Superhero comics: What insane story/character developments do avid followers take for granted but would blow the minds of anyone only peripherally aware of them?

Squirrel Girl became the Avengers' nanny a few years back! Only caught the first few issues of that but it was pretty entertaining. Mainly I loved the audition issue with dozens of sad Avengers hangers-on coming out of the woodwork, including a particularly desperate D-Man.

i didn't know Squirrel Girl dated back that far, though she was a '00s creation

Originally, Squirrel Girl only appeared in that one 1990s story, which was just a 10 page story in anthology title... Still, it seems to have been kinda memorable for some folks, because the humourous tone was so different from your regular 1992 superhero comics, and because she was such an awesomely bizarre character: in her first appearance she ends up saving Iron Man and defeating Dr. Doom with only the help of her squirrels. Apparently Dan Slott was one those people who still remembered her, as he revived her for the Great Lakes Avengers mini (which by the way is a great comic that everyone should read), with her gimmick now being that she's able to defeat the biggest badass villains in the Marvel Universe (like Doom and Thanos) despite her goofy and limited powers. I guess her subsequent popularity is partly due to that gimmick, partly because Marvel doesn't have too many funny and innocent characters anymore. (I really, really, really hope no one tries to make her more "dark", like they did with Speedball.)

http://webcomicoverlook.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/glipenancejpgix7.jpg

fun developments with speedball and squirrel girl

love it

Can he see out of that helmet?

he's trying to headbutt Squirrel Girl

Started listening to the Rachel and Miles X-plain the X-Men podcast this week. It's insane story development after insane story development, the whole point pretty much being to make these more intelligible for the layman. As my own X-Men knowledge is somewhere between novice and intermediate, I'm enjoying the hell out of it.

I'm not following the X-books anymore, but I read somewhere that Wolverine is gonna "really", "actually" die this year. Did that happen already?

It's kinda funny how, whenever there's a big superhero movie around, it seems the hero of that movie is dead and/or replaced by another character in the comics. No wonder the movies haven't managed to attract new audiences for the comics, this stuff must seem incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't been reading superhero comics for years already.

no one ever really dies in comics

and yeah superhero continuity is totally incomprehensible to me these days

Yeah, I know, hence the scare quotes.

one of my favorite crazy X-Men stories is how the entire original+ team was captured by a living island

do you mean the original Giant Size X-Men #1 that introduced Wolverine and Storm to the team, or the wacky do-over with the secret team and the secret evil Summers brother

Unfamiliar with that comic, but there's an episode of Rachel and Miles that discusses it intensively.

I meant GSXM #1, forgot about the secret evil Summers brother do-over which basically is like putting frosting on frosting

I think they're teasing a huge change with Wolverine but death is a red herring?

Isn't the living island now their lawn?

It's a progeny of the living island, I think!

God bless you, X-Men; God bless you, each and every one

I thought that had been, and it turned out that he was just mortal (IN A COMPLETE COINKYDINK like he was in the film that came out just sfterwards). And dead in which book? He's got about 5, all with separate continuities.

Anyway, other current potential candidates for the thread title:

Daredevil now lives in San Fransisco (for the first time, conveniently erasing the two years in the 70s he lived there shagging Black Widow)
J Jonah Jameson is mayor of NYC
Doctor Octopus had a blistering affair with Aunt May
Doctor Octopus displaced Spider-Man from Spider-Man's brain but not before he had made him feel what it was like to shag Aunt May
Doctor Octopus was better at being Spider-Man than Peter Parker
Hank Pym and the Wasp miniaturise and crawl about in each others genitals for sexy fun times
The Human Torch was dead for a couple of years
Amy's Crack from Doctor Who destroyed Earth-4
Supergirl is now a Red Lantern, who are led by Guy Gardner (looking like he's in Mastodon)
John Constantine is in the Justice League
Jonah Hex went to the future and got his face fixed up, now he's back in the Old West and nobody believes him when he says who he is

Daredevil now lives in San Fransisco (for the first time, conveniently erasing the two years in the 70s he lived there shagging Black Widow)

I don't think that earlier time in SF was retconned away! I'll check...

Doctor Octopus displaced Spider-Man from Spider-Man's brain but not before he had made him feel what it was like to shag Aunt May

No. Please, no.

The Doc/May thing actually has an old goofy history, not surprised they brought it back
Wasp/Pym junk was in Ultimate universe, doesn't count
Wait, so does this mean Supergirl spits up lantern-fireblood (or whatever it's called) and she'll die if she loses the ring? Does she hang out with the cat Red Lantern?
That Jonah Hex thing sounds hilarious!!

OK, there are references to DD's previous SF residency in the last series' last issue and the new series' 1st issue.

Mea culpa, I was only skimming the DD stuff because Waid.

Yeah, Supergirl is the whole blood vomiting deal. The cat is away with Atrocitus, who got sold out by GG and died but came back through the ring of a giant ox and is now alive again.

Hex is great, you should all obtain All-Star Western and read it.

The DC-verse was attacked by an evil Superman who drew power from kryptonite and was weakened by sunlight. Therefore, he put the moon in front of the sun, and since apparantly none of the heroes in the US realize that the world is round, he could defeat them all. Only after a long battle did someone realize they could just move the moon away again, and the evil Superman was easily defeated.

I tried to type out the insanity that has been the X-men since schism, but I can't be bothered to check on it. Are the young X-men still around, and is it true that young Cyclops will get his own ongoing where he is in space?

yes and yes.

Cyclops #2 comes out tomorrow.

Doctor Octopus displaced Spider-Man from Spider-Man's brain but not before he had made him feel what it was like to shag Aunt May

Aw jeez. My kid's been reading that title. How bad is it?

Parker goes EEEW and ICK much like your kid would at the thought of old people kissing before it goes anywhere tbh.

Thanks. I used to monitor his comics after reading about this one upthread

Superhero comics: What insane story/character developments do avid followers take for granted but would blow the minds of anyone only peripherally aware of them?

but let my guard down after a while.

Ha, I remember the Torch dying but didn't keep up with it after that, the return sounds just like a total mess:

It is later revealed that the Human Torch was revived by a species of insect-like creatures that were implanted in his body by Annihilus in an attempt to force Storm to help open the Negative Zone portal. However, although Storm refused, Annihilus gained a means of access when an alternate dimension Reed Richards opened the portal for him, forcing Storm to escape and lead a resistance against Annihilus with the aid of his fellow prisoners.

i mean that CANNOT be what they had in mind right? Like at least the Superman thing turned out to have been a pretty well-planned out two-year story arc and was totally awesome. I was a kid, sure, but at the same time was the wretched death and return of Mister Fantastic, which even then I knew was lame by comparison.

Daredevil now lives in San Fransisco (for the first time, conveniently erasing the two years in the 70s he lived there shagging Black Widow)

I've only read as far as the most recent trade (which ends with DD moving out of NYC), but in it the explicit reason why he moves to San Fransisco is his previous history there.

Oops, sorry, I see that WilliamC addressed that already.

Wow, I REALLY skimmed it.

Doctor Octopus had a blistering affair with Aunt May
Doctor Octopus displaced Spider-Man from Spider-Man's brain but not before he had made him feel what it was like to shag Aunt May

Didn't the Octopus/May romance happen, like, decades ago? I remember reading about it as a kid. Or are you saying he romanced and had sex with May while inside Peter's body? Because if it's the latter, wtf?!

No, it's all flashing back to 74 (?) but it's not a supervillain scam like it was in the original book (apparently, not read) but a proper marriage.

So they've retconned it so that he really was in love with May? IIRC it definitely was presented as some sort of a scam in the original story.

Dude, I read something like 35 hero books a week. Give me a break here.

35?! Why?

Because he doesn't have time for a 36th!

ps Aldo are we talking physical copies or do you digi comic too?

Just digi, buy very little in physical.

Marvel and DC, on an average week, put out something like 15-18 books each. Add a couple of indies and BAM.

As to why, search for my "reads so you don't have to threads". Just because i stopped writing doesn't mean i stopped reading (I even say as much on the DC thread).

Johnny Storm's return was pretty awesome, and very intricately plotted. The mechanics of his revival and escape also played a major role in the next phase of the story. I highly doubt it wasn't planned out well in advance.

It was written by Hickman, who seems to specialize in complex extended plots. (Sometimes to the books' detriment when floppies are rolling out in 2- to 4-week intervals. Infinity didn't make much sense to me at the time -- it might read better in a chunk.)

Yup, his plots are insane, and elements back from Secret Warriors will occasionally still get drawn into his new stuff. But at times he loses his handling of it, I think everyone at marvel has admitted that Infinity spun out of control. I liked it, though, but that's compared to crossovers where nothing happens for six out of seven installments, and then half of the final installment is spent setting up new stories.

New insane development: Thanos has an Inhuman son, who is even more powerful than him.

As to why, search for my "reads so you don't have to threads". Just because i stopped writing doesn't mean i stopped reading (I even say as much on the DC thread).

this doesn't actually explain why!

Yeah, your implication is that you were torturing yourself reading all this stuff just to post about it!

OK, by way of explanation...

I stopped writing the DC one pretty much because I found the writing was sucking what pleasure I was getting out of the actual good books away, probably because I was spending all my time trying to think of new and inventive ways to say "this books sucks" about landfill titles like Grifter. I always had time for the good and equally for the awful cf The Liefeldening.

Because I am an Aspie shut-in rube creature of habit, having got myself into a routine of obtaining the comics on a weekly basis I pretty simply never got back out of it. It's helped me in a lot of ways get back to an almost child-like appreciation for them - the good ones are good, the bad ones are bad, and some of them are just FUN. Now I'm moved completely away from my LCS and only get floppies no more frequently than monthly I get a re-read when they turn up of the good stuff, or at least the stuff that I like enough to buy. I also re-read chunks in 'trade' in digi, the whole Doc Ock/Spidey brain stuff was beginning to look like a candidate for that but real life has got in the way over the past couple of months and I only get the weekend to read at the moment so keeping pace is all I can do.

I suppose I'd convince myself I just love comics. You could less charitably say I'm stuck in a rut, and I certainly have a weakness in quality filtering for Marvel.