#new defenders

[coolcomicbookcovers]

[evilhorse]

Secret Wars II house ad (circa February 1986)

[splooosh]

against Gargoyle?

Kevin Nowlan

[positivelybeastly]

The New Defenders #126

Hank, you goddamn goblin, just eat the burger, oh my god.

Also, the running joke in this series of Bobby and Warren just out of nowhere thinking the exact same simp thoughts about Moondragon will never not slay me.

[wanderingmind867]

Team 3 (Angel, Iceman, Gargoyle, Man-Thing and Namor): When the dream demon ambushed Namor, he sent him to a strange planet with a rocky surface and a deadly sea of fire with only very tiny rivers dotting the far flung countryside. It is a struggle to stay alive for the Sub-Mariner, being so far from the life giving sea. It becomes a quest of endurance as he must go from the rocky cliffs and fiery oceans of this land to their one lush, jungle paradise and it's waters of life, a paradise at least a week or two away, if we're being generous.

Angel, Iceman, Gargoyle and the Man-Thing end up on this world too when the dream demon ambushes them in the swamp. By the time they get to this strange world, Namor is already nearly at his jungle destination, although he is about to fall into the trap of the mosntrous beast stalking those jungles. In any case, our quartet (Angel, Iceman, Gargoyle and Man-Thing set out for the jungle paradise too, but not before they have a nasty fight with a powerful fire demon who is the guardian of a giant volcano.

While on their quest, our strange quartet meet a nature spirit who has lost her way. She needs the team's help. Once, this land was home to a beautiful, verdant forest. But now, all that remains is rock and fire. Her beautiful Willow tree is gone. And the longer her tree is gone, the weaker and weaker she gets. She's nearly on the verge of fading away (just like all her fellow nature spirits did) by the time our quartet find her.

Willow is also able to warn them about the jungle to the north. It's a large trap. The strongest of all the monsters is located there: a giant shapeshifting beast with the power to shoot fire and acid. He's the reasons this whole world has fallen to pieces. Willow wants to go with the team to help them fight him, to get revenge for her fallen brethren.

Also, Willow and Man-Thing have a strange bond. Possibly because Willow is a nature spirit, she is able to touch the Man-Thing in a way few others can. But for the whole team, she is pretty much their guide to this strange new world.

Eventually, our strange group of five manage to make it to the jungle, where they're ambushed by the shapeshifting beast. Well, some are. Man-Thing and Willow narrowly escape. But Angel, Iceman and Gargoyle are captured and manage to meet up with Namor. While these four prisoners are busy escaping from the beasts giant nest, Willow is trying to find his weakness. She remembers a story she once heard from another nature spirit when she was just a sapling: about a shapeshifting beast defeated by a legendary warrior using nothing but sheer endurance and trickery. He tricked the beast into a cave, then sealed the cave shut behind him. There was no food in the cave, so the beast died of starvation.

Just as Willow remembers all this, the others show up. And together, they use their combined skills to defeat the beast. Man-Thing and Gargoyle will fight the beast and face all his blows with their heavy endurance, while Willow, Angel, Iceman and Namor lure him into a cave. Angel leads him all the way to the very back of the cave, where Iceman gets to finish him off with a powerful Icy Spear to the chest. Then (once Angel and Iceman have escaped the cave), Namor uses his mighty strength to create a rock slide which traps the injured beast's body inside the cave.

Now that they've beaten the beast, the dream demon's curse is ended. And all our heroes are driven back to Man-Thing's Swamp. The strange thing though: Willow came with them. Her connection to the Man-Thing (plus her world being the temporary creation of a demon) leads to her simply being sent to earth with the rest of them. She can finally go back to being a nature spirit, and not worrying about dying from the lack of connection to nature.

[elgaberino-mcoc]

ANGEL has been added to the MCOC Wishlist

Young, time-displaced “Black Vortex” Angel was near the end of the list, but we had no entry for Angel (Classic)

So we added a proper “any version but Archangel” entry and deleted the lesser variant. #WishlistCleanup @MarvelChampions

[planefood]

rules for thee and not for me

[alex51324]

So, the NDA signed by producers of The Apprentice just expired, and one of them has published a tell-all article. Most of the article is about how they used standard reality-TV tricks to portray Trump as being wealthy and intelligent, when in reality he was, and is, a deeply indebted buffoon.

The money shot, however, comes when Trump and the producers are preparing for climax of the final episode, when the winner will be decided.

Per the FCC's rules for game shows, producers could not be involved in deciding who would be fired each week, or who would ultimately win: it had to be Trump's decision alone, like contestants and viewers were told it was. The producers could, and did, give him a presentation about the strengths and weaknesses of the contestants each time he had to make a decision. These were recorded, in case questions ever arose about whether the producers had crossed the line.

So, for the final episode, there were two contestants remaining. Both were men, one white, the other Black. They'd both done well in the final challenge of the competition. As the producers were summarizing the points for an against each candidate, this happened:

“Yeah,” he says to no one in particular, “but, I mean, would America buy a n— winning?” Kepcher’s pale skin goes bright red. I turn my gaze toward Trump. He continues to wince. He is serious, and he is adamant about not hiring Jackson.

In the finished program, Trump chose the white contestant as the winner.

(Four years later, Trump would propagate the baseless conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a native-born US citizen and therefore had not legitimately won the presidency.)

The article also describes how women working on the production faced discrimination based on whether or not Trump wanted to look at them while they did their jobs:

While leering at a female camera assistant or assessing the physical attributes of a female contestant for whoever is listening, he orders a female camera operator off an elevator on which she is about to film him. “She’s too heavy,” I hear him say. Another female camera operator, who happens to have blond hair and blue eyes, draws from Trump comparisons to his own Ivanka Trump. “There’s a beautiful woman behind that camera,” he says toward a line of 10 different operators set up in the foyer of Trump Tower one day. “That’s all I want to look at.”

And there's a third anecdote where he pressures a woman producer to break the FCC rules, while being casually misogynistic toward a contestant:

Trump corners a female producer and asks her whom he should fire. She demurs, saying something about how one of the contestants blamed another for their team losing. Trump then raises his hands, cupping them to his chest: “You mean the one with the …?” He doesn’t know the contestant’s name. Trump eventually fires her.

This information is pretty unlikely to persuade anyone who wasn't already persuaded by any of the other things Trump has done and said, which would for anyone else be a career-defining scandal. But it is a useful reminder of who we're dealing with.

(Link is to Slate, an x-number-of-free-articles-a-month site, but the incognito window trick works.)

[sourcabbages]

twilight au except lance is both bella and jacob

[noonstate]

i need well meaning cis people to stop attemping to steelman trans healthcare conversations because it basically always ends with them just lying about easily checkable things "no minors are getting irreversible treatments" wrong not true "no minors are having surgery" also false, like instead just say the truth: currently some minors (few, but some) are able to access hrt that will have some irreversible changes on their body, some (even fewer) minors are able to access surgery.

the counter to transphobes screaming "these kids are being irreversibly changed" isn't "no children are accessing this care" it's "puberty is also an irreversible change" and "i think under 18s and even under 16s should be able to make medical decisions actually"

"no minors are accessing this care" means that transphobes can easily point to the examples of minors who are accessing that care, which just make us look like liars. sometimes teenagers and children need to make medical choices on their own. i think a 14 y/o should be able to get an abortion. i think trans kids and teens should be able to have the approriate care, which for some will just be like, picking a new name or haircut, and for some, sure, could be surgery.

[dmitryanya]

i'm just saying, they're all disney and this boy could use a princess emotional support group

[little-pondhead]

DP x DC Prompt

…

There are no more heroes.

Well, okay. Rewind a bit.

Danny has been doing the hero thing for a while now. He’s had a big reveal; everyone has accepted him (including his parents), the GIW disbanded, the Anti-Ecto acts repealed, and generally, everything is going great. Some of the A-Listers are even training as junior ghost hunters to help give him a break from his rogues! (Being Ghost King makes things hectic sometimes, and he just needs the extra help. Sue him!)

The point is, literally nothing is wrong with Danny Phantom’s afterlife.

And then Valerie Gray, the Red Huntress, disappears in front of his eyes.

Danny is baffled! She’s just…gone! Valerie just popped out of existence, like she was never there. But no matter how hard he searches in the Ghost Zone, he can’t find her soul anywhere. His core isn't broken in grief. So she’s not dead. Which is good. So then, where is she?

Some of the others come forward with ideas on how to find her. A few ghosts volunteer to go out into the mortal realm, an area Danny had declared off-limits, to see if she was out there. Danny approves it. He rounds up some of the friendlier (i.e., discreet) ghosts and Amity Parkers and demolishes the outside travel ban.

So everyone spreads out, looking for their dear frenemy and teammate. But it becomes apparent very quickly that something is wrong with the rest of the world.

There are no more heroes.

Every single living superhero on the face of the Earth has just…vanished. Villains are running amok; the countries are in chaos! Some aliens are invading Earth, mythical deities are trying to take over, and society is crumbling to the ground. Everything is on the brink of collapse.

Well, Danny was still there. And so were his people. They were pretty spread out, so could they just…take up the mantles? He also knew where to find the souls of dead heroes in the Zone; surely they wouldn't mind coming out of retirement for a little bit, especially if they couldn't die again. Oh! And that skeleton army leftover from Pariah Dark's reign might be useful in repelling those invading forces.

Honestly, there were more than enough hands to go around! And with the heroes gone, Danny didn't mind letting everyone out for a little break, as long as they followed his rules. They wouldn't stop the search for the other heroes, but hopefully, when they found them, the heroes wouldn't mind Danny's intervention too much. :)

In other words:

Someone fucks up, and all of Earth's living heroes are either wished out of existence or are whisked away to some far-off realm where Danny hasn't checked yet. In the attempt to figure out what's going on, Danny lets the dead run amok over the Earth as they search for clues. The skeleton army repels the invading armies, the souls of dead heroes deal with the world leaders, and his rogues and other Amity Parkers set up shop in place of famous heroes, trying to get the cities under control again.

Basically, they just do their best to keep everything from imploding until the Justice League and others are back.

(And why is it that Danny hasn't disappeared? Well, whatever caused everyone to go poof! only affected living heroes. Anyone heroes that were dead in the first place, or even just half-dead, stayed behind.)

[journalismjpg]

The 109-page indictment paints the movement to oppose the construction of a massive police training center in the Atlanta area’s Weelaunee Forest as a criminal conspiracy, and it goes back to the Minneapolis police department’s killing of George Floyd, which took place almost a year before Cop City was announced.

By doing so, the National Lawyers Guild said in a press statement, the indictment “attempts to render all mass protest against police violence and racism—including the killing of Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta police—an ‘unlawful conspiracy’ or ‘racketeering.’ ”

Read more here.

[splooosh]

“The New” 1984

Mark Badger - Kevin Nowlan

[positivelybeastly]

The New Defenders #131

Hank McCoy is my favourite Marvel superhero.

[wanderingmind867]

I made a bunch of Defenders ideas a few months ago, I think. Now that I've been reading the avengers/defenders war storyline, I've decided to go back and revise some of the idea. I think I'll post it all again soon. Because I had 3000 words written, all spaced out over like 35 paragraphs. If I keep writing this idea, I'll have enough concepts to last like 20+ issues of a comic! And so before I share all of this again (and search for my old notes on it), I have to ask: would anyone want to see it again? This way too wordy saga of The Defenders, with characters from Angel to Valkyrie to Black Panther all involved in it?