Lurker > scarletspeed7

And on top of all of that, Mento has the ability to go as far as Zatanna, went, and with the helmet on, he has no qualms about doing so. Just look at Fright, after all.

Vicki

Han's probably right - Vostok.

I'll admit, I've never come up with a name better than Foal Fruntell for anything. Although I'm excited about another horse name later in the campaign.

I could see Foal dropping here.

I had no choice. He knows what he did.

I had a lot of fun running with Lady Flash for a little while. These speedsters have something unique about their speech patterns, and the rate of motion around them just always seems to slow down when they show up. Great fun.

I don't think I quite get the clue - most of the families in the campaign share a last name, at least. I'm going to say A.J., maybe?

EDIT: Oh, Hal makes sense.

It's not Taliesin.

fiddler

Jessie

Oh, yeah, good point. I'll go with Canary and Aquazon then.

I'v always assumed MI wasn't a big fan of La Dama, but Scare has me rethinking that now. It's a really good guess. I'll second it.

Poor Rover.

But what of the rings they wield?

pArch

Parademon and Brennus, what a good combo.

Can't believe you're ranking Twiggy. Or maybe I'm reading the hint wrong and this is actually, like, Starsa.

Jessie

Parch

Ol' Harv.

Thinker

Snapper!

Corrik7 posted...

I can already tell Daemon is right. Hightower is snake af.

No he was the Lizard

Constantine hasn't been in ZZ since the beginning!

My favorite part about Art King is that people assumed that was a moniker, like "King of Art", instead of his name. Arthur King.

I could see Snapper dropping at this point.

Jessie

BlueCrystalTear posted...

As much as I enjoy that trio, I'm not sure where else their story could go.

Still mad at what they did to Shaundi between 2 and 3. No development, just an abrupt transition that wasn't explained until SR4. Because the fans were mad, they needed to explain themselves.

I ended up LOVING the SR4 Fun Shaundi mission, however. It's one of my favorites in the series.

What's funny is DC technically owned League of Extraordinary Gentlemen first.

I just want to lament how said I am that this game is pretty universally earning nothing but disappointment. Saints Row was such an enjoyable romp of a franchise for me just getting into high school and going through college, and I could tell from the trailer that there was such a toothless game waiting in the wings this time.

Rebooting was the mistake. The series had always been about diversity and anti-capitalism from day one, but I think eradicating all connections and just trying to start fresh is what caused me to lose interest. I wanted Pierce and Shaundi and Johnny Gat!

Thor 4 drops on D+ on September 8th!

Penguin, I guess?

Mr_Lasastryke posted...

yeah, posts like that are what i have a problem with. there's a lot of posts in this topic saying stuff like "ant-man is 1000x bigger than shang-chi," "shang-chi is nothing," etc. you can easily point out that lopen is wrong without being super hyperbolic like that.

i'd say shang-chi was bigger than the guardians of the galaxy before their respective movies came out tbqh. i personally was a lot more familiar with the former (though i was aware of the latter's existence)

I think the Guardians are a toss-up. They'd had more recent comics exposure, but what does that matter to the mainstream, right? What the Guardians had was easily marketable, in my estimation. But that's a really good point in terms of going all-out on a nothing brand.

Mr_Lasastryke posted...

uh

Missed that post, but I will disagree with it.

Lopen posted...

Stretching the limits of the branding just a hair farther isn't some sort of madness.

But that's the point. It goes from the AVENGERS brand to the MARVEL brand. With Ant-Man, it's all adjacent to that key team component. With Shang-Chi, you've veered so far away from the foundational pillar that it's solely about Marvel name recognition and solid trailer work. And this is where the disconnect comes from. Marvel gambled big with Eternals and Shang-Chi, and both during the pandemic era. Quite honestly, that's far, far, far more impressive than reliance on founding Avengers. You'd actually have a better time making this argument with Captain Marvel than with Ant-Man, but again, even Captain Marvel had far more brand recognition thanks to being an almost lifelong Avenger herself.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

I'll fully admit that part of the reason I brought up the DCEU is because I wound up watching a good bit of the ending battles of Batman v. Superman while channel surfing. The action itself was pretty cool but I still got the vibe the movie was trying to accomplish in one film what it took the MCU a whole phase to do.

That's absolutely correct, and I think every single person who watched the film said the same thing five years ago when the film came out. This isn't a hidden story. DC thought it could reverse-engineer its Avengers. The thing is? It can. James Gunn is doing it right now with a Suicide Squad cottage industry. It won't have the returns of the Avengers, but it's smart thinking to some extent. Starting with Peacemaker, an unabashed success, and moving now to Bloodsport, I think it could create a loyal fanbase who enjoy the harder-edged darker humor.

Iron Man was far more popular than Ant-Man prior to the films. It's clear through the sales of clothes and the cultural permeation of the name in the vernacular. He was a solid B-List hero. But Ant-Man, ironically enough, was at the other end of the bell curve of the B-List as well.

No one has at all been saying that even comic nerds didn't know Shang-Chi. Of course they did. Maybe not all of them - if you're, say, a diehard DC guy, maybe not. But Ant-Man is absolutely not C-Tier. Sales dictate that, use in other media dictates that. For comics, Ant-Man was well and truly in the realm of characters. Avengers sales reached 300,000 with reprints for single issues with Ant-Man in the title. Shang-Chi, as far as I've seen in analysis of old figures, never cracked 70k outside of maybe a first issue. That's apples to oranges.

Now, how does that translate to modern day? Well, it's like saying Walking Dead was popular before Walking Dead came out. Shang Chi was on that level. Walking Dead barely scraped by with 50k in sales and while it was known in the industry as a sleeper hit once the public market found it, that's what it was. What AMC did with Walking Dead is akin to what Marvel did to Shang Chi - but Marvel is far more impressive because Walking Dead was swept up in a popular fad of the time, while Shang Chi was summoning up a decades-dormant kung fu fad.

Don't get caught up in your friends or tiers of A, B and C. Look at the numbers. Look at the cultural permanence of being a star of one of the five most popular comic teams even at the nadir of the Avengers' success during the bankruptcy era. Look at the millions of eyeballs from cartoons, look at the millions of eyeballs from games. Shang Chi just has none of that to his name.

There's a reason why I don't point out personal anecdotes, and the reason is because while your fake friends are going around reinforcing your story, the internet narrative from film websites, Twitter, etc., were all asking where Ant-Man and the Wasp were in Avengers back in 2012 - it was a natural question, given that everyone was looking up the Avengers at the time and expecting the founding members.

There's no way Bobo is on MI's list!

I've got no idea what the hint is referring to, though. Maybe Hal?

SO I finally got the chance to watch She-Hulk ep 1. My issue is this character is just blatantly free of any consequences of her powers at all - which makes me think episode 2 is going to be that she gets sued by Titania. She was just such a brat that I have to assume the idea is going to be that we double down on the lawyering and how it will affect her new identity.

And I have no idea why anyone is upset about the Captain America virgin thing. Seems like exactly the sort of puerile banter that normal people have with their friends!

Lopen posted...

The scarlet appreciation squad

From the beginning of this conversation, you keep calling me out by name, and I'm really not sure what the hell I've done to earn all of this enmity. But the half-hearted apology you offered earlier? It's not accepted.

Spectacular Spider-Man was a truly phenomenal serialized account of the Peter high school years. I think it was absolutely tremendous!

It's really the unquantifiables, too. Googling Avengers and getting Ant-Man right at the top. Looking for comics at your library and finding Avengers classic editions, Avengers Forever, Ultimates. Easier access to animated films featuring Ant-Man like Ultimates.

TotallyNotMI posted...

https://cmro.travis-starnes.com/character_details.php?character=743

This site says 361 but it's also inflated because if an issue has multiple stories it counts them each as a different appearance.

Wow, yeah. I mean, that's less than the Blackhawks. Anywhere here know who the Blackhawks are? This is less than them.

Also, guys, at this point, I really have to ask why you're arguing with someone who thinks that we're suffering from the Mandella Effect, which I'm pretty sure is Lopen suffering from the Mandela Effect.

CassandraCain posted...

Oh yeah my bad, Shang-Chi was in a few different Avengers teams, though I doubt it adds much to the issue count. I would guess he's appeared in no more than a hundred issues (and this is probably high balling it) since his movie debut.

A hundred would actually be pretty impressive, when you consider that would be something like 12 issues a month!

That's the problem with Comicvine - it over-represents modern comics to the tune of 3x the amount it over-represents old comics. Just looking at big chunks, I think the numbers are something like 6x the comics for Ant-Man over Shang-Chi. It's a little bonkers.

I don't have time to really sift through it, but I'd guess we're looking at something like 400-450 Shang Chi appearances.

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

Oh! I see why Shang-Chi is in so many books. It looks like most of his old books were released in other languages entirely because of the Kung Fu boom. That accounts for a lot of them. Plus the re-release other language books he was in.

Comic Vine seems to be a lot more sloppy about that.

I did a count of Comicvine's foreign language X-Men count on Cyclops once, and it cut his appearance total by more than half at that time!

MoogleKupo141 posted...

its kind of a stretch to cal the League popular characters like the Avengers unless youre posting from 1900 or something

the youth of post-9/11 America were not going crazy for Dorian Gray and Captain Nemo. come see all your favorite public domain characters from your local library team up wasnt an inherently compelling sales pitch

Yeah, you know, this actually a really interesting conversation from a cultural and numbers perspective. Is there a place anymore for literary characters to have great success? I think part of the issue is just how bad LXG was written, how lambasted (deservedly) it was. You look at its cast and really, it's reliant entirely on Connery for starpower, too. You have all of these characters with connections to major cultural touchstones - but the issue is that you have to have some momentum. I look at it's box office, and I'm like, "Hell, it did really good for the reaction it got!" It made 180 million worldwide on an 80 million dollar budget. That's pretty impressive, especially considering we were still in this early period of testing the waters of superheroes. It was a cottage industry, and the quality was still wildly variable.

Sometimes, I think the problem is just that a movie sucks. I wonder about a world where, say, you've got Guy Richie directing a Steve Zaillan written League. Maybe it rejuvenates the classic characters.

In that case, I'll say the mantle outweighs the man underneath. You're selling Paul Rudd as Ant-Man more than you're selling Paul Rudd as Scott Lang. Unlike a franchise where the name matters, like if DC suddenly went with Jay Garrick as Flash, and suddenly you have that much more uphill of a battle.

Well, LMS, the LXG is less about being the Avengers in the comics than... the Avengers, in the British sense, the original spy organization. The fact that they went supergroup when the comic really is a lot of talking with punctuated grisly brutal violence here and there is part of the issue. The flaw was going super-Avengers rather than spy-Avengers.

Lopen posted...

I think you exaggerate significance of a multitude of things in comic books in an attempt to give your passion more weight in discussions here when for something like an MCU topic it doesn't really mean a lot.

Trying to arbitrarily stick more tiers in terms of mainstream notoriety strikes me as exactly the kind of thing you'd do to inflate your sense of self worth

I actually hardly ever fucking discuss stuff in these topics, so I think you're an absolute liar. When I DO discuss this stuff, I stick to games, shows, and older comics. Comic books sell shit in today's marketplace. Older decades sold far better and on a more consistent basis, aside from minor aberrations here and there like the issue #1s for Rocket Raccoon and Squirrel Girl which were all built on heavy social media campaigns from creators. They are absolutely not useful in telling the value of sales of a character from a media perspective.

Older comics are, especially as those are most often used a template for the cartoons, shows, etc. Shang Chi has almost no outside cultural significance from comics because, unlike Ant-Man he had no cartoons, no games, nothing. Ant-Man, as a founding member of the Avengers in comics, had such an obviously leg up - first of all, he so many more copies of comics in a time when that was significant. Comic shops didn't exist - the market at the time allowed more permeability into the mainstream. Then you have shows, you have games, you have all of the ways for Ant-Man to be presented as a founding member of the Avengers. He even makes it into the Ultimates, which had some reach outside of the normal comics marketplace.

Then you get into the weird, often unquantified market of graphic collections which sell pretty well in the 2000s and early 2010s at places like Barnes & Noble, and there are just no collections for Shang-Chi. You'd have to be a reader like me, willing to dig in back issue bins to find the guy until he finally gets a string of Secret Avengers appearances that resuscitate him - and only a little. What matters here is that for an outside market, Ant-Man was an easier sell. He had a small amount of fame, but fame nonetheless. You can't discount the half million-selling comics from days gone by. You CAN discount comics in the barely 100k moving market of the last decade.

As for your narrative about me, I think I'm pretty clearly a person on the board who deals with significant self-worth issues, and this bizarre presentation of me is not only uncalled for, hurtful and rude, but it's just fucking wrong.

Jessie

Leonhart4 posted...

As someone slightly above a comic book casual, I'd heard of Ant-Man before the movie. Shang-Chi was just totally unknown to me.

Yeah, I think this is the general narrative, especially given that Shang Chi spent decades with almost no appearances at all given he was just riding a fading wave of kung fu movies with a niche popularity in the US.

I like how you think me having knowledge of comics somehow makes me unaware of the general cultural milieu.

I just think it's important to really note that the Eternals and Shang Chi are building solely off of the Marvel brand and its goodwill - at the moment. The question is if Disney+'s less than stellar shows will start to cause any waning interest in these tentpole movies. It's probably a good thing that we're going into familiar franchises again for a little while.

I'm actually super-curious if the Marvels can break 300 mil in the US.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Shang Chi isnt minor unless your standard is like, anyone below the top tier of popularity doesnt matter. Hes considered the best in the universe at hand to hand combat and was based entirely on Bruce Lee.

Shang Chi is ABSOLUTELY a minor character in comparison to the characters that have had movies up until that point. He's certainly C-List. He can't sustain a comic book series at all. His role in comics and his powers mean dick. Total dick. If that mattered, then the most popular character would be the One Above All. Shang Chi himself was a cash in on the kung fu movement of the '70s, and a lot of his popularity was absorbed by Iron Fist - which was pretty minimal.

Marvel did something amazing by turning Shang Chi into a box office success.