Amph 101 "Oh ****!" Moments in Comic Book History

Welcome to this thread that celebrates the reason we still love comic books!

This is how this thread goes: myself and mod slave JoinTheSchwarz will be listing some epic moments of comic book history that made one and many go "Oh ****!!!". What TVTropes calls Crowning Moments Of. The thread is going to be hosted, to give it some focus and help generate some discussion and fun times.

Then we shall all discuss them, why they gave us the reaction that they did, and how it affected our reading experience. This will probably not go any further than back to 70s reading, but all suggestions are welcome, of course.

This is purely a discussion thread, but centralized over certain plotpoints and reactions to them, so it doesn't really fit in the general comic book discussion thread. Plus we're expecting plenty of off-topic comments and tangents: this is JCC, after all!

Participation and suggestions are welcome: just PM me or JoinTheSchwarz and we will fit it in, be it a suggestion or a full writeup.

Oh, by the way: this list is in no particular order, just a collective of the 101 greatest hits.


And so, we begin.....

# 101-The Bar with no Name(and no customers)

Captain America #'s 318-320


The "Bar With No Name" is an illegal floating hideout that accommodates those that live outside the law in the super-villain community. There isn't just one location where this bar is found, but rather several in many regions throughout the country. Probably the most infamous event that took place within the bar was the mass murder of eighteen super-villains committed by the Scourge of the Underworld, who disguised himself as the bartender.


Writer/editor Mark Gruenwald originally created the Scourge in 1985 as a plot device intended to thin the criminal population of the Marvel Universe, in particular eliminating those supervillain characters he deemed to be too minor, redundant, or ill-conceived.



Villains killed in the Bar With No Name

In Captain America #319, the Scourge was disguised as the bartender of "the Bar With No Name," a super-villain hang-out in rural Medina County, Ohio. A number of villains had gathered there that evening to organize a concerted effort to stop the Scourge, all at the urgings of villain "manager" Gary Gilbert, formerly a villain called Firebrand.

Security equipment that Gilbert borrowed from the gadget-villain called the Tinkerer was ineffective in detecting the Scourge, as no one thought to scan the bartender. Taken completely unawares, eighteen villains, including Gilbert himself, who attended the meeting were killed in a single stroke.

Jaguar
first appeared in Daredevil #120

Mirage
first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #156

Hellrazor
first appeared in Marvel Team-Up #87

Shellshock
first appeared in Fantastic Four Annual #5

Bird-Man
first appeared in Daredevil #157

Cyclone (André Gerard)
first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #143

The Ringer (Anthony Davis)
first appeared in Defenders #51

Turner D. Century
first appeared in Spider-Woman #33

The Grappler
first appeared in She-Hulk #18

The Cheetah
first appeared in Captain Marvel #48

The Vamp
first appeared in Captain America #217

Commander Kraken
first appeared in Sub-Mariner #27

Letha
first appeared in Marvel Two-in-One #54

Steeplejack
first appeared in Ms. Marvel #14

Mind-Wave
first appeared in Daredevil #133

Rapier
first appeared in The Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #2

Firebrand (Gary Gilbert)
first appeared in Iron Man #27

Hijacker
first appeared in Tales to Astonish #40







If they were thirsty before, they weren't after.

 

Years later, Rick Remender had The Hood resurrect a group of The Scourge of the Underworld's victims, give them a power-up, and send them to kill The Punisher during the excellent Dark Reign event. You can call that the second part of a 2-hit combo of awesome.



Turner D. Century became one of my favorites.


Good start, Juli.

 

Just so we're clear. Countdown thread. Average opinion of 2 critics?

 

It's a discussion thread, not a countdown, and we're no critics.

Try to pull out here what you did in the Who thread and I'll make sure you post in WNU for THE REST OF YOUR DAYS.

 

Rick Remender's thoughts on TDC , which I found quite lol

 

So, its like "101 Oh ****! Moments that dave and juli can remember, it'd be more, but they're old and forgetful"?

 

Go away.

Amazing. Remender is the best.

Love his "yay, comic books are fun!" line. So appropriate for this thread!

 

How much do you think the split between DC, Marvel and other companies like Image, Dark Horse and Vertigo will be, guys? I know at least Dave definitely prefers Marvel to DC but I don't want to see only Marvel things, especially since they're the only company out of the ones I listed that I don't have any trades of.

Also to be clear on the TV Tropes "Crowning Moments" thing Juli mentioned...would that mean anything like a CMO Awesome or Funny, or just Awesome? And what about Tear Jerkers? I go on TV Tropes a lot so I know about these things.

 

This thread is not exclusive to Marvel, there are plenty of "Oh ****!" moments in every company, and if Ross would read the ****ing opening post, he'd see that we want suggestions from everyone.

~Edit~ And yes Zap, this is not excluded to violent situations at all, it's just what I opened up with. Anything that makes your jaw drop, is worthy, regardless of the context or theme.

 

All CMOs should qualify, IMO. Anything that made you stop for a second, breathe deeply and resume your reading.

I'm more of a Marvel, indies and manga guy, but Juli is more of a DC girl, so you should expect some good material from her. This said, please send us your "Oh ****!" moments.

 

So you can't even come up with 101 moments??

 

Oh, managa is included too? I thought it was for Western comics only. Cool!

I'll send some suggestions soon.

 

I might drop some European comic books bits and all!

 

Continue the trolling and the point might become irrelevant for you.

 

I might drop some Canadian com....oh...right.

 

Got a couple I can think of, but I feel like they're so obvious you guys already thought of them.

 

Send them anyway. The more, the merrier!

 

People still read comics?? I thought print was dead.

 

It's cool, they've basically all gone same day digital.

 

that, but also these are events that have generally speaking already happened. So, it will still be a fun ride. jump in the car Strife!!!

 

I know sweety, I already miss Alpha Flight too

 

Am I allowed to say "*Alpha Flight was gay!" or is that against the rules?

* = One member of

 

Northstar is an X-Man too, wanna call wolverine gay? Not so much that he wouldn't listen to you as he would disembowel you afterwards.

 

What difference does it make if he's gay? If anything it made him more interesting.

 

Another Marvel entry, but don't worry: #99 won't. Just wanted to feature some nu-Marvel stuff.

We already got around twelve different suggestions. Keep 'em coming!


#100. The End of Genosha (New X-Men #114-#115)

Back in 2000, Grant Morrison (who back then I only knew as "that guy from JLA" and "the Animal Man weirdo") took over the X-Men franchise and rebuilt them in his image and boy, did he do it with a bang. He took a group of supeheroes and turned them into transhuman relief workers, taking a hint from the movies and turning the comic into a sci-fi book.

New X-Men #114 introduces a new villain called Cassandra Nova, a really creepy old woman with an uncanny resemblance to Charles Xavier, and has her get her hands into Sentinel technology. Sentinels had been the preferred mooks of the mutants for a few decades, but Morrison and Quitely manage to turn the old Kirby robots ("design classics", as he would call them some forty issues later) not only into something genuinely scary but also into something weird and out-worldly.

New X-Men #115 would show Cassandra bringing her plans to fruition. There's so much to love in this issue. Quitely's art is superb, and some of the dialogue is simply perfect:

Wolverine (to Cyclops): "You know what I admire most about you Summers? Your icy calm lunacy under pressure."

Cassandra Nova: "Do you want to know the real message of evolution? All life ends up as manure"

But the real "Oh ****!" would come during the last pages, when Cassandra Nova unleashes her newly built Super-Sentinels on Genosha.





The island of Genosha was no stranger to any X-Men fan. Even the more casual fans knew of it thanks to the 1990s animated series and the episode "Slave Island".



Genosha, introduced by the legendary Chris Claremont in 1988, was originally intended to be a sci-fi analogue to Apartheid-era South Africa: a dystopian African country where mutants were not only second-class citizens, but mentally-conditioned slaves of the human majority. The concept was interesting enough to surface in several major storylines.

During the late 1990s, the concept of Genosha was revisited and changed, this time becoming an Israel analogue: the mutant homeland. After a vicious civil war, mutants took over and ended the oppressive regime of the humans; Magneto would eventually be crowned king of Genosha (or maybe president, I forgot). The event was important enough that even though I had stopped reading comics years before, I heard about it from friends: "Magneto is the new ruler of Genosha, man, and they're accepting all mutants!". The idea of Magneto as the internationally-approved benevolent dictator of a mutant country was, well, intriguing and fitting.

But Morrison and Quitely were going to give the concept another turn, thanks to Cassandra Nova's machinations.


I leave you with the last minutes of Genosha:











Cassandra Nova's cold and logical genocide. The goth girl's prophecy. Magneto's apparent death. Charles feeling the lights going out. The numbers going down. 16 million mutants dead in a matter of minutes. One of the worst catastrophes ever to happen in the Marvel Universe, and one that's become a fundamental part of it. And a sign showing that Morrison was intending to do some drastic things to the stagnant X-Men books...

I still feel a chill down my spine every time I read this issue.


You?