Anyway, that really wasn’t the question. The Sentry is an excellent answer to the first question – I can’t dislike him because I don’t ever consider him except when Marvel (Bendis) shoehorns him into a book. But I couldn’t give you an answer to the second part of the question, so…

I’m gonna have to get back to you.

Also, the Winter Soldier. Sorry, but Bucky is lame. Making him into Grim-N-Gritty Cyborg Assassin Bucky makes him no less lame, any more than a fifteen-year-old boy growing a wispy mustache makes him twenty. It just makes him look silly. And having him beat the Red Skull doesn’t make him cool, it just makes the Red Skull lamer because hey, he just got his butt kicked by Bucky. The more Brubaker tries to pump him up, the more it feels like authorial fiat is driving the stories instead of real characterization. I have no idea how you fix this one, to be honest. I’d have left him dead.

Penance. “Dark Speedball” sounds like one of those concepts the 90s rejected because it was too pathetic and obvious an attempt to be “edgy” even for that decade. Make him fun again. If you don’t want to tell stories with an actual fun, light-hearted character with goofy powers, then just put him back in his box until the trend comes around to that kind of story again. But making him an S&M emo painfreak with a troubled past? Yeeeeah. Dan Slott nailed the absurdity of that one perfectly.

However, Reddy is like four shots of espresso compared to the Punisher. I don’t know that I have never made through an entire comic featuring the Punisher. I have tried Frank Miller, Mike Baron and Garth Ennis multiple times. I have loved the work of those guys on other characters. It is always just the story of some jerk who likes to shoot people that wronged him. I don’t want to talk to the “ninja” who hangs out at the comic shop either.

How to make him more interesting?

Maybe, if he lightened up a little. You know, got some trick guns that shot glue or laughing gas. Maybe he could get a teen sidekick with a gimmick. Sort of bring in a wise-cracking kid that is into something goofy like break-dancing. How about a dog with a skull mask named “vendetta”?

This is a guy who can react to a bullet touching the back of his head and can evacuate a city in less than the time it takes a nuke to blow.

Yet his Rouges gallery is a bunch of bank robbers with ray guns.

Puh leese!

Fraction’s Thor stuff looks completely boring to me. I’m not into the shit-kickin’-hardass-TOTALLY METAL-type stuff.

And since I, too, enjoy this Question of the Week business: This may be heresey, but I’ve never been interested in Ra’s Al Ghul. I understand his place in Bat-history and what he represents, and I even think he should theoretically be interesting, but I’ve just always found the character grating. A lot of it is things that have been picked up by other writers and have been made cliched through overuse — the “villain who believes he’s in the right but uses extreme measures to accomplish his goals,” the “villain with a gentlemanly respect for his adversary,” “villain who knows hero’s secret identity but will never let on.” Vandal Savage has always been a more interesting application of the “immortal villain” trope simply because he’s older (if you’re going to use a gimmick, you might as well go all out) and because he’s just plain nasty.

How to fix Ra’s Al Ghul? Maybe getting rid of Talia would help; I always feel there’s an oppressive amount of baggage to the Batman-Ra’s-Talia triangle. Don’t kill her, though, just sever her ties to Ra’s and see if her character has a purpose beyond her relationships to Ra’s and Batman. Also, I’d maybe try him out as a Superman villain for a bit; anything to avoid another barechested swordfight in the desert. Keep him in the background, maybe make him the “shadowy manipulator” type.

I would make Hulk more interesting by drastically reducing his face time. Cancel all his comics. Make him a very rare guest star. Since he’s little more than a sounding board in his own comic for other ideas to bounce off of, make him into this full-time — an anti-hero that pops up occasionally at the worst times to threaten other heroes or villains. He works fine as an antagonist driving the plot for other, more interesting characters, so lets treat him as such.

As to how to fix the character, I guess my take would be turn him into Quicksilver. The Quicksilver segment of X-Factor #87 is still one of my favorite pieces of character writing in Superhero comics.

Mike Loughlin: Imagine a Justice League comic featuring mad robot Red Tornado and pompous, regal Geo-Force. And throw in annoyed, regal Aquaman for extra tension. I’d buy that one WITHOUT waiting for the trades.

I have a 4 1/2 year-old son who likes the Penguins of Madagascar cartoon. One of the characters, King Julius, is an ineffectual imperious lemur with delusions of grandeur and a long-suffering assistant. I’d make Geo-Force like that. In his own mind, he’s the greatest hero, one the others shouyld fall down and worship. In reality, he’s a clod who makes situations worse just by opening his mouth. any action he takes leads to disaster. Everyone else looks on with exasperation and has to clean up his messes. He’s on the Justice League because no one can kick him out- even Batman can’t get through to him. Either Giffen, DeMatteis, & Maguire or Evanier & Aragones would do the comic.