Ebony Bishop

This post relates to: Whose powers would you want to have?

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This post relates to: What's your favorite version of the Hulk (color, personality, smartness, etc)?

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I know he doesn't get the sort of high level attention that people like Bendis, Vaughn and Millar get, but thank whatever Deity brought us a man willing to bring back the Living Weapon, and have the balls to make him human.

God bless you, Mr. Brubaker.

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In preparing for some of my edits here on various characters of mine, I've been going back through old issues of obscure characters -- and I've been realizing there is a real problem with what comics do to these characters.

Every character, I assume, in a solo title, is made a well-rounded hero who can handle anything thrown at them, regardless of the insanity the logic has to accept. And writers, it appears, to test themselves, decide to put their heroes into more and more impossible situations, and still have them find a way out.

And then, when their characters lose sales, and their comics get canceled, and they get folded into another comic as a supporting character, there is a gradual but definite de-powering, to make them just another hero who might need either the help of the star of the comic, or can't do anything without the rest of the team.

I'll give you a "for instance".

I was re-reading an old favourite of mine from the 80's, "Dazzler". (Stop laughing! She was cool!) In her first 20 issues, she beat the Enchantress twice without help, took out the Hulk, beat the Absorbing Man by letting Black Bolt yell at her, and was tapped by Galactus to defeat Terrax the Tamer because she was the ONLY one on Earth who could enter a Black Hole and come back out. She could create holograms, a "light fog" that obscured vision, could alter emotions with light, levitate and limited flight, and more, as the situation demanded.

And when the Beyonder showed up, he decided if he could have any woman on Earth, he wanted Dazzler, for her power and beauty.

Then the book gets canceled.

Dazzler joins the X-Men, and lo and behold, she is slowly brought down by the fact that she's not the most popular X-Man. I haven't seen her make a hologram in that book ever, never mind her levitation or other powers. She doesn't seem to remember that she can do these things. In her own book, she was clever enough to defeat world-class villains with a little ingenuity, or at least a cartwheel wearing roller skates. And yet, joining the X-Men, she lets that all slip away to be the dizzy blonde who drools over Longshot. She shrieks, she runs, she's a damsel in distress for Longshot, or more regularly, Wolverine, to save, despite Project Pegasus calling her one of the most powerful mutants ever .

And now, she's a c-lister in Excalibur. She's treated as an object of lust for Juggernaut, with a bad dye-job and a destroyed career which involves singing disco in disguise (which is weird -- despite her clothes, Dazzler was a rock singer). They've forgotten her glory days, but what's more important, so has SHE. Because she ceased to be "popular", she's become weak and almost powerless.

Why do our canceled characters get treated like dirt outside of their own series? Why can't writers peek at the old issues and realize what they have on their hands? Instead, in the A-List X-Men, we have Cannonball, one of the worst concepts for a character ever, who literally blasts red clouds of gas away from his bottom to fly in an impenetrable cloud.

When I do that, I'm sleeping on the couch.

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