And Now for something completely different…!
My friend Gerg turned me onto this innovative yet disturbing comic awhile ago called MARSHAL LAW. Created by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill, this was the futuristic tale of “Hero-Killer” Marshal Law, a very “Judge Dredd”-ish vigilante hell bent on cleaning out the super people of his world. You see, in this future, the entire world is populated by super-heroes, born or genetically created, and they have taken over civilization, and Marshal is the sole person to keep the Heroes in check.
The great kick out of these issues is that every Archetypical Super-Hero is portrayed/skewered in the stories, and there have been spoof groups of everyone from the Justice League, The Legion Of Super-Heroes, The Avengers AND the Golden Age Justice Society. In between, Mills & O’Neill built up a the most interesting and colorful supporting cast, and it is just fascinating to see what new concoction they come up with for each new “Hero”!
In later years, many other series would follow this trend, great comics like The Authority, The Pro, and even Waid and Kingdom Come. Whenever a storyline employed a gaggle of archetypical heroes and villains, Gerg & I would always describe them like “Oh, you gotta check out this comic…the characters are like Marshal Law!”
Anyway, In one of the earlier issues, Marshal Law has to attend the wedding of a high-profile super-hero. He brushes with a few heroes who are outside the wedding, watching a fight, and one of these was a very sexy doll named Maskara, whose costume gave new meaning to the term “underboob”! She and her cohorts try to unmask Marshal and are baffled when the face underneath is some joe schmo that no one knows! While they are pondering, Maskara puts on Marshal’s police hat, a truly sassy move if there ever was one, and that just killed me!
Ultra short-skirt aside, I don’t know why she stood out for me, since almost all of O’Neill’s girls were pretty sexy, plus the chick is wearing a MASK, and it’s not like I could see her face! But affect me she did, and even years later, I would be comparing Maskara to the later Super-heroines in the Marshal Law series!
Maskara
by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill
[Marshal Law #4]
