Bets on whether the Big Two each have similar charts for their own properties that editorial uses to plan their real-world schedules? It would explain so much. 
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Friv, if any villains do not show up in the crossovers would you think of declaring that they were quietly dropped and have not seen print in 20 years?
Probably not, unless I had an idea in the Diamond Age for a grand return, or there was a villain I really wanted to get rid of. There are forty-eight villains that I’ve done up, after all, and anywhere from 0 to 15 of them will be in the crossovers.
In general, the idea of this is that the villains I’m showing off are the most enduring ones in the line, and these crossovers only cover one event for every three years. There are a few exceptions for villains who don’t have a lot of airtime but who massively change the setting, like the Scion of Silence, but most of the time they’re assumed to be still around doing things. Like, I don’t think I’ve mentioned the Driver since the Silver Age, but I assume that he shows up at least once every couple years all the way through the 70s, probably is a bit less common in the 80s, gets some kind of unpopular 90s makeover and then returns to form in the 2000s.
The villains are only likely to actually vanish if their heroes are pulled out of comics for a while, or if vanishing and returning is a big part of their storyline.
Was there someone in particular you were thinking of?
a little curious what DeSabra is up to.
second question- assuming that Venture exists in the same world as Sentinels there would be allusions or true crossovers in the OblivAeon event giant splash pages- What Venture character do you think would have been most obviously featured as a “random background hero”.
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Well, it’s not on the schedule but I’m happy to do a mini-dive! We know the Dread Dynasty is a recurring and major presence in the late 60s and through the 70s. When Covert Tacticsreboots in 1985, that’s likely to bring a minor reboot to them, too, since they don’t have as long a history with Madame Liberty any more. In the revised timeline, she fought them as part of AEGIS before quitting, and they’re a secondary Covert Tactics foe. I’m going to say that in 1985-1988, we get one major DeSabre story and two smaller ones.
In 1989, DeSabre and the Dynasty are part of a Knightgrave two-parter in which X-Calibre tries to join them (discussed briefly in his writeup.) This leads to DeSabre trying to recruit Mordred as a member of the Dread Dynasty in 1990, which in turn leads to the Dynasty becoming secondary recurring antagonists to Knightgrave throughout 1991-1995, although I think that the writers develop a new Dynasty member to be Knightgrave’s primary foil, and DeSabre is a more minor presence. DeSabre himself remains in Covert Tactics, and there are going to be a couple of stories in which Madame Liberty uses her secret AEGIS access to find out what he’s up to and stop him.
Around 1995-1998 the Dynasty fades a bit as AEGIS increasingly becomes the primary threat to Covert Tactics and Knightgrave folds. They make one appearance in Fish Out Of Water, and Madame Liberty probably has a storyline using them to weaken AEGIS in the 1998-2000 period. After Covert Tactics #200, one of the final storylines before the comic is cancelled is Dynasty-focused, with hints they were going to be the main antagonist for the next run, but instead they pop up in Liberty’s Dream with one small story feeding into a larger one just under a year later, establishing an extradimensional base of operations and oppressing the magical locals; the team manages to drive them out as part of their nation-building activities.
After that it’s the Plutonium Age, so we will see! I expect they get at least one crossover, even if it’s not one of the big five we’re going to focus on.
Ohh, that is a good question. I have three options:
- Skybreaker is in a back panel throwing a spear. He’s distinctive enough to be recognized and one of the longest-running characters, but his powers aren’t as flashy and they can say he’s just some fae character.
- Hyperstar is there, in a manner which allows her to be a deniable Legacy alt.
- Some Sentinels artist who also drew for Venture includes a Plutonium Age character they invented who never caught on.
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To an extent it is just the limits of Hero Forge but we are getting an idea of what Xur’Tani uniforms look like so I figure one of their uniforms in a color scheme we have not seen yet or worn by M’kk, Hugh or Portja would also be a good center page not hiding at all cameo.
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Oh, that’s good. I like that a lot.
History of Venture Comics, Pt. 13: The Plutonium Age
First up, our conversation about the age itself, and how it affected Sentinel Comics! I discussed this briefly above, but more in-depth: the Plutonium Age is a term I use and which I originally saw online, but which is not in highly widespread use. It describes the period in modern comics starting around Identity Crisis in 2004 and House of M in 2005, and covers the period in which the status quo was constantly exploding and being rebuilt, with a new company-wide crossover every year or two to try and draw eyeballs. My general feeling is that the Plutonium Age isn’t actually over, but I think we’re in a cooldown period for it, with crossovers starting to be between a handful of titles again rather than with literally everyone. I have also seen this referred to as the Event Age, for basically the same reason. Other people peg the turnover of ages as being between the Iron Age and the Diamond Age around 2012, with a shift to digital comics, an increasing focus on cinematic tie-ins and comics being changed to reflect live-action counterparts, and a desire to blend Silver Age optimism with Iron Age grittiness. But essentially, there’s no real agreement about what age of comics history we’re currently in.
One of the decisions explicitly made by Christopher and Adam is that Sentinel Comics doesn’t have a Plutonium Age, because Sentinel Comics largely avoids the escalating company-wide crossovers, constant reboots, and stunt events that dominated the late 2000s and 2010s and doesn’t have the same cinematic kickoff. Instead, Sentinel Comics simply expands at a steady clip for fourteen years. Disparation Vol. 2 launches in 2002, Ra becomes Arcane Tales again in 2006, and Alpha: the Wolf Woman and Cosmic Concurrence join the team in 2008, taking us to twelve monthly and one bi-monthly comic.
2011-2012 is a bit more confusing. We definitely get five new books (Southwest Sentinels, Time and Time Again, Prime Wardens, The Guise Book, and Revocorp Presents) and one cancellation (Dark Watch). But the lead-up to the relaunch of Prime Wardens is the last time that either Fanatic or Savage Haka are mentioned anywhere, with no specific notes about their cancellation. They aren’t mentioned in the lead-up to Oblivaeon either, so I think they’re cancelled here, but I’m not sure. So we could be anywhere from fourteen to sixteen monthly titles, one bi-monthly, and various limited runs.
Finally, a new Dark Watch launches in 2015, along with the reboot of the Southwest Sentinels through the Deepest Space limited series into Void Guard, taking us to a total of fifteen to seventeen monthly titles, one bi-monthly, and the limited runs. For those who are curious, this is about a quarter the size of Marvel or DC in the same era. All of these comics are then cancelled in 2016 and 2017 in and around Oblivaeon in a company-wide reboot.
Obviously, Venture is doing quite a bit worse than that, thanks to the chaos. And speaking of chaos, we begin with…
Randomizers:
Options: 49 (Heretic/Razorline), 82 (Scion of Silence), 71 (Empress of Ash), 21 (Drifter)
Cancellation: 16 (Liberty’s Dream)
New Comic: 20 - 16 (New Solo Hero), 8 (Classic Title Reboot: Vanguards!)
Ashes to Ashes (2005)
Main Comic: Twilight Carnival #243-250, March-October 2005
Major Crossovers: Earthwatch #54-57 (Apr-July), Champions of Truth #392-395 (June-Sep), Liberty’s Dream #32-36 (June-Oct),
Minor Crossovers: Cryptic Trails #32-33 (Apr-May), Spectacular Skybreaker #221 (May), Vanguards (Vol. 2) #1 (Aug)
The first major crossover of the Plutonium Era was a magic-focused one that ran through much of 2005, touching on seven different comics and ultimately collected in six trade paperbacks (one of which also included the classic Sovereign of Secrets finale from 1984 to help explain the setup.) Writers had noticed that the hero Heretic, who had made a handful of minor appearances since the end of Remnants ten years earlier, shouldn’t have powers according to the rules they had set up - the Sovereign of Secrets was gone, and they had been the source of Heretic’s abilities.
It seemed like a good time for a bit of 90s nostalgia and a test of major crossover events, so the Ashes to Ashes event unfolded in the pages of Twilight Carnival, focusing on Heretic and pushing the usual main cast to supporting roles. Heretic, who was still trying to atone for mistaking the Sovereign for a holy being, discovered that his powers did not stem from the Sovereign at all - they drew from the Empress of Ash, and the light and flames that he channeled were Her terrible forces! The Empress was planning to use the Heretic as a link to devour the Sovereign’s realm, adding their power to her own and becoming an unstoppable threat to every dimension. As her power reached out, mingling the frenzy of flame with wishcrafting, Heretic was forced to turn to the least likely ally imaginable - the Scion of Silence. Together, and supported by the Twilight Carnival, the hero and the villain delved into the dimensions, working to break the link that the Empress had forged between her own magic and the Sovereign’s.
Three major storylines branched off from this event. In the pages of Earthwatch, Nightguard and Gale Force were caught in the Empress’s new magic, drawn into a vision of a world in which their powers were burned away, leaving them as civilians in their ideal bodies. At the same time, monstrous forces using their powers attacked the rest of the team. In the end, the two heroes were forced to sacrifice their dreams to save their friends, but they came out of the story in a new relationship and with even more determination. In Champions of Truth, the Empress assailed the Earth’s greatest heroes, her forces threatening to burn the world to keep them from assisting her enemies; only quick action by Wonderer was able to protect the team as they developed countermeasures. And in Liberty’s Dream, the four heroes were joined by Moon Angel, whose powers were retconned to be fae-related, as they fought to save worlds on the fringes of existence from being absorbed as the twin realms of the Sovereign and the Empress pressed in on them from both sides. Greenheart and Skybreaker also had solo events in their own comics, and the newly-launched Vanguards Volume 2 began with the team, now including Partisan once again, dispatched to the Jotari realm to save the provisional government from the newly-reinforced Cult of the Flames.
In the grand conclusion, Heretic did what comics fans joked he did in every issue - he sacrificed himself, cutting off the Empress’s influence, becoming the lock on the Sovereign’s tomb and sealing the Scion away once again when he tried to betray the hero and unleash his master. This time, however, Heretic understood that a thread of power was needed to prevent the dimensional god from gathering its power and breaking free in another few years. As such, the spirit of the Heretic went searching for a new hero to bear his mantle, one who would be willing to give up their soul to save the world, channelling dark power for the greater good. The new Heretic series, featuring the ghostly Heretic and his new disciple, would launch in November 2005.
Behind the Scenes
Our first event turned out to be a magical one! There has been some interest expressed in Heretic getting his own series, so when he showed up at the very beginning, and alongside the source of his powers no less, I had to go for it (doubly when we had a new hero debuted after the event!) I went back and forth for a bit on whether I wanted to have the Drifter or the Empress be the third character; with the Drifter, it becomes more of a mirror worlds thing, whereas for the Empress it would be a “one great monster tries to eat another, using the Heretic as her tool.” But since our other new comic was Vanguards, and they were Empress-related, we went for the latter. I like how it turned out, but boy, it must have been exhausting to try to read all of it.
Also: poor Madame Liberty. Her titles get cancelled a lot.
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Understatement. And the publishing industry of the SC meta-setting is even less comprehensible based on what we know of it (which isn’t much, since C&A aren’t much interested in digging into circulation numbers, distribution channels, and corporate maneuvering - all the stuff that really decides where the industry goes). Just look at it - by fiat SC got to avoid the disastrous run of event comics that saw IRL publishers suffer a steady loss of readership throughout the Plutonium Age and yet they still felt it necessary to do a company-wide reboot with Oblivaeon because of sales? That’s the equivalent to DC’s own reboot in 85-86 and something they took over decade to really recover from - but SC’s timing means they had less than three years to establish their post-Oblivaeon books before COVID arrived. And they seem to have come through that without much of a hitch despite the fact that (unlike the Big Two IRL) SC isn’t owned (and propped up by) much larger media companies interested in keeping them afloat as IP farms. You need more suspension of disbelief to accept all that than you do to believe the terralunar impulsion beam was a good idea.
TL;DR I wouldn’t worry about Venture Comics faux publishing history not making too much sense when held up next to the real world history of the industry trends. Your inspiration for the project is already way far out there.
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I don’t have a quote on-hand, but my memory is that Oblivaeon happened because of the same somewhat-lucky foresight that prevented Sentinel Comics from falling into crisis crossovers; their sales weren’t falling yet, but the increasingly tangled storylines were threatening to overcomplicate everything they were doing, and editorial wanted a hard reset to keep readership strong. I believe that the result of that is that they don’t have to rebuild post-Oblivaeon; the reset pushes sales up, not down. As a result, they’re in a good place to ride out Covid (although, you know, they didn’t know about Covid when they wrote that timeline.)
I’ll have some thoughts on the odd post-Oblivaeon world of Sentinels when I get to the Diamond Age, though.
edit: Oh, and one advantage of being a much smaller publishing company is that Sentinels probably doesn’t need a big company to keep them afloat. They aren’t trying to get people to buy 75 comics a month, so as long as their lines are relatively successful, they can manage a stable bullpen. You can get by on ten hits when you only have eighteen comics; Dynamite Entertainment sure didn’t have the problems that Marvel and DC did in the mid-2000s.
Randomizers:
Options: 39 (Shockeye), 66 (Avarice), 81 (Maggot Core), 2 (Kid Liberty)
Cancellation: 12 (Related to 2nd Character)
New Comic: 17 (Team of New Characters)
Shock and Awe (October 2007 to February 2008)
Main Comic: Earthwatch #84-87 and Champions of Truth #420-424, October 2007 to February 2008
Major Crossovers: Cryptic Trails #62-65 (Oct 2007 to Jan 2008), Spectacular Skybreaker #251-253 (Nov 2007 to Jan 2008)
Minor Crossovers: Twilight Carnival #275 (Nov 2007), Heretic #26 (Dec 2007), Company Town #227-228 (Dec 2007 - Jan 2008)
The second status-shaking grand event of the Plutonium Era was one that was meant to be talked about for years to come, and it sure was.
In the rather ill-chosen pages of Champions of Truth #420, Avarice once again escaped from jail, determined to bring down the Champions and demonstrate his mastery over energies of all sorts. This time, however, he made use of experimental technology acquired by remnants of AEGIS; Kid Liberty, currently working on his own with his patron busy off-screen in the various magical realms she was protecting, discovered the theft and went to his allies in Earthwatch for help, only for them to arrive just in time to see Avarice successfully steal the powers of the entire Champions of Truth team! A last-ditch effort from Shockeye disrupted the power transfer, causing the powers of the Champions to go wild, abandoning the original heroes and passing into an entirely new collection of people.
The story unfolded along two paths. In Earthwatch, Shockeye led his team to chase down Avarice, who was now empowered with a devastating array of abilities and wrecking havoc. Meanwhile, in Champions of Truth, Kid Liberty spent three issues tracking down the six people who had inherited the Champions’ powers, gathering them into a new team to join the fight. Ultimately, the new Champions defeated Avarice and returned his stolen powers to their original holders - but because of Shockeye’s interference, there were now two teams of people with each set of powers. The original Champions were still extremely weak and temporarily retired until they could recover, and an entirely new team was unfurled: Kid Liberty and the Champions of Freedom!
Major side stories for Shock and Awe included storylines in Cryptic Trails and Spectacular Skybreaker featuring the nearly-powerless Greenheart and Skybreaker relying on their supporting casts to fight crime, which gradually shifted into storylines about them training and slowly rebuilding their capabilities. Minor stories included the Wonderer appearing in Twilight Carnival, intending to work at the circus until his powers returned, the new Heretic getting drawn into the chaos and lending a hand, and a Company Town storyline in which the Rogues had to protect Flatfoot’s inactive chassis, while Fly Boy dealt with the loss of his mechanical genius. Hyperstar became a temporary supporting cast member to Earthwatch, returning to lend her tactical experience and personal journey with the recovering ex-villains.
Behind the Scenes
This storyline took some consideration. Based on the results, the middle character would either be Avarice or the Maggot Core, which meant cancelling either Champions of Truth or Celestial Travelers. I’m enjoying the fact that Celestial Travelers has been running non-stop since 1939 so I want to keep it around, but losing Champions of Truth this early in the Plutonium Age felt weird.
But a comics company ending their popular flagship team in order to start an entirely new team of cool 2000s characters that you will surely love to pieces? Now that’s comics! If Kid Liberty and the Champions of Freedom make it far enough I will bother to define any of them, I promise. For now, imagine six super-cool 2000s versions of Skybreaker, Greenheart, Flatfoot, Fly Boy, Wonderer and Hyperstar who were designed by executives that were absolutely certain that they would be the new hotness. Also, I promise that if I am given the chance I am cancelling them.
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Well, yes, but that’s apples and oranges there. Dynamite didn’t even exist before 2003 so they were a brand new company with no pre-existing baggage (including debt, a huge issue for the Big Two). They relied heavily on public domain and licensed characters for their output at first before adding some very valuable creator-owned properties and eventually buying up the Chaos Comics line (barring Lady Death herself) and later the Gold Key heroes while pursuing other bargain licenses as their reps grew. To this day they really don’t focus on original superhero comics as much as they do on adaptations from other media, licensed IP crossovers, reprints of material from other companies and (if we’re being honest) sleazecake books with plenty of skin showing. They’ve avoided committing heavily to ongoing “cape” series, the part of the market that’s been suffering the most shrinkage over the last 20-ish years - completely unlike the Big Two IRL and (in the game setting) Sentinel Comics, who all live or die based on how superhero books are selling.
Dynamite is successful, but their approach and focus is so different from most companies it’s hard to compare them to anyone outside of maybe Dark Horse, and even that’s a bit of a stretch.
Regrettably true. That, I can believe happening.
You just know there’s bound to be one of them that becomes inexplicably popular and lingers on far past the rest to the eternal annoyance of fans of the original owner of those powers.
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Well…
Randomizers:
Options: 41 (Solace), 79 (Greyheart), 7 (Dr. Cosmos), 21 (Drifter)
Cancellation: 16 (Newest Comic)
New Comic: 4 (Team Based On Cancelled Title)
Night of Lost Souls (2010)
Main Comic: Night of Lost Souls #1-6, March - October 2010
Major Crossovers: Spectacular Skybreaker #279-284 (March - Sept 2010), Celestial Travels #854-857 (Apr - Aug 2010)
Minor Crossovers: Heretic #54-55 (Apr - May 2010), Earthwatch #124-125 (Apr - May 2010), Company Town #256-258 (May - July 2010), Vanguards (Vol. 2) #58-60 (May - July 2010), Twilight Carnival #306-307 (June-July 2010), Cryptic Trails #94-96(June - Aug 2010), Protean #150-151 (July - Aug 2010)
By late 2009, it was clear to the editorial board of Venture that the Champions of Freedom had been a huge mistake. Sales for the title were cratering, while sales of Spectacular Skybreaker and Cryptic Trails had risen as their writers addressed the heroes’ slow recoveries. In an emergency meeting, it was agreed that Champions of Freedom would end with Issue #24, and a major crossover would re-establish the original Champions and bolster their lineup. Venture’s lead editor decided to make this the biggest event since Sovereign of Silence, declaring that every title would take part in this crossover. Thus was born the Night of Lost Souls.
Despite the title, the Night of Lost Souls was a dimensional story, in which a dimensional reflection sent waves of energy into the bodies of a variety of deceased heroes, villains, and supporting characters who had substantially travelled between dimensions, re-animating them as undead-like beings empowered by dimensional forces, with shadows of their original personalities. Led by perennial destructive force Greyheart, the Lost Souls attempted to trigger a dimensional calamity large enough to sustain their resurrection and grant them immortality. Their first attack was against the Champions of Freedom, all of whom were either injured and taken out of action or kill and resurrected as zombies themselves; Kid Liberty escaped with the injured, taking them to recover safely.
In Night of Lost Souls, as undead creatures attacked on all sides, Solace and Dr. Cosmos travelled into the magical Well of Souls together, seeking any ghosts of the dead who lingered to launch a counter-attack by having them possess their zombie bodies. Her sojourn culminated in the return of every hero who had died over the past seventy years of comics (as well as more than a few villains) who fought the forces inhabiting their bodies and then helped return the Lost Souls to the grave before fading away.
In the comic’s major crossovers, Skybreaker pushed himself to recover his powers as he struggled with his inability to help his wife, and the Celestial Travelers dealt with the interstellar repercussions of the dimensional rifts as interstellar travel was assaulted by undead forces. Most of the minor crossovers were instead based on the heroes dealing with enemies from their pasts seemingly returning to life, although two comics delved deeper into it: Protean, who was forced to deal with Singularity’s attempt to hijack the dimensional calamity for her own ends, and to Heretic, who was able to use her powers to channel those energies away from undead as her predecessor inhabited his old body to help her.
In the aftermath of the event, the Champions of Truth reformed, and the title picked up its numbering as though Kid Liberty and the Champions of Freedom has been part of the running, returning with #499. All six original Champions returned, but their ranks were bolstered with the return of Madame Liberty, and the addition of Kid Liberty and Solace. With nine members, the new comic tended to focus on a few heroes at a time, with the rest serving as minor background characters in any given issue.
Night of Lost Souls was hugely popular, but it was also plagued by organizational issues and delays. It took eight months for all six issues to release, creating timing issues across the board; Celestial Travels had to insert an older comic in the middle to keep up, while Spectacular Skybreaker simply ended up spoiling an event in Issue #5 and a few of the secondary issues referred in passing to events that hadn’t happened yet.
Behind the Scenes
Ahahahahahahahah!
I swear to God when I made my previous decision I did not know this was going to happen. I knew there was a chance. Three out of nineteen options were the new Champions, and three more could be if I had a crossover character that could reasonably apply to the new volume. But that was still less than one in three, and the chance would drop as soon as another new comic started. But nope! The Champions of Freedom are gone after twenty-four issues, replaced by a new team based on the cancelled title… so the original Champions of Truth are back, bay-bee!
It’s like the randomizer knows me.
Anyway, this ends up being the biggest crossover yet, an attempt to fix a huge problem by returning to the status quo after a couple years, and then using that return to build an even-bigger collection of Champions of Truth by bringing back classic Madame Liberty and finally addressing why Skybreaker’s wife isn’t joining him on his larger team.
One of the “newer” Champions might stick around as a sidekick or successor to one of the veteran ones, if there’s a good Diamond Age slot for them. We shall see.
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The impersonal forces of probability are probably trying to make up for that long string of option-restricting duplicate rolls you had way back when. That was pretty ridiculous IIRC.
If only we could count on the dice to free us from IRL mistakes. Is Peter married to MJ again? No? REROLL! Secret Wars II? REROLL! Civil War II? Dammit Marvel, stop doing sequel series. REROLL!
Getting a line-wide crossover series done only two months behind schedule and with just a handful of glitches would be amazing for the Big Two, but I suppose Venture has a lot fewer titles to deal with. And your back-from-the dead plot sounds so much better than that nonsense with the Black Lanterns in DC a while back. Come to think of it, I did an environment that might work for the part of this where the Lost Souls are trying to trigger a dimensional calamity. Probably needs some tweaks.
I nominate “Netizen” from over on the purple site (you should really mirror those possible names over here for people who don’t read both forums) on the basis of the name alone. Fully worthy of inclusion on that never-published version of Marvel’s New Warriors alongside Screentime and his “internet gas” induced Google powers.
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Oh, right! These are subject to change if I think up better/more ridiculous options, but the current draft lineup is: Greensleeves, Stormrider, Netizen, Incarnator, Sunbeam, and Mathcore.
Of those six, a Diamond Age returnee would probably end up being either Greensleeves or Netizen. Greensleeves has the advantage of being a Golden Age sidekick callback, which might let her join Greenheart’s supporting cast with a bit of a buff-up. Netizen, as you note, is a strong contender based on having the best name of the bunch.
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I already know that I both love and hate Mathcore.
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Yeah, Mathcore’s just a hair behind Netizen for me as wonderfully awful names go.
I had a player use Sunbeam for a PC in a game I ran, so I can’t say anything negative about that one.
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I feel like Mathcore and Netizen (dial-up, of course) are coming straight out of a mid-90s PBS show and they’re gonna help us find Carmen San Diego, wherever in the world she is. Sunbeam is there for support with bread-based powers.
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Cripes, I hadn’t even thought of that connection. Do they even make that brand anymore?
“Never fear, fellow heroes, I’ll use the power of carbohydrates to make the villains feel sluggish and bloated!”
EDIT: Answering my own question, Sunbeam Bread is still around as a franchise made by regional bakeries, which explains why I haven’t seen it locally in decades. One of the licensees is hilariously named Bimbo Bakeries USA, which seems a bit off-tone for the property’s Little Miss Sunbeam logo mascot.
On a grimmer note, if wiki is to be believed soldiers who’d avoided injury in Viet Nam supposedly referred to themselves as members of the “Little Miss Sunbeam Club” - a reference to the brand’s advertising boast that the bread had “no holes” in it - voids in bread being more common back in the day than they are now. Equating “holes” from bullets and shrapnel with voids in bread is some pretty dark humor there.
Sunbeam is the one who is most wobbly name-wise; my vague idea is that she was a relentlessly positive person that people around her sarcastically called Sunbeam and decided to claim the name as a nickname just to prove that she wasn’t going to let the haters get her down, and then she got Hyperstar’s powers and was just, “yay, I’m a cosmic superhero now, the name works, we are going to have so much fun fighting bad guys!”
She was… not beloved in comics fanbases at the time, although I suspect she has a cult following in the 2020s who look back on her with wry fondness.
Mathcore is literally a musical prodigy who inherits Fly Boy’s mechanical genius and becomes some kind of music-tech guy. He’s VERY COOL and EXTREMELY HIP and DEFINITELY NOT WRITTEN BY A FORTY-YEAR OLD TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE LATEST MUSICAL TRENDS. He does not develop a wryly fond fanbase later.
(Oh no, I’m developing personalities and ideas for these heroes, I’m going to have to do something with them later… quick, pivot! Pivot!)
Randomizers:
Options: 8 (Wavelength), 76 (Rougarou), 87 (Jimmy Hix), 54 (The Huntsman)
Cancellation: 7 (Earthwatch)
New Comic: 3 (Solo based on cancelled title)
Concrete Jungle (2014-2015)
Main Comic: Concrete Jungle #1-8 (September 2014 to April 2015)
Major Crossovers: Company Town #309-313 (Oct 2014 - Feb 2015), Twilight Carnival #359-363
Minor Crossovers: Cryptic Trails #155 (Sep 2014), Protean #202-203 (Nov-Dec 2014), Heretic #111-112 (Jan-Feb 2015)
The success of Night of Lost Souls in 2010 led to a wave of annual crossovers in Venture Comics, but most were not particularly popular. A Protean and Company Town crossover in 2011 featuring Earthwatch and the revived Champions of Truth failed to make waves, as did a space-themed crossover following the ‘Parole Granted’ finale storyline of Earthwatch in 2013, in which the heroes of Earthwatch were granted full pardons, going on their respective ways as Shockeye and Synthesis began to expand the Earthwatch program to work with more incarcerated villains, becoming secondary characters in the comics of the heroes connected to those villains.
The space left by Earthwatch was filled with a few limited run series and crossovers, but the largest ended up being 2014-2015’s Concrete Jungle, a magical-technological blend taking place in Ferristown. In Concrete Jungle, the Huntsman was summoned by Headmaster, who wished to put his pupils through a particularly harrowing challenge - proving their worth by competing against the greatest hunter in the world. Two teams were formed, one led by the Huntsman and one led by Jimmy Hix, and the Headmaster unveiled their intended prey - the captured Rougarou and the werewolves he had been turning for weeks!
A horde of werewolves were unleashed into Ferristown, overwhelming the local heroes and throwing the city into chaos, as Jimmy and the Huntsman used their respective talents in an attempt to hunt down Rougarou and prove themselves. Overwhelmed, the Rogue Agents called the Twilight Carnival for help, and the hunt unfolded through the pages of three comics. Minor crossovers included a Protean story in which Carlie was bitten and Wendy had to find a way to cure her, a Heretic story in which Heretic struggled to keep the werewolves from escaping the city and spreading the curse, and one issue of Cryptic Tales in which Greenheart investigated a mysterious rash of werewolf sightings.
Concrete Jungle ended with a classic twist, as Protean’s werewolf cure was wielded by Dawn Rider to great effect, removing the Rougarou curse from its host and implanting it in the Huntsman! Now a werewolf, the Huntsman was cast back into the Dark Sea, seemingly solving the problem of Rougarou forever - or at least until the next major event…
In the aftermath of Concrete Jungle, the editors launched a new, entirely unrelated comic. Gale Force had been a popular hero, and the writers were interested in what she was doing on her own, so she gained her own title, with her romantic partner Nightguard appearing from time to time. Gale Force worked for hire for people who couldn’t afford to get help, a one-woman A-Team with the connections to pull in other heroes from time to time.
Behind the Scenes
We’re coming down to the wire, and it looks like once again, Earthwatch’s insistence on not having a stable status quo leads to its cancellation; there’s only so long you can do “these guys are learning to be heroes” before they either fail or succeed. Wicker and Golden Retriever go off together and appear from time to time, Shockeye and Synthesis are busy with the Earthwatch Program, and that leaves Gale Fore and Nightguard to be choices for the new solo project. Maybe we’ll get Shockeye’s new Earthwatch in our final crossover, or maybe it will have to wait until the Diamond Age.
Not too much to say about Concrete Jungle, except that when you get three villains and hero who has nothing to do with any of them as your leads, it takes a bit of finesse to figure out what the heck’s going on. So we get “two villains hunting a third, and the heroes are caught in the middle of it” as our crossover. To be honest, I think I would have loved Concrete Jungle back in the day.
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