Yeah, MC2 was the sort of vague mirror I was going for with this one, and Horizon is falling into the Spider-Girl role, including strong support from a small number of fans keeping the comic alive. She only got a second year of renewals, sadly, but again, Venture is a smaller company!
And who knows, maybe someone who read her as a kid is working at Venture in the 2020s and decides to bring her back. We will have to wait and see.
Randomizers:
Approach: 2, 7, 6 [Options: Skilled, Disruptive, Focused, Mastermind, Specialized, Creator]
Archetype: 1, 1, 4 [Options: Predator, Inventor, Guerilla, Indomitable, Fragile]
Upgrade: 3, 1, 10 [Options: Mook Squad, Group Fighter, Calming Aura]
Mastery: 6, 10, 2 [Options: Behind the Curtain, Mercenary, Total Chaos]
Fiendslayer
Real Name: Deckard Dewitt, First Appearance: Twilight Carnival #41, April 1988
Approach: Disruptive, Archetype: Fragile
Upgrade: Group Fighter, Mastery: Mercenary
Status Dice: Green d10, Yellow d8, Red d6. Health: 15+5H (Upgraded 35+5H)
Qualities: Stealth d10, Magical Lore d8, Investigation d8, Professional Hunter d8
Powers: Gadgets d10, Dragonspine Dagger d10, Awareness d8, Invisibility d8
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
Of the many foes that Twilight Carnival tangled with over the course of the 1980s, few were more prolific and less interesting than Fiendslayer.
Deckard Dewitt was a big game hunter who used whatever traps and tricks were at his disposal to hunt the most dangerous game at the lowest risk to himself - until he discovered he had a rare genetic condition that was slowly killing him. In search of a cure, he delved into the darkest secrets, eventually getting ahold of werewolf blood that pushed off the disease at the cost of increasing his aggression and clouding his mind. From there, he began to look for curses to the previous magical treatment he had taken, and then cures for the side effects of those treatments, and along the way he began to develop a reputation as a skilled hunter of magical beasts.
This, of course, brought him into conflict with the Twilight Carnival, when he came hunting for Ophelia’s soul knives as a job for a collector. He was soundly defeated and seemingly killed, but the magical bloods within him revived him, and he came back for more. Over the next decade, he would appear a half-dozen times, sometimes along and sometimes with allies, looking to take something or someone that the Carnival was sworn to protect. In his most dangerous appearance, he arrived just having eaten a dragon’s heart, more powerful and focused than ever - but he still failed.
And in the end, that was what made him vanish. Despite how much the comics tried to hype him up, Fiendslayer was never shown succeeding in a single one of his hunts. By the end of his appearances, fans were rolling their eyes when he appeared and mentally counting down the pages until he would be killed ‘forever’ once again. As the 90s closed out, Fiendslayer largely closed out with them; he would appear from time to time as a henchman of a more serious opponent, and would be one of the monster hunters gathered by the Headmaster in Concrete Jungle, but he would never have a serious storyline of his own.
Behind the Scenes
I EAT WHAT I KILL.
This is basically what happens when someone creates Ambuscade or Kraven the Hunter and forgets to actually make them good at what they do. Fiendslayer talks a big game, but it takes more than that to make it to the big leagues.
Disruptive and Fragile is a fun combination, though - a villain that can really mess with the heroes, but once a hit or two slip through they’re going to fall apart in a hurry. Combining Dust Devil with Swallowed By Shadows has the potential to absolutely wreck a hero team for a turn, but if Fiendslayer rolls badly, well… not much health there.
that’s honestly a really funny subversion of a Kraven the Hunter archetype 
I like it
Randomizers:
Approach: 6, 2, 7 [Options: Skilled, Disruptive, Focused, Mastermind, Specialized, Creator]
Archetype: 10, 10, 3 [Options: Bruiser, Squad, Invader, Titan]
Upgrade: 8, 9, 5 [Options: Power Upgrade I, Quality Upgrade II, Defense Shield]
Mastery: 1, 12, 5 [Options: Annihilation, Mad Science, Malice]
Blitz
Real Name: Blitz, First Appearance: Champions of Truth #203, June 1989
Approach: Focused, Archetype: Titan
Upgrade: Quality Upgrade, Mastery: Annihilation
Status Dice: Starts at d12. Health: 45+5H (Upgraded 65+5H)
Qualities: Close Combat d10, Alertness d8, Terrifyingly Large d8
Powers: Strength d12, Momentum d8
Unique Challenge:
[ ][ ]: Stop Blitz from moving, reducing their status by one die size.
[ ]: Hit Blitz in their weak points, reducing their status by one die size.
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, the Champions of Truth were a predominantly magical team of heroes, and their foes began to slowly tilt in a more magical direction as well. A common theme during this time was villains attempting to use science to control magic, and the terrible disasters that resulted. One of those disasters was Blitz.
In 1989, in the middle of a six-arc storyline about a corporation attempting to leech magic from the world’s ley lines, the villains of the piece accidentally awakened a giant monstrous force of nature, a creature that tore its way out of their lab and began to rampage across the city. Blitz was a massive monstrosity, which only got stronger and stronger the longer it rampaged. The heroes responded, with Greenheart and Skybreaker trying to slow the beast as Penitent and the Wonderer saved civilians and Reverie tried to reach the monster’s heart and learn what had enraged it. Ultimately, they learned that Blitz was simply responding to a damaged leyline, and calmed the beast back to slumber.
As a single story, it was a solid and popular one, so of course writers decided to go back to that well. Blitz would return a few times over the course of the Champions’ magical run, each time as a final threat raised by an unstable magical force. In its final appearance in 1996, the monster was deliberately awakened and implanted with technological controls, and a gang of criminals followed its rampage to steal valuables from the devastated ruins. None of these appearances were nearly as popular as the first, retreading old ground and slowly losing steam, and the last story limped across the pages before Blitz was retired. The monster would briefly return in Twilight Carnival in 2004, in which the team successfully moved it to Lostwood where it could sleep undisturbed.
Behind the Scenes
It’s - it’s - a city-wide Blitz!
In all seriousness, this villain was created because (a) I rolled Titan and (b) the Champions don’t have any villains right now that they just punch. So I made the punchiest monster around. As a result, it’s not actually a very interesting recurring villain. A neat one-time thing of a monster that just gets stronger the longer it rampages, building up momentum and crashing through things, but not something that you’ll see often. Unless someone decides that you should see it often, at which point… well, you get Blitz.
Blitz should have six abilities. You get to choose another one from the Titan menu.
Every superteam should have to fight a kaiju sooner or later. 
I was going to ask if Venture had had a generic giant monster on par with Groot
Fixed! With another flavour of Attack/Hinder.
There were definitely some alien monsters in the 60s that showed up and had to be fought. They might all be D-Listers, or there might be one that managed a bit more endurance. Probably none that came back later as a superhero though.
Venture doesn’t appear to have the history of doing monster comics that Marvel did. You can still see the fingerprints in Marvel even today, with characters like Groot (despite how little the modern version has to do with the original world-conquering alien with a weakness to termites) and Fin Fang Foom, not to mention early superhero stuff like Mole Man’s beasties and Namor’s Giganto. They still had a soft spot for kaiju in the 70s and beyond, what with Godzilla and Shogun Warriors getting their own books, Doctor Demonicus getting dragged out of oblivion every now and then and Red Ronin getting demolished and re-assembled multiple times over the years in various books - although the latest(?) version doesn’t have anything to do with giant robots.
Still kind of weird to me that AFAIK Tony Stark never bothered to build himself a mega-suit just in case, but the Hulkbuster armor’s never worked out all that well so maybe that discouraged him. It would be awfully specialized and kaiju aren’t exactly common.
DC doesn’t have anything quite in the same vein, although Titano is an obvious Kong knockoff and in the old days the Challengers had to deal with a fair number of things we’d call kaiju today. Of course, some of that came from Marvel influences, particularly by way of King Kirby.
Yeah, while there certainly are giant monsters in Venture, they tend to be either giant robots built for single issues, aliens who are being encountered in alien environments, or connected to major interdimensional or mystical threats. I haven’t written any yet that are just monsters; Blitz is the closest, and they’re still tied to ley lines rupturing.
oh, here is a good question for meta-history and D-List character-
what are some memorable “hero variants” from Venture? Times when a short-term change justified a completely new character sheet? SoTM of course has Variants but Hero-Clix and VS. both used memorable events for rare cards/units.
Spider-Man with four arms, The Captain Universe overlay, or wearing a Fantastic Four costume + paper bag + “kick me” sign.
Aquaman with and without beard, hook-hand, water hand, or no crippling injury, or ridding a giant seahorse named Storm
And of course, all the shenanigans Uncle Morty green lite.
And then we have Else-Worlds, What If, (Disperation), [Broken Mirrors/Venture into the Unknown]
Besides Horizon are there any Venture characters from parallel worlds that any fan would recognize instantly.
Interesting. Unless I’m mistaken, every single one of those specific examples of variant figures arise from stories before 2000. That’s also about the point where my Big Two reading dropped off to near-zero and I stopped working comics retail altogether to concentrate on games so I haven’t kept up the way I once did. Have IRL comics backed off on doing major visual character changes so much post-2000 (barring cinematic universe impacts, anyway)?
Also interesting that you didn’t mention Spidey’s “black costume” variant. I know there was at least one, but Venom has been around so long now the fact that it was originally a rogue batch of laundry seems to have faded from the forefront of memory. Such a big deal back when it was still new and mysterious.
I don’t know if they happen as often, but they definitely still happen. I don’t know DC as well, but Marvel had standouts like Iron Spider (2005), Odinson Thor (2014) and Cerebro Head Professor X (2019).
For Venture… There absolutely were memorable short-term variants. I don’t have most of them in my brain yet. I’ve sort of revised Corporal Liberty to be a short-term variant for Kid Liberty at this point, although “short term” here means ten years. Greenheart would have gotten a revised costume in her Japan arc, that’s practically mandatory. Dawn Rider probably got a goth variant for a short time after the killing of Bog Body, when she was in danger of succumbing to her soul knives. And Skybreaker had his Broken Sky variant in 1993, although that wasn’t precisely popular. Might create some more some day.
There are definitely some popular Broken Mirrors settings that people would recognize, and I have written up none of them. That’s a future project!
Oh wait! I lied, I have written up one set of moderately popular Broken Mirrors: the classic “evil versions of the heroes” that invade the universe in 2002 during the Shattered Mirrors event.
In the Shattered Mirror timeline, the Drifter was corrupted during the fall of Atlantis and became The Atlantean. He set about using his powerful telepathy and precognition to corrupt and control Earth’s most powerful heroes, creating the Crusaders of Tyranny:
(Shattered Mirrors ended with the Drifter managing to free the Adversary, who immediately gained revenge on his captor by undoing the damage the Atlantean had done to the other heroes before vanishing. Those heroes returned to their pocket dimension to try and repair the damage they’d been forced into committing; it was a popular place to return to occasionally in the late 2000s and 2010s.)
The Randomizers:
Background 3, 3, 5 [Options: Performer, Academic, Upper Class, Struggling, Medical]
Power Source 6, 6, 7 [Options: Nature, Relic, Artificial Being, Cursed, Cosmos]
Archetype 3, 5, 9 [Options: Physical Powerhouse, Blaster, Flyer, Manipulator, Psychic, Minion-Maker]
Personality 5, 6, 9 [Options: Sarcastic, Distant, Inquisitive, Stoic, Decisive, Jovial]
Nightlife and the Savage Defenders
Real Name: Gerry Fielder, First Appearance: Savage Defenders #1, April 1990
Background: Medical, Power Source: Nature, Archetype: Flyer
Personality: Stoic, Principles: Caregiver, Inner Demon
Status Dice: Green d6, Yellow d8, Red d12. Health: 34 [Green 34-26, Yellow 25-13, Red 12-1]
Qualities: Alertness d10, Close Combat d10, Medical d8, Science d8, Finesse d6, Leader of the Pack d8
Powers: Flight d10, Speed d8, Awareness d8, Raven’s Claws d8, Animal Control d6
Green Abilities:
Yellow Abilities:
Red Abilities
Out
Principle of the Caregiver {Expertise}
During Roleplaying: You are attuned to the pain of others, and can tell when someone is hiding their suffering.
Minor Twist: What pain are you making yourself responsible for?
Major Twist: What harm is too serious for you to help?
Principle of the Caregiver [A]: Overcome to help someone heal physical or mental pain. Use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
In 1990, as the speculation market began to boom, Venture Comics started rolling out new character concepts that they thought would make it big. Three of these teams were introduced in the span of a year; of those, the first and least successful proved to be the Savage Defenders, and their leader Nightlife.
Gerry Fielder was a paramedic working on the mean streets of Neulyon when she responded to a call about violence at a local nightclub. As it turned out, the club had been attacked by a mysterious animal monster, and while Gerry was helping the survivors, a group of armed men showed up and grabbed everyone who had seen anything, kidnapping almost a dozen people. The creature had been the result of illegal genetic testing, and the survivors became the next round of test subjects.
Some time later, Gerry, now transformed into a bat monster, engineered a breakout. She and three of her fellow captives chose to remain together: Hotblood, a singer who had been given flaming blood that she could unleash against her foes, Depth Charger, a struggling waiter who had been chimerized with a shark and could extrude massive globes of water to swim in and drown foes, and Shock Jock, a drummer covered in an armadillo shell, who’d been given a pistol shrimp’s ability to created pockets of deadly hyper-fast air. Together, they set out across the United States, looking for proof of the shadowy organization that had been experimenting on them and a way to reverse their monstrous changes, and working to save others from a similar fate as the Savage Defenders!
The Savage Defenders might have been a success, but they entered a crowded landscape. Covert Tactics was already investigating shadowy government agencies, and within a few months the Rogue Agents would take up a similar space as black-ops experiments gone wrong. And above all, the Savage Defenders were a bit… goofy. Their style was a bit too silly to appeal to the hard-edge fans of grim and gritty comics, while their stories were far too grim and morose to appeal to four-colour comics readers. Ultimately, after only twelve issues, the series was cancelled. The Savage Defenders were captured by the Vanguards in the Vanguards of Order storyline in 1991, the first sign of the team’s dangerous fall towards authoritarianism. They re-appeared under AEGIS control in the late 90s, but after the fall of AEGIS they vanished. A brief, ironic attempt to revive them as the Savage Offenders in a six-issue miniseries in 2011 was derided both by their original fans and those who’d never heard of them, and they sank back into obscurity.
Behind the Scenes
Someone at Venture was running out of name ideas in the early 90s. Nightlife and Nightguard, Hardline and Razorline… it just happens sometimes.
Anyway, the Savage Defenders are a team that’s just a little too edgy and a little too goofy at the same time, which is just about the only time that I’ll use the word ‘savage’ in a creative endeavor. They might have gotten some traction in a more irony-enjoying time, but then the attempt to do so was too ironic and they failed completely.
I’m reminded of DC’s Scare Tactics, who also managed to last 12 issues before the screwy mix of gonzo silliness and rather grim and gritty storylines left them to fade away into late-90s oblivion. They’ve never had a revival miniseries attempt that I know of (at least partly since 40% of the team are either dead or evolved beyond mortal concerns) but they did get introduced with a bunch of one-shot team-ups with actual, relevant characters. Pity, it was pretty entertaining in its own strange way and could have had potential for continuing with new, equally weird band members getting recruited as they travelled around. I wonder if Brother Power the Geek can play drums?
Scare Tactics was my first thought.
favorite bit (and an idea I have read about before) was the vampire using her own system as a filter to sober up the human when he was drunk. She bite his neck injects the blood back into him and then vomited up the impurities from his blood.
Amazing. I’d never even heard of Scare Tactics and now I want to find and read all of it.
AFAIK they’ve never been collected for a trade reprint, but finding them as floppies shouldn’t be too hard (they were not a 90s success story, to put it mildly) and they’re probably readable online. Same goes for the other Weirdoverse books, although I can’t personally recommend any of them beyond the Challengers of the Unknown book, which took the original formula and re-imagined it as something closer to X-Files in theme and tone. Scare Tactics had some connections to the (not-a-Doctor) version of Fate in the Weirdoverse but nothing that mattered enough to require reading that book to understand what’s going on in ST - pretty much just their manager/driver acting as an info guy for Fate.
All of the “monster” characters in the band managed to get reasonably satisfying story arcs in the series, ranging from tragic to sublime to just showing some real growth and dealing with their pasts. It’s a surprisingly well-plotted series for something that seems like a goof, and was definitely left open for a revival that could add new cast members without actually leaving you feeling like it had been left unfinished. One of those odd little gems that cropped up in between the better-known 90s stuff I was parodying on my blog a while back.
AFAIK only Jake/Fang (the group’s guitar playing werewolf) has appeared since the book ended, showing up briefly in a Young Justice issue in 2001 and winding up as a minor TV celebrity on a Buffy parody called Wendy the Werewolf Stalker. So, happy ending I guess, although it suggests the band didn’t find replacement members and keep touring after all, which is how the series left off.
You can listen to the promo single “InhuManifesto” that DC’s legal department nixed on Youtube, but it is NSFW due to cussing. I’ll say this much for it, that’s about what I imagined Nina/Scream Queen’s singing to sound like.
god, they sound like the perfect basis for a very dumb fighting animals cartoon in the mid to late 90’s
Randomizers:
Approach: 10, 10, 1 [Options: Relentless, Overpowered, Generalist, Ancient]
Archetype: 6, 8, 4 [Options: Guerilla, Overlord, Inhibitor, Squad, Thief, Domain]
Upgrade: 3, 5, 11 [Options: Grouper Fighter, Power Upgrade I, Power Dampening Field]
Mastery: 7, 12, 1 [Options: Annihilation, Mysticism, Malice]
Calico Jill
Real Name: Bonnie Blake, First Appearance: Knightgrave #75, October 1991
Approach: Relentless, Archetype: Thief
Upgrade: Power Upgrade I, Mastery: Mysticism
Status Dice: No Bonuses d6, 1-2 Bonuses d8, 3+ Bonuses d10. Health: 30+5H (Upgraded 50+5H)
Qualities: Acrobatics d10, Persuasion d8, Alertness d6, Diviner d8
Powers: Gadgets d10, Leaping d8, Awareness d6
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
In 1991, the writers of Knightgrave decided to introduce some romantic tension into his comic. He had a level of complicated romantic tension with Detective Esme Sharpe, and in order to keep it complicated, a villain was introduced who would serve as a romantic foil and dangerous foe.
Also, the writers decided to have her be a pirate for some reason.
Bonnie Blake was an accomplished thief, who had learned spells to study the world’s mystical flows, and sought to steal magical trinkets and artifacts for her own use. She had no grander goals; magic simply fascinated her, and she wanted it all. She styled herself as a sky pirate, flying in under cover of night to raid antique shops, underworld auction houses, and museums for their relics. When she learned about Knightgrave’s magical sword, Clarent, she decided that she absolutely had to have it, and set about luring the undead knight into a trap to claim it for herself.
Over the course of their first confrontation, Bonnie became increasingly fascinated by Knightgrave, flirting and taunting him, and the stoic knight found himself flustered and off-guard. He was able to keep her from escaping with Clarent, but she vowed that she’d be back to take her prize.
Calico Jill would make a few more appearances in the pages of Knightgrave, but readers found her romantic interactions with him forced. Letters argued that he wouldn’t be interested in a thief just because she could flirt, and asked why a pirate, anyway? The writers stubbornly kept at it, with Calico Jill continuing to appear once or twice a year for the next four years, but she never caught on and when Knightgrave was ultimately cancelled in 1996 it was the end of her major appearances. She would pop up from time to time as part of larger operations, especially in the pages of Into the Green or Skybreaker Stories, but never as a major character with much dialogue or a plan of her own.
Behind the Scenes
Obviously, if you have a knight you’ve got to have him fight a pirate. That’s just logic.
Mechanically, this is deliberately not a very strong character - aside from Quick Movements, she can’t create bonuses for herself, which limits her status dice. When she gets them, she tends to hold onto them, but that’s not necessarily the best plan. She doesn’t have much magic to use with her mastery of mysticism, relying on divination and trinkets. Calico Jill’s not that tough, and she doesn’t have area effects. But she makes a good supporting element to a scene.
