Miracle Monday, 2010: "Oh Deadly Darkseid!"
I.
So.
Miracle Monday, 2010 and I just can’t stop thinking about those wonderful Superpowers action figures from back in the mid-1980s.
There was this specific time in which….
Well. The setting was Darkseid’s throne room on Apokolips (namely, the top of my desk). The story per se would revolve around Darkseid and Lex Luthor making plans and schemes and ... yadda, yadda, yadda... defeat Superman once and for all.
That specific Luthor action figure was based on artist George Pérez’ designs for the comics-slash-toy line: The short-lived, but fondly remembered "battle suit" look. In the comics, which debuted there around with the toyline, Luthor was depicted as having found that armor, as opposite to having created it himself, in an abandoned laboratory on planet Lexor. Luthor’s Lexorian battle suit (named War Suit) granted him strength and invulnerability close to Superman’s, plus the ability to emit powerful bolts of pretty much all known kinds of energy as a weapon. That suit was so damn powerful that when Luthor employed it against Superman in its very first outing on Lexor, he ended up destroying the entire planet instead, killing his own wife and daughter.
Luthor’s suit lasted for another couple of years, tops, and vanished for good during the Crisis on Infinite Earths in ‘85. It would eventually inspire a myriad of other suits, and looks, and weapons for the "post-Crisis", Wolfman-slash-Byrne-revamped Luthor afterwards, up until this day.
But I had entirely missed out Luthor’s War Suit comics debut, mostly because I was too absorbed with Chris Claremont’s X-men at the time (well, who wasn´t, right?), but also probably because, from what I remember, that mag was never published in Brazil anyway. But that’s why our lord satan created eBay, isn’t it?
So -- since I had no idea of the War Suit’s orgins or powers back then -- I had to make do with what I had: Comic book-ey logic plus a fertile imagination: It was, thus, pretty much obvious to me that A) Luthor’s armor was made of green Kryptonite, B) That its gauntlets would emit "nuclear blasts" (blame it on Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, what the hey!), and C) that it was a product of Apokoliptian technology.
Oddly enough, the early-2000s version of Luthor’s War Suit from Jeph Loeb’s Public Enemies story arc was indeed a product of Apokoliptian technology. And had built-in, weaponized Kryptonite fragments. So there for being twenty years ahead of my time.
But Darkseid’s boon to Luthor wouldn’t come for free, of course, though, and that’s why, at least as far as the top of my desk was concerned, Luthor would eventually have to re-pay the favor. Luthor did it so, as I imagined it, via my reading lamp, which became a machine capable of amplifying the power of Darkseid’s omega beams.
I was, naturally, leveraging the gimmick on Darkseid’s action figure: That toy had this slit on the top of his head, see, so that ambient light could filter through the transparent red plastic in his eyes and make it seem as if his eyes were actually glowing with the omega effect thing. Without the need for the annoying batteries, to boot.
Then...
Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I would spend so much time setting up the plot for the story, most of the times I’d simply never get around to actually playing with the figures. But it’d go something like this: Superman would be lured to Darkseid’s throne room on Apokolips, Luthor would soften him up with his War Suit, then activate the reading lamp machine in order to Darkseid to deliver the killing blow. But he would never get around to it, because Superman would call upon his trusty Supermobile in the nick of time. And that was the cool, slick, sci-fi Superpowers Supermobile, not the dorky 1970s version from the comics-slash-Superfriends cartoon-slash-Corgi miniatures, with the big hands on its side.
Of course neither Luthor not Darkseid were a match for the mighty might of the Supermobile, and evil would thus inevitably lose.
But it was not their fault, though. I mean, Luthor was supposed to have a vehicle of his own, see, the Lex Soar Seven, which was like, seven thousand times cooler than the Supermobile, with a mean landing gear that doubled as a claw to capture Superman, Kryptonite-laser cannons and a big, bad removable chunk of green Kryptonite molded in translucent plastic powering its engines.
...but that ship was never sold in Brazil either, so by the time I found a mint-in-box version on eBay many, many, MANY years later, the whole desktop and reading lamp thing didn’t quite cut it anymore, mostly because of Midnight Oil, College, vodka, and girls.
Does that mean C.W. Saturn ends up winning anyhow? Wow. Really?
Wow.
II.
Truth be told – I just guess I wrote all that just to tell you that hey, guess who’s just spent a fortune over the weekend to buy all the seven action figures in Wave 12 of Mattel’s Superpowers revival toyline, DC Universe Classics, just to assemble all pieces required to build that giant, badass Darkseid figure…
Looks so damn cool over the TV set, let me tell you that much!
So.
Miracle Monday, 2010 and I just can’t stop thinking about those wonderful Superpowers action figures from back in the mid-1980s.
There was this specific time in which….
Well. The setting was Darkseid’s throne room on Apokolips (namely, the top of my desk). The story per se would revolve around Darkseid and Lex Luthor making plans and schemes and ... yadda, yadda, yadda... defeat Superman once and for all.
That specific Luthor action figure was based on artist George Pérez’ designs for the comics-slash-toy line: The short-lived, but fondly remembered "battle suit" look. In the comics, which debuted there around with the toyline, Luthor was depicted as having found that armor, as opposite to having created it himself, in an abandoned laboratory on planet Lexor. Luthor’s Lexorian battle suit (named War Suit) granted him strength and invulnerability close to Superman’s, plus the ability to emit powerful bolts of pretty much all known kinds of energy as a weapon. That suit was so damn powerful that when Luthor employed it against Superman in its very first outing on Lexor, he ended up destroying the entire planet instead, killing his own wife and daughter.
Luthor’s suit lasted for another couple of years, tops, and vanished for good during the Crisis on Infinite Earths in ‘85. It would eventually inspire a myriad of other suits, and looks, and weapons for the "post-Crisis", Wolfman-slash-Byrne-revamped Luthor afterwards, up until this day.
But I had entirely missed out Luthor’s War Suit comics debut, mostly because I was too absorbed with Chris Claremont’s X-men at the time (well, who wasn´t, right?), but also probably because, from what I remember, that mag was never published in Brazil anyway. But that’s why our lord satan created eBay, isn’t it?
So -- since I had no idea of the War Suit’s orgins or powers back then -- I had to make do with what I had: Comic book-ey logic plus a fertile imagination: It was, thus, pretty much obvious to me that A) Luthor’s armor was made of green Kryptonite, B) That its gauntlets would emit "nuclear blasts" (blame it on Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, what the hey!), and C) that it was a product of Apokoliptian technology.
Oddly enough, the early-2000s version of Luthor’s War Suit from Jeph Loeb’s Public Enemies story arc was indeed a product of Apokoliptian technology. And had built-in, weaponized Kryptonite fragments. So there for being twenty years ahead of my time.
But Darkseid’s boon to Luthor wouldn’t come for free, of course, though, and that’s why, at least as far as the top of my desk was concerned, Luthor would eventually have to re-pay the favor. Luthor did it so, as I imagined it, via my reading lamp, which became a machine capable of amplifying the power of Darkseid’s omega beams.
I was, naturally, leveraging the gimmick on Darkseid’s action figure: That toy had this slit on the top of his head, see, so that ambient light could filter through the transparent red plastic in his eyes and make it seem as if his eyes were actually glowing with the omega effect thing. Without the need for the annoying batteries, to boot.
Then...
Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I would spend so much time setting up the plot for the story, most of the times I’d simply never get around to actually playing with the figures. But it’d go something like this: Superman would be lured to Darkseid’s throne room on Apokolips, Luthor would soften him up with his War Suit, then activate the reading lamp machine in order to Darkseid to deliver the killing blow. But he would never get around to it, because Superman would call upon his trusty Supermobile in the nick of time. And that was the cool, slick, sci-fi Superpowers Supermobile, not the dorky 1970s version from the comics-slash-Superfriends cartoon-slash-Corgi miniatures, with the big hands on its side.
Of course neither Luthor not Darkseid were a match for the mighty might of the Supermobile, and evil would thus inevitably lose.
But it was not their fault, though. I mean, Luthor was supposed to have a vehicle of his own, see, the Lex Soar Seven, which was like, seven thousand times cooler than the Supermobile, with a mean landing gear that doubled as a claw to capture Superman, Kryptonite-laser cannons and a big, bad removable chunk of green Kryptonite molded in translucent plastic powering its engines.
...but that ship was never sold in Brazil either, so by the time I found a mint-in-box version on eBay many, many, MANY years later, the whole desktop and reading lamp thing didn’t quite cut it anymore, mostly because of Midnight Oil, College, vodka, and girls.
Does that mean C.W. Saturn ends up winning anyhow? Wow. Really?
Wow.
II.
Truth be told – I just guess I wrote all that just to tell you that hey, guess who’s just spent a fortune over the weekend to buy all the seven action figures in Wave 12 of Mattel’s Superpowers revival toyline, DC Universe Classics, just to assemble all pieces required to build that giant, badass Darkseid figure…
Looks so damn cool over the TV set, let me tell you that much!
posted by 186282mps at 8:50 AM
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