Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Spaceopoly The Non-Legion Comics Trivia Thread Pt 5

Still trying to think of the armour guy's name, or the Tas look-a-like...

which fellow Outsider was Windfall interested in?

Not:

Geo-Force
Halo
Black Lightning
Arsenal
Faust
Metamorpho

poor thothy. there are two armor guys, by the way.

Atomic Knight.

Blacula has it. And Atomic Knight returned her interest, too.I found it quite cute. Not sure how old the Knight was though. Windfall seemed to be in her late teens.

Sigh, Windfall is definitely my favorite Outsider too, and look what happened to her. Kind of like with Kole...

I was reading an article with some quotes from Barbara Kesel on the death of Dove in Armageddon 2001. At first she thought both Hawk and Dove would become Monarch. She felt if it was both then Monarch would be unstable. But she was disapointed when she learned "they were just playing another round of 'kill the girl'"

I just looked up Windfall. I'll need to check on the creative team so I can avoid them like the plague. I forgot all about The Atomic Knight being in there. That seemed like a strange one, but I wasn't reading the book.

Poor Windfall. She had such potential; being the youngest of the Outsiders, she contributed a lot of brilliant and practical insights on the few cases she was in. Alas. Another character ruined.

Re Dove, good point. Poor Dawn was killed so Hank could get his sinister motivation. Ugh.

I quite liked what I saw of that version of Dove. That was before I read the original Hawk & Dove that quickly missed the point of the brothers' ideological differences.

John Ostrander killed off Windfall (and a handful of other interesting characters) in Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag. I liked that series but those predictable deaths were definitely the weakest part of it.

Re: Dove. I've always liked her and hate to see interesting female characters get killed off to fuel a male character's story... but I think I might be the only person who didn't mind the events of Armageddon: 2001. The build up (primarily in the Superman books of which I was a big fan at the time) was exciting and the Annuals were for the most part excellent I thought (one of the better uniform Elseworlds storylines IMO). And Hawk's journey to become Monarch just seemed so natural to me, with the death of (another) Dove being that last necessary blow that was required to push him over the edge.

(I also think he works a lot better in the role than Captain Atom would have; and even though everyone criticizes the swap, I think it works to the betterment of the story by creating a clever sense of misdirection for the central mystery. It's actually one of the best mystery stories DC's ever done now that I think about it.)

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Q: What is Abraham Lincoln famous for on Earth 3?

Re Raise the Flag, I agree. I liked the premise and the action, but the deaths were sooooo predictable. Basically, everyone who wasn't a Squad mainstay died. Windfall and Sister Twister are the ones I regret the most.

Abraham Lincoln: for the secession of the Confederate states?

I'd have to agree that Raise the Flag wasn't the best. It was a shadow of his earlier Squad run, and body count was for effect, rather than having a story impact as some earlier ones had been. I picked up the Arm 2001 crossovers that I would have been getting anyway. But there are any number of better time travel stories around in other media.

Abe - Did he kill President Booth?

Re Armageddon 2001, Hawk as Monarch made sense. I'm just sorry Dove had to be sacrificed for that. I do agree that the switch from Captain Atom to Hawk was handled well and realistically.

And I also loved the many glimpses of the future we saw in the various annuals.

Yes he did!

If I was an editor at DC I would have greenlit an Earth 3 ongoing book years ago. I would have loved to read the continuing adventures of heroic versions of normally villainous characters in a sort of twisted/backward universe.

Lincoln killing Booth, should have thought of that! Such a perfect reversal!

Invisible Brainiac:



No it didn't. Of all the A:2001 Annuals, the Hawk and Dove one was the ONLY one where the titular heroes and Monarch are actually seen together!

It was supposed to be Captain Atom, but everyone figured it out before the event even started, so they decided to throw a curveball. But Hawk was both a bad story idea and a dumb character choice. Better they stuck to their guns and just make it a good story rather than a surprise. If they really felt they had to throw a curveball, I think Guy Gardner would have been a decent option.

Don't remember that.



Yes, I know about the curveball. Always felt that Hawk's personality would make him a decent choice for Monarch.

I agree with IB's prior agreement with me. (We are like this topic's version of an ouroboros!)

I don't remember the Hawk & Dove Annual well enough to comment on the discrepancy of having both Hawk and Monarch appear on-panel, but why does that have to be a deal-breaker anyway? Body doubles (robots/clones/twins/etc.) go back to almost the beginning of comics and Monarch was explicitly shown using duplicates of characters (e.g. Kole) in the New Titans Annual with the Team Titans anyway.

As for it being a bad story idea, well that's just personal opinion of course but I'd be interested in hearing some reasons why. The only reasons I ever hear on message boards are the same two about the two characters appearing on panel and Captain Atom being the first choice. The first one doesn't carry any weight with me for the reason I just out-lined and the second one has always struck me more as some fans having sour grapes about being tricked by the writers. Many other works of fiction have also been altered late in the process and sometimes for the better.

It's interesting you bring up Guy Gardner as a more preferable substitute for Captain Atom than Hawk. Now that I think about it, I agree with you. For three reasons: 1) it would have diminished the only-getting-worse problem of having too many Earth-based Green Lanterns; 2) because the writers haven't really known what to do with Guy since his JLI hey-days anyway; and 3) it wouldn't have benched a unique and interesting DC concept like that of 'Hawk and Dove' for something like two decades. But those are all meta/real-world reasons. From a story/character point of view, I don't know why he would have made a much better choice than Hawk. They were both very similar in temperament and outlook and both were influenced by the tragic events of their pasts at the time. It seems to me like anyone who had a story/character-based reason for disliking the Hawk reveal would feel the same way about a Guy Gardner reveal.

Blacula:



I'll tell you why I think it would have worked better:

1) They wouldn't have needed to kill off Dove (or Ice) to make it happen - Guy isn't that much tied to a partner.
2) Guy did not, in fact, appear on-panel with Monarch like Hawk did. Yes, it can be explained away, but why should that be necessary?
3) Guy always had an inferiority complex with relation to other heroes (especially Hal Jordan and Batman), and a self-centered, somewhat twisted world-view. I could see this translating into becoming a tyrant and villain...much more so that Hawk's generalized hyper-aggressiveness.
4) Hawk was an avatar of Chaos - becoming a leader of a very orderly society made no sense. Guy was authoritarian by nature.

As far as the "meta-reasons" go, the hints that Monarch was going to be Captain Atom were that his solo series was ending just then, and that JLE was the final Annual in the crossover. When they pulled the switch, they used another hero whose series was just ending, i.e., Hawk. But Guy had no series of his own, he shared Green Lantern, so no need to cancel a series right before the conclusion of the crossover. It would have fit in perfectly fine.

hm, good reasoning for Guy Gardner there.

I think this is the strongest "in-story" reason for why Guy should have been Monarch instead of Hank. I guess the reason they didn't is because Guy was active in more titles than Hank back then. He had both Justice League and Green Lantern (which was something of an ensemble book during that period) and I think it wasn't long after this that he got his own series. So DC probably thought he had more life in him than Hank at that point. I think they made the wrong decision as between these two characters but I still don't think the story was ruined because they used Hank.

Who transferred from Earth Prime to Earth 2 and defeated the Justice Society?

Johnny Thunder ?

It was not Johnny Thunder

Superboy-Prime?

Not Prime. This would be earlier than his first appearance.

Aquarius?