What made Proletariat go bad after this?
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Actually, it’s only every hundred years you get to change the first digit of your age!
“Oh, that’s me!” I love their banter so much. 
I like the implication that Hulk is not a Haka fan, but an Alpha fan.
“That’s aged well.” Oh my god. XD
I am so pleased to hear that Proletariat has always had a pet dog who is a very important part of his character since the very beginning. :’)
I hope we learn everything about Miss Medusa someday. :V
Ahh, asbestos! Cures what ails ya! I suddenly want every golden age Absolute Zero story ever.
I like that Proletariat gets a First Appearance variant right off the bat. 
I’m super into the Bear showing up in Perestroika, great idea. I could see a story where they break him out of prison, expecting that he will indeed want to return the glory of Mother Russia, then he betrays them because, like they said, he doesn’t care about that, but was totally williing to play along until the time was right.
I am also VERY HERE for post-Oblivaeon DE!
Definitely want Neil Gaiman’s Proletariat.
Infinitor in the Fae Realm when
Yeah, I think that’s a good explanation for Tempest.
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Regarding “cover games” during the Golden Age, they were at least as bad then as they are now. For ex, the IRL March 1945 issue of Action Comics (a decent parallel to Justice Comics) features a text-free cover with an image of Superman rescuing Lois from a giant eagle that has nothing to do with the contents of the book. Pretty though, aside from the piss-yellow sky as a backdrop.
And while Action is more of an anthology book than (say) Superman, both of them regularly include multiple back-up stories and other features, including text-only pieces. It would be almost unheard of to only have two or three stories - Action included five for a dime plus a few one and two page features. People wouldn’t spend ten cents on a book that didn’t deliver some variety, and even more dedicated books would feature at least three stories about the main character every issue.
Very, very different era in terms of reader expectations, and there are a lot of stylistic things that we take for granted that either didn’t exist or were sporadically employed. Proper thought balloons may be out of fashion these days, but they barely even existed back then. Not that the era is without innovation, eg the Water Sprite in that Action’s Superman story borders his word balloons in bubbles, which I assume was intended to represent a burbling “accent” - and he speaks in rhyme on top of it.
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I’m glad my letter got Proletariat ear marked for having at least some moment in OblivAeon along with other villains.
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Honestly, Bear strikes me as the Russian gangster BEFORE the fall of the USSR, which means a lot more anti-authority. Sure, the modern Bratva is rather weird since it recruited (and was largely taken over by) former Soviet military and intelligence, but there’s a LONG history of “No Cooperation With Government.” I think it’s more likely that Bear and Perestroika go to war…
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I’d forgotten that Proletariat was introduced that late in the war and was a villain in his second appearance; I’d had a vague thought that he was introduced in '42 or '43, appeared a few times as a hero, then vanished only to return later. (And Christopher is correct - the multiverse recap lists his second appearance as 1958, not 1948; it was just a misremembering on the part of the letter-writer.) There’s something very funny about the idea of Sentinel Comics writers developing this cool new hero, and then literally months later the war is over and the Soviets are bad guys again and they drop him like a hot potato.
The discussion about “present-day” Proletariat definitely makes me hopeful that we’ll get some more things out soon that let us move the timeline forwards. Right now, we still don’t have the names of the 2018 launch titles aside from Neighborhood Watch, and we’re still missing a lot of the content of the 2017 stories. The downside of a production schedule is that the “present day” of Sentinel Comics is slowly slipping into the past!
And finally, the discussion about Tempest makes me wonder if there’s a place in the post-Oblivaeon timeline to introduce a Maerynian character who is trans, in the sense that they commit to one phase of the Maerynian gender pattern instead of flowing through them as most Maeryians do; possibly someone who didn’t realize what their discomfort was until they came to Earth and discovered the concept of a lifelong gender. That would be a really neat inversion of the tendency of comics to include “trans” characters where it’s just what their species is, which I absolutely agree with Christopher feels unearned as a rule. (There’s a whole thing about “the non-binary character is always the shapeshifter and that’s lazy” in queer fantasy fandom.)
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Just a mistake on my part. Even listening initially I thought he said the right year from my letter so I was confused why he was confused by the year.
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gendersolid
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I remember there was a Star Trek Next Generation episode with a mono gendered race that had a 'taboo" underground subcommunity that chose gender roles.
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That’d be The Outcast. Met with rather mixed receptions at time of airing, both within the LGBTQA+ community and beyond it.
I mostly remember it getting compared to Left Hand of Darkness a lot despite the species and societies being portrayed being radically different from one another on a fundamental level.
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