hero" role, and he's teaming up with Spider-Man, however reluctantly, within six issues of his first appearance.

They flirted with him using "mercy bullets" (some sort of nebulous non-lethal rounds) for much of the 1970s so that he could he a proper Marvel antihero, though by the time they started really pushing the character they'd pretty much given that up. The character really has several distinct phases:

1974-1980: He's almost exclusively a supporting character in Amazing Spider-Man (appearing eight times in three years)
* he also appears a couple of times in Marvel's B&W magazine line during this time, in the same magazines as adaptations of the Executioner books

1982: Frank Miller uses him in Daredevil, where he becomes a real cult character. In the first ten years of existing, Punisher only appears a couple of dozen times (including cameos)

1986: Punisher gets his first mini-series, which is a hit

1987: Punisher gets his first ongoing series, primarily written by Mike Baron, who is an oddball libertarian and this absolutely reflects his version of Punisher who veers between blowing up crack dealers and taking out corrupt government officials, white collar criminals, Jihadis, Klan members, Not-Exactly-Jim-Jones, Not-Exactly-Charles-Manson, kind of whatever Baron is mad at that month. It's barely recognizable as The Punisher in 2020, as he's constantly getting beat up and outgunned, making wisecracks, falling in love with a beautiful woman that he can't quite commit to because of the memory of his dead wife every three issues. It's weird to read now.

1989: Barely a year later Punisher gets a second (and soon a third) ongoing series, plus all sorts of one-shots, graphic novels, mini-series, etc. Chuck Dixon settles in along with various other journeymen as the go-to writers and pretty much all of the idiosyncrasies (for good or ill) are churned away and he become the iconic Angry Stonefaced Murder Machine 1990s Antihero.

1993: The wheels have started falling off of the popularity of the Punisher, so they start coming up with increasingly elaborate crossovers to "change the status quo forever" which mostly results in doing a hamfisted version of Reign of the Supermen except with four different people 'carrying on the legacy of the Punisher' before Frank comes back to show them how it's done.

1995: All of the Punisher books are canceled, and for the next five years they keep trying to revamp the character in various unsuccessful ways: maybe he's an mind controlled government agent! Maybe he's going deep undercover as a Mob Hitman! Maybe he'll fight Sentinels and anti-mutant terrorists! Maybe he retires and becomes a priest!

1998: After lying dormant for a couple of years, Punisher gets revamped into an Avenging Angel (literally, with ghost guns and wings and poo poo) as part of the initial run of Marvel Knights books. This is not well received.

2000: Picking up the pieces of the aborted Angel Punisher, Garth Ennis starts writing Punisher, going from Marvel Knights to MAX and for several years Punisher effectively only existed in the MAX Universe, not the Marvel Universe proper. This seemed like a pretty decent deal for all parties.

2006: Mark Millar pitches WHAT IF WE BRING THE PUNISHER BACK as part of Civil War, and while there have obviously been ups and downs it's been a real square peg/round hole series of revamps ever since.

It's really hard to reconcile all of these versions of the Punisher, zero of them are "good guys" but the level of awfulness really waxes and wanes. I could never see the Ennis (or Baron, or Conway) version of Punisher going along with HYDRA in Secret Empire, but could 1000% see Chuck Dixon or Nathan Edmondson's version doing it. I'm grasping at straws to think of a significant storyline where the Punisher (not mind controlled) was a flatout villain though.

Long story short, the Netflix Punisher wasn't as far afield from (some) of the comics as people who have mostly read modern Marvel might think, Secret Empire is still very bad, and writing Punisher as anything other than an utterly broken tragic antihero is bad on multiple levels, not the least of which that too many people have proven utterly incapable of reading him as such.

And yes, Punisher's first appearance (where he's trying to kill Spider-Man) sets him up as a vigilante who signs on to work with the Jackal because the Daily Bugle accused Spider-Man of murdering Norman Osborn, and the Jackal sold it as "I'm next, please protect me and stop this bad guy" and Punisher realizes by the end of the issue that Jackal is bad and Spider-Man's not a murderer.

Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Jun 6, 2020

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

MH Knights posted:

Was the Punisher originally meant to be an outright villain? I seam to remember something about the Punisher being inspired by Death Wish and its derivatives and was supposed to be a commentary about murderous vigilantism. However like the white vigilante movies that inspired the Punisher a certain demographic latched on to the character and he was made an "anti-hero."

And for a while the Punisher used "mercy bullets" (a concept swiped from the Doc Savage pulps), which made it more reasonable that heroes like Spider-Man would be able to fight alongside him occasionally.

Random Stranger
Nov 27, 2009



Edge & Christian posted:

1987: Punisher gets his first ongoing series, primarily written by Mike Baron, who is an oddball libertarian and this absolutely reflects his version of Punisher who veers between blowing up crack dealers and taking out corrupt government officials, white collar criminals, Jihadis, Klan members, Not-Exactly-Jim-Jones, Not-Exactly-Charles-Manson, kind of whatever Baron is mad at that month. It's barely recognizable as The Punisher in 2020, as he's constantly getting beat up and outgunned, making wisecracks, falling in love with a beautiful woman that he can't quite commit to because of the memory of his dead wife every three issues. It's weird to read now.

It's weird to me that Baron wrote this and Nexus at the same time where Nexus is given a far firmer foundation for the justification of his killings (the people he goes after typically have body counts in the millions due to being politicians and military leaders who lead violent regimes and before going after them he experiences the deaths of all of their victims), and Nexus shows what an enormous toll those killings still take on him. It's like they started from the same place but they're philosophical opposites.

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


There have been many versions of the Punisher, but there's only one that is "my Punisher".

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



I was just about to post that.

Edge & Christian
May 20, 2001

Earth-1145 is truly the best!
A world of singing, magic frogs,
high adventure, no shitposters
That was from (the first) time they had the government MK-Ultra him into being crazy. I can't remember if that was a retcon or not.

muscles like this!
Jan 17, 2005


Wasn't that from Daredevil where he was acting super weird, gets sent to prison and then in his mini they reveal it was drugs?

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


Edge & Christian posted:

That was from (the first) time they had the government MK-Ultra him into being crazy. I can't remember if that was a retcon or not.

It was a retcon, yeah. Bill Mantlo just decided to have the character melt down because he saw it as a natural endpoint of being a serial killing vigilante, and then someone else went "nuh uh!". I think it was a year later, so it wasn't an immediate retcon either.

muscles like this! posted:

Wasn't that from Daredevil where he was acting super weird, gets sent to prison and then in his mini they reveal it was drugs?

He got sent to the psych ward, then in his mini he's in prison because the drugs wore off.

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Big Bad Voodoo Lou
Jan 1, 2006

Edge & Christian posted:

I think the issue here is that there are a lot of different Punishers, so trying to line it up to what the character was "originally meant to be" is kind of a fool's errand.

Gerry Conway has been pretty consistent in saying the inspiration was The Mack Bolan, Executioner series of novels. I'm not that familiar with them, but I don't think he's ever portrayed as a villain, secretly or otherwise.

1974-1980: He's almost exclusively a supporting character in Amazing Spider-Man (appearing eight times in three years)
* he also appears a couple of times in Marvel's B&W magazine line during this time, in the same magazines as adaptations of the Executioner book.

My dad read literally hundreds of Mack Bolan novels throughout the '80s and '90s (my childhood and teen years). They were pulpy "men's adventure" novels, and I think Bolan's family was also killed by Mafia-related crossfire just like Frank's, inspiring him to become a vigilante.

Back in the days of Waldenbooks, B. Dalton Bookseller, and used bookstores everywhere, my dad was always picking up a new Mack Bolan novel or hunting down yellowing older editions while carting me around to comic shops and small conventions in hotel ballrooms. He liked comics as a kid, but was too poor to collect them back then, so he encouraged my reading and collecting while reading and collecting his own stuff. There was a related series called Phoenix Force that he also liked, and then there were big Stony Man novels where Mack Bolan, Phoenix Force, and Able Team did teamups. My dad loved it when those came out. Man, I haven't thought about those in years, and he eventually graduated to Robert B. Parker's Spenser and Lee Child's Jack Reacher.

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