Comic Book Resources

The homage: Amazing Spider-Man #8.

(Huzzahs for those Spider-Man digests in mass-market PB size I got when I was a kid. They were cool back then; they're cool points now!)

Another good Snark Free Corner. I really look forward to these.

The cover homage is, I think, Daredevil #1, because I know they look pretty similar and I really doubt anyone did it before then. But I could be wrong.

Leslie was a pretty cool supporting character, and it's a shame what they did with her post-"Wargames." Hopefully she'll be retconned back to respectability soon.

And finally, my own Personal Birds of Prey would probably be Black Canary, Huntress, and Oracle.

Um, too easy? Okay, barring those three, Dr. Light, Zatanna, and Vixen.

As for the Birds, well ... at the risk of sounding like I fear change: I'm bummed that Black Canary's leaving the flock and I'm even considering dropping the title. (I like Gail Simone's stuff, so I'll give her one or two issues to see where she's going with it. NOT a Big Barda fan though. And beyond that personal dislike, the character seems way too powerful for the Birds. It becomes much more another outright super-team with her around.)

So I'd have to say: Oracle, Black Canary ... and Gypsy. She seemed like a perfect choice. Where'd she disappear to, anyway? (No pun intended.) Hawkgirl would make a good third leg of the triumverate too; she's not too powerful and in fact her identity would strengthen the meaning behind the title (which has always been kinda flimsy). I bet Gail would do great things with Katana, who's got a great backstory and who's wasted with Winick writing her.

My Birds of Prey would consist of Big Barda, Zatanna, and Liberty Bell because that pretty much covers any situation they could get into.

It's gonna sound boring, but my personal Birds of Prey would also be Black Canary, Oracle and Huntress. I'm sorry, but I think it works so well with the three of them.

Or, maybe instead of Huntress have Gail Simone put herself into the book as a character.

for the hero/villain team ups:

Didn't Spiderman and Venom team up for the Maximum Carnage storyline?

When the ghost of McCarthy returns and starts accusing everyone of being closet terrorists, all Ron Garney has to do is show 'em his Cap run. Just look at that first issue: twenty or so pages of ho-hum '90s unspectacularity, and then BAM! the Shield appears and suddenly he's John Trumbull. Seriously, any time someone shares a panel with anything red, white, and/or blue, be they Steve Rogers or Pedestrian #4, they are instantly transformed into some godlike patriotic American hero. Look at geeky prick McElroy there, who somehow becomes the spitting image of Clark Kent the minute he throws the shield. Why? Because Ron Garney's father was George Washington and his uncle was Sam, that's why, and no two-bit loser shares a panel with Old Glory with him at the pencil.

Brubaker/Epting may be awesome, but Waid/Garney made me salute.

Some more cool yin-yang team-ups:

-There were two during "Infinity Gauntlet," first when Doctor Doom joins the heroes to fight Thanos (and naturally makes his own play for the IG), and then when Thanos teams-up with Dr. Strange, Warlock, and the Surfer against Nebula.

-Doctor Doom again, this time with the whole Marvel Universe against Onslaught (apparently, the world isn't really in peril unless Doctor Doom gets involved, which is exactly as it should be).

-Magneto joined the good guys on the Beyonder's planet in the original "Secret Wars."

-Apocalypse helped the X-Men take down Stryfe in "X-Cutioner's Song."

-The ex-Brotherhood Freedom Force were with the X-Men united against the Adversary in "Fall of the Mutants."

-When Iron Man teamed up with Bullseye, Venom, and a host of other reasonable individuals to defeat the Internet-shattering villainy of Captain Amer...dear God, make it stop!

For heroes teaming up with villains, Animal Man teamed up with Mirror Master in Grant Morrison's run on the title.

Also loads of heroes teamed up with Darkseid in Cosmic Odyssey - but then Darkseid betrayed them so I don't know if that counts.

re: Birds of Prey - it's kind of tangential, but from what I gather when Peter David brought brought back the Silver Age Supergirl in his run on Supergirl (just before it was cancelled), he had planned to turn the book into a kind of Birds of Prey with powers. I can't remember who exactly he had planned to have in it, but it was something like two Supergirls (there were three to choose between at the time) and Powergirl. Big Barda seems a more natural fit for that team than Birds of Prey

Dan

That Cap issue also had a great line from Hercules.

"On Olympus, we measure power against Zeus, wisdom against Athena, and courage against Captain America."

Alex Saviuk's art on that Spider-Man cover is mullet-tastic.

Here's the cover homage for anyone interested:

http://www.samcci.comics.org/spider-man/008.htm

Why they felt that teenagers needed a tribute is beyond me.

For 'hero villian team-ups', I'll go back to one of the earliest: the original Fatal Five story with the Legion of Superheroes. Astonished me to find it wasn't on the list, it did.

That Captain America panel sequence? I think Dave Campbell of Dave's Long Box would call that a F**K YEAH moment.

The best part is that it totally defies your expectations and becomes an even better F**K YEAH moment for it.

Re: hero and villain team-up. How about the Odin/Loki/Thor team-up during the Walt Simonson Thor run, when they charge into battle against Surtur to try and stop Ragnarok? "For Midgard!" "For Asgard!" "For myself!"

Personal Birds of Prey
Oracle (duh!)
Black Canary (boo Meltzer!)
Katana
Nightshade

Hero-Villain Team-Ups

Leaving aside (admittedly very fun and entertaining) fake-outs like the Batman-Joker/Penguin and Superman-Joker team-ups from Brave and the Bold and DC Comics Presents. I can think of a few more:

-- Superman and Brainiac teaming up to stop the smarter-than-Brainiac Grax in Grax's first appearance back in the 1960s.

-- The very first Doom/FF team-up, against Overmind from Fantastic Four v.1 #116-7. Even wilder, none of them really beat the bad guy, as the Stranger has to turn up and save their butts.

-- Spider-Man and Doc Ock teaming up to save Aunt May from Hammerhead in Amazing Spider-Man v.1 #157-8.

-- Flash and his Rogues Gallery teaming against Abra Kadabra for the final issue of his Silver Age series, #350.

-- X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills. Magneto was still by and large a villain at this point.

-- Thor and Loki teaming to stop Surtur in Thor v.1 #350-3, by Walt Simonson. Actually, Simonson did a lot of cool stuff with shifting alliances in his Thor run.

-- Batman and Two-Face were forced to team up against a new, even worse Two-Face at one point in the 1980s.

-- And, though not from comics, Buffy teaming with Spike to stop Angelus from destroying the world in the second season of Whedon's show.

When the ghost of McCarthy returns and starts accusing everyone of being closet terrorists, all Ron Garney has to do is show ‘em his Cap run. Just look at that first issue: twenty or so pages of ho-hum ’90s unspectacularity, and then BAM! the Shield appears and suddenly he’s John Trumbull.

Since my name is John Trumbull and I'm also a cartoonist, the above sentence really made me do a double take. Then I realized that the poster was talking about the American painter of the same name. My bad.

Great team-ups:

Thanos and Adam Warlock team up against the Magus in 'Infinity War'...it's so awesome because Thanos is such a different character than you've seen before, but he still has all the coolness he had as a villain.

Token Non-Comics Hero/Villain Team-up: The Doctor and the Master, in 'Logopolis'. The scene of the two of them shaking hands was the actual cliffhanger, it was such a shocker. (Oh, and the Tenth Doctor teaming up with the SPOILER[s] against the SPOILER[s] in the season finale of Season Two, but that doesn't really count because a) it was a brief alliance of convenience, and b) if I said anything more about it, Doctor Who fans who read this would kill me, and rightly so.)

The Thunderbolts and Avengers teaming up against Dominex...not really sure if this counts, because the Thunderbolts were good guys by then, but the Avengers didn't know that, and were very leery of the team, even with Hawkeye leading it. A better choice would probably be the first Thunderbolts/Avengers team-up, where the "good" members of the team and the Avengers who'd escaped Zemo's mind-control battled Zemo and a horde of zombified super-heroes. Kurt Busiek had that series singing back then...

Does the Hitman/Green Lantern team-up count?