Reinvention Ideas For DC/Marvel Characters

any ideas for Wonder Woman or the magic based heroes?

For a crossover universe, I actually like the idea of bringing back the Donald Blake aspect of Thor and shipping him with Wonder Woman. The BDSM subtext would be delicious.

I'd turn the Joker into a sort of legacy character, with the original likely being dead for years. Copycat killers are nothing new, after all, and it would explain the vast inconsistencies in portrayal. However, I'd also make them be essentially paper tigers with way less influence and importance than they imagine. More often than not, the Joker would be lured to inadvertently cover up other people's crimes with his antics, basking in the attention the media give him... while Batman treats the respective encounters with bored indifference, a far cry from his own usual obsessions.

I'd also spruce up the Penguin as a more imposing arch-nemesis. Always made a lot more symbolic sense as well. A mammal that flies against a bird that doesn't. An athletic bruiser against a deformed thinker (not that they're slouches otherwise either). An old money tycoon against a self-made kingpin. However, I'd also try and alleviate most of the unfortunate implications, with the Penguin having his own noble streak and affection for Gotham's underbelly. I imagine him acting akin to Capone or the Yakuza, often doing more for the poverty stricken ghettos that either Batman or Bruce Wayne ever could. All in all, putting noble yet naive idealists against ruthless yet reasonable pragmatists is something of a pet theme of mine.

edited 10th Mar '17 2:16:59 AM by indiana404

I've had a similar idea in the past, except instead of having the Joker be an explicit legacy character, it'd be left more ambiguous. Every so often he'd be left in a situation that should kill him (falling off a tall cliff, being trapped in an exploding building, etc.), but no one would ever find the body, so when he turns up again with a slightly different outfit and modus operandi, characters would wonder if this is the same Joker or a copycat, but would usually not get any confirmation one way or the other.

I was thinking of taking another crack at New 52 Lobo. I think he would have worked best if he had a personality similar to, say, Dante from Devil May Cry rather than a straightforward mercenary.

Well this party's getting crazy...

I didn't mind the characterization per se, but rather the vague melodramatic backstory, playing his being a self-made sole survivor for angst rather than dark comedy. I know the original started out as a parody of overblown anti-heroes and then become one himself, but this time, he wasn't even a parody of the angsty prettyboy to begin with. I reckon I'd keep the characterization, but a lot more self-aware and comedic. For an emotional impression, picture stacks of The Cure disks... topped with the soundtrack to Equestria Girls. That's the guy's mind in a nutshell. If Deadpool is where insanity meats comedy, Nu!Bo is where wangst meets narm.

edited 21st Mar '17 3:04:21 AM by indiana404

Actually, I think the parody part was added later, kind of like what happened with Deadpool.

I remember before the New 52 version debuted in the comics, some speculated he would be a parody like you suggested. Then we read the book...

edited 21st Mar '17 3:05:44 AM by windleopard

No such luck. No luck at all.

Actually, if Lobo is supposed to be Czarnian military, I'd turn him into a parody of the grizzled space marine populating way too many video games and related media these days. Though, for a complete arc, he might start this way, shaved head and all, and literally grow into the casual mercenary and bounty hunter we all know and love.

Xiang Po aka Gloss of the New Guardians.

I'd connect Xiang's abilities to the Chinese goddess Nüwa and explore her control over the five Chinese elements (fire, water, earth, metal, wood). Basically she'd be DC's Crystal. Alternatively, I'd make her powers similar to the Old Power from Marvel.

I'd remake Checkmate in the form of the Overwatch organization. After stopping an alien invasion the League failed to stop, the evolves into a global peacekeeping force and an engine for innovation, making advances in scientific fields ranging from space exploration to medical research.

Characters would include Kimiyo Hoshi, Michael Holt, Sasha Bordeaux, John Diggle, Koryak, Connor Hawke, Hessia, Akila, Xiang Po really any character the League won't use.

I'd put Amethyst on the Titans.

Cisco can form a dimension exploring trio with his brother Dante and Cynthia Reynolds. Witchfire or any magic character could join.

edited 24th Mar '17 7:02:44 AM by windleopard

For all the elseworlds turning heroes into villains, I've never noticed much focus on the opposite, so I wonder how that might look. The idea is to have the characters as close as possible to their original concepts, only where they zig toward violent crime, their heroic counterparts zag toward nobler endeavors. Let's see, now:

The once clean streets of Gotham suffer under massive corruption at the hands of the powerful Wayne family. His parents killed by a rival criminal, Bruce Wayne adopts the horrifying persona of the Batman, allowing him to crush the opposition directly while keeping his public image pristine. Supporting him are his own adoptive children, taken from assassinated rivals and raised as his personal henchmen, and the city's corrupt police commissioner who prevents any honest beat cop from ever getting a solid lead to take them down.

Against him, however, stand a rag-tag bunch of misfits and outcasts, declared insane for ever raising their hand, yet still unwilling to give up the fight for justice.

Mr. Freeze - Avenging his own attempted murder at the hands of a city official, as well as looking for ways to revive his wife from a rare illness, Victor Fries knows that even the most corrupt judge can't ignore criminals with their feet literally frozen on the crime scene.

The Riddler - Once a brilliant private detective, Edward Nygma was framed and disgraced after a case risked revealing Wayne's corruption. Now he works underground, providing leverage against the city's upper crust, but always leaving hints of his involvement, so that Wayne's cronies know who ultimately did them in.

Killer Croc and Baby Doll - An unlikely duo, the literally gutter-raised street urchin and the former starlet now defend victims of prejudice and hate-crime on the mean streets. Still better not ask what they do on a date.

And of course, the Joker - One of the few Arkham patients who might actually use a stint in a mental institution, this unpredictable trickster is dead set on crumbling Wayne's control of the city like a house of cards. His subversive clown-themed antics offer fleeting joy and lasting hope to the citizens of Gotham, showing them that it only takes one man, neither particularly rich nor powerful, to crack the pretentious mask of order imposed by the corrupt plutocrat and his maniacally violent alter-ego.

I could do more, but it's a mouthful already and I want to see how the idea takes.

edited 6th Apr '17 2:01:11 AM by indiana404

Honestly, Indiana, it sounds a lot like the Crime Syndicate Earth that we've seen every so often- the JLA are evil, so their baddies have to step up to the plate as heroes.

Anyways, what I'd do? Sliding timescale launched straight out the nearest window and into a dumpster. Preferably one that was on fire.

Sure, that would raise all kinds of fuss with movie tie-ins and whatnot, since apparently the comics have to remain permanently in their most 'iconic' state so that new readers (HAH!) aren't confused, but at this stage I say hand out recap comics as needed with the theater tickets and call it good

No more endless swirling down the retcon drain, no more clumsy, everything-from-before-gets-tacked-back-on-eventually reboots, no more tapping so deep into the well of the same friggin' story over and over and over again that you're hearing echoey Cantonese from the hole.

Characters grow old and eventually retire, even die. Eventually, Frank Castle goes out in a blaze of glory that cripples the East Coast crime families for a century. Bruce Wayne realizes that swinging from his trusty bat-grapple isn't as easy as it used to be, and that there's a bit of sag in the old tights that even kevlar can't quite contain. So he hangs up his cowl and devotes himself full-time to charitable work, leaving jumping off buildings in spandex to a younger generation, one that, like Ted Grant before him, he helped train. Luthor finally swallows his pride and goes to therapy when he realizes that he would rather be alive than 'proven right', and it works. He has his struggles and relapses over the years, but by and large, he uses his incredible genius to pursue his own interests, rather than simply being driven by his ego. Maybe, after a few years, he collaborates with Emil Hamilton, bringing Kryptonian technology to the world at large, and even assisting Superman on some of his cases.

But the characters aging would (at least theoretically) dodge the bullet of them getting reset to the status quo every time a new writer turned up. And them retiring would prevent things like Professor X roller-coastering wildly between St. Charles of Salem Centre and 'OH ****, Professor Xavier has (another) shocking secret that will doom us all... and was kicking puppies in his spare time while pretending to be wheelchair bound!'.

Long story short? DEATH TO THE STATUS QUO. It's strangled comics for long enough.

Ain't that the truth. Considering how Marvel's "All-New" line right now is nothing but affirmative action legacy characters, one can't even make the argument that having heroes grow old and die somehow prevents further stories.

I'd say that what kills the industry these days is not so much the enforced status quo, but rather that the status quo sucks. The desire to turn every issue into the ultra-dramatic story to end all stories has pretty much sapped the fun out of the game. In effect, you end up with these supremely powerful individuals who constantly impose arbitrary limitations on themselves, not out of respect for actual laws, but merely so as not to solve any particular problem. And then there's the zealotry with which all this is shilled. Say potential fans walk by and see an issue where Batman spends more time defending the Joker rather than fighting him, or the Avengers fight among themselves rather than actual villains. When those fans are regarded with abject hostility for pointing out the emperor's clothes are somewhat threadbare, you can't blame them for going to the Dark Horse shelf or just moving on to Baen Books for their sci-fi action fix. Heck, friggin' Harlequin has imprints with more action these days.

For a more particular change, I'd make the X-Men more inclusive, being an actual mixed team featuring ordinary or artificially enhanced humans. Moreover, instead of the obligatory bad future they've milked for even longer than the Terminator franchise, I'd have someone get visions of a good future that's worth protecting. As of Logan, I've become convinced not even the writers have any clue about how to picture a truly united world, so all the preachy posturing in that regard has gotten old.

While letting the characters age and change is a good idea, it might be difficult to coordinate the rate at which they age. What happens when one series spends 12 issues covering events that take place over the course of a few weeks, while another series has months go by for its characters during the same stretch of time?

You fire the wannabe auteurs who can't be bothered to leave such decompressed ambitions for mini-series and one-shots. Or you do as Hellboy does and stamp the date of the story on the front page. Either way, instilling some standards and writing guidelines - the same that pretty much every other medium does and hence every potential fan is used to expecting from their fiction - won't do any harm and probably isn't akin to rocket science in terms of difficulty.

There's nothing wrong with decompressed storytelling, especially when you're telling action stories in a medium where giving anything more than the broad outline of a fight scene requires spending several panels or even several pages on events that probably only last a few seconds.

Insisting that every series be told in real time, with each issue taking place over the course of a month/one month apart, would be an overly rigid structure that, applied across an entire line, could quickly make things feel samey. Some stories are going to have each major event follow very closely on the heels of the last one, without much downtime for the characters in-between, while other stories depend on long stretches of time going by in the characters' lives that we don't need more than a quick summary of. And any company putting out dozens of different series each month needs to have room for both.

Case in point for the knee-jerk aversion to change.

Like I said, nothing wrong with just putting a date on the story and letting it unfold on its own. The only problems tend to arise from the obligatory crossovers, but even this can be alleviated by just setting up one official reference timeline and requiring writers to work within that. Star Wars comics are plentiful right now, and that's how they do it.

Have to agree with you on that. Take Valiant Comics for example, that universe attempted at a universe whose stories are all happening at real time and reject the status quo theme a lot of mainstream comics do. And for the most part, it's actually successful.

However that is achieved due to the company's strict deadline policy when it comes to producing stories. Because of this policy, it is vital that all creator must turn in their work or else the universe would fall apart due to one out of place story. Well, Deathmate happened and Rob Liefeld was involved with the event; and that is the day the first Valiant Universe was destroyed and the company went under for its first time.

So a real time comic universe is a neat idea, but one that needs a lot of dedication and hard to keep it going.

Personally, if I would of just take the Eichiro Oda route and just give the whole universe a visioned beginning and end. In my revised universe I have a clear end goal I envisioned for the heroes. For DC, whose theme is all about iconography and legacy, it will start out with the formation of the Justice League and ends with the Justice League; namely that by the end most of the founding members will either be dead or retired, and the members of the final JLA team would be younger heroes that they have mentored, inspired or raised during the course of the story. For Marvel, which I see as super heroes trying to fix the real world, I like end it with them achieving their goal: the Fantastic Four improved the planet with all of their inventions/discoveries, X-Men taught the world how to live in unity with one another, the Avengers create absolute security from the many dangers that would threaten anyone. Something along the lines of those The End stories that Marvel produced.

edited 7th Apr '17 11:59:01 PM by BigK1337

I haven't read any of the Star Wars comics, so I don't want to judge them, but in my experience, Expanded Universe stories tend to be . . . not the best. They're designed to fit within the margins of what the main, Canon stories have established, and the restrictions that imposes can very much be felt. From an artistic perspective, that doesn't seem like a model you'd want to emulate.

I enjoy a good Shared Universe, but it's something best used as a garnish, not as the main attraction. If you're majorly contorting how you tell your stories in order to make all the pieces of the Shared Universe fit together, that seems like putting the cart before the horse.

edited 8th Apr '17 12:17:28 AM by RavenWilder

From an artistic perspective, it's even worse to keep milking other people's decades-old cash cow characters rather than switch to a creator-owned-friendly company like Dark Horse. When even big-budget blockbusters haven't raised interest in the actual comics, the objective here is not to look for perfect solutions, but merely something that's gonna keep the presses printing. In that regard, Star Wars titles already outsell the bulk of superhero comics - can't demand much more proof than that.

And isn't moving the goalposts to first complain that different books in a shared universe would be problematic to sync to a single schedule, yet when a possible framework is presented, to complain about the concept of a shared universe altogether? Nobody's really asking for crossovers anyway, this is simply a way for them to happen without wrecking the timeline of individual titles themselves.

For a large-scale project, I'd like to differentiate between mutants or otherwise enhanced humans, and actual superpowered vigilantes running about. Specifically, I'd go with the idea of the world entering a post-cyberpunk state, with biological enhancements being considered a relatively normal facet of technological progress, to the point mutants are regarded as likely side-effects of all the other strange phenomena literally seeping into the soil. However, in order to keep the premise of differently powered individuals engaging in spectacular fights all over the place, I'd draw a line between cosmetic or otherwise mundane enhancements, and actual combat-capable superpowers, and the people who use them for that purpose. In that regard, actual superheroes might take the form of officially acknowledged specialists taking on similarly empowered criminals, terrorists and the like, while the average John Q. Telekinetic is more likely to use his abilities for mundane purposes.

The point is to distinguish between superpowers and superheroes, so that not every story is drowned in self-image and identity issues where proper action is supposed to go.

edited 8th Apr '17 2:39:05 AM by indiana404

How would you keep badass normals useful though?

With guns. Lots of guns. Or advanced gadgetry and whatnot - just about every other team already consists of non-powered humans fighting alongside potential city-busters, won't be much of a stretch to imagine the same for the X-teams. Besides, to complement the difference between regular mutants or enhanced humans, and military-grade bruisers, it's only fitting to highlight the blurring of boundaries between mutations and open market enhancements. When just about everyone walks around with cybernetic prosthetics, bionic grafts and psionic amplifiers, it's safe to say normal ain't what it used to be.

edited 8th Apr '17 3:38:36 AM by indiana404

Is magic still going to be involved? I always do like when sci fi and magic are mixed and done well.

I was thinking of having Diana and Mari Mc Cabe form a union for public identity heroes to deal with all the usual problems they might suffer.

Per the idea of blurring the lines, I find it would be interesting to involve traditionally religious elements, though more in the vein of anime impressions thereof - priests and occultists duking it out alongside warlocks and demigods, that sort of thing. So long as some writers actually sit down and do their research, it can even be a respectful look on how different cultures fight against their own mythical horrors and the philosophy they bring to it.

Notably, the Blade mythos already has dozens of non-powered monster hunters - I've mentioned before how when the story revolves around a purpose, even if it's as basic as staking vampires and gunning down ghouls, the protagonist teams are about as diverse and egalitarian as it gets.

So something like A Certain Magical Index then?