Yikes! The Silver Banshee is truly one of the more bizarre characters ever to be featured here on Super-Vixens, but I guess that’s a testament to the art of John Byrne that he can take a girl who’s literally death becomes her, and put such a sexy spin on her that you find yourself strangely attracted…
There have been many yeas and nays regarding John Byrne’s SUPERMAN reboot back in 1986, and while I’ve agreed and disagreed on the various pros and cons of the jumpstart, the very creation of Silver Banshee has already made it worth my while- folks, I just LOVE this super-villainess!
Look at this splash page that introduces the character to us…YE GODS what a shot! I have to say, I fell in love with her right on the spot! I’ve always said that nobody drew gals’ legs like Byrne, and to see the 7 foot tall demoness struttin’ her stuff down 5th Avenue, complete with sexy heels, WOW! I was hooked!
Yes, she’s (like) a walking vampire, sucking the life out of anyone hapless enough to get in her way, but at times, she is downright ADORABLE! YES! So powerful and yet so much like a “fish out of water” in ways…gotta love when she’s propositioned by the construction worker, and asks, “Are you addressing ME, little man?”! She couldn’t believe some guy of the street was trying to pick her up…I, however, fully understood!
(and I guess would have met the same fate as the now-deceased dude!)
Byrne really went all-out with this character- from the very beginning you’re drawn into her story, and want to find out more about her! Strangely cute to watch her flipping out when she can’t find her book, and that little lost look on her face when “Superman” passes through her…she’s completely befuddled!
And I think secretly even Jimmy Olsen has a thing for Ms. McDougal, because it really seems like he spends an AWFUL lot of time spying on her as she “does her thing” in those bookstores. He ‘s always peeking at her through a window in the background! Ahahaha!
Another thing to ponder. Back in the day, me and my friends used to think the Marvel Comics Soul –Searching Silver Surfer was WHITE… only later when they released an action figure of him all painted in shiny chrome that we realized, “Hey, yeah…he was supposed to have been silver-but comic colors just couldn’t give us the metallic sheen, so they just left him white!”
Now, what’s the deal with Silver Banshee? Is she ALSO supposed to be silver with black accents? I hope not…I think the solid black and white contrasts give her the shocking impact you’re supposed to have, reminding me so much of a pirate ship flag with its stark skull and crossbones design. Plus, the white gives her the ghostly, ethereal look, too!
One day, back in 1992 or so, I was listening to the radio, and on came what sounded like a brand new song by Robert Smith and the Cure! Fun, jingly, and with an incredibly catchy chorus, I was surprised when the radio DJ announced it was in fact, a group called Presence!
Presence? Who the heck were these guys? And why did they sound so much like the Cure? Back in the days before the Internet, one couldn’t attain such information so easily! Then one day, after playing the song (which I had now known was called “Act Of Faith”), the DJ offhandedly stated that it was a song by a new group from a former member of the Cure! “So!” I thought to myself, “Robert Smith has split up the Cure, and formed a new group called Presence!” Right?
Well, no, not really.
I was to later find out by way of a magazine (ah, back when information was only found in the printed word!) that although it WAS a former member of the Cure, it wasn’t Robert Smith at all (who was quite happily still with The Cure, thank you very much) but Laurence Tolhurst, one of the original members, first as a drummer, then later on keyboards, before leaving (under circumstances I still don’t know for certain) the group after the Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me Album.
So it was Laurence Tolhurst’s group! Then I thought to myself, “Wow, I never realized how much he and Robert Smith sang alike! It must be all that time working together that did it! Right?
Well, no, not really.
You see, after his departure from the Cure, Tolhurst reunited with Michael Dempsey (he himself another ex-Cure member) to create an almost doppelganger sounding group to the Cure itself... As for the amazingly Robert Smith-ish vocals, they’d simply gotten Gary Biddles, a talented singer who sounded like a exact clone of Robert Smith, to fill Robert’s shoes!
Sadly, the group never really caught on, and their album Inside turned out to be their one and only release. But for what it’s worth, it’s quite a catchy record, and for light-hearted pop tunes, it certainly satisfies, and is still a joy to listen to!
Taking one look at evil chanteuse EMERALD EMPRESS’ striking features, one would immediately assume that the Marvel Comics character she reminded me of was Lorna Dane, that OTHER green-locked vixen POLARIS of the X-Men...but you would be wrong!
While it’s true that the two girls look awfully similar in both appearance AND their flight/attack mode, for some reason, the character that Emerald Empress always reminded me of was that THOR and AVENGERS baddie The Enchantress! Maybe part of it was the similar sounding names and green-coordinated outfit. And perhaps part of it was her haughty yet alluring personality that was so akin to the Asgardian outcast. But most likely, the BIGGEST reason was that both were paired up with a giant armored warrior with a huge-ass axe!
As the reigning queen of the Legion of Super-Heroes diabolical arch enemy group THE FATAL FIVE , she appeared alongside four other baddies: Leader THAROK and his mind controlled powerhouse VALIDUS, MANO, the mutant with powers to make things crumble at his touch, and finally, THE PERSUADER, the wielder of the giant battle “Atomic” Axe, the character that reminded me SO MUCH of Enchantress’ sidekick / partner THE EXECUTIONER!
I never drew any connections between them when I was reading Legion comics with the Fatal Five intact (i.e., all five members present) but when Emerald Empress and Persuader broke off from the group and became a duo , something in my mind clicked! Ahahahaha!
By the way, it was interesting to note that in almost every story where the Fatal Five (or sometimes even all by her lonesome), at the end when The Empress is “defeated”, she’s always detained simply by being held down by one of the male members of the group, and when you look at some of the illustrations, part of me thinks Superboy and the guys rather looked forward to their chance to "subdue" her...!
Sarya's one of the Legion's oldest foes and one of the most enduring characters, She's absolutely my favorite villain in the series, and she sports one of my very favorite costumes as well! That's a thumbs up, all around! Now If I could only catch her without that darn Emerald Eye spying on me...
When I used to read by friend’s old battered copies of DC’s strange and quirky super robot team METAL MEN, my eyes just naturally settled on the pretty silver maiden who obviously stood out as she was the smurfette to the otherwise all-male demographic!
The Metal Men were a group of metal robots with varying densities and personalities befitting the metal they'd been made out of, but something about these characters always reminded me of another very human super-group called the INFERIOR FIVE, they were so zany!
I can’t say I ever took a more than passing interest in the actual STORIES in those old comics, but the illustrations of Tina by Ross Andru (he later of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN fame) always gave me enough incentive to go ahead and read ‘em all, anyway! Delicate and doting on Doc Magnus, Tina always seemed the most "human" out of the group, frequently crying and worrying about the latest crisis that might threaten her beloved creator!
At the time, I recall is being really puzzled as to why there were two robots made of Tin. I mean, there was Gold, Lead, Mercury, and Iron, then Tin and Tina. It was only years later that I found out Tina was actually Platinum, NOT Tin!
Another thing I remember was that it seemed (to me, at least) like they were ALWAYS fighting this one villain called CHEMO, this humanoid-shaped container filled with a mixture of chemicals that gave him sentience… I’d pull out a different issue, and groan, “Ahg, not THIS villain again!” But my memory’s probably distorting the facts…
Wait...I just checked that John Byrne Action Comics Superman story where he teams up with the Metal Men- and the villain is...CHEMO! I WAS right!
One of my favorite Science Fiction authors is the Hugo- Award winning Mike Resnick, famous for (among other things), his Santiago Novel, the story of the most infamous of super-outlaws in Futuristic Outer Space. One of the more interesting aspects of Santiago are the colorful characters and the detailed Planetary Systems, and he has subsequently written many other novels based in this same “world”, the blurb on the book cover usually reading “return to the world of Santiago!”
Out of these stories came SOOTHSAYER in 1991, the first chapter of a trilogy. The book was followed in 1992 by ORACLE, and concluded in 1993 with PROPHET.
The story is about a very young girl named Penelope Bailey. Penelope has a very unusual gift that makes her very desired by everyone concerned. She has the ability to see into the future, and by performing certain actions, can manipulate the outcome. Naturally, a talent like this is very, very useful for anybody, whether they be gambler, outlaw or politician, and when we first meet her, she is prisoner of an alien who stole her away from some other kidnappers, and she is trying to work out the variables in her head that will help her escape and be “left alone” The only problem is that sometimes her visions don’t come quickly enough, and occasionally, there is no “good” future to pick from, and she has to roll with the incident.
Thus she crosses paths with a man named Carlos Mendoza, known to the Outer Rim as The Iceman. Unlike the various people who want her to further their own personal exploits, he sees the young girl as one thing only: A Threat. Unlike everyone else, he realizes that although she has limited control over her power, Penelope is only a scared little girl, and her skills will only increase as she gets older, growing as she does, until she becomes an entity who might be able to control the outcome of the entire Universe!
When we first meet up with Penelope, she uses her powers like so: If, for example, someone is chasing her, she may “see” four or five different outcomes in her mind. She sees in one of the “futures” that if she places her doll on the steps, the pursuer will slip and break his neck. Or she may choose another “future” where they simple get away by turning a corner. It’s all a matter of orchestrating things for a favorable outcome.
When Mendoza meets up with Penelope again in ORACLE, she is now a young lady, and has progressed much like he’d predicted she would, but her powers are still growing, and by the time the Iceman catches up with her in PROPHET, she is a fully grown woman who has mastered her gift to its fullest, where she need only stand in a certain way, or gesture with her hands, that hundreds of scenarios and untold futures bend to her will.
By the last book, Carlos Mendoza is an fat balding old man with a pot belly and a limp, but he alone knows that Penelope is orchestrating some huge, diabolical plot that will involve the destiny of the galaxy. But when he catches up with her, will he Kill her, or join her?
An engrossing read, as are ALL of Resnick’s books: along with the Soothsayer trilogy and Santiago, I also recommend some of my other favorites, The Dark Lady and Ivory!
One of the first comics a friend of mine collected was THE INCREDIBLE HULK-( this would be around…oh 1978 or so) Though I myself wasn’t a reader of Marvel's jolly green giant, I always loved looking at the covers of those comics because they had such impact!
There was one of Hulk lifting a tractor above his head. There was one of Hulk smashing through the wall of a roadside saloon . There was an incredible cover (by Ernie Chan, as I recall) of the Leader in some robot-gizmo blasting Hulk’s back…
And there was this one featuring a “Maiden” punching out the Hulk named Moonstone!
Looking at Psychologist-turned-Villianess Karla Sofen’s costume now, it wasn’t much different from the other duds of the day, sort of NOVA mixed with the RED GUARDIAN, but at the time, I really thought that was one KEWL chick in that costume! I didn’t get around to actually reading those issues til years later, and didn’t get around to picking up copies for myself until even LATER, but as the old adage goes, better late than…you know the rest!!
Re-reading the comic now, it’s shocking to see how subdued Karla’s Moonstone character is. In the day of big boobs, skimpy costumes and pin-up splash pages, artists Bob McLeod and Sal Buscema seem almost unconcerned about using her sexiness as a selling point, (Ahh, these were the days, after all!) and I really had to scrounge around those two issues to get any kind of decent full-body shots of Moonstone!
Of course, Karla and her lunar powered alter-Ego Moonstone would get the “modern” updating in titles like THUNDERBOLTS, complete with obligatory sexy poses AND sexier new costumes, nonetheless, it’s still cool to see that Karla's character is still around, even though she ain’t NOTHIN’ like the Maiden I loved all those years back!
Moonstone
First Appearance
Incredible Hulk #228
By Marv Wolfman, Frank Robbins and Sal Bucema with Roger Stern and Bob McLeod
We start off with the All-American wonder-girl of the group, Ms. Abbey Chase, better known to us as “The Marilyn Monroe-ish chick of the group”. Or at least that's the way she seemed to be depicted to my friends!
As for me, I don’t know why, maybe it’s that mole on her right cheek or the dramatically arched eyebrows or pointed nose, but Abbey always reminded me of Christine Baranski, a statement I’ve said to the appalled groans of my fellow Danger Girl fans!
I know I’m in the minority, but gee, I think Christine Baraski’s sexy!
More acceptable is my other note that there are times when Abbey reminds me of 4AD rocker Tanya Donelly, and folks, trust me when I tell you that from ME, that’s a HELLUVA compliment!
Oh, and by the way, I KNOW that Pink Waitress outfit I posted up as the "Signature" pose isn't her official costume, but it's my favorite get up she's worn. Sue Me.
Although it’s hard to tell in a comic full to the brim with hot chicks, Sydney’s supposed to be the “Sexy” one in the DANGER GIRL gang, truly a “Vixen” if there ever was one! Lithe, naughty and forever clad in leather, is there any question as to why she’s my favorite girl in the bunch? The girl is HOT HOT HOT!
Did I make myself clear?
Oh, and she hails from Down Under (get it? Sydney, Australia? Ar Har Har.), so it’s even more tantalizing to imagine every word out of her mouth spoken in that aussie accent!
And another helpful little hint here- although sometimes there are so many scantily clad girls running around crowding up the strip, you can always tell which gal Sydney is by that oh so subtle beauty mark right above her right boobie! Did I just say “boobie”? Ah, I must be talking about Sydney!
Ah, poor misguided Natalia, the third member who turns out to be a double agent!
Pretty original to have one of the three girls in a brand new comic turn out to be a traitor! But of course, that left the comic scrambling to find a new “third” girl, and though for the most part the spot seems to have been taken by “Silicon” Valleri, there always seems to be a member missing!
Too bad…Natalia sure rocked that Ursula "Honey Ryder" Andress bikini ensemble back there, didn’t she. Woulda been nice to continue seeing that in future issues!
I was a relative newcomer to the Brian K. Vaughan / Pia Guerra masterpiece Y THE LAST MAN, and didn’t get around to reading it til they published the series in the collected graphic novel format. But once I got through the door, I was all in, hook, line and sinker!
The story and artwork really invoked (to me) the best works of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon in both HELLBLAZER and PREACHER to me, and since I was a HUGE fan of both comics, I INSTANTLY fell in love with Y The Last Man, diving in headfirst and full throttle through the entire run! I guess it didn’t hurt that I didn’t have to wait issue-by-issue, either!
And GIRLS! Man, for a guy who spends his time fawning over his favorite super-heroines every day, a comic about a world populated solely by WOMEN was like Heaven on Earth! Obviously the strip was crammed to the hilt full of cool and sexy female characters, but there were four or five that really had impact on me while reading the strip, and those are the ones who I’ve decided to gush a little about here today…
First we have HERO, Yorick’s cool, collected and WAY pretty sister, one of the first characters you get to see just as the Apocalypse hits. As her partner and lover dies in front of her eyes, you immediately have sympathetic attachment to her, and want to stick around to find out what happens to her plight.
Hero is the female character that I think changed the most not just through the crisis, but throughout her whole life, from her rebellious childhood to her resentful teenage years, we see her falls and ascensions from heroic emergency medic to ruthless killer outlaw, and yet we always saw the tender side of her, and when she finally makes peace with herself in the end, that’s when you really feel in your heart that the story has come to its conclusion.
...But of course, my favorite heroine in Y THE LAST MAN just has to be Agent 355, the heart and soul of the strip, the woman who was everything from bodyguard to conscience to Yorick!
When we are first introduced to 355, she is a hard-a-nails kick ass government working on a mission in some third world country, but once she is assigned by the governor to protect her son, the last living male on the face of the earth, we slowly get to see a multitude of different facets of her personality.
As the relationship between 355 and Yorick develops and become more than bodyguard and bodyguardee, her character is slowly fleshed out ( and those flashbacks of 355 from childhood to rookie agent and beyond are by FAR my favorites in the book!) and you realize she’s more than just a kick ass chick- she’s caring and compassionate, and by the time the story is winding down, you aren’t surprised to see that the two have developed feelings for each other as well!
At the end of the mission, we see 355 all dolled up and feminine, folks, this scene is what I was waiting to see throughout the whole strip, though I didn’t know it at the time!
I was like, “WHOA! Check out 355- she’s so…pretty!” When you see Yorick finally meeting up with her, and 355 looking so damn great, you really are aching for these two to get together, though fate has other plans for the couple.
When the strip ended I was like “Gah! I wanted MORE stories featuring 355…how could they DO this to me?!”
Yes, more kick-ass girls with numbers for names. 711 was part of the Culper Ring with 355, and it was really nice to see a part of 355’s past, knowing she was a trusted partner made me like her right off the bat, and then when things got wonky (i.e. Tying up Yorick and “punishing” him pure S&M style, see pictures above), you were SO interested just to find out where the interrogation was going!
Up until this point in the strip, Yorick was wandering around without aim, dealing with the guilt of having survived the horrible ordeal of the Apocalypse- She was the one who took his life by the reins and forced him to see something worth living for.
I just love the fact that after they’ve gone through this violent and explosive situation, by the time the other girls get back, they have smoothed out their problems, and are quietly reading !
As an afterthought I figured I’d throw in another extremely hot but altogether brief character from Y the Last Man here: the delectable (yet venomous) Kilina, Captain of the Whale, a ship the gang hitches to get across to Japan, totally unaware that it’s a drug-smuggling ship !…
Just like Han Solo (that OTHER drug smuggler), Kilina is a cool and reckless leader, a ruffian of sorts, and yes, even “Scruffy-looking”! To me she always seemed like Tia Carrera coulda played her a la RELIC HUNTER, but my friend says she seemed more like a young Grace Slick character than a model-turned-tomb-raider. Heck, she’s a bit of BOTH!
Like many of you out there, I am a HUGE fan of John Byrne, and have voraciously read just about every title he’s done over the years, from Marvel to DC, Dark Horse, and Beyond!
And as any fan of Byrne can tell you, there are many things that are BOUND to happen in a any given tale of his, and the “Signs That You’re In a John Byrne Comic” entries are just fun captures of similar links between his wonderful stories that give you a sense of Deja Vu!
Way back in 1973, there was one song on the radio that me and siblings just loved, and that was Paul McCartney and Wings’ BAND ON THE RUN. we loved the catchy refrains, the three-part song changes, and the easy-to-understand story of a guy breaking out of jail. It was this knowledge of the story that led us to think Paul was singing “MAN on the Run,” and we would sing those lines as loud as we could whenever the song came on. My mother was quick to correct us, saying that the words were in fact, BAND on the Run, a fact that we just couldn’t believe. The song was about a guy in jail, right? and he broke out and now the cops are chasing him, right? so it had to be MAN on the run!
A few weeks later, we were out shopping with my mother and her friend and her kids, and when we heard the song blasting out of the record shop, we felt vindicated when her friend’s kids ALSO started singing “MAN on the Run, Man on the Run!” We triumphantly ran to our mother, saying, “See! See! Even THEY say that the song goes “Man on the Run!” My mother simply stated as-a-matter-of-factly,“I don’t care WHAT they’re singing, it’s BAND on the Run.”
Well, as we all know, dear old Mom was totally correct, a fact that we were forced to accept when we had the chance to buy the single one night at our local Woolworth’s- Right there on the label the title of the song was printed, and it was indeed BAND on the Run! I remember us playing that single over and over again, staring at the curious Apple logo on the record as it spun around, not knowing or caring that Paul McCartney had ever been a part of a group called the Beatles, only that he was part of this group called Wings, and they rocked! I remember me and my brothers and a couple of friends even created little skits to “act out” to the song, singing part one in jail, part two breaking out of jail, and part three with us running around the apartment like loons, playing cops ‘n’ robbers, all the while Band on the Run blasting out of our phonograph speakers!
We loved that darn song so much, that it was quite exciting and significant news when one day I came home from riding my bicycle, and my brother and his friend Miles called me over, and said, “Hey, listen to this song…it 's SUPER COOL!” Glancing at the single on the record player, I saw that they were playing the flip-side of Band On the Run, an ominously titled song called “Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty Five”. Maybe it was the title, but right away I got the feeling of the song’s grimness (if that’s a word), and even then I got the feeling like it was part of a bigger epic work. Plus, the song seemed LONG, and after awhile, I started fidgeting, wondering just what it was that my brother and his friends thought I’d think was so cool. “Wait a little…it’s coming!” they assured me. The song played on and became more and more dramatic, as synthesizers droned on louder and louder along with horns blaring, till it all came crashing to an incredible crescendo… and then, as the song droned to fade-out, the strains of Band on the Run chimed in! WHA!!! I stared open-mouthed at the guys, and they grinned back, proud of their discovery of the “hidden” Band on the Run track! “That WAS cool!!!!” I exclaimed, putting the needle back to the beginning of the single to listen to again. There it was again! This was genius! Pure Genius! “Holy Cow,” I thought, this is the coolest discovery of all time!
When we’d share the secret track to cousins and friends, it seemed to be an unspoken rule that you couldn’t just skip to the end…no, for the ending to have the cherished impact as intended, the entire song had to be played, much to the boredome of many of our friends! It was because of this that I really started listening to the song, I mean really listening, soaking up the melodramatic score while trying to understand the meaning of its cryptic lyrics.
Not having any idea of any connection to Orwell’s 1984 (or whatever McCartney’s actually referring to), I still got the gist of the theme when Paul sang lines like “Oh, no one ever left alive in Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty Five will ever do,” or, “I didn’t think, I never dreamed that I would be around to see it all come true”, that this was a song supposedly taking place after some devastating holocaust or something where not too many people had survived.
So the song gave me that uneasy feeling anyway, and when the Moog Synthesizer started underscoring the song after the first verse, the futuristic sounding instrument transformed the melody into a quasi-science fiction-ish drama soundtrack. When I would listen to the track, I’d close my eyes and picture in my mind great abandoned republics and huge, vast dead seas in strange worlds as the song unfolded, the tune was THAT rich with feeling.
And that end… It got to the point where it didn’t even matter that the snippet of Band on the Run was attatched to the end- No matter how many times I played it, that HUGE crescendo still was the most incredible finale I’d ever heard, and it blew me away EVERY TIME!
Well, we truly played that single to death, and there soon came a time when the 45 record just could not play anymore without jumping and skipping as soon as the needle hit the vinyl. When I really thought about it, it was a miracle that the single survived as long as it did in our destructive house. At this point the record really shoulda been tossed, but there was SO much sentimental attatchment to it, we kept it anyway, storing it away in our 45 record box as we moved onto the newer singles for our collection, like Ariel by Dean Freidman, I’m Your Boogie Man” by KC & the Sunshine Band and even later classics by Paul McCartney like Let Em In and Silly Love Songs!
At some point I made the very grown-up transition to buying albums instead of singles (or at least as well as), and I began to entertain the thoughts of buying some older Paul McCartney albums as well. The obvious first choic was the LP Band On the Run,a s it featured the single that started it all, but I was happily surprised when I found out that Nineteen hundred and Eighty-Five was given the highly respectable position of Album closer! I immediately bought the album (albeit a used copy, all my wallet could afford) and ran home to throw it on. The album was great, every song was fresh and just as groovy as the singles I already knew from them (like Jet and Helen Wheels), and when it finally got to the last song, I have to say…As soon as my ears heard that opening piano piece, I was instantly carted back to that childhood science fiction feeling I’d felt when I was a kid. It was no mistake- this was a grand, momentous song, and I was convinced that this LP was that epic drama that I’d always suspected Band on the Run and Nineteen Hundred & Eighty-Five was culled from. As the opening and closing songs of the album,it turned all the songs in between into parts of a greater work, the masterpiece that IS the"Band On The Run LP!
And HEY! Check out this COOL cover of Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five by Mexican Beatles Cover Band The Blue Meanies- They got it RIGHT!!! An AWESOME performance!!!
