THE SEVEN MOST AWFUL TOYS and ACTION FIGURES

The new TOY STORY movie is coming out and if you live in the free world, you’ve been inundated with commercials for the film, the Happy Meal boxes, the collectables, the clothing line, the comics, the books, the cakes, the fork lifts, the feminine hygiene spray and the video games.  As Bill Maher said last week “we’ve been promised so much, this movie better give me a real buzz and a real woody”.

We all love toys, because we’re all kids inside, especially the unrepentant kids out there who love comics.  (That gang is not-growing-up with an aggression that borders on psychosis.)  But we don’t love all toys, because all toys don’t deserve it.  Some toys are just so bizarre, so wrong-headed, so unholy that Winslow Schott wouldn’t play with them drunk.   If these toys came to life, we would run screaming from the room, looking for a gun.

These are…

THE SEVEN MOST AWFUL TOYS

and ACTION FIGURES in history!

#7-SPIDER-MAN TOILET LAND

Please, look away for god's sake.

Tingle, Spidey-Sense, TINGLE!

I know Peter Parker has a shitty life and he sometimes gets all pissy about the way that fate treats him, but who thought that translated out to a toy line?  Well, we’re living in an age in which all our urination and bowel evacuation needs can be taken care of in a soft, nurturing, Spider-Man environment.  Cradle your family jewels in Spider-Man’s mask to the left, until it’s time to take them out to get them off to work.  Now with a choice of Spider-Man toilets to aim for (below), you can admire your “Spider-Man on the Toilet” action figure (above) as inspiration and instruction.

Those EYES! Staring into my soul...or something.

It's not an industrialized nation until you have many Spider-man toilet seats to choose from.

And when you’re done, Spider-Man toilet paper will bring you back to Aunt May, nice and clean.

Now, with wall crawling freshness!

There’s no versions of these toilet/pooping toys for Spawn or Ghost Rider (two characters easily crappy enough to warrant them), so it must be something they think ONLY Spider-Man fans might want.
Spidey fans, are you going to take that?

#6- HULK SHOWER HEAD

When you’re in the shower head business, you should figure out early you cannot license a super-hero character for your product.  There’s simply nowhere for the water to come out of a human shaped  shower-head that isn’t disgusting.  Any stream of anything exiting from below the belt is right out for most consumers (except for the Belgians who delight in that sort of thing)

This is in Belgium, and it's art. So back off, provincial fools.

Which leaves you with a choice of a shower head that either cries, sneezes or spits-up its contents onto you while you bathe.

Or shouts it at you, in a bout of soul-heaving retches.

And when it comes to the Hulk, a steady supply of steamy water-vomit is just what I’m looking for in a hygiene product for my bathroom.  “Hulk Smash!”?  I don’t think so.  I say “Hulk, relax away my troubles!”

#5-BATMAN SQUIRT GUN

Gaze upon its beauty and wonder.

Another in the theme of water streaming from the mouths of super-heroes.  I love this toy, and own TWO, and one of that pair will be one of the five things I’m being buried with.  (Read my will for the other four, you vultures).

Help me, I've squirted, and I can't get up!

WHY IT’S GLORIOUS:  When you “pull the trigger” (which we all noticed is where Batman’s penis would be) liquid squirts jauntily out his mouth at an alarming pounds per square inch pressure.  That’s a lesson to confuse the youngins, for in real life, that’s not going to happen, unless you sack-punch someone who’s chugging beer.  And even then, the likely result is more of a gush than a tightly directed stream….and then, of course, more sack-punching, all around.

Touch me, and you risk me fisks.

Either way, I can never “pull the trigger” with my Batman Squirter, for “Wertham based” reasons, so it rests on a shelf with my My Popeye Squirter, and my Donald Duck Squirter.  I know sailors don’t shoot high pressure liquid from their mouths when you pull THEIR triggers, but I cannot speak with authority about ducks.  I’ve never sack-punched a water fowl, and continue to be proud of that.

#4- PUNISHER “SHAPE SHIFTER” GUN

Obviously someone at TOY BIZ, saw the Batman/Popeye/Donald duck dick squirter guns and said “We must top that.”.

And they did.

Don't judge me, I lost my wife and kids to mobsters.

We’re so far past simple “pulling the trigger” dick jokes and well into Rocket Phallus, spread legged anal probe territory that I have to assume this entire thing was a cry for help from a toy designer deep “in the bowels” of the Toy Biz/Marvel/Legions of Satan organization.

It's the film strip of torture photos up the side of the box that makes it sing!

It’s not just that you can pose this figure in remarkably impolite ways all through the transformation process that makes this clearly-not-well-focus-tested product, such a delight–It’s that the FINAL transformation may well be the most impolite thing ever done to a human doll since voodoo was invented.

But before we get to that grand funk finale, check out the awkwardly posed figure, second from the top on that set of blackmail photos running down the side, where Frank Castle is first introduced to “harsh interrogation methods”.   By the time it’s all over, in final stage #5, he’s been left in “stress positions” all night, and this is one toy ready to tell you whatever you want to hear, or take you dancing.

I hope it’s a squirter pistol, ’cause this whole thing is giving me a “water board”, if you know what I mean.

Ah, that's better. I've worked out all the kinks. Now, you had questions for me, my captors?

What self respecting child would ever hold this “gun” in his hands except to show the therapist where the inappropriate touching happened?

#3- WEEPING PADME PREGGO TOY

Take me home! Play with me! I promise I'll stop crying.

If there’s one thing a kid wants from an action figure it’s ACTION!  And nothing says ACTION like a weeping pregnant lady all swollen up and ready to drop her puppies.  If you’ve ever had a little sister or brother arrive in your life, kids, then you know the excitement THIS action mom is in for, over six months of sleeplessness, bloating, crankiness, and cracked nipples.    Add to that level of thrill, collectors delight that this toy ties into one of the three best prequels in the Star Wars saga.

BONUS ACTION POINTS:  The doll inside the package has clearly become so depressed that she’s cut off all her hair in a deranged moment of self destruction.  Now with Post Partum Depression grip!

#2- DONALD DUCK VIBRATING RIDE

The people that work at Disney have a frustrating existence, I know.  The work long hours for meager pay, they’re not allowed to grow facial hair, and they have all those lectures about the “Articles of Zion” to attend every Wednesday lunch.    And that explains the occasional dildo on the Little Mermaid Video Box:

Yup it's real. Get your own copy out and stare at it.

or the odd Tigger assault on the children,

That's it, boy. You f***ed with the wrong Tigger.

but I have no explanation for this:

I'm speechless. What caption could I write to equal this image?

How did it get built?  What designer approved it?  Where can I find one?

Sure, it vibrates like a bucking bronco, and it’s our job to feed it the quarters while our daughter hangs on, but does Donald have to be LOOKING at her like that when she rides?  And if you’re going to teach youngsters how to “Cowgirl”, for god’s sake instruct them on where to put their hands.  It’s never holding onto the hat.

#1- WONDER WOMAN ACTION SCISSORS

Working your Wonder Woman, step one.

Ah, Princess Diana’s oddest collectable, and another of my prized collection.  The best you can say about it that at least she’s not tied up.  It’s still impossible to ignore the underlying message of this toy.  To make it work, you must pry Wonder Woman’s thighs apart and quickly thrust them back together again, OVER AND OVER.  And what does it do while this is happening?  IT CUTS THINGS OFF!

Working your Wonder Woman, step two. SPREAD them THIGHS!

If there was any justice in the world, this is the weapon that street women carry in their boot to fight off evil johns who don’t pay up.  Like a St. Christopher sculpture is used for the dashboard of your car.  But I think these are safety scissors, so you couldn’t cut up your pimp with them at all.  Darn it.

IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING WHERE THESE TOYS ARE:

I try to check my sources and facts at Art Land and discovered that the following toys turned out to be hoaxes.  As popular as they are on the inter-web, they do not exist in real life.

This was faked up by the Onion. Oh, those guys and their gay nozzle inflation jokes!

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I've seen this in a few places. Not real. But we can always dream...

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I'm not sure if this is real, but I'm sure the girl is really annoyed at Hulk for flashing the gamma ray like that.

There are many other action figure and toy hoaxes, and to be honest, I’m slightly dubious of the Weepin’ Padme,  but the following toy is real, you can look it up yourself.

It’s the Britney Spears action figure, complete with car seat and lack of moral center.  From HEROBUILDERS. com.

I put the black box there. This is still a FAMILY blog, goddamnit!

I think I’m going to nominate Britney as our honorary #9th most awful toy, but under no circumstances will I ever use the phrase “MINT IN BOX” to describe it.

That’s it for today.  Join us tomorrow when SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS will give away another hilarious webcomic for your freeloading enjoyment.  Until then, may you lick all your American made toys in a lead free environment and have a good afternoon.

Ty the Guy OUT!

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The Top Seven Comics Creators who can KICK YOUR ASS

Oooh...tough guys!

Last week saw the release of KICK-ASS a promising Comic Book Movie with a tepid box office on opening weekend.  Industry types were somewhat surprised, as the title and premise suggested a bigger response, but those of us in the know expected it.  You can’t fake KICK-ASS, it has to be in your blood, your pores and in your gonads, my friends, or the audience knows.

As much as I admire the work of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr, the creators of this epic story, I simply cannot in good conscious call them KICK-ASS examples of the male species.  While Millar is British, and therefore has soccer hooliganism in his DNA, Mr. Romita is an average-sized man, with straight teeth and no criminal record to speak of.   I’d feel fairly confident facing either of them in a bar fight, and I’m willing to go in sober and unarmed.

But the world of comics DOES include some of the most stunningly macho examples of man-flesh in the history of the visual arts, and you should know about them, if only to avoid their supremely terrifying gaze if they appear at conventions.

Be afraid fanboys, of—

9

THE TOP SEVEN COMIC CREATORS WHO COULD LITERALLY KICK YOUR ASS.

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#7

Ken Lashley

No, he's not standing on a box. Everyone else is just that small.

Currently illustrating The Flash.

You know that scene in Jurassic Park where the water is jiggling in the cups, so you know there’s a giant dinosaur coming?  That’s based on Ken Lashley.

Ken is the largest human in the comic industry, if not in western civilization.  At seven foot nine, eight hundred and sixty pounds (and none of it fat), the only reason he doesn’t play professional football is that “it wouldn’t be fair to the other players”.  I’m big, but whenever I’m in a room with Ken, he makes me feel like a skinny schoolgirl in knee high socks, with a Hello Kitty backpack.  Seriously.

He happens to be a pleasant, quiet, somewhat reserved individual, however, which is a disappointment to lovers of ass-kicking manly misbehavior the world over.  I never thought it was part of Ken’s character to be aggressive — until I saw his cover for Excalibur #73

This is the single most testosterone-fueled drawing I’ve ever seen.  It’s an existential scream of pure maleness rarely witnessed outside of Heavy Metal Gay Snuff-porn.  This image of a blue-balled demon radiating nuclear energy from his dick while magnetically attracting the red lady, makes anyone viewing it more manly by 25% — including any girls.  And AFTER seeing this illustration, if any of you go out and kick someone’s ass, Ken Lashley officially gets the assist.

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#6

Charles Moulton (aka Dr. William Moulton Marston).

We had no idea what this man was up to...

This Y-chromosome-soaked head-shrinker helped create three amazing

The good doctor knew that real men liked this sort of thing. And real women.

legacies for himself in the 20th Century.  One was the polygraph machine (the Lie Detector) which has done more to fight crime than a squad room full of cops on a lifetime steroid binge–another was the fictional queen of lesbo bondage adventure, Wonder Woman.

But Dr. Will got his high testosterone scores in a much more impressive way.   He was in an openly poly-amorous relationship with two ladies his entire life–  had kids with both women– and the one he WASN’T legally married to, was the one he based Wonder Woman on.  Anyone who could keep TWO sexy bisexual fetish-doms happy for a lifetime of tied-up joy had to be producing twice the man-sauce you and I were issued at birth and could easily pound our weak asses into the sand without breaking a sweat.   Trust me.

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#5

Jim Steranko

This Nick Fury artist had a comic career that was finished and done forty-five years ago — it lasted for maybe four months — and he’s STILL considered one of the most influential artists who ever worked.  The balls it takes to be THAT good at something and walk away from it is impressive enough, but it’s par for the course for the Most Interesting Man in Comics.  Let’s take a look at a recent photo of this senior citizen to give you a sense of his essence.

"Last week I punched that Dos Equus guy in the face, just to win a five dollar bet."

Steranko was born tough. Instead of spending his youth PLAYING Grand Theft Auto on his mommy’s couch with his brother’s game system, Teen-Steranko stole actual cars, and occasionally got arrested for it.  That experience in the lock-up inspired him to become a circus escape artist, where laughing at thick, manly chains is in the job description.

But even this wasn’t enough for Jim (Grand Cojones) Steranko, who permanently moved into the he-man badass club-for-life when he became a professional sword swallower and FIRE-EATER.

You read that right, bitches. I can literally breathe fire.

Now you know why Steranko could write the adventures of spy-stud Nick Fury with such authority, and why he insisted on calling Nick the “ramrod” of SHIELD.

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#4

Jack (King) Kirby

Who, but an authentic tough guy, could rock this plaid dinner jacket?

We all know that Kirby was THE hardest working man in the history of comics who could write and draw an entire comic book in five days, and it would STILL be better than the one that took you three months.    But besides being an authentic artistic genius, Jolly Jack was an authentic war hero of epic proportion.

MANLY MOMENT #1: When he found out he was going to be drafted, Kirby didn’t go get drunk and beg the local girls for a “shipping-out-tomorrow” roll in the hay…instead he WORKED TWICE AS MANY HOURS PER DAY to double his already astounding output, and stockpile enough pages to continuing publishing his titles without missing an issue while he personally punched out the Nazi war machine.

MANLY MOMENT #2: While sleeping in an infantry foxhole in the winter of ’44 Kirby got frostbite, and was shipped to a hospital where a doctor wanted to take his legs.  Jack said no, and just to show off, he forced the circulation back into his limbs by power of his own male  will.

MANLY MOMENT #3: When a commanding officer discovered Kirby could draw, he started sending Jack out ALONE at night to sketch the terrain and draw maps of enemy territory.   Kirby went behind enemy lines armed with a pencil and paper.  Eat that, pussies.

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#3

Mike Grell

Nothing manly to see here. Move along.

“Iron” Mike has so much more going for him than being the creator of THE WARLORD (who is that half-naked dude with a giant helmet and a big broadsword who ISN’T Conan).  To begin with, anyone who’s named after a foundry metal without a trace of irony is already tougher than anyone you’ve ever met.

But Grell gets his he-man cred the old fashioned way. He’s the Ted Nugent of comics — a big game hunter who delights in personally killing and eating the larger creatures of our world, often with no more than an arrow, a knife and his own teeth.  Though I don’t share his love of blood sports, I do share his carnivorous taste buds, and while having lunch with him at a convention a while ago, I brought it up.  He told me that he refuses to eat any creature unless he’s already killed at least one of their species.  “I’ve cut the throats of chickens, ducks, geese…I’ve butchered my own cow.  I feel I owe it to the meals I eat,” he said to me, with an expression I refuse to describe as “Lecter-like”.  I can’t argue with the logic, but I told him it meant he could never enjoy a crocodile steak or shark-fin soup — two meals I have tasted in my travels.  His response, I swear to god:  “I haven’t eaten shark fin soup….yet.”

If this thing in front of me was alive, I'd have eaten it by now.

Brrrr.

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#2

Bill Mauldin

As the creator of the extremely popular WWII comic series, “Willie and Joe”, Bill Mauldin was the first, last and only cartoonist whose job required him TO BE SHOT AT TO MEET DEADLINES.

Bill Mauldin: He don't look like much, do he?

While with the 45th Infantry, Bill was part of the invasion of Sicily, sketching cartoons about frontline life for “The 45th Division News”, in between dodging live rounds.   These cartoons became popular enough that Bill was transferred to Stars and Stripes for the duration and told to produce the adventures of Willie and Joe as a matter of vital national need.   Any man with a normal set of testes would have hopped a jeep for the rear and started sharpening pencils, gleeful to be out of danger, but not Bill.  Instead he asked for his own jeep, and spent the rest of the war DRIVING AROUND THE FRONT LINES looking for ideas.  And just to prove he wasn’t kidding around, in September of 1943, he had his drawing shoulder ripped apart by a German mortar while visiting a machine gun crew near Monte Cassino.  True to his granite-testicled manner, Bill used it as an opportunity to do a few cartoons about life in an army hospital and kept right on going.

MIND-BOGGLING MAN POINTS: General George Patton once threatened to court martial Mauldin for gross insubordination, but the cartoonist was rescued from discipline by none other than Supreme Allied Commander and future President, Dwight Eisenhower, who told Patton that Mauldin’s characters were essential for troop morale and to “leave him alone”.   Next time you get in trouble, wait and see if the MOST POWERFUL MAN ON THE PLANET shows up to have your back…

I'm not afraid of Nazis, but Bill Mauldin scared me yellow.

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#1

Larry Hama

Don't sneak up on this guy if you value your life.

Whatever those Nancies at Hasbro might think about inventing the famous American action figure with the Kung Fu grip, Larry Hama created GI Joe for a generation of fans, and knows more about macho conflict-fiction than anyone alive.  And lest you think his world of big guns and phallic-named characters was only the product of Larry’s wimpy imagination, you should know this:   Hama is an eighth-degree black belt in five different martial arts.  I don’t know what that eighth-degree means, because every time I ask about it, someone kicks my ass, but I figure being ANY black belt qualifies Larry to obliterate me with one hand.

And just in case Larry has to kill you from a distance, he’s a qualified marksman and weapons expert from his time in Viet Nam serving in the Army Corps of Engineers during the war.

And if that list of impressive man points hasn’t dropped you to your knees in supplication–Hama’s specialty in the Corps?

Demolition and explosives.

Fiery explosions and certain death. Larry Hama must be nearby.

So naturally, the single most goddamned dangerous man in the history of our medium ended up the editor of Wonder Woman comics.

He owed it to Dr. Moulton.

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That’s it for today.  My delicate, lily white ass cannot stand sitting for so long.  I have to lie down.

Ty the Guy

click here for more of Ty’s Top Seven lists

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THE SEVEN WORST RESURRECTION STORIES IN COMICS.

The New New Testament?

In the spirit of Easter Monday, the day that Christians believe that Jesus resurrected and started showing off a little of that holy spirit, I’ve turned my attention to the subject of resurrection in comic books.

We’re all thrilled that Joker was brought back to life by editor Whitney Ellsworth in his very first appearance.  And we cheered Superman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Luthor, Bucky, Reed Richards, Captain Marvel and Captain America when they all returned from the dead.  And Batman when he comes back, and whoever is next to go…it’s all part of the gig.  But what about the mistakes?  The horrible retcons and the undoing of GREAT farewell issues?   Because I’m a cynical bastard at heart, I tend to focus on the screw ups and the terrible tales…I love that stuff.

And so, on this, the arbitrarily chosen anniversary of one of the bigger resurrection tales in history, I list

MY SEVEN LEAST FAVORITE RESURRECTION STORIES IN COMICS

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#7

RESURRECTION MAN

Today is a good day to die. And so is Thursday. And the weekend is good, perhaps around brunch.

Created by Andy Lanning, Dan Abnett and Jackson Guice for DC Comics in the late 90s, the character of Mitchell Shelly was a lawyer who could not die.  Shoot him in the face,  he was back in ten minutes, thanks to an experimental nanotechnology formula coursing through his veins that fixed any hole, rupture, exploded heart or crushed skeleton he bad-lucked his way into that issue.  And you know, if you left it there, you have an interesting idea.  But the concept of an un-killable lawyer wasn’t pants wetting enough for these guys, Old R-Man had a GIMMICK, too!  Every time Mitch died and came back, he got a brand new super-power, because you know, that’s logical.   Sometimes when he picked himself up off the ground, he could fly, or shoot beams from his eyes, or he suddenly understood the intricacies of feng shui, and it was different every time.  Then it got weird.

He developed this device he wore around his wrist called “The Resurrector”, which allowed him to know what powers he would get, depending on how he next died.  So it was ENCOURAGING him to commit suicide.  It was a Suicide Watch, clearly, but they hadn’t the courage to name it . Can we all say ICCCCKKKK at the same time?

The scripts were actually okay, really, and the art by Butch Guice was excellent…but how could a series based around so wholesome and friendly a concept as continuous suicide ever get canceled?

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#6

Norman Osborn

I'll bet this comic had "meaning" and "drama" when you first read it, suckers!

Oh, THIS old tale.  An industrialist ingests an experimental formula, gains super-intelligence-and-mad-strength, dons a Halloween goblin costume, fights Spider-Man, kills the love of that hero’s life, and ends up impaled on his own rocket glider.  Gone, dead, gone—a beautifully told tale that runs from Spider-Man’s first year, until issues #121-122.  And at least this time, the experimental formula is going inside an INDUSTRIALIST.  No more undead lawyers.

You couldn’t bring a character like the Goblin back after so dramatically correct an ending as he saw in #122.   But a fleeting twenty years later, towards the end of the universally despised CLONE NONSENSE, we discover that Osborn was alive and well, and had been behind damn near every piece of evil shit that happened to Spider-Man in the years in-between, including the Clone Stuff, Spider-Man’s tax audit, Gwen Stacy’s lost virginity and the death of Aunt May.

The explanation?  See, the Goblin had long ago healed himself of that nasty bout of “impaled chest cavity” disease more or less just because he was all “super-heal-y” and stuff, we just didn’t know… and he had more or less just gotten up off the slab at the morgue, replaced himself with a recently chest-impaled homeless guy,  and wandered off to Europe to secretly pull the strings of damn near every piece of evil shit that happened to Spider-Man in the years in-between.

A world famous Super-Villain and equally world famous billionaire industrialist, went wandering undead around Europe for twenty years and did not get noticed.  Lucky guy was only world famous in the United States I guess.

Though there have been a few good Norman stories of late, the Osborn resurrection made us all victims of the Gwen-Stacy-gave-Norman-her-virginity-and-had-kids-with-him-that-grew-up-to-try-to-kill-Peter story line that made a generation of Spider-Man fans physically ill a few years back.  And that I cannot forgive.

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#5

Iron Man – The Crossing  – Timeslide

This comic is a good argument for going blind.

Not a resurrection in the technical sense, so it’s lower on the list than it should be.  For its sheer nonsense factor, it should be around #2, but here’s the 411:  Around Avengers #395, it started to come out that Tony Stark had been a long time agent of Kang, the Avengers time traveling enemy.  And now Iron Man was working against the Avengers and the only way to stop him was to travel back in time and pick up a teenage Tony Stark from BEFORE he was a Kang agent, and strap the teenage Stark into some IRON MAN armor and let the teenage one kill the middle aged, drunken Kang Bad Guy Iron Man so he could be replaced by a new, commercially friendly TEEN IRON MAN.

Lordy lordy, it was awful.  A special kind of awful.  And thankfully, it all wrapped itself up in less than a year, as the entire Avengers franchise was handed over to Rob Liefeld to clean it up, and it was swept under the rug like the skin of a dead animal.  Imagine a time when Rob Liefeld was an improvement on what you were getting previously, and pray you never read these comics.  Pray hard.

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#4:

Alfred Pennyworth

I'm betting the terrible skin rash is influencing his decision to turn evil.

The granddaddy of the preposterously stupid resurrection stories of the Batman Universe.  Show of hands, how many of you knew Batman’s famous butler had died?  We ancient fans, in our mid-forties, recall a time (Detective #328) when Alfred pushed the Caped Crusaders to safety one evening, whilst they were menaced by a giant boulder, and he was squished flat by this boulder and left for dead by Batman and Robin who wandered off to put a little Aunt Harriet in their lives.  (An editorial decision had hoped that folks might stop thinking Bruce and Dick were gay if they had a spinster aunt living with them.   Well, obviously, the gays never go near the spinster aunts!) Sadly, with crime to fight, there was no time to go back and get Alfred’s body for burial, or even to think much about it after a while, and Batman and Robin

Dressing up in swim trunks while Batman pounds you on the chest=NOT GAY.

left Pennyworth’s rotting corpse to the hands of a mad scientist named BRANDON CRAWFORD, who we find out (in Detective #356) sort of fiddled around with Alfred’s dead body, hoping to resurrect him.   He had mixed results, bringing Alfred back to life all right, but accidentally turning him into a boil covered telekinetic super-villain named the Outsider.   After turning the Batmobile and Batcave against our Dynamic Duo, the OUTSIDER  effects kind of “wore off” and that was that.  Smiles all around.

And then they kicked Aunt Harriet out of their lives, and resumed what they were doing before all this nonsense began.  Alfred NEVER talks about it.  Neither do we.

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#3

Doctor Doom

Doctor Doom cannot come to the battle right now, but if you leave your name and power level, he'll get back to you.

I have had enough of bringing Doctor Doom back from the dead.  The first eighty-six times they did it, it was all kinds of fun-cookery, but after a while, who didn’t notice the pattern?  As soon as someone kicks Doctor Doom’s ass, and he falls off a cliff, into the nether-lava, we all know IT’S NOT DOCTOR DOOM.  It’s a clone, or a robot, or his brother in-law, or his chiropractor.  In fact, any time you start to think you have the drop on Doctor Doom, you might as well pack up and go home, because it won’t be him.  Face it.  Doom is a pussy.  A complete pussy.  He wouldn’t go into battle with a real enemy if there was any danger on the line, and he’s shown it over and over again.  He hides at HOME.  Punk ass pussy.  You know that green costume he wears?  It was originally BLUE, but the gallons of coward urine this knee-knocking candy boy has been spraying from his terrified urethra has stained it green over the years.

That’s right, Doom.  You heard me.  You’re a coward, and I’m calling you on it.  What are you going to do?  Send your best friend from summer-camp after me in a Doom Suit?  Call me when you grow a pair.  Ty’s new rule.  You CAN’T KILL DOCTOR DOOM anymore.  We no longer care.

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#2

Jason Todd.   Robin II

Hey everybody! There's no reason not to like me!

If we depend on my obviously fuzzy memory,  Jason was either an orphaned circus boy (like Dick Grayson), or an jerk street kid who stole the wheels off of the Batmobile on a whim and became Robin the Second.  I seem to recall that Jason was fairly popular when first introduced, and equally unpopular once he’d morphed into the “total douche” version of Robin after the CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS (or “Ass-Hat-Robin”, as he was known at the time).  But rather than just “improving the writing”, (a tactic abandoned in a number of comics throughout the nineties), DC had a phone line poll to see if the brat lived or died.  After a judicial application of tire-iron to the boy’s skull, at the hands of the Joker, the phone calls were counted.  The kid lost, and Crap-Robin was mercifully Dead.  Gone.  Dead.  Batman got mopey.  Tim Drake eventually showed up as the new Robin.  We got on with our lives…

Enter Superboy-Prime and the glorious, magical, transcendent RETCON PUNCH.

I’ll try to explain this to the unfamiliar, and you’ll believe me insane when I do, but here goes: There’s a version of Superboy from a parallel world, and that world got destroyed before THAT Superboy had much of a chance at a career of super-ing  Instead of saving banks from teenage Lex Luthor, Superboy-Prime got to see his universe wiped out, and as a reward, he got to live on a farm in the parallel nether-world of Paradise Wonder Cove Land, with an older version of himself that was married to old Lois Lane.  And there was a teenage version of Luthor there, too…with a terrible perm and metal pants.  So Superboy-Prime did what any teenager with the powers of a god would do (when the only nearby female was married to an older version of yourself)…he punched the walls of his pocket  universe in frustration.  And each punch changed someone’s history back here on Earth (including dead Jason Todd’s), because, like, the Super-ripples of continuity super-frustration and confusion, went forth from the parallel world and just…”did stuff” to the universe, man. POW!  The Doom Patrol is sort of not dead.  POW, Brother Power the Geek has a muskrat farm in Ohio.  BANG.  What ever the royal f**k your head could blort out, could be explained away by one of these retcon punch things….

NOTE TO EDITORS:  You CANNOT allow writers to use just ANY substance to help them be inspired. NO ingesting cactus and anything with little pictures of Care Bears printed on them.

Anyway, a Superboy-Prime punch caused the highly tire-ironed and very much ripped-apart-in-an-explosion Jason Todd to just “wake up” in his coffin and claw his way to the surface.  And the digging out section of his week didn’t require any air, but it did require temporary superhuman strength, to push the six feet of dirt and coffin lid off him, but then that went away.

And now Jason’s back.  Sometimes he’s Nightwing.  Sometimes he’s the Red Hood.  Once he pretended to be Clayface pretending to be Jason Todd.  It’s all good.

——————————————————————————————-

#1:

Aunt May dies beautifully in Amazing Spider-Man #400.

Comes back with a bomb in her head, about four years later.

If you don't cry reading this comic, you're a psychopath.

At the time they killed off Peter Parker’s perennial pill popping Aunt May, I thought it was a poor choice, as the character was too important to the basic Spidey dynamic to lose (especially after so many other core characters had died… Uncle Ben… high school sweetheart Gwen… best friend Harry, favorite high school teacher Professor Warren, and best villain, the Goblin, amongst others).  But it was impossible to argue the story wasn’t touching and memorable.  May gets a sense that it’s “her time” and she and Peter go to the Empire State Building, where she confesses to Peter that she’s known he was Spider-Man all along, and she tells him that she’s secretly proud of him and Ben would be, too.  They discuss tiny details of their time together, and wrap up a lifetime of love.  Then she goes home, lies down, cradles Peter’s face, gets a sudden worrying fever, and dies, while Mary Jane waits in the hall outside with her Aunt Anna.

Go read the story and try not to cry.  I’m sobbing like a bear caught in a leg trap just typing this.

But a few years later, Howard Mackie returned Aunt May to the world or Spider-Man using a little known writing trick called “not giving a crap if you suspend disbelief or not.”

Here’s the rub:  The Aunt May who died at home, surrounded by family, friends and detailed memories of their lives together, was, in fact, an actress, hired by Norman Osborn, and given DNA altering compounds and plastic surgery to more closely resemble Aunt May…all because Normie wanted to make Peter experience the death of a loved one, essentially as a really mean prank.   This was part of his being behind everything awful that happened to Peter scheme mentioned earlier.  Why KILLING the actual Aunt May wouldn’t have been a far meaner prank is beyond any mortal mind to comprehend.  Instead, the Goblin kidnaps the REAL Aunt May and replaces her with the actress…then, after carefully not killing Aunt May at all, he surgically implants her with a bizarre weapon/device/bomb in her skull that makes nearby people melt into piles of DNA goo if Norman presses a button.  THEN, he puts May Parker into suspended animation, to pull out as a goo-melting dead-Aunt trump card, should he need one in the middle of a battle.  Which he does in Spider-Man #75.

I swear to god Marvel published it.  I didn’t just dream it.  It may be the single worst retcon of all time.  And I’m including the much maligned BRAND NEW DAY, which resurrected Harry Osborn with the delightfully succinct “I’ve been in Europe”, where the undead are clearly commonplace.

What happened at the editorial meeting where someone said “Let’s bring back Aunt May, wire her head with a flesh-gooing weapon, claim the one in the gravesite next to Ben was a genetically altered actress, and the fans will just ADORE it!”?!?  How could a loving and forgiving god have allowed this comic to be published?

HOW?!?

Peter...why won't they let me die in peace...Peter...?

I’m sure I missed some.  Hammerhead escaping a nuclear explosion by turning into a ghost.  Red Skull becoming a disembodied spirit of  hate…and ALL those Life Model Decoys taking one for the team.  If there’s an especially awful resurrection I left out, let me know in the comments section.

Til then, happy Resurrection Day!

Ty the Guy

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