Nostalgia, Part III

 So, I know comic nerds. Collectors, mostly, buying and selling rare copies of comics where important things happened to popular characters. I am not one of those. But I love stories. Always have. And, as much as I have appreciated comics for their stories, I have been a big fan. I was a fan back when the rivalry between Marvel and DC was more in good fun, rather than the all out war it is today. As far as Marvel over DC, I like individual characters in DC better, but overall, I like the Marvel universe more. 

My favorite comics of all time came out in the years 1996 and 1997. It was only one month for each year, though, as far as I know. It was a publicity stunt Marvel and DC collaborated on and started by pitting fan favorite characters from each universe against each other. In continuity, they described it as each universe having a personification that woke up from incredibly long slumber, only to detect each other among universes, and for some reason decide that only one of them could survive. The most powerful beings from each universe decided that they would try to sideline the destruction of one of their universes, at first, by convincing those personifications to use members of each universe to fight for the universe as a whole. Superman versus the Hulk, Batman versus Captain America, Thor versus Captain Marvel, now known as Shazam, Wonder Woman versus Storm. When that didn't work, the guardians of the universes decided they would try one last thing to spare them from destruction: combining the universes. The result were characters that were combinations of characters from both the Marvel and DC universes. Even better, they went meta, and when they published the comics that were supposed to be from this new, combined universe, the Amalgam Comics universe, they included fake response letters from supposed fans that had feedback about issues that never existed, as if the two comic companies were always one. 

Anyway, it was that mixing that made my favorite comic book characters. Darkclaw is my top superhero of any continuity. He's a combination of Wolverine and Batman. Basically, if you gave Batman Wolverine's abilities, you'd get Darkclaw. There's Super-Soldier, who is objectively better than Superman in my opinion, a combination of Superman and Captain America. There's also Iron Lantern, a close second to Darkclaw, a combination of Iron Man and Green Lantern. One of the other good ones was Dr. Strangefate, a combination of Dr. Strange and Dr. Fate, from the Marvel and DC universes, respectively. He was the sorcerer supreme of this combined universe. Sometimes, when they couldn't get the result they wanted from just combining one character from each universe, they would throw in another character from one or the other. With Dr. Strangefate, they combined the two powerful sorcerers with Charles Xavier, the most powerful mutant telepath in the Marvel universe. This made him quite the powerhouse in comparison to his component characters, such as Dr. Strange. There were also a couple of lemons. Most notably, Spider-Boy, a combination of Spiderman and Superboy, and the Skulk, a combination of the Hulk and Solomon Grundy. 

So, obviously, there's some kind of theme. I like mashups, a lot. I like new takes on old tropes. It's kind of how I do my creative thinking and it's a big part of how I think creative thinking is done in general. Kind of goes back to that "art is dialogue" thing I like to bring up a lot. As far as comics go, Amalgam was the best. But not the only way to get a fix like that. Sometimes there are other efforts made by artists to do some of the same. There are few that come to mind. One of them I went out of my way to buy some chase paperbacks of. The Supreme Power line of comics was a gritty, adult take on an old Marvel property called Squadron Supreme, which was basically an effort on Marvel's part to retell the Justice League. DC did a couple of lines of what they called "Elseworlds", which is basically like Marvel's line of "What if...?" stories. There was one that proposed the idea of the infant Kal-El, otherwise known as Superman, being adopted by the Waynes instead of the Kents and becoming his universe's version of Batman. This was called "Speeding Bullets," a reference to Superman's aged catch line, "faster than a speeding bullet", and how Batman lost his parents. There was also a run called "In Darkest Night" which was about Batman being chosen to be the Green Lantern from Earth, instead of Hal Jordan. Marvel did two runs that impressed me even more and more recently. The first was called Infinity Warps, which was basically Marvel Amalgamating their own characters. Hex 23 was a combination of Scarlet Witch and X-23, the female clone of Wolverine. Iron Hammer was a combination of Thor and Iron Man. Soldier Supreme was Dr. Strange and Captain America. The second, even more impressive take, ended just this past year, and it was called Heroes Reborn. It was alternate universe, where the Avengers never took form, but was rather replaced by a version of the Squadron Supreme. In this universe, the villains were very reminiscent of the Amalgam comics. Dr. Juggernaut was what happened when Dr. Doom searched out the Gem of Cytterak of the Juggernaut, so that he could physically take on Hyperion, Marvel's version of Superman. This character is extremely reminiscent of Dr. Doomsday, the Amalgamation of Dr. Doom and the alien, Doomsday, that killed Superman. There was also the Silver Witch, a combination of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, which reminded me very much of Speed Demon, an amalgamation of the Flash and Ghost Rider. 

Years ago, after Ray and I stopped playing, I was well into college, I was playing World of Darkness, mostly online, through chat rooms and whatnot. A friend of mine had invited me to play a Marvel RPG chat he was participating in. They had two types of players. The first were people who wanted to play established Marvel characters and would basically put their names on a waiting list. When it was their turn, they would have a predetermined amount of time to play the character. The other type of player was a person who came up with a totally original character, who they wouldn't have to wait to play and who they wouldn't have to surrender to the next person on a list. I chose to be the latter. Who I really wanted to play was Darkclaw. But.... Wolverine was already a played character in the setting, and they were very specific not to use properties from other companies, which Batman most obviously is. So I decided I would come up with something like Darkclaw, but not Darkclaw. I mixed Wolverine with the Supreme Power version of Nighthawk, the guy who was supposed to be Marvel's take on Batman. This version of Nighthawk, though, was half Batman, half real-life Black Panther character. He is black, and his parents were murdered by white supremacists. When he grew up, he became a rich, brilliant vigilante, but a racist one who mostly defended victims of color and killed their assailants. 

So I combined Wolverine with the the Supreme Power version of Nighthawk. Fully Marvel inspired, and slightly cooler, all told, than Darkclaw himself. I called him Nightmare. I never got to play him. 

Come years later, when I had to come up with a superhero world for my Kingdom Hearts inspired setting, I decided to start with Nightmare.  I decided to base a world off of the premise I started with him, combining mainstream Marvel characters with Supreme Power characters, directed or inspired by the Amalgam characters connected to them. So, I combined Hyperion with Captain America, Storm and Princess Zarda, and Iron Man with Dr. Spectrum. Where the Supreme Power comics came up short, I relied on the base DC comics Justice League. Obviously, I made tweaks of my own. The result is what I'm calling Metrotopia for convenience's sake in my game setting. Which finally lets me finish the overview of my d20 setting. Next I'll go over my default World of Darkness setting.