Hobie Brown's luck finally ran out this week. There's just no way I can see to legitimately award the win to Prowler. Not only does the Voice have the edge in terms of variety of powers, in the specific issues referenced he comes off clearly the better. Where the Voice more or less single-handedly collapses a building and fights of a small legion of thugs, the Prowler is badly beaten in a fight with a single guy (though, admittedly, the single guy is Spider-Man) who isn't even trying to hurt him.
When you add the fact that this fight is taking place in an active war zone, you've gotta believe that time would be of the essence. Whoever's gonna win this needs to take care of business fast. It seems obvious to me that the Voice goes to the championship!
This baleful issue introduces a character that I consider the most rage-inducing in the Midnight pantheon, Sniffer Snoop. Imagine someone inept, arrogant, and useless and you've got Sniffer Snoop. He was the animated incarnation of the Dunning-Krueger Effect. As exhibit A in my prosecution, I point you to Snoop's letter of introduction.
I'm not sure the writer thought through the explanation for how Sniffer found Midnight. If he did so by reading Smash, then that means the world of Smash is our world, right? But if that's the case, then wouldn't everyone who read Smash know Midnight's "secret" identity?
After he invades our hero's life, Snoop brings along his pet polar bear cub Hot Foot (where'd this doofus acquire a polar bear cub? Who knows?)
After being a real jerk to our classic trio, Snoop gets offended and storms off. (This is a high point of the story, wherein one might entertain the futile hope that Sniffer will never be seen again. Alas, dear reader, you are not so fortunate.)
Ambling through Big City in an envious stupor, Snoop believes he's hit upon a brilliant idea to put Midnight in his place.
Well, I can't imagine any way that this could possibly go wrong.
In the first example of the dumb luck Snoop was to become famous for, the world's most-annoying detective stumbles across a dead body in the museum (that is...y'know...after committing felony breaking and entering).
So for the first time in this entire tournament, I must lament a tragic miscarriage of justice. The readers (whose judgment I committed to respect) have picked Black Crow as the winner. I whole-heartedly disagree and would offer the following reasoning:
One of the premises of this fight series is that we're judging the combatants based on how they performed in specified issues. Despite his more expansive and impressive-sounding power set, the only thing I saw Black Crow do in Civil War #6 - 7 was take a vicious backhand from the Taskmaster.
Meanwhile, Ion fights off the Chemo-Golem along with a varied assortment of other super-villains and henchmen in MOST #1. Ion may be unknown, but he deserved this win. Oh well, I guess that's politics for ya. Better luck next time, kid.
Still trying to catch up following the effects of technological interruption. Consequently, I wasn't able to prepare the Midnight post I had in mind for today.
Instead, I'll direct you to this issue review of Infinity, Inc.--a title I've become much more interested in as an outgrowth of my research into the All-Star Squadron.
First, my apologies for being over a week late with this post. I've experienced a lot of internet disruptions recently, but they are (hopefully) now resolved.
Second, calling this fight was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. Maybe readers felt similarly conflicted, because this was the first time in a while that I received no reader feedback.
Ultimately for me, this one boiled down to a literal coin toss. Thus the winnah and last semifinalist is: THE PROWLER!
Thanks to the good folks at the Rialto Theater this past week I finally got to watch Avengers: Infinity War. In no particular order, here's a few of my initial responses.
Thanos has gotten ridiculously powerful. I mean, even before he has the completed Infinity Gauntlet, the movie opens with Thanos beating the Hulk (you know, "the strongest one there is") into near unconsciousness. This is, of course, after he and his minions have already subdued Thor and Loki. (I'm guess that's picking up from Thor Ragnarok, which I still have yet to see).
Now, I have to admit that the original Infinity Gauntlet series was my introduction to Thanos, but I quickly picked up from references and comic lore that he'd long been a nemesis for characters like the original Captain Mar-Vell, Silver Surfer, etc. Thanks to Chris over at Comic Tropes, I learned there was even a time when ole' Thanos tootled around in a helicopter, had a hard time battling Hellcat, and was successfully bound by grass.
So...from that to beating the Hulk in a straight up punching match?!
I can't decide whether I like Thanos' altered motivations. The movie makes pretty explicit that Thanos is seeking the Infinity Gauntlet and to kill half the universe ultimately because he's a true-believer in Malthusian views of population control. In the movie, Thanos essentially argues that in order to ensure life continues he has to kill half the universe's population to ensure there are sufficient resources left over for life to actually have a future.
This is quite a change from the motivations that drove Thanos in the initial Infinity Gauntlet story line, wherein he killed half the universe NOT to preserve life, but simply because he was enraptured with love for the feminine personification of Death.
When I first read IG as a kid I was left pondering, "if Thanos loves Death so much, why did he only kill half the universe instead of the whole thing?" Recently, a co-worker and long-time Silver Surfer fan informed me that Lady Death had previously requested this percentage of universal genocide from her suitor prior to the events of IG. So, I guess the original story was more internally consistent than I realized at the time.
I suspect the primary reason for cinematic deviation was story-telling pragmatism. (Strict adherence to IG canon simply doesn't work without the introduction of Lady Death as a major new character.) However, an ancillary benefit, is that this results in the movie taking a surprisingly conservative position on a major political/cultural debate.
Calls for reducing "carbon footprints" by steps such as elective abortion and/or euthanasia in order to "fight global climate change" seem to explicitly embrace (Movie) Thanos' reasoning. As a Christian Libertarian, it's surprising that an industry I think of as pretty uniformly left-of-center would produce a movie in which the epitome of evil parrots the central logic of many modern Leftists.
They should've explicitly titled this Avengers: Infinity War(vol. 1). I studiously avoided reading reviews or watching previews beforehand, because I didn't want spoilers. However, I do wish I'd realized the story wasn't going to be wrapped up in this movie. I don't exactly fault the decision. A fight for the survival of reality itself is a pretty big story. It deserves to be done well. I just would've appreciated a "head's up."
I really hope they don't plan to wrap this up in Captain Marvel. If they're gonna make this a two-parter, then the conclusion deserves to have a parallel name and stand on its own: Avengers Infinity War 2. I have this fear that they're going to stretch it out over multiple movies and that Captain Marvel might be only the first.
Despite his long-honored history, today is the day that Doc Savage goes down. Especially given the fact that in the designated story (Doc Savage Annual #4)the Man of Bronze does more soul-searching and internal struggle than external fighting. This stands in marked to the Voice who single-handedly fights off an entire insurrectionist army. Apparently, readers shared this opinion, as 100% of votes cast were given to Voice. I guess that settles it. Voice is going to the semifinals!
