I didn’t want to give a blanket ability to absorb lieutenants, because lieutenants in Sentinel Comics are often people important enough that you don’t want to just let them get eaten.
I would assume that, narratively, cult leaders will also get absorbed if they get killed as a rule, especially since they’re halfway to being part of him already. Mechanically, it would depend on the circumstances.
Since we’re coming up on the weekend and I have a busy evening (and don’t want to forget again), I’m dropping our next buddy early!
Randomizers:
Approach: 8, 6, 1 [Options: Relentless, Disruptive, Focused, Mastermind, Specialized, Ninja]
Archetype: 5, 3, 3 [Options: Bruiser, Indomitable, Inhibitor, Fragile]
Upgrade: 8, 8, 4 [Options: Villainous Vehicle, Quality Upgrade]
Mastery: 11, 9, 2 [Options: Behind the Curtain, Superiority, Unfathomable]
Scion
Real Name: Emilia Van Horne, First Appearance: Champions of Truth #14, June 1944
Approach: Ninja, Archetype: Fragile
Upgrade: Quality Upgrade, Mastery: Unfathomable
Status Dice: Green d10, Yellow d8, Red d6. Health: 15+5H (Upgraded 35+5H)
Qualities: Stealth d10, Close Combat d10, Investigation d8, Magical Lore d8, Scion of Power d8
Powers: Invisibility d10, Agility d10, Wall-Crawling d8, Awareness d8, Presence d6
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
Despite her popularity, the writers of Greenheart found that it was difficult to create interesting opponents for her that wouldn’t simply end up dead at the end of a storyline. A few attempts were made to create interesting criminal geniuses or Roman champions from her homeland seeking to defeat her and ‘prove’ their ideology superior, but they lacked the charm and wit to be proper foils. In 1944, the writers of Champions of Truth hit on a different approach. Rather than threatening Greenheart with yet another man seeking to oppress women, they created a woman who was everything that Greenheart was not, and who had found a much darker way to live in a man’s world.
Emilia Van Horne was the only child of a wealthy family who could trace their lineage back to the dawn of America. She grew up with every privilege, but one night she learned her family’s dark secret - the nameless eldritch god that they served. Through ritual human sacrifice, the Van Hornes ensured their own prosperity, and Emilia’s firstborn would be the next given up.
Instead, Emilia put together a different plan. She learned the dark magics of her family, and used them to sacrifice her politically-arranged husband on their wedding night. Then she killed her father, took control of the family business, and set about arranging more sacrifices to bolster her personal and societal power. After all, if one death each generation could bring this much wealth, what could she do with more? She targeted the poor and vulnerable, who would not be missed - and when she targeted a young woman working at a munitions factory, planning to cover the death as part of an accident, she came into contact with Greenheart.
Emilia possessed terrible powers that made her a dangerous threat to Greenheart. She could pull the world around her, fading out of existence and slipping into locked places. She could scuttle up walls like a lizard, strike from the shadows, and call up horrific demons inspired by Gothic fictions. In most of her stories, she would be in the middle of a long-form ritual, only for Greenheart to discover it, hunt her down, and defeat her. Each time, she seemingly died, only to be saved by the grace of her dark patron.
Scion’s fourth appearance was a 1948 crossover between Greenheart and the Penitent, in which she indicated that she recognized the latter hero. Whatever thread was planned never came to pass; it was their only interaction in the Golden Age.
Behind the Scenes
Six! Six times in a row that one of those 3d12 spreads rolled doubles! Once I hit the Silver Age, I may add a rule that if I roll doubles there, I reroll the double; it gets oddly limiting to only have two choices.
I wanted a good Greenheart villain, and when I got Ninja and Fragile it created an interesting combination - a villain who is absolutely devastating until you can pin her down, at which point she gets battered to death. Upgraded Scion is much more dangerous, between higher dice and enough health to survive a couple bad turns. In general, she’s utterly devastating in single combat, but vulnerable to being surrounded and found out.
Narratively, we’re leaning on pulp era again, and drawing a little bit on the Lovecraftian (although in 1944, Lovecraft was not yet a particularly popular author, he was just known enough that it’s possible that one of the writers of Scion read a bit of his work and integrated it for this unknowable god.) This also acts as a counterpoint to a more traditionally demonic force in Urak, which combined with the Fomori creates three different styles of dark forces active in the Venture Comics setting. This is probably not an issue in the Golden Age, but it’s going to make for some fun myth-weaving down the line.
Randomizers:
Approach: 7, 2, 5 [Options: Skilled, Bully, Focused, Specialized, Tactician]
Archetype: 5, 6, 4 [Options: Guerilla, Indomitable, Overlord, Loner, Squad, Domain]
Upgrade: 8, 4, 5 [Options: Villainous Vehicle, Power Upgrade, Quality Upgrade]
Mastery: 11, 9, 9 [Options: Superiority, Unfathomable]
Overlord Trake
Real Name: Trake , First Appearance: Champions of Truth #19, November 1944
Approach: Bully, Archetype: Overlord
Upgrade: Power Upgrade, Mastery: Superiority
Status Dice: 9+ Minions: d12, 5-9 Minions: d10, 3-4 Minions: d8. 1-2 Minions: d6. 0 minions: d4. Health: 35+5H (Upgraded 55+5H)
Qualities: Ranged Combat d8, Deep Space Lore d8, Uranian Warlord d8
Powers: Nuclear d10, Speed d8, Gadgets d8
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
Over the course of his publications, the Steward primarily interacted with human evils, acting in his purview to help the innocent of Earth rise above its worst elements, but as an alien protector, he occasionally tangled with other alien forces who wished to exploit or conquer the planet. The most enduring of these forces would be the Uranians, and their terrible Overlord Trake.
Hailing from the planet Uranus, the Uranians were a human-like alien race who exuded radiation, who mined the planet’s depths for radioactive materials to maintain their civilization. Upon discovering that humanity was on the verge of unlocking the power of the atom, the Uranians decided to invade and claim it for themselves, only to be foiled by the power of the Sentry. Just over a year later, the Uranians returned, this time with a powerful champion of their own - Overlord Trake. The Overlord was in charge of Uranus’s military forces, a vain and cowardly combatant who disdained both his own soldiers and the civilians of Earth, monologuing about his nuclear might and using his own tremendous radioactive power to assault Earth’s major cities.
The Steward found Trake a difficult foe; in addition to his raw power, nuclear energies played havoc with the Steward’s own abilities, giving him bursts of power followed by exhaustion. He was only able to defeat Trake’s invasion with the help of the people of Earth that he had been working alongside, their own spirits proving up to the challenge.
Trake and the Uranians would appear twice more in 1945 before the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshimi and Nagasaki, and the subsequent slowly rising awareness of the cost of doing so, made radioactive invaders less entertaining for a time. They would eventually return in 1949, as fears of Soviet nuclear power rose, in the pages of Flatfoot Adventures, as Flatfoot and the Steward joined forces to repel Overlord Trake’s attempt to conquer Ferrisville. This crossover, initally an attempt to return attention to the struggling pages of Champions of Truth , proved useful for Trake and the Uranians; while they would not appear as Steward foes again in the Golden Age, they continued to appear sporadically over the next few years as enemies of Flatfoot.
Behind the Scenes
Seven in a row. This is getting ridiculous. By my math, the chances of getting doubles on one of two pairs of 3d12 are just about 40%. The chance of that happening seven times in a row is about 0.16%. Wild.
Trake gets to be one of those villains who slips from their intended hero over to someone else. I basically built him because if we have an anti-Superman, we need an anti-Zod; a coward of a leader who hides behind his troops while spouting off about how great he is. Trake, notably, is an Overlord with no inherent ability to deploy minions, coupled with a lot of abilities that depend on having minions. He’s thus limited to whatever the environment or his lieutenants can produce, which means that as his forces go down, he gets less dangerous. This is doubly true against heroes whose status dice go up as the scene tracker advances, who become less vulnerable to his main non-minion move.
Obviously no aspect of the Uranians is scientifically accurate. They’re more based on the bevy of alien races that Zatara and Wonder Woman fought, all of which were basically “like people, and we’re not making much effort between issues to keep them consistent.” I spent a bit of time looking up when radiation started becoming a thing in comics; the first radiation-powered hero doesn’t seem to have appeared until 1945, but the first nuclear villains were popping up as early as 1941, when Superman fought against a radiation-powered scientist.
Cool. Is the connexion betwixt the Uranians having radiation powers and the element uranium being radioactive intentional?
Yep! Someone thought they were very clever (that someone was me, if we’re being honest, but I love the idea of a Golden Age writer just nodding thoughtfully to himself. “Uranium, Uranus. Probably Uranus has a lot of uranium, we’ll go with that.”)
Randomizers:
Approach: 7, 2, 3 [Options: Skilled, Prideful, Bully, Focused, Specialized, Overpowered]
Archetype: 6, 1, 2 [Options: Predator, Inventor, Bruiser, Overlord, Formidable, Inhibitor]
Upgrade: 12, 5, 12 [Options: Power Upgrade, Brainwashing Zone]
Mastery: 1, 5, 3 [Options: Annihilation, Conquest, Mad Science]
Doctor Freak
Real Name: Joseph Ford, First Appearance: Twilight Carnival #14 , Sep 1946
Approach: Prideful, Archetype: Predator
Upgrade: Brainwashing Zone, Mastery: Mad Science
Status Dice: 0-1 Engaged Opponents d10, 2-3 Engaged Opponents d8, 4+ Engaged Opponents d6. Health: 40+5H (Upgraded 50+5H)
Qualities: Magical Lore d10, Science d10, Investigation d8, Conviction d8, My Latest Enhancements d8
Powers: Monstrous Enhancement d10, Deduction d10, Gadgets d10, Vitality d8
Note: Monstrous Enhancement is a Hallmark power that represents of the different monster strengths and weaknesses that the doctor possesses in each appearance.
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
Night Rider’s early foes were made up of various monsters and ghouls that haunted the night, but what would prove to be her most pervasive enemy was originally intended as a one-off introduction of a rival monster hunter. Doctor Freak was introduced in an early issue of Twilight Carnival as the owner of another circus, a mad scientist named Joseph Ford who sought to capture monsters in order to extract their essence and remake himself into a perfected human. Of course, the operation went wrong, and the half-turned monstrous doctor rampaged through the local town before Night Rider was able to defeat him, seeming to leave him dead.
But the concept of a mad scientist rival to Night Rider was too tempting for the writers of Twilight Carnival to pass up on, and soon enough Doctor Freak was back to his old tricks, disturbing an ancient and previously peaceful nest of insect-beasts and forcing Night Rider to save locals from the riled-up monsters while also stopping Freak from turning himself into a massive centipede monster. Soon enough, Doctor Freak was a common threat introduced to up the stakes of whatever monster Night Rider was investigating. Each time, his latest monstrous enhancements gave him a new set of powers and a slightly different appearance, and each time, he was defeated and seemed to be dead before his body vanished mysteriously. In the span of eight years, Night Rider would face Doctor Freak eighteen times, occasionally joining forces with Penitent or Greenheart to thwart his schemes, but never able to put a final end to his search for the ultimate monstrous form.
Behind the Scenes
Eight for eight. I am deeply beginning to suspect the capabilities of the die roller I am using. I am officially ruling, starting in the Silver Age, that I will be rerolling doubles for Upgrades and Masteries only.
A lot of the time, it’s the upgrades and masteries that decide what form a villain will take. I wanted a Night Rider villain, and when I saw Mad Science plus brainwashing, the idea of a villain who goes after monsters to take their power popped fully-formed into my head. Doctor Freak is another nasty bad guy who would need some pretty major revisions to make it into the Silver Age, but the same is true of his nemesis so we’ll see what happens.
Mechanically, Doctor Freak is a moderate threat; he’s not the nastiest thing out there, but he can stack Boosts and Hinders to make your life miserable if you let him. When he picks a target he can Hinder everyone else while he smashes the hell out of them through stacked penalties. With that said, if you’ve got a group that can tank the penalties, he’s not so tough.
I think I’d let his upgrade affect lieutenant-grade monsters in the scene the same as it does heroes, giving the players an additional headache in that beating down a hostile monster will spawn an obedient minion version of it for the Doc. Might also give him more motivation to deal with a monster himself (since they’re hostile to him too) so he can tame the beast. If Extract Essence counted degrading a monster’s die size as “changing zones” he’d even get a P+E bonus out of the deal when it fails a save. Narrative ability tweaks are fun.
Also love the concept, as I’m a big fan of freakish chimerical mutants and mad science self-experimentation.
Now that is an awesome villain. 
Sure is, isn’t he? The minis modeler in me really likes the idea of a baddie with a different set of weird grafts every time they appear.
And our final Golden Age character! Tomorrow, I’ll update the timeline and our first character of the Silver Age, and then it’s on to single updates each day.
Randomizers:
Approach: 10, 4, 5 [Options: Underpowered, Bully, Overpowered, Generalist, Ninja, Adaptive*]*
Archetype: 3, 5, 1 [Options: Predator, Bruiser, Guerrilla, Indomitable, Overlord, Inhibitor]
Upgrade: 7, 12, 5 [Options: Power Upgrade, Quality Upgrade, Brainwashing Zone]
Mastery: 5, 1, 4 [Options: Annihilation, Enforced Order, Mad Science]
Mary Molotov
Real Name: unknown, First Appearance: Company Town #123, June 1949
Approach: Underpowered, Archetype: Indomitable
Upgrade: Quality Upgrade, Mastery: Annihilation
Status Dice: d8. Health: 30+5H (Upgrade 50+5H)
Qualities: Stealth d10, Criminal Underworld d8, Investigation d6, Bombmaker d8
Powers: Fire d8, Intuition d6, Agility d6, Gadgets d6
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
As a grim avatar of vengeance, Revenant didn’t have a great many recurring villains; most of his foes tended to die in their first appearances, and not very many of them were colourful enough to be worth reviving. However, he did have one villain who made enough of a name for herself to endure - Mary Molotov.
In her first appearance, Mary was a professional arsonist working for the shadowy Mr. Ferris, who set fire to tenement buildings in order to clear the way for new construction. The Revenant learned of her plot, discovered her masquerade as a local janitor, and cornered her in one such building after evacuating it to force her to disarm her charges; instead, she gleefully set them off, happy to die if it meant taking the only person who had ever unmasked her with her. Revenant, of course, survived the fire, and was able to evacuate the people still trapped in the building, but was forced to leave Mary to burn.
Readers were thus quite unsurprised when Mary returned six months later, somehow uninjured with the excuse of ‘having had an escape tunnel dug’. This time, she was setting explosives to kill advocates and politicians seeking to clean up the neighbourhood. After two successful assassinations, Revenant disguised himself as the third target and drew her out, but while he was able to stop her bombs, the woman he captured turned out to be a decoy blackmailed into setting the charges and Mary escaped once again.
The editor of Company Town was leery of overusing her, given her destructive tendencies, and saved her for key moments when they wanted to push sales. Over the course of five years, Revenant faced off against Mary Molotov only four times, each one accompanied by destruction and devastation. The third of those events featured a 1952 crossover with Madame Liberty, and there was discussion behind the scenes of having Mary make a solo appearance in Madame Liberty’s stories; this did not transpire in the Golden Age…
Behind the Scenes
Mary Molotov is a classic Golden Age villain, combining a straightforward approach with a criminal motivation for the grimy setting of Company Town. I like the idea of an Underpowered villain who’s just got bombs ready to take down heroes to try to stop her, and her goal is straightforward: set fires or blow things up for money. With several “hit everyone with bombs, do a secondary thing” abilities, she’s mostly going to lurk around, set off explosives, and try to avoid consequences until she’s brought in.
As a very late addition to the Golden Age, Mary’s timeline here is pretty short, but as someone that blows up buildings, she could easily get a Silver Age facelift with downgraded lethality.
And, at the very finish line, we got a character who didn’t have doubles in their Upgrade or Mastery!
Both her motif and her famously-Russian last name might have been a problem when McCarthy’s personal power and paranoiac lunacy reached its heights over the five years following her introduction. OTOH, it might also have made her even more popular as she’s very much the murderous bomb-throwing saboteur stereotype so many people though “commies” were during the craze. Did her few later Golden Age appearances push her down a more explicitly “Soviet agent” route than her initial “cynical crime and capitalism” style? That would be playing to popular trends.
Well, we will see in a couple of weeks, because I have just written her Silver Age counterpart. What I will say not to spoil it - my historical understanding is that because of their use by Finnish soliders and civilians fighting against the Soviets, Molotov cocktails are publicly associated more with rioters and “anarchists” than with Soviets, and I think that was always true? Mary’s Golden Age appearances were very “will do anything to do anyone for money”, so one of them may have involved the Soviets trying to destabilize something or someone, but she definitely stayed mercenary to the end.
edit Actually, looking at my dates, Mary’s last Golden Age appearance was in 1953, just as the McCarthy stuff was reaching its peak, so it’s possible that the editors decided to give her a couple of years off right before everything went wrong.
Speaking of the end…
History of Venture Comics: The Golden Age
Pt. 1: The War Years (1938-1945)
Over the course of the Golden Age, Venture Comics set out its stake as a bustling, successful comics publisher. While Celestial Travels largely avoided any superhero stories, staying a science fiction comic for the duration of the Golden Age, the war years saw their portfolio grow from five comics in 1940 to nine titles by 1945.
Madame Liberty and Flatfoot Adventures were the first titles added, both in 1942. Madame Liberty and Kid Liberty would continue to appear in Covert Tactics from time to time, but became largely focused on her own title, while Flatfoot would continue to make regular appearances in Company Town in addition to his own work. In 1943, Champions of Truth was launched, with either Greenheart or the Steward taking on the primary story, and the other often appearing in a backup story in the same issue. This left Skybreaker and Cormorant to return to being the primary heroes of Cryptic Trails, along with occasional stories of lost kingdoms and mysterious orders. Finally, 1945 saw the debut of Twilight Carnival, which used the Night Rider’s carnival as a backdrop for her own adventures, as well as for the stories of people whose lives the carnival passed through.
The war years also saw a handful of early crossovers between heroes, beginning with Greenheart and Skybreaker in 1942 but continuing over the next few years. The Penitent crossed over with Skybreaker, Greenheart, and Night Rider on various occasions, Madame Liberty also joined forces with both Skybreaker and Flatfoot in one story each, Greenheart met up with Skybreaker twice and the Steward three times.
One minor spat with a rival company broke out in 1942, with the temporary addition of the Celestial Commodore to the pages of Celestial Travels. The Celestial Commodore was a bumbling idiot from England who found himself on an alien world and tried to civilize the natives, only to be humiliated again and again as it became clear that they were much more advanced than he was. He was also a clear parody of Cosmic Tales’ Captain Cosmic; the rumour was that the lead editor of Venture Comics felt that the [C][T] title structure was official branding of Venture Comics, and Cosmic Tales was an attempt to steal their thunder. The Celestial Commodore vanished after three stories spaced out over the year, and the spat faded into history with no legal action taken between Venture Comics and Sentinel Comics.
Pt. 2: The Post-War Years (1946-1953)
The end of the war marked the beginning of a decline in superhero comics. At first, Venture Comics tried to ride the wave. With the Germans defeated, Madame Liberty spent 1946 hunting down Nazi war criminals before turning her attention to protecting Europe from the Soviet scourge (to mixed responses from both fans and her own writers.) The Revenant was introduced to return Company Town to its pulp roots, and Flatfoot faded out of that comic. Starting in 1949, the writers of Flatfoot Adventures (as a favour to the long-struggling editors of Company Town) quietly started referring to Flatfoot’s home city as “Ferrisville” rather than “Ferristown”, with no formal indication given about whether Flatfoot and Revenant were operating in the same city.
By 1950, it was clear that sales were struggling. Despite a few attempts in 1949 to draw attention to the title via crossovers with more popular comics, Champions of Truth was cancelled in August; Greenheart returned to the pages of Cryptic Trails, which she slowly took over from Skybreaker and Cormorant, and the Steward mostly faded away; his final appearance in the Golden Age was in an unremarkable story in Celestial Travels in 1952. Covert Tactics shifted focus, with its final story involving superheroes being a minor Kid Liberty adventure in 1950, and became a comic focused on the Korean War. Skybreaker and Cormorant themselves saw their final adventure in 1953, defeating a major Fomori outbreak and implying that they may have defeated the Fomori forever.
But worse was on the horizon.
Pt. 3: The Comics Code (1954-1957)
Venture Comics’ editors had hoped that their recasting of Madame Liberty as an icon of patriotism against the Red Menace would shield them from Congressional inquiry. They were wrong, and were swept up in the same wave of histrionics that marked the era. Greenheart was an unapologetic Italian foreigner corrupting the youth of America! The Night Rider was a criminal carnie invoking demonic forces! The Penitent was depicting horrors that would scar young minds! Madame Liberty was travelling alone with a teen boy, putting him in danger and possibly exposing him to lewd behaviour! And worst of all, Company Town portrayed a city in which the police and political structures were the enemy of god-fearing people, undermining faith in American institutions!
The introduction of the Comics Code was a devastating blow to Venture Comics. Campfire Terrors, Company Town, and Twilight Carnival were cancelled overnight in September 1954, signalling the end of the Penitent, Night Rider, and Revenant. Cryptic Trails struggled on for almost a year, but the constantly-shifting adjustments to Greenheart in an effort to meet the approval of the Code were wildly unpopular. The title ended with Issue #170 in May 1955. Madame Liberty continued on, but Kid Liberty was returned to the United States to resume his schooling under the supervision of an old friend, making occasional appearances when his mentor visited him. The only hero to make it through the period mostly unchanged was Flatfoot, and even he was now fully morphed into a patriotic and pro-police figure compared to his earlier, more nuanced portrayal of police corruption.
By the close of the Golden Age, Venture Comics was down to four titles. Celestial Travels and Covert Tactics had eschewed superheroes in favour of more popular genres, while Madame Liberty and Flatfoot Adventures persisted. The publisher was struggling, and it was clear that something needed to change. But what?
“Mary Molotov” is a great name. : )
FWIW, the Molotov cocktail is indeed Finnish (and a reference to the Soviet foreign minister during the Winter War), but the weapon was enthusiastically adopted (with its original name intact) by the Soviet army, where they served to kill a fair few Nazi invaders just a few years later. So it manages to be associated with both the Finns and the Soviets to some degree, and remains popular with rioters and firebugs to this day.
As it should. 
The Randomizers:
Background 2, 7, 7 [Options: Criminal, Law Enforcement, Interstellar, Anachronistic]
Power Source 2, 3, 2 [Options: Training, Genetic, Experimentation, Mystical, Artificial Being]
Archetype 2, 1, 7 [Options: Speedster, Shadow, Physical Powerhouse, Armored, Flyer, Elemental Manipulator]
Personality 10, 9, 1 [Options: Lone Wolf, Inquisitive, Alluring, Stoic, Jaded]
Skybreaker (II)
Real Name: Cooper Cullen, First Appearance: Venture Into The Unknown #2, February 1958
Background: Anachronistic, Power Source: Mystical, Archetype: Physical Powerhouse
Personality: Inquisitive, Principles: Time Traveller, Indestructible
Status Dice: Green d6, Yellow d8, Red d12. Health: 32 [Green 32-25, Yellow 24-12, Red 11-1]
Qualities: Fitness d10, Ranged Combat d10, Magical Lore d10, Leadership d10, Ancient Demigod d8
Powers: The Spear of Assal d10, Strength d8, Weather d8, Presence d8, Awareness d6
Green Abilities:
Yellow Abilities:
Red Abilities
Out
The release of the new Freedom Five in 1957 heralded a new wave of interest in superheroes. Seeing an uptick in sales for Madame Liberty and Flatfoot Adventures, the editors of Venture Comics decided to risk launching a new title, which would test new heroes and adventures. Their first issue was forgettable, but in Issue #2, they breathed new life into an older hero, both figuratively and literally.
Rhonda Randall was an unassuming historian at the Grovedale Museum of Culture who received an anonymous donation of a beautiful golden Celtic spear on the same day that a group of armed robbers attempted to steal the collection for their own purposes. As Rhonda faced certain death, a sealed tomb that had been in the museum’s collection for decades cracked open, and the Celtic hero Cu Chulainn emerged, confused and very much alive! He took up his spear and easily defeated the robbers, and then admitted that he had no idea where he was or what was happening.
With Rhonda’s help, the hero took on the alias of Cooper Cullen, a mild-mannered assistant at the museum, while he explored this strange new world he had found himself in. Soon enough, he was tangling with mystical threats and ancient enemies, including the magical villain who had tried to steal the spear in the first place, as the heroic Skybreaker!
The new Skybreaker was more targeted at young audiences, calling up storms to slow enemies or hitting them with the shaft of his spear rather than killing. He had a zest for life and an endless curiousity about the modern world that led to lighthearted hijinks and heroic escapades, and his supporting cast of museum associates gave him a secret identity that he and Rhonda frequently struggled to keep concealed. It wasn’t entirely clear whether this Skybreaker was in the same continuity as the previous one; the writer of the first issue hinted that the Spear of Assal had been donated to the museum by an anonymous source, which may have been Lewis Lamont or may have been unconnected.
All in all, Skybreaker was a grand success, heralding the start of a new age for Venture Comics, and June saw the launch of Skybreaker Stories to bolster their titles.
Behind the Scenes
So, I was pretty sure that I wanted Venture to echo DC by having their first big hero of the Silver Age be a revamp of either Skybreaker, Greenheart, or Steward. The first randomizer immediately made me choose between the first two and the third, and when I went with Anachronistic, I ended up with a set that could have been used for either Skybreaker or Greenheart. I’ve tentatively gone with Skybreaker, and hopefully it’ll be interesting.
A ginger! Have I ever mentioned how much Marvel’s blonde Thor irritates me?
Interesting display of comic color theory at work here. He’s gone to the three primary colors (counting the hair) and immediately seems to look friendlier and more obviously heroic than his Golden Age ancestor despite still carrying a giant pig-sticker. 
Cu Chulainn, woot!
I wonder if they did that for trademark reasons. Probably not.
Hmm, I dunno, Skybreaker I’s golden-ish get-up looks pretty heroic to me. But yeah, II’s brighter colours definitely make him look more superheroic.
Yeah, the general goal was for Skybreaker I to look dashing, whereas Skybreaker II looks friendly. And a little bit cocky. Because he’s definitely a little bit cocky, he’s Cu Chulainn! (Well, a version of Cu who’s been made more G-rated for the Silver Age, anyway.)
I don’t mind blonde Thor, but God of War Thor is definitely the superior version!
wow, a whole-ass Cu Chulainn for a hero reboot that’s wild!
