We need to save the film industry before it flatlines. As someone who’s passionately dedicated to film and aspiring to be a filmmaker, I can see the writing on the wall. While I'm currently a podcast producer, my extensive background as a successful strategic marketing consultant for over 14 years uniquely equips me to tackle what I think might be one of the most critical issues impacting the entertainment industry.
Alarm bells are definitely ringing, folks. The industry is literally on life support, fighting off several cancers that are eating it away. The obvious ones include a dramatic change in viewing habits, ticket prices that are still far too high, and piracy being more prominent than ever. But there is a much greater malignancy doing harm: outdated marketing and promotional strategies. Simply put, they are fundamentally incompatible with the modern era, and this incompatibility will only compound with time. These practices have failed to evolve alongside the rapidly changing digital and social media landscapes. While the industry is proficient at maximizing reach, there’s a profound disconnect in how these efforts resonate with audiences. Often, negative sentiments are amplified and spread more aggressively than positive ones, substantially skewing public perception even before a film reaches theaters.
To witness the real-time impact of the pernicious negative feedback loop created by film marketing and promotions, just look at the discourse surrounding filmmakers like Zack Snyder and James Gunn. These directors have become lightning rods for this vein of self-multiplying negativity, which is not exclusive to them and could devastate any project or professional within the industry. The discourse and reactionary engagements surrounding these two directors serve as the best evidence of this phenomenon. Just look at how quickly the new reveal of the Superman suit snowballed into a Matterhorn.
Yet, the problem extends beyond marketing missteps and the other aforementioned issues. The industry is also grappling with a significant decline in film quality. Modern cinema is plagued by an over-reliance on reboots and remakes, with many new films feeling more like stale repetitions than fresh explorations. This creative stagnation not only disappoints but disorients audiences seeking originality and innovation.
Compounding these issues is the heavy-handed incorporation of socio-political agendas within films, which often comes at the expense of subtlety and storytelling finesse. Films increasingly serve as platforms for preaching and proselytizing rather than narratives that organically engage and challenge audiences. No one loves clever and nuanced subtext and analogy more than I do. This shift has not only diluted the art of cinema but has also forced marketing campaigns to navigate a minefield of public sentiment, battling backlash from all sides of the socio-political spectrum.
This trifecta of flawed marketing, declining quality, and politicized content creation demands a revolutionary overhaul. The industry must fundamentally reimagine its approach to marketing films, ensuring that strategies are not only nuanced but also robustly aligned with contemporary audience behaviors. This is critical, as the foundational issue of how movies are promoted sets the stage for all other aspects of their reception. Until we establish a secure and effective platform for film promotion, free from the distortive effects of preemptive judgment and social media bias, efforts to address the quality of content will be in vain. Marketers need to urgently address these polarizing impacts, creating a safe harbor where genuine, unbiased appreciation can thrive. Only then can filmmakers and studios truly recommit to the craft of storytelling, prioritizing originality and deep audience engagement over overt agendas. This dual focus on innovative marketing and authentic content creation is essential to revitalizing the industry and restoring trust with audiences.
This issue requires thoughtful exploration, and I’d love to connect with anyone in the sub who works in film marketing and promotions to discuss real actionable solutions.

I've already contacted my doctor and am waiting for a response, but I am hoping to feel less alone and maybe get some recommendations.
I've had chronic migraines for over decade. They're genetic. My siblings get them.
Five nights ago, my son superman lept on top of me and smashed his had into my right eye socket. (He's fine.) As soon as his head made contact with mine, I was smelling cigarette smoke, my ears were ringing, stomach ache, nausea, pain, all of my normal migraine symptoms. Over the next few days (it's not abnormal for them to last days for me) the symptoms lessened and went away, EXCEPT I still have blurry vision in that eye, and on and off pain, as well as an on and off stomach ache.
I would just write it off as a normal migraine (and did for a few days) except 1. I'm reaching the end of a normal length for me, 2. I've never had one come on so quickly, and 3. I've never had symptoms on only one half of my head/face before.
Do I need to worry about a concusion or eye injury? Has anyone else ever been bonked into a long migraine? And not as the origin of all migraines, just a migraine.

DON'T JUMP RIGHT IN. SERVERS ARE UNSTABLE A.F
2V2 on XboX disconnect after 2-3 ring outs.
1v1 disconnect you on lower map ring out.
Superman lags the game. ATM is unstable Save some cells,save some nerves.

There's two characters in Gnosis I'd like to poll your opinions of, specifically your moral judgements of. Feel free to explain your opinion in detail below, or just vote in the poll. These two aliens, who later civilizations granted the Occite (dead language, used similarly to how we use latin today) names Aeldymyga and Aeldyshana are part of the Haloborn offshoot the same people named "Aeldya" and two of the oldest living beings in the setting. The others are Aeldylumna, Aeldymalga, Aeldyfarsa, Aeldyvinza and Aeldydeita, yes there really was only ever seven of them. (The prefix "Aeldy-" roughly means "bizarre deity" and I'll be cutting it off from here on.) Their history is long, complex and deeply unpleasant, but at its core this is a question about whether or not atrocities on the scale of those the Aeldyans committed constitute a moral event horizon from which it is impossible for anybody to return.
Our story starts off over twenty thousand years before they arrived in this system, on the homeworld of the Haloborn. This world orbits a star that in turn orbits perpendicular to most of the stars in the galaxy and on its most recent (and only the most recent) pass its inhabitants were a technological civilization that specialized in biotech due to the metal-poor nature of their host star. These two, like nearly all Haloborn, were cripplingly impoverished in a post-scarcity society that refused to share its resources with its people. As automation reached the point where society didn't need workers at all anymore the elite of their society hatched a scheme to dispose of the poor and eliminate their greatest fear at the same time. See, they noticed that there was no sure signs of any other intelligent life in the galaxy, at least that they saw, a familiar issue we humans call the Fermi Paradox. Their solution to this was to assume something must be destroying the rest of them, not the truth which is that they were just early and the only earlier civilization was on the far side of the galaxy. We call this absurd conclusion built off the unchallenged assumptions of authoritarian ideology "The Dark Forest", and they decided to exploit and destroy the rest of their people to burn The Dark Forest to the ground. Their people were rounded up, forced into extreme longevity treatments that deliberately sterilized them and put in re-education camps off in very nearby uninhabited star systems over the course of several centuries. There entire star systems were being strip-mined to make a personal colony-constructor ship for every one of them while they each designed their own autonomous military and tested them against eachothers' in simulations before and after they were shoved into a million-tonne transport & factory ship and sent off to commit genocide against the entire galaxy. This is where Shana and Myga met, and when Shana was sent off with her parents and siblings Myga requested to go with her and lacking a group of her own was allowed to do so. This journey to Gnosis was only a couple hundred light years, but being so mechanically primitive they had to travel the full distance at <1% C instead of traveling millions or billions of times shorter of a distance with spatial compression technology. In the score of millenia it took them to arrive a new, third spacefaring civilization arose even closer, got hit by other Haloborn like them, investigated and discovered what the Haloborn's rulers did to their own people, built a star laser around a small red dwarf about thirty light years away and about thirty years later the entire Haloborn homeworld was melted, vaporized, ionized into plasma and driven into its parent star. (Too bad most of those responsible for what happened to its regular people had already left, the ultra-advanced Neo-Haloborn and the Wrath of the Rim have been waging war across the Milky Way ever since.) Most of this is greater-universe information unavailable in this setting, but it's available in another setting much earlier in the timeline so it's all still fair game.
When they launched for Gnosis, it was host to naught but microbes. When they arrived it was on its second interstellar civilization, its first (the Precursors, the only interstellar civilization that predates the Haloborn) having shown up and terraformed 4 planets and 9 moons then ditched this place in response to problems abroad, then a second one had shown up a few centuries before their arrival. Other than it being the civilization that brought humans here we know nothing about them because of Aeldya. When the seven arrived they sneakily deployed their colony-constructors in the outer system, building their invasion forces and nudging five kuiper belt objects onto trajectories that would all intersect with one of the inner worlds around the same time. When the defending fleets dispatched to redirect the comets they launched gargantuan missiles for all thirteen worlds I nicknamed "Extinction Engines", each accelerating 6 sub-missiles to ~173km/s (~C/1728, or "0.001C" as they'd write it), with each of those carrying six ~0.8 exajoule "Supernova" MIRVs (antimatter-enhanced nuclear weapons that fuse hydrogen until it produces nickel-56, hence "Supernova"). The parts of the fleet dispatched to deal with them found they were able to break up early to target warships, and not long thereafter the Aeldyan drone fleet hit them from behind, destroying their orbital defenses, their fleet and naval command stations, and not long after all military, industrial and government facilities in the entire system were annihilated along with all the key infrastructure the current inhabitants had built. At least in this star system their civilization was gone forever and retaliation never came, leaving humans and everybody else in the system as post-apocalyptic tribes. Myga and Shana were as involved in this as all the others, barely any gentler during the initial invasion than the others were and only in the sense that they only nova bombed the listed targets hard enough to ensure their destruction, not to destroy entire surrounding cities like their counterparts did. That said, afterwards they did prove to be the nice ones in the group, but "nice" is relative. Shana positioned her main compound at the south pole of the most verdant world since almost nobody lived on the ice cap, while Myga positioned hers on the planet's most populous and second largest continent to quietly watch the people there. Notably, they were the only Aeldyans to share a world, all the others took one or more as their domain exclusively.
After a few years Myga changed the RoE for her all her robots from "warning shots only unless attacked" (already gentler than how the rest had it set) to "no lethal force on sophonts under any circumstances", never to be changed back. Shana followed suit some time after, the first in a long series of behavioral changes Myga modeled and Shana followed. Soon they were building together all over the planet, partly building up a massive military presence and partly building units to make fight eachother's for fun, but mostly just making things to entertain themselves and eachother. This isn't unusual, Haloborn usually just play around with their tech after they take a star system over (would you do any different?), but what is unusual is that after a few centuries Myga started helping the local tribes. This was slow at first, early on she just had her units drop the carcass of any animal they killed at the nearest village, but in less than a millennium she started distributing small arms (mostly coilguns, good for hunting) to local villages, ordering units with less-lethal weapons to intervene in armed conflicts (too bad she stopped, shit's fucked right now) and sending out a handful of robots programmed to demonstrate useful techniques like irrigation to the locals. She also started building a lot of giant statues of herself and Shana, way more than the others built giant statues and that's really saying something. Shana soon joined in, and in no time they were climbing into humongous mecha and using them to see the progress of the locals in person (while remaining impervious to anything they'd have for centuries). I think you can see why ancient people thought of Aeldyans as deities, all things considered.
Then things fell apart. We're still not sure what happened, but we have a pretty basic timeline of events in the final century of Aeldya. First, Myga's statues... Changed. We're not sure exactly when, the oldest of the weird ones we found was dated to about a century before the explosions started give or take a few decades, but it and many more portrayed Myga's head swollen up larger than her entire thorax. (Haloborn have a two-segment body with four limbs attached to each a dimorphically-horned head and six digit appendages, except male haloborn have a seventh, extra-jumbo middle digit on all four forelimbs.) Not long after this, she built at least one statue where she and Shana were both like that. We don't know what she was trying to communicate and it seems doubtful the purpose of these statues was to communicate anything to us, but modern civilizations have been able to figure out from them that the four Aeldyans with the larger heads, downward-curving horns and six-digit hands were female, that their species gestates in their mother's head of all places, that their brain probably isn't in their head and what the males' extra digits are for. What we do know is that almost immediately thereafter one of the others nova'd Myga's central compound and everything she built on the entire continent. (And I'm not telling you who.) We thought for a while this probably killed her based on what happened next, we have reason now to believe she's still alive but the others didn't know that. Before the fallout had settled, Shana was at war with her father and siblings. Just a few short weeks later Shana killed her father Vinza so hard she gave Gnosis Vin a ring system; a ~13km ball of porous rock and ice struck his compound at ~35km/s with enough kinetic energy to dwarf The Chicxulub Impact. Without her father's involvement and with her kill-crazy lunatic sister attacking everybody, Shana was able to best both her brothers and while she didn't kill any of them she did destroy most of the other three's industrial capacity and their colony-constructor ships so they couldn't rebuild it. In the process, Gnosis Aelsif got nova'd to hell and back. We only just found a way to the moon-planets of the planet-star where her mother resides (Gnosis Dei is an odd, unnatural object) so we don't know if she was involved or not. Shana's next move was to nova everything she and Myga had built together over their time in Gnosis. (Curious...) Then Shana moved past "anger", skipped "bargaining" and went straight to "depression", and how! (No seriously, you don't understand, she was outright catatonic for millenia.)
Since then, the modern civilizations have developed in the shadow of Aeldya and the other civilizations that came before. We've seen signs Myga is alive, mostly that her units haven't changed behaviour at all where Vinza's CCAIs (command and control artificial intelligences) turned on eachother and his drones have been fighting a civil war ever since across his planet and the entire inner asteroid belt (with explosions so gargantuan you can see them from the planets) while ignoring everybody else. That screams "failsafe", we think it happens any time one of them dies (but our sample size is one.) Other than that we've found that her old compound (now known as the "Still City of the Storm's Eye") is now in the eye of a stationary blazing hypercane, the ground beneath melting into shards of flying glass with light from the Precursor dyson swarm which power the megameter an hour winds that reach clear into the stratosphere. (And send shards raining down hundreds of kilometers away.) If she's in there she sure doesn't seem to want visitors but it's not like there's any better explanations. We've also seen that the continent around it has gotten weirder and weirder ever since, invasive species somehow arriving from other planets and moons in the system, some we don't know where they're from, some might even be entirely new creatures never seen anywhere else and some we can't fathom occuring naturally, and yet it all thrives even in places where not much should be living. The new ecosystem is strong, stable and turned even desert and tundra into thriving, verdant wilderness teeming with life. These "Otherlands" CANNOT be natural. While we don't know of any technology that could produce all of the phenomena there, the Precursors brought life to these planets somehow so maybe Myga's hijacked whatever kind of world-seeding engines they had and that would at least explain the "unconventional" lifeforms. (IE: "Spirits", sexually reproducing machines made of bioplastic orbs and tubes surrounded by a hologram and an electroweak field that protects their fragile body.)
So far we've seen them move on from the worst atrocity in the history of the setting to (for a while) help the descendants of their victims and then after the Aeldyan civil war we've seen signs one of them is trying to repair the damage done to the environment by their horrific weapons. We haven't talked about why, because modern people don't know that, but here's the part where I ditch what IU people know: Myga's every action since the invasion was out of remorse and an effort to be seen by the people of the planet as a benevolent figure so she could see herself as less of a monster and she dragged Shana along with her. However, it was Shana who first created their greatest gift to the younger civilizations: Immortals, starting with immortal Folk (the humans physically most like us) known abroad as the "Children of Heaven". Immortals are what you get when you use Haloborn biotech to turn the unborn into supersoldiers, and while there's a LOT of ethical problems with the process (like the complete lack of consent from any party) the resulting people have insurmountable immune systems, hypermetabolism and healing factor, stop ageing at a pre-programmed point, can survive incredible physical trauma, the main downside is sterility, their only weakness is poison and the only unsurvivable physical trauma would be the destruction of the heart or brain, or decapitation if the head isn't reunited with the body within about a week. This isn't insurmountable by any means, it won't let them survive a direct strike from naval artillery for example, but it's pretty impressive to non-spacefaring people. She created the children of heaven as a hasty apology, she accidentally collapsed a building on an expedition to the south pole trying to scare them away from her compound, retrieved their leader's corpse after he crawled out with his one remaining limb and died, rebuilt him as the first Child of Heaven and proceeded to find him over a century later to create more immortals of this type. Warit Abn Alaliha is a... "complicated character" (plus she still doesn't know about his worst actions, and might be involved in his positive character arc in more ways than its length) so we'll skip evaluating his dubious morals. When she found him in the capital of his New Holy Empire she decided to "bless" the academy he built on the eponymous bay of Blessed Bay by installing a facility under one of the islands that would monitor the academy and ensure any folk girl who conceived there would become host to a pair of tiny symbiotic drones that would improve her health and modify her eggs so her children would be Children of Heaven and as she made immortals for new species she gradually made it so girls of all those species who conceived at the academy would give birth to immortals from then on. She also began monitoring other societies around the world around this time and when she saw giant empires stomping on tiny tribes she intervened by granting those tribes their own immortals. She's not the only creator of immortals anymore, both Myga and Shana's brothers have joined in, but only her and Myga remain true to the original goal of helping those unable to resist imperialist aggression defend themselves. For once it was Shana dragging Myga in a constructive direction, even though she doesn't know yet. Unfortunately the Elven Empire managed to steal some of her technology and make their own immortals to fuel their imperialist aggression, and while she didn't intend that particular outcome it wouldn't be an unreasonable opinion that it was forseeable and she's still responsible for it.
This is where we are today. Neither of them communicates with modern people as far as society at large knows, modern people aren't even 100% Myga's alive (even if us outside observers know better) and the assistance they've been providing from the sidelines has been very light-touch, indirect stuff to the little guys the big empires keep kicking around. They've helpfully rebuilt and abandoned some factories and then half-destroyed and aged them so they'd look like they'd been there since their civil war and let the powers that were less aggressive and more prone to sharing have some of their tech bit by bit over the years after seeing Warit Abn Alaliha's New Holy Empire had found and restarted one production line in one of Shana's kinetic warhead plants and figured out how to hard-start the missiles to use them against the Elven Empire as if they were ordinary semi-active laser homing weapons. They even intervened a few times more directly, such as the time they ran aground an Elven Empire Company cargo ship full of those small arms Myga once made for people on one of the largest islands of the Palisadean Realms said Elven Empire and all its companies had been ravaging (by which I mean wiping entire islands clean, killing all who resist and dragging the rest off as slaves or the subjects of unethical human experimentation) so the locals could use those weapons to defend themselves. The only times either one has been willing to be blatant is whenever the Elven Empire builds on the shores of Shana's ice cap she uses an EMP generated by a 29 petajoule upper-atmospheric nova bomb as a "warning shot" and if they won't take a hint she detonates a 38 terajoule nova 2/3 of a klick in the air, reducing their base to smoldering rubble beneath a mushroom cloud before they've even finished building it, and she's only willing to be that heavy-handed because nobody else is down there to be collateral damage. As it stands, it doesn't seem like they intend to get directly involved even now that the inner worlds have been consumed in a horrific great war so vicious it reached an 8-digit number of fatalities in six days. (That is NOT hyperbole.) This could be written off as "prime directive" bullshit, but really it's plain old, garden-variety guilt, shame and self-doubt. (Whether they'll change their mind remains to be seen.)
So have Aeldymyga and Aeldyshana managed to redeem themselves with their actions over the last eight thousand years? Is what they did so far beyond the pale that nothing can redeem them? Or can they be redeemed but they just haven't gotten there yet? That's all just an opinion, so let's hear yours.
View Poll

https://reddit.com/link/1d27pe8/video/b5p15g6mi23d1/player
*[CAUTION]: Cringe Levels beyond safe parameters Issued by the CDC*

cursed #supermanlimitbreaker #giant #humbled #superman #dccomics #alternateuniverse #lessermook

Try & picture it. Mile-High x2, a giantess npc if you will (*cringing 300%), yer size matches your ego now.
Amoral psychopath. Think you're invincible because of your size (until you inevitably starve to death, or suffocate from brain damage from lack of proper oxygen, & or die of dehydration anyway specifically because of your size... Oops?)
Then after you lay waste to millions for no apparent reason, out of fucking nowhere, like a genuine force of nature that makes your gigantism look like the handicap it is-
Dude comes along, mops the floor with you, minimum effort, severing your nerve endings at the speed of goddamn light by just flying through your skin, he's causing you severe migraines by heat visioning various points of your brain organ, punches your jaw into splinters with a single love-tap.
The ground around you is turning into a landscape of hell every time he gets near you, sonic booms are going off in every direction like firecrackers, your ears are ringing.
And because of your size, you CAN NOT see him, it's like thin air is kicking your ass. Just a tiny red blur unraveling your body's motor functions like he's taking apart a Lego.
Your friend is convulsing on the floor with 4th degree burns, and there's nothing you can do about it. Powerless to help her let alone yourself.
After all that, are you still thinking you're some kind of "goddess"? Do you think you're in control? Or shitting mountain sized bricks because you just got the reality check of the CENTURY, that size is NOT POWER?
And now you're going the way of Goliath and every Giant after him that didn't know their place.
You are big enough to cause sonic booms by moving your fingers through the air but is getting absolutely dominated in every conceivable way by a middle class News Reporter, who's about to reluctantly yet painstakingly erase you from humanity's list of immediate inconveniences.
And he's not even trying, he's just heartbroken, and disappointed, at best. OUCH.
Sad part is: If the girl wasn't already unconscious due to every bone in her body being broken, she'd wish she instead lived in a universe where she wasn't a psychopathic idiot who thought genocide was a fucking game- Perhaps another universe where she is sane, alive & the most of her troubles in life was getting a boy to confess his feelings to her, a kinder world, maybe somewhere out there that is her life.
-Multiverse is an ugly beast. Hellish fever dream.-

1985-1986 (Oct. 18, 1985 to Dec. 31, 1986):

1. Duck Hunt (Launch Title)
2. Excitebike (Launch Title)
3. Pinball (Launch Title)
4. Stack-Up (Launch Title)
5. Super Mario Bros. (Launch Title)
6. Tennis (Launch Title)
7. 10-Yard Fight
8. Baseball
9. Clu Clu Land
10. Donkey Kong Jr. Math
11. Golf
12. Gyromite
13. Hogan's Alley
14. Ice Climber
15. Kung Fu
16. Mach Rider
17. Wild Gunman
18. Wrecking Crew
19. Gumshoe
20. Balloon Fight
21. Donkey Kong
22. Donkey Kong 3
23. Donkey Kong Jr.
24. Mario Bros.
25. Popeye
26. Urban Champion
27. Ninja Kid
28. Chubby Cherub
29. Tag Team Match: M.U.S.C.L.E.
30. Tag Team Wrestling
31. 1942
32. Commando
33. Ghosts 'n Goblins
34. Karate Champ
35. Gradius

1987 (Jan. 1, 1987 to Dec. 31, 1987):

1. Trojan
2. Pro Wrestling
3. Volleyball
4. Rush'n Attack
5. Track & Field
6. BurgerTime
7. Castlevania
8. Ikari Warriors
9. Athletic World
10. Kid Icarus
11. Mighty Bomb Jack
12. Rygar
13. Section-Z
14. Solomon's Key
15. Metroid
16. The Legend of Zelda
17. Arkanoid
18. Athena
19. Elevator Action
20. Slalom
21. The Legend of Kage
22. 3-D WorldRunner
23. Deadly Towers
24. Double Dribble
25. Lode Runner
26. Raid on Bungeling Bay
27. Ring King
28. Sky Kid
29. Spelunker
30. Spy Hunter
31. Sqoon
32. Stadium Events / World Class Track Meet
33. Star Voyager
34. Stinger
35. Tiger-Heli
36. Winter Games
37. Alpha Mission
38. Lunar Pool
39. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
40. Rad Racer
41. Zanac
42. Side Pocket
43. BreakThru
44. Gotcha! The Sport!
45. Jaws
46. Kid Niki: Radical Ninja
47. Star Force
48. Super Pitfall
49. The Goonies II
50. The Karate Kid
51. Top Gun
52. Mega Man
53. Wizards & Warriors

1988 (Jan. 1, 1988 to Dec. 31, 1988):

1. Karnov
2. Renegade
3. Contra
4. Gun.Smoke
5. R.C. Pro-Am
6. Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage
7. Dragon Power
8. Ice Hockey
9. Freedom Force
10. Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road
11. Major League Baseball
12. City Connection
13. Rambo
14. Double Dragon
15. Metal Gear
16. R.B.I. Baseball
17. Bases Loaded
18. Defender II
19. Gauntlet
20. Iron Tank: The Invasion of Normandy
21. Legendary Wings
22. Life Force
23. Adventure Island
24. Galaga: Demons of Death
25. Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode
26. Jackal
27. Jeopardy!
28. Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf
29. Milon's Secret Castle
30. Wheel of Fortune
31. Xevious
32. 1943: The Battle of Midway
33. Ghostbusters
34. Joust
35. MagMax
36. Mickey Mousecapade
37. Millipede
38. Pac-Man (Tengen)
39. Racket Attack
40. Seicross
41. Spy vs. Spy
42. Super Mario Bros. 2
43. Anticipation
44. Blaster Master
45. Bubble Bobble
46. Cobra Command
47. Dr. Chaos
48. Super Team Games
49. Bionic Commando
50. Blades of Steel
51. Bump 'n' Jump
52. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
53. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
54. Othello
55. Paperboy
56. Platoon
57. Rampage
58. Robowarrior
59. Skate or Die
60. Superman
61. Xenophobe
62. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

1989 (Jan. 1, 1989 to Dec. 31, 1989):

1. Bomberman
2. Sesame Street: 123
3. Star Soldier
4. Tecmo Baseball
5. WWF WrestleMania
6. Bandai Golf: Challenge Pebble Beach
7. Friday the 13th
8. Gyruss
9. Q*bert
10. Tecmo Bowl
11. Ultima: Exodus
12. Dance Aerobics
13. John Elway's Quarterback
14. Kung-Fu Heroes
15. Marble Madness
16. Ninja Gaiden
17. World Games
18. Adventures of Lolo
19. Amagon
20. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
21. Fist of the North Star
22. Legacy of the Wizard
23. Mappy-Land
24. Mystery Quest
25. Predator
26. Taboo: The Sixth Sense
27. The Guardian Legend
28. Operation Wolf
29. Tetris (Unlicensed; Tengen 1989)
30. Airwolf
31. California Games
32. Desert Commander
33. Guerrilla War
34. Hoops
35. Hydlide
36. Mega Man 2
37. Monster Party
38. Nobunaga's Ambition
39. Shooting Range
40. Street Cop
41. Super Dodge Ball
42. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
43. The Adventures of Bayou Billy
44. Track & Field II
45. Baseball Stars
46. Cobra Triangle
47. Defender of the Crown
48. Strider
49. Super Sprint (Unlicensed)
50. Thundercade
51. Adventures of Tom Sawyer
52. Dragon Warrior
53. Faxanadu
54. Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll
55. Jordan vs. Bird: One on One
56. The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
57. Adventures of Dino Riki
58. Air Fortress
59. Back to the Future
60. Bad Street Brawler
61. Castlequest
62. Disney's DuckTales
63. Fester's Quest
64. Hollywood Squares
65. King's Knight
66. NFL
67. P.O.W.: Prisoners of War
68. Sesame Street: ABC
69. Sky Shark
70. The Black Bass USA
71. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
72. Casino Kid
73. Goal!
74. Godzilla: Monster of Monsters!
75. Jeopardy! Junior Edition
76. Rolling Thunder (Unlicensed)
77. Romance of the Three Kingdoms
78. Stealth ATF
79. The Three Stooges
80. Twin Eagle
81. Wheel of Fortune: Junior Edition
82. 720°
83. Road Runner (Unlicensed)
84. Tetris (Nintendo; 1989)
85. Vindicators (Unlicensed)
86. After Burner (Unlicensed)
87. Alien Syndrome (Unlicensed)
88. All-Pro Basketball
89. Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine
90. Dig Dug II: Trouble in Paradise
91. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
92. Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II
93. Kings of the Beach
94. Knight Rider
95. RoboCop
96. Robodemons (Unlicensed)
97. Shadowgate
98. Shinobi (Unlicensed)
99. Short Order + Eggsplode!
100. Silent Service
101. The Battle of Olympus
102. The Uncanny X-Men
103. Toobin' (Unlicensed)
104. Willow
105. The Adventures of Captain Comic (Unlicensed)
106. Baby Boomer (Unlicensed)
107. Crystal Mines (Unlicensed)
108. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Unlicensed)
109. Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu (Unlicensed)
110. Metal Fighter (Unlicensed)
111. Raid 2020 (Unlicensed)
112. Tagin' Dragon (Unlicensed)

1990 (Jan. 1, 1990 to Dec. 31, 1990):

1. The Magic of Scheherazade
2. 8 Eyes
3. A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia
4. Archon
5. Bases Loaded II: Second Season
6. Clash at Demonhead
7. Demon Sword
8. Double Dragon II: The Revenge
9. Genghis Khan
10. Infiltrator
11. Rescue: The Embassy Mission
12. River City Ransom
13. RoadBlasters
14. Rock 'n Ball
15. The Chessmaster
16. Top Gun: The Second Mission
17. Top Players' Tennis
18. Twin Cobra
19. Super Mario Bros. 3
20. Batman: The Video Game
21. Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum
22. Destination Earthstar
23. Rollerball
24. Super Spike V'Ball
25. Abadox: The Deadly Inner War
26. Adventures of Lolo 2
27. Al Unser Jr.'s Turbo Racing
28. Astyanax
29. Baseball Simulator 1.000
30. Burai Fighter
31. Championship Bowling
32. Code Name: Viper
33. Conflict
34. Fisher-Price: I Can Remember
35. Fisher-Price: Perfect Fit
36. Heavy Barrel
37. Jack Nicklaus' Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf
38. Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs
39. Magic Johnson's Fast Break
40. Target: Renegade
41. Terra Cresta
42. Vegas Dream
43. Wheel of Fortune: Family Edition
44. Win, Lose or Draw
45. Double Dare
46. Dynowarz: The Destruction of Spondylus
47. Ghostbusters II
48. Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road
49. Phantom Fighter
50. Pinbot
51. Snake's Revenge
52. Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular!
53. Super C
54. Tecmo World Wrestling
55. To the Earth
56. WCW World Championship Wrestling
57. Wrath of the Black Manta
58. Xexyz
59. Final Fantasy
60. Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos
61. Remote Control
62. Adventures in the Magic Kingdom
63. [219]
64. Arkista's Ring
65. Bad News Baseball
66. Boulder Dash
67. Cabal
68. Captain Skyhawk
69. Castle of Dragon
70. Disney's Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers
71. Dragon Spirit: The New Legend
72. Heavy Shreddin'
73. Jeopardy! 25th Anniversary Edition
74. Mechanized Attack
75. Michael Andretti's World Grand Prix
76. Pinball Quest
77. Puss 'n Boots: Pero's Great Adventure
78. Rad Racer II
79. Rocket Ranger
80. Shingen the Ruler
81. Silkworm
82. Solstice: The Quest for the Staff of Demnos
83. Starship Hector
84. The Last Starfighter
85. The Mafat Conspiracy
86. Wall Street Kid
87. Bad Dudes
88. Battle Chess
89. Bigfoot
90. Circus Caper
91. Crystalis
92. Dungeon Magic: Sword of the Elements
93. Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball
94. Image Fight
95. Klax (Unlicensed)
96. Little League Baseball: Championship Series
97. Mad Max
98. Pictionary
99. Snake Rattle 'n' Roll
100. The Adventures of Gilligan's Island
101. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
102. Barker Bill's Trick Shooting
103. Dick Tracy
104. NARC
105. Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream
106. Swords and Serpents
107. Total Recall
108. Back to the Future II & III
109. Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse
110. Classic Concentration
111. Destiny of an Emperor
112. Dragon Warrior II
113. Garry Kitchen's Battletank
114. Gauntlet II
115. Journey to Silius
116. Kickle Cubicle
117. Little Nemo: The Dream Master
118. Low G Man: The Low Gravity Man
119. M.U.L.E.
120. Maniac Mansion
121. Mission: Impossible
122. NES Play Action Football
123. Pipe Dream
124. Rally Bike
125. RollerGames
126. Skate or Die 2: The Search for Double Trouble
127. Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship
128. Spot: The Video Game
129. Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight
130. The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
131. Thunderbirds
132. Time Lord
133. Ultimate Basketball
134. A Nightmare on Elm Street
135. Caveman Games
136. Days of Thunder
137. Dr. Mario
138. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
139. Loopz
140. Mendel Palace
141. Orb-3D
142. Sesame Street: Big Bird's Hide & Speak
143. Super Glove Ball
144. Arch Rivals: A Basket Brawl!
145. Conquest of the Crystal Palace
146. Formula One: Built to Win
147. Mega Man 3
148. Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival
149. Palamedes
150. Puzznic
151. Silver Surfer
152. The Immortal
153. The Punisher
154. Werewolf: The Last Warrior
155. WWF WrestleMania Challenge
156. Yo! Noid
157. Bandit Kings of Ancient China
158. Déjà Vu
159. Digger T. Rock: The Legend of the Lost City
160. Dirty Harry
161. Dragon's Lair
162. Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu
163. Little Ninja Brothers
164. Ninja Crusaders
165. Nintendo World Cup
166. North & South
167. Shadow of the Ninja
168. StarTropics
169. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game
170. The Adventures of Rad Gravity
171. Thunder & Lightning
172. Ultima: Quest of the Avatar
173. Bible Adventures (Unlicensed)
174. Blades of Steel
175. Castle of Deceit (Unlicensed)
176. Challenge of the Dragon (Unlicensed)
177. Chiller (Unlicensed)
178. Deathbots (Unlicensed)
179. Double Strike (Unlicensed)
180. Dudes With Attitude (Unlicensed)
181. Exodus: Journey to the Promised Land (Unlicensed)
182. F-15 City War (Unlicensed)
183. Fantasy Zone (Unlicensed)
184. Galactic Crusader (Unlicensed)
185. Impossible Mission II (Unlicensed)
186. King Neptune's Adventure (Unlicensed)
187. Krazy Kreatures (Unlicensed)
188. Menace Beach (Unlicensed)
189. Mission Cobra (Unlicensed)
190. Moon Ranger (Unlicensed)
191. Ms. Pac-Man (Unlicensed; Tengen 1990)
192. P'radikus Conflict (Unlicensed)
193. Pesterminator: The Western Exterminator (Unlicensed)
194. Puzzle (Unlicensed)
195. R.B.I. Baseball 2 (Unlicensed)
196. ShockWave (Unlicensed)
197. Silent Assault (Unlicensed)
198. Skull & Crossbones (Unlicensed)
199. The Miracle Piano Teaching System
200. The Ultimate Stuntman (Unlicensed)
201. Tiles of Fate (Unlicensed)

1991 (Jan. 1, 1991 to Dec. 31, 1991):

1. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance
2. Fun House
3. G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero
4. Kabuki: Quantum Fighter
5. Peter Pan and the Pirates: The Revenge of Captain Hook
6. Qix
7. The Hunt for Red October
8. The Krion Conquest
9. The Untouchables
10. Wayne Gretzky Hockey
11. Adventure Island II
12. Conan: The Mysteries of Time
13. Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones
14. Flying Warriors
15. Galaxy 5000: Racing in the 51st Century
16. Ikari III: The Rescue
17. Isolated Warrior
18. Magician
19. Metal Storm
20. Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom
21. Ski or Die
22. Super Cars
23. The Last Ninja
24. The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants
25. Touchdown Fever
26. Harlem Globetrotters
27. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
28. Kiwi Kraze
29. Metal Mech: Man & Machine
30. Power Blade
31. Totally Rad
32. Whomp 'Em
33. Bill Elliott's NASCAR Challenge
34. Nobunaga's Ambition II
35. RoboCop 2
36. World Champ
37. Beetlejuice
38. Family Feud
39. Flight of the Intruder
40. Monopoly
41. The Rocketeer
42. Times of Lore
43. Battletoads
44. Castelian
45. Cyber Stadium Series: Base Wars
46. Faria: A World of Mystery and Danger!
47. Laser Invasion
48. Rainbow Islands
49. S.C.A.T.: Special Cybernetic Attack Team
50. Tombs & Treasure
51. Uninvited
52. Videomation
53. Frankenstein: The Monster Returns
54. High Speed
55. KlashBall
56. Disney's The Little Mermaid
57. Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure
58. Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom
59. The Lone Ranger
60. Adventures of Lolo 3
61. Bases Loaded 3
62. Captain Planet and the Planeteers
63. Gun-Nac
64. James Bond Jr.
65. Magic Darts
66. Monster Truck Rally
67. NES Open Tournament Golf
68. Rockin' Kats
69. Romance of the Three Kingdoms II
70. Smash TV
71. Super Jeopardy!
72. Where's Waldo?
73. Zombie Nation
74. American Gladiators
75. Bo Jackson Baseball
76. Darkman
77. Home Alone
78. Pirates!
79. Roger Clemens' MVP Baseball
80. Trog!
81. Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?
82. Wolverine
83. Eliminator Boat Duel
84. L'Empereur
85. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
86. Sesame Street: ABC & 123
87. Snow Brothers
88. Space Shuttle Project
89. Star Wars
90. The Bard's Tale
91. Uncharted Waters
92. Vice: Project Doom
93. Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth
94. Barbie
95. Batman: Return of the Joker
96. Captain America and the Avengers
97. Golf Grand Slam
98. Shatterhand
99. Disney's TaleSpin
100. Tecmo Super Bowl
101. The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy
102. The Simpsons: Bart vs. the World
103. Tiny Toon Adventures
104. Toki
105. Tom and Jerry: The Ultimate Game of Cat and Mouse!
106. Treasure Master
107. Action 52 (Unlicensed)
108. Big Nose the Caveman (Unlicensed)
109. Death Race (Unlicensed)
110. Firehawk (Unlicensed)
111. Bubble Bath Babes (Unlicensed)
112. Micro Machines (Unlicensed)
113. Pac-Mania (Unlicensed)
114. Peek-A-Boo Poker (Unlicensed)
115. Quattro Adventure (Unlicensed)
116. Quattro Sports (Unlicensed)
117. R.B.I. Baseball 3 (Unlicensed)
118. Rad Racket: Deluxe Tennis II (Unlicensed)
119. Secret Scout in the Temple of Demise (Unlicensed)
120. The King of Kings: The Early Years (Unlicensed)
121. Venice Beach Volleyball (Unlicensed)

1992 (Jan. 1, 1992 to Dec. 31, 1992):

1. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
2. Bucky O'Hare
3. Cowboy Kid
4. Die Hard
5. Dragon Fighter
6. KickMaster
7. Legends of the Diamond
8. Mega Man 4
9. Monster in My Pocket
10. Motor City Patrol
11. Nightshade
12. Rampart
13. Sword Master
14. The Addams Family
15. Wheel of Fortune: Featuring Vanna White
16. Hook
17. F-15 Strike Eagle
18. Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters
19. Hudson Hawk
20. M.C. Kids
21. Sesame Street: Countdown
22. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
23. Super Spy Hunter
24. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project
25. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
26. Dragon Warrior III
27. Fisher-Price: Firehouse Rescue
28. G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor
29. Gemfire
30. Ghoul School
31. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
32. Town & Country Surf Designs: Thrilla's Surfari
33. Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power
34. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Pool of Radiance
35. Hatris
36. Paperboy 2
37. The Mutant Virus: Crisis in a Computer World
38. Toxic Crusaders
39. Ultimate Air Combat
40. Wizardry: Knight of Diamonds - The Second Scenario
41. Alex DeMeo's Race America
42. Roundball: 2 on 2 Challenge
43. Wacky Races
44. Disney's Darkwing Duck
45. Day Dreamin' Davey
46. Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge
47. King's Quest V
48. Power Punch II
49. Yoshi
50. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: DragonStrike
51. Baseball Stars II
52. Defenders of Dynatron City
53. Greg Norman's Golf Power
54. The Blue Marlin
55. Capcom's Gold Medal Challenge '92
56. Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat
57. Might & Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum
58. RoboCop 3
59. Adventure Island 3
60. Contra Force
61. Krusty's Fun House
62. Tecmo Cup Soccer Game
63. The Blues Brothers
64. WWF WrestleMania: Steel Cage Challenge
65. Crash 'n' the Boys: Street Challenge
66. Dragon Warrior IV
67. Felix the Cat
68. Gargoyle's Quest II
69. Ghost Lion
70. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
71. Panic Restaurant
72. Power Blade 2
73. Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six
74. Stanley: The Search for Dr. Livingston
75. Goal! Two
76. Lemmings
77. Little Samson
78. Prince of Persia
79. Tecmo NBA Basketball
80. Widget
81. Best of the Best: Championship Karate
82. Caesars Palace
83. F-117A Stealth Fighter
84. George Foreman's KO Boxing
85. Joe & Mac
86. Mega Man 5
87. R.C. Pro-Am II
88. Swamp Thing
89. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends
90. The Great Waldo Search
91. The Jetsons: Cogswell's Caper
92. The Simpsons: Bartman Meets Radioactive Man
93. The Terminator
94. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
95. Tiny Toon Adventures: Cartoon Workshop
96. 6 in 1 (Unlicensed)
97. Bee 52 (Unlicensed)
98. Big Nose Freaks Out (Unlicensed)
99. Blackjack (Unlicensed)
100. Cyberball
101. Joshua & the Battle of Jericho (Unlicensed)
102. Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade (Unlicensed)
103. Maxi 15 (Unlicensed)
104. MiG-29: Soviet Fighter (Unlicensed)
105. Operation: Secret Storm (Unlicensed)
106. Pyramid (Unlicensed)
107. Quattro Arcade (Unlicensed)
108. Solitaire (Unlicensed)
109. Spiritual Warfare (Unlicensed)
110. Stunt Kids (Unlicensed)
111. Ultimate League Soccer (Unlicensed)
112. Wally Bear and the NO! Gang (Unlicensed)

1993-1994; 1995 (Jan. 1, 1993 to Dec. 31, 1994; 1995):

1. Batman Returns
2. Break Time: The National Pool Tour
3. Overlord
4. Ultima: Warriors of Destiny
5. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Hillsfar
6. Bomberman II
7. Rollerblade Racer
8. Alien³
9. Fire 'n Ice
10. Mickey's Safari in Letterland
11. Zen: Intergalactic Ninja
12. Bases Loaded 4
13. Casino Kid II
14. Kid Klown in Night Mayor World
15. Lethal Weapon
16. Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland
17. Yoshi's Cookie
18. Kirby's Adventure
19. Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team
20. Cool World
21. Disney's DuckTales 2
22. Jurassic Park
23. Color a Dinosaur
24. Mario is Missing!
25. Mighty Final Fight
26. Bubble Bobble Part 2
27. The Addams Family: Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt
28. Battleship
29. Bram Stoker's Dracula
30. Star Trek: The Next Generation
31. Championship Pool
32. Last Action Hero
33. Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing
34. Tetris 2
35. Cliffhanger
36. Jimmy Connors Tennis
37. Ms. Pac-Man (Namco; 1993)
38. Pac-Man (Namco; 1993)
39. Pro Sport Hockey
40. The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckaroo$!
41. Wayne's World
42. WWF King of the Ring
43. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
44. Bible Buffet (Unlicensed)
45. Dizzy the Adventurer (Unlicensed)
46. The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy (Unlicensed)
47. Bonk's Adventure
48. Disney's Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2
49. Alfred Chicken
50. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters
51. Mega Man 6
52. Mickey's Adventure in Numberland
53. Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II
54. Mario's Time Machine
55. Disney's The Jungle Book
56. The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!
57. The Incredible Crash Dummies
58. Wario's Woods
59. Trolls on Treasure Island (Unlicensed)
60. Sunday Funday: The Ride (Unlicensed)

Plus, there are 756 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) video games in North America and including unlicensed games.

The No Siders

In the city of Bainbridge, a group of superheroes called the No Siders operate under the radar with over one hundred different superhero teams; the country of Marwick is overflowing with superheroes.
The Red Rider leader of the No Siders: a man whose power is the ability to move at super-speed. Except for running; he can't run at super speed.
The next hero of the No Siders is Power Fist, a 15-year-old, part-time hero. The dark-haired, pale, thin, girl who is Power Fist wears a dress that makes her look like Wednesday Addams's lesbian lover, with a half-shaved head. You know, like all the cool girls these days. The only thing that made her stand out from the crowd: the sliver gauntlet which was given to her to help to control her powers by some magic dickhead. I think she said he was a doctor of some kind. I met him once, he wouldn't take off his helmet, and he talked to himself. There are a lot of weirdos out there.
Power Fist is saved from a life of boredom and education by her beloved uncle, the Red Rider. After finding out his sister's daughter had powers like him, Red left the state prison which he was staying in for the last three years to teach her to fight crime- not like the Aubrey Plaza-looking ingrate ever says “thank you, Uncle Tomás.”
Number two on the Riders list is Makko: a merman who is half-shark, yet can't swim. That's why he was so easy to recruit. But when Red Rider looked in his eyes, he saw a hunger for justice, and an ad in the paper which said that the shark-man would work for food. That was all that Red Rider needed to hear.
The next gem on the Rider's list is Metal Mouth: a hybrid robot that runs on corn oil, and electricity. He fits the team perfectly thanks to Red's power; he would always be kept charged. To think the team found him at a junkyard as they were looking for spare parts for the Justice Van. For just $150, and a Superman fan club ring, they got Metal Mouth.
The last member of the team is Alonzo. He and Red went to school together, and he let the team use his junkyard as their HQ. Plus, he can fix cars. He also has Red's Superman fan club ring, so they're stuck with the bastard until Red gets his ring back, anyway.
Tonight, the team is out to recruit a hot, young prospect named Gus. This young buck had taken down a gang of bikers selling PCP on a playground at night. The team knows everyone worth a damn would want this kid. But the No Siders have a secret: He lives two miles from the junkyard. Seeing their chance for glory, the team runs all the lights- red, yellow, and even green- to get to this kid. Red can't wait to tell the press he's a No-Sider. He can almost smell the headlines. In this day and age, good press is worth its weight in gold.
As the Justice Van pulls up to the kid's house, Red gets out, and walks to the door, knocking hard, and fast.
An old man walks to the door. "Hello, my name is Gus Winston. How may I help you?"
Thinking quickly, Red grabs the old man, and runs back to the van. "Start the car! Hurry, start the car!" Red commands as the van comes to life with a roar of sound, and ignites the most powerful lights which The Rider could afford. Red always feared that, in a world with magic, it wouldn’t be long before vampires terrorized the city. "Keep him quiet," Red says as they enter the junkyard.
Pulling the sack off of his head, Red introduces the team to the newest recruit. "Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Gus Winston the Third," Red says.
As Red tells the team not to crowd around the new guy, Mr. Winston demands to know what's going on. Pulling him aside, Red tells him about the team, and himself, also his acceptance to the most prestigious superhero team in all of Bainbridge.
After a few moments, Gus figures out what is going on, and explains to the team what happened. "The person you want is my grandson, Gus Winston the Third." Gus says. "He joined some group of heroes this morning- I think they were called The Insiders or Out…"
The Red Rider grabs Gus to stop him from talking. Seeing the look of anger on Power Fist's face, he tries to spin this mistake to the team. "Wait, did you guys want that kid from the news?" Red asks, laughing. "We came out to get the real star of the show: the man who taught the kid everything he knows, the real star, old man Gus."
Taking Gus to Justice Shack to find out more about their new recruit, The Rider finds out that he is a Korean war vet, and has no powers.
"My wife, indeed, got powers a few years ago while taking my grandson to the park. The particle accelerator blew in a lab somewhere, and they got powers. Not me," Gus says.
Before Red has time to think, Makko knocks on the door of the shack. "Sorry to bother you. but the newspaper is out here. Also, the cops, sooo…" Makko informs.
Thinking fast, Red pulls out old man Gus's hearing aid, before leading him outside to a quickly made stage with a mic. "Hello! I'm glad you're all here to welcome our newest member: Oldman Gus. This is the No-Sider's senior crime-fighting initiative," Red says. "Unlike other teams who pretend To care about justice, and think bats are scary, the No Siders are committed to helping this community," he says.
After a few minutes of talking up his team, and down-talking all of the others, Red's speech comes to an end.
As the noise dies down, the police pull Red and Gus to the side to ask about the abduction.
"Kidnapped? Are you insane?! It's a No Siders tradition to take the recruit against his or her will, you see," Red says.
"What about the six red lights you ran? And his bloody nose?” Officer Jones asks.
"A funny prank that got out of hand officer. Isn't that right, Gus?" If all would go well, Oldman Gus would agree.
"He's lying!" Mrs. Winston yells. "Tell them, Gus, tell us what these lunatics did." She instructs.
As the rest of the team sweat, and prepare for life in the big house, The Rider just smiles, and points to Gus. "Go ahead tell them the truth." The Rider winks.
Oldman Gus steps up, saying, smiling shyly, "I indeed begged them to make me a member, then I forgot about my request because I'm old, and forgetful. Sorry to worry everyone. Forgive me, honey."
As the crowd, and police, begin to disperse, Officer Jones walks up to Red, and gives him six tickets. "One for each light you ran." He makes it clear that, if anyone was living, or congregating at the junkyard, the health inspector would shut this place down.
"It's just where we park our van, you understand?" Red says.
Rolling his eyes, Officer Jones gets back into his squad car, and leaves.
After a week of keeping a low profile, the No Siders decide to patrol the streets. Red Rider and Makko abduct Oldman Gus, and the team drives into the heart of the city.
Power Fist and Makko are sent to patrol on the top of a bank, while Metal Mouth and Alonzo patrol the docks. Red takes Oldman Gus, and heads to the local Best Buy.
After waiting for over an hour, Power Fist decides to take the bus home, but just as she's about to leave, a huge explosion rocks the bank.
As three men exit the bank, each one wearing a mask, and holding a gun, Power Fist and Makko jump off of the bank, and attack the robbers.
Makko opens his mouth, and swallows a man whole, while Power Fist uses her powers to launch her gauntlet into the air, and, like heat-seeking missiles, the metal fists each take out one of the remaining robbers.
As Power Fist and Mako are celebrating, Makko farts loudly. Power Fist laughs, but as she is laughing, Makko shits himself. Instead of shit, purple slime exits his ass, and begins to take the shape of a man.
Standing before Makko and Power Fist is the bank robber whom Makko ate. The bank robber laughs, and asks, "What's wrong? Upset stomach?"
Makko can't believe what he's seeing. No one has ever used superpowers to rob a bank before. Most superpowered people choose to be heroes, and the few villains who exist don't waste their time robbing banks, they run criminal gangs which sell drugs, or extort local businesses.
Makko doesn't waste time trying to figure out this crook's motivation, he simply attacks, and tries to subdue the man.
Power Fist fires her gauntlets at the man, only for him to melt like an ice cream cone on a hot day.
The man whom Makko calls Melting Man moves around the ground like water, and enters the mouth of one of his fallen friends. Power Fist and Makko watches as the dead man rises, and vomits his friend out of his mouth.
As the dead man stands up, he emits a red aura, and fires red beams from his hands.
Makko hides while Power Fist fires her gauntlets at him.
The last bank robber splits in two, then splits himself again, and again until there are over one hundred of them walking around.
Looking out of the corner of her eye, Power Fist can see the three bank robbers escaping in their van.
As the one hundred clones attack them, Makko begins eating them, one after the other, and Power Fist flies up into the air, and comes crashing down to the ground, sending shockwaves all throughout the city.

***

While Alonzo is searching the docks, Metal Mouth is distracted by his reflection. Alonzo yells at him to pay attention, and the rusty, old robot turns to Alonzo, and asks what they're looking for. "If I knew, I'd tell you. Now, stop looking at yourself, and pay attention to what we're doing." Alonzo says.
As they get closer to a large boat called Free At Last, Alonzo sees a man sitting on the boat holding a human head. "Metal Mouth, get this guy!" Alonzo commands. But, as he turns around, Alonzo finds that Metal Mouth isn't behind him. Instead, he sees three men. One of the men is on fire, his entire body engulfed in flames, yet he smiles at Alonzo. The second man has no arms, or legs, yet he stands up as if on his feet. The last man turns into a fly and disappears.
Alonzo is glad that he doesn't have to fight three men. He just wishes that the other two would turn into cats.
Choosing the weaker of the two men in front of him, Alonzo decides to fight the man with no arms. As he runs towards him, though, a huge gust of wind blasts him in the face, and Alonzo is taken off of his feet.
The man with no arms then turns towards the man on fire, and blasts him with wind, the flaming man exploding into a ball of fire.
As the boats, and the dock which they’re standing on, catch on fire, Alonzo spots Metal Mouth on the Free At Last, and jumps onto the boat.
Alonzo punches the man holding the human head, but finds that the man is a hologram.
Making his way to Metal Mouth, Alonzo sees that his heart is missing. The heart-shaped computer chip is what keeps Metal Mouth alive.
Alonzo looks around the ship, trying to find the heart, but he's unable to. As the hologram looks on, Alonzo pulls some parts out from the boat, and jerry-rigs Metal Mouth a new heart.
"That's good work, young man. And I should know; I am a genius. They call me The Know It All, and my two friends are Hot Fire, and Windbag. I hope you four will get to know each other well,” the hologram says.
As he disappears, Hot Fire, and Windbag, jump onto the boat, and attack Metal Mouth, while Alonzo hides in the lifeboat as Metal Mouth tries to deal with them.
Metal Mouth turns his hands into a fire extinguisher, and blasts Hot Fire in the face.
Windbag blows a frosty wind from where his arms would be, and freezes Metal Mouth's arm, stopping him from defeating Hot Fire.
Alonzo, unsure as to what to do, thinks quickly, and pulls Metal Mouth into the lifeboat, and the two proceed to row away from the villains as fast as they can.

***

The Red Rider and Oldman Gus shop at the local Best Buy. As Gus wanders off, Red looks at the new, big screen T.V.s. "Is 75 inches the biggest size you have for T.V.s?" Red asks.
After being told that Oldman Gus is in the parking lot, trying to get into other peoples’ cars, Red is asked to leave the store. Walking into the parking lot, Red sees the old man hopping into a strange car. Heading over, Red Rider is stopped by two men who look like muggers. Red shakes his head, and tells the men to leave him alone.
"But we just want to talk to you." One of the muggers says.
As Red tries to walk past them, one of the men punches him with a stone fist, and the other grows to sixty-five feet. Picking up the car which Oldman Gus is sitting in, the giant mugger throws it at Red.
As the car is about to hit him, Red begins to vibrate, slows down time, and the car stands still, allowing Red to pull Oldman Gus out, and to the ground.
As the car sails over their heads, Oldman Gus and Red Rider cling to the ground in hopes of not being hit by it before they run into the Best Buy to hide. As they flee, Red looks up, and sees the League of Heroes.
As Tiger Man and his team: Lucky Lady, Speed Demon, Castle Man, and Mr. Invincible arrive to stop the two muggers, Red joins the fight to try and get some attention for his team.
As Tiger Man attacks the man with the stone fists, Red begins to chat up Lucky Lady. Speed Demon runs around the giant's legs, tying him up with some rope, while Castle Man punches the giant with his massive stone fists. Mr. Invincible uses his laser eyes to burn the giant, and as the giant swats at him, Mr. Invincible charges into him headfirst, knocking the giant over.
As both Castle man and Mr. Invincible pound the giant, Tiger man claws the stone-fisted mugger across the stomach. Speed Demon and Lucky Lady try to help protect civilians from the fight, while Red waits for his moment to strike.
The mugger with the stone hands shows Tiger Man that his entire body is made of stone.
As the media arrives, Red Rider sees his chance to be famous. Grabbing some quarters from a homeless man's hat, Red rushes to Tiger Man's side, and begins to vibrate until he's moving so fast that he turns invisible, throwing the coins at the stone man's chest, which sets them ablaze, the flaming coins bursting into the stone man’s chest, and knocking him unconscious.
After knocking out both of the muggers, the League of Heroes gives an interview, and Red stands over the unconscious giant, yelling to Tiger Man about how he just saved his life.

***

In a dark cave under the city of Bainbridge, The Know It All wakes up six of his clones to help him to build his supercomputer.
The brown-skinned Know-it-all uses his intelligence, and engineering skills to build his computer. Using the heart which he stole from Metal Mouth, the Know It All finishes building his computer Brain drain.
"I am Brain Drain. How can I help you?" The computer says.
The Know It All orders his new minion to kill the clones which he's woken up, and then to make him something to eat.
Brain Drain gives him a sideways look from his screen before sending his drone to kill the Know It All clones, and connecting to the fridge to make him a sandwich.
As the Know It All sleeps, Brain Drain sends a few of his drones outside of the cave to spy for him. One of Brain Drain's drones reaches the town of Highland Hills where it attaches to the car of Mike Luis, the star quarterback of the Highland Hills football team.
As the drone attaches itself to the car, it begins to drill into the gas tank, and, after a few miles, Mike's car dies.
Calling his father for help, Mike is told by his father that he's busy with a superhero emergency. Mike is furious, and he walks to a gas station two miles away.
As he walks in silence, the moon is blocked out by what he believes is a swarm of Locusts. Mike runs from the swarm until they are on top of him.
As the swarm of drones attaches themselves to Mike's body, he screams in pain as the little robots drill into his skin, and inject him with Nanobots. With hundreds of drones augmenting his body, Mike is helpless to stop the changes happening.
Back in the city, the Know It All is using his new computer to plan a robbery. "Brain Drain, please track police locations for the next three nights," the Know It All instructs.
The next night, the Know It All puts his plan into action. Injecting a few of his cronies with a superhuman serum, the Know It All sends them out to rob six banks at the same time. His lead crony, Whiplash, is mutated into a man with whips for hands, the metal whips made of a strange blue metal.
The rest of the Know It All's cronies have six arms, and wear gold armor which seems to have melted into their skin.

***

Sitting in the junkyard, the No Siders read the paper. As Red Rider shows off the picture of him in the paper, Power Fist and the others aren’t impressed by his feat of strength.
Makko sits by Power Fist. The boy in his human form looks like your typical, Hawaiian surfer.
Power Fist ignores him as she tries to get her uncle to listen to what she thinks is going on. "I think this is some kind of attack by that Know It All guy. If we want to stop him, we have to find his hideout," Power Fist says.
As the two argue, an explosion rocks the ground beneath their feet.
The No Siders run to the Justice Van, Alonzo driving as the team jumps in, the van heading to the center of the explosion.
They arrive just in time to watch the League of Heroes being killed by a group of bank robbers. The bank robbers all have six arms, and gold armor. They don't wear helmets, and their arms are exposed, as well.
The six-armed robbers repeatedly beat down the superheroes. Lucky Lady and Tiger Man are almost to the point of death by the time that Red Rider and the rest of the No Siders arrive on the scene.
Red-Rider orders Makko and Power Fist to help Lucky Lady and Tiger Man, while Metal Mouth and Alonzo help Speed Demon and Castle Man. The giant Castle Man is under attack from a man with whips for fists.
Alonzo calls the man with whips for hands The Whipper, and he hides behind a car while waiting for Metal Mouth to deal with the robbers.
Metal mouth grabs one of the man's whips, and pulls him towards the ground, trying to disarm him. Tt's only after knocking the man to the ground that Metal Mouth learns that the whips are attached to him. Before he can react, a six-armed goon punches him in the head, knocking him twenty feet away from the whipper.
A strange shadow watches over the battle from one of the rooftops. Red thinks that he can see the shadow from where he's standing, but then a fist twice the size of his head comes straight at him.
Red slows down time, and dodges the fist, but once he looks at whose fist it is, he’s shocked, seeing a blind Castle Man stumbling around, punching at everything in front of him.
Red Rider thinks fast, and orders Power Fist to attack Castle Man from behind. He then heads towards the Whipper, and, vibrating his hands, he cuts off the Whipper's whips. He sees Power Fist coming his way with Castle Man, and he electrocutes the whips using the power lines above his head.
As castle man runs through the whips, he's electrocuted, and collapses to the ground.
It takes the No Siders only half an hour to deal with the robbers. Makko and Power Fist make a good team as they deal with the final robber.
The No Siders return the money to the bank, and the Know It All watches them on the TV. "Looks like I'll have to try harder to take over the city," he says.

***

Three weeks after their battle with the six-armed, golden goon squad, the League of Heroes are still out of commission. Groups like the Teenage Titians, and the Duck Squad, are taking on more responsibility for the city's safety. Red Rider and the No Siders spend their time trying to track down The Know It All.
Power Fist and Makko meet up with a new hero in town called Toilet King: a man who has the power to shrink down, and breathe underwater. He can travel around in pipes, and usually climbs up and out of peoples’ toilets.
Toilet King stands at six feet tall in blue spandex with a red and gold toilet on his chest, and a crown on his head. The balding forty-something-year-old man has his eyes covered by a blue mask. "What can I do for you, kids?" Toilet King asks.
"We're members of the No Siders, and our leader, Red Rider, sent us to speak with you about something important," Power Fist says.
Toilet King and Power Fist sit at a table in front of a diner as Makko stands guard over the table, looking out for any signs of danger, though, when Makko spots a fish, and some old meat in a trash can across the street, he leaves to get it.
The meat and fish are chewy, but the fish head tastes great. As he is eating, Makko sees a spaceship overhead. Its glowing lights and tractor beam begin to release dozens of child-sized green men with squid heads, and circular mouths with razor-sharp teeth. The little aliens wear silver Lycra-like clothes, and they fire laser guns twice their size at buildings, and shops, causing them to disintegrate.
Power-Fist and Toilet King rush to the defense of the denizens of Bainbridge, while Makko finishes stuffing his face with fish and rotten meat before running to Power Fist's side.
The aliens demand to be taken to the city's leader. They use a translator box attached to their necks to communicate their wishes.
As she sends one of her gauntlets at a gang of aliens who are grouped together, Power Fist tells the alien leader that, if he wishes to speak with someone in charge, he'll need to stop attacking the city, and wait for the mayor to come and speak with him.
"Mayor? I wish to speak to Queen Felicity Porter, ruler of the University of New York,” the alien leader says.
"Do you mean New York University?" Power Fist asks.
The little green man becomes enraged, and demands to be taken to Queen Felicity.
As he turns around to point to his many soldiers, the little alien doesn’t see his men anywhere. As he calls for his men to respond to him, Makko throws up a glowing arm with a beeping white light on his wrist which seems to be some kind of communicator.
Seeing the hulking shark man standing over him, the little alien surrenders, and begs for help, telling Power Fist to save him from the monster.
"What's your name, green guy?" She asks.
"My name is Allvier. I come from a world where men and women have long since decided to just be friends, and I was cast out of my world after hitting on a girl in my year. It is my hope that Queen Felicity can convince my people to allow me to return to my world," Allvier says.
Power Fist calls her uncle, and asks him if he knows a woman named Felicity Porter.
"You talking about the woman from the TV show Felicity?" Red Rider asks.
Power Fist is curious how her uncle Tomás knows anything about the show Felicity, and he explains that it was all which he watched in prison in the late 90s, and early 2000s.
Power Fist tells Makko to get the Justice Van, and to drive her to Best Buy. She asks Allvier if he wants to come with her in her van, and he says yes.
The spaceships overhead all return to space, and Power Fist asks Alliver why his ship is leaving. "That ship wasn’t mine. It was just dropping me off. My ship will arrive in twelve lunar cycles," he says.
Makko wants to ask what a lunar cycle is, but, instead, he decides to focus on driving.
Power Fist checks the glove box, and finds her uncle's knife, and a small handgun, as well as a map of Area 51. Pocketing the map, Power Fist puts the knife and gun back in the glove box before the car reaches Best Buy.
The three of them head into the store, and look for some DVDs.
Makko finds the DVD section, walks back to his friends, and tells them he's found what they’re looking for.
Power Fist, who finds a DVD of Felicity, shows it to Alliver, and tells him they are going to buy it, as well as a few other things.
Power Fist grabs Game of Thrones, seasons 1-8, all five seasons of Breaking Bad, and a show called Outlander, seasons 1-7, and she pays using her uncle's credit card, and to make sure he doesn’t suspect anything, she heads to the liquor store, and get three bottles of vodka, some batteries, and a box of regular-sized condoms with the word Magnum printed on them.
Returning home to the junkyard, Power Fist and Makko introduce their new friend to the team.
Alliver is able to outfit the van with a device which can make it move at twice its normal speed.
Alonzo, who is the team's builder, and repairman, isn't impressed by the little green man. He demands for the Martian to show his work, and teach him how to use the alien tech.
"Of course, my new friend. I will happily teach you my ways,” Alliver says.
Red Rider pulls Alonzo to the side, and tells him to relax. "We aren’t going to replace you. I mean, you let us sleep in your junkyard for free. Also, you have my Superman fan club ring, so you're not going anywhere until I get it back. Understand?" Red tells him with a smile.

You find yourself in a peculiar room, with strange costumes lining the walls. A voice rings out, explaining to you that these Super Suits once belonged to long forgotten Heroes and Villains from across the Multiverse. However, while these heroes and villains are now long gone, their powers have been infused into theses suits, allowing anyone that wears them to access their abilities. And you have been chosen to don them once again!
Some things to keep in mind: All suits are greatly durable and can withstand a lot of damage; in addition the suits are capable of regenerating from any damage, even if reduced to atoms (maximum recovery time is 24 hours). All suits grant the wearer a base upgrade to peak physical fitness; in addition your will stop aging and all health problems will cease (but only when wearing the Suit). You will only be able to use a suit's power when you are fully wearing it. Lastly, while wearing a suit you will be granted complete identity protection (no chance of someone discovering your secret identity).
There are 13 Super Suits available, and you must choose 2, one Hero Suit and one Villain Suit. Keep in mind, however, that how you use the suits is up to your own free will, regardless of the former owners of the suits. Use them for good or evil, it's up to you.
Hero Suits-
Power Vow: once belonging to the strongest hero of their world, this suit grants you a basic superman-eques package (super strength, super speed, invincibility, flight, power breath); however, there is a catch. When donning this suit, you must make a VOW, an oath on how you will use your powers. The stronger, more binding, more restrictive the vow, the more the oath means to you, the greater the power you will receive. Breaking this VOW will mean the weakening or loss of your powers. Furthermore, any promise you make will be binding, you will be held to keep your word, or else you may face backlash. This also means, however, that any promise made to you will be made binding as well.
Color-Porter: worn by a very versatile teleporter, this suit grants you the ability to create various colored portals, with planetary range. What's unique about these portals is that when passing through them you can be granted different powers, depending on the color. WHITE transports you to a subspace (the homehub for all your portals), RED grants enhanced strength, ORANGE grants energy projection, YELLOW grants enhanced speed, GREEN enhanced durability, BLUE grants telepathy, INDIGO grants invisibility, VIOLET grants size shifting powers, BLACK destroys anything that passes through (black was never used by original user). Suit also grants enhanced acrobatics and agility.
Thousand Mercy: belonged to one of the greatest search-and-rescue heroes. Grants you enhanced sensory powers, allowing you to search and find any lifeforce signature within a 1000 mile radius. Can create up to 1000 energy arms that connect to you; these arms can stretch up to 1000 miles, can phase through solid matter, and have enough strength to carry a fully grown adult. The arms can transmit a powerful healing effect, not only capable of healing and resuscitating living beings, but to a smaller extent restore and heal damage to inanimate objects (like buildings, roads, etc...)
Scanalyzer: once belonging to a hi tech hero, this highly advanced suit's main feature is it's powerful scanning function, aided by an advanced and helpful A.I. The scanning functions can reveal information, uncover weaknesses, create high speed battle simulations, hack into enemy computer systems and more. You will not only be able to predict enemy movements and actions, but the suit will also be able to develop specific counter measures and weaponry/defenses to combat foes.
The Warden: belonged to a warden of one of the most dangerous super prisons, the suit grants you the power to create prison-themed constructs (manacles, cages, restraints, barriers, etc...). You can imbue/modify your constructs with various effects, in order to neutralize enemy abilities and powers. Can also create special restraints that can draw on a prisoner's energy, strengths and abilities (only one prisoner at a time).
Twilight Knight: once belonging to a knightly hero of the day and night, the suit's power changes depending on the time of day. During the day you gain light and heat based powers (strongest at noon), and during the night you gain dark and cold based powers (strongest at midnight). During the twilight hours of Dawn and Dusk, you gain access to both set of powers (light and darkness).
Villain Suits-
Hydrasma: once belonged to a snake-themed villain, this suit grants the power to generate and manipulate various deadly miasmas. Can create constructs from the miasma (original user created snake-themed constructs). Also grants powerful regenerative powers by absorbing miasma (weak to fire, however).
Brawn & Brain: worn by a genius bruiser of a villain, this suit grants you enhanced physical and mental abilities. By lowering either your physical or mental abilities, you can greatly strengthen the other. Become a mindless brute of destruction, or a weakened near-cripple with powerful intelligence and psychic abilities.
Hell Bullet: once worn by a villain with unmatched firepower, this suit gives you the ability to create an unimaginable amount of projectiles to fire at your enemies. You can imbue these projectiles with various effects (explosive, fire, freezing, electric, etc...). You will also be granted speed equal to a speeding bullet, and can transform into a living bullet at will.
Tic-Toc: belonged to a dangerous villain with power over time. You will be able to generate a time-dilation field around yourself (maximum range 10 meter radius), which can accelerate or decelerate time. Age something to dust, or de-age someone back to a baby. You yourself will be, by default, immune to this power.
Mr. No-One: This suit belonged to one of the greatest spies/saboteuassassins. You will constantly emit a subtle psychic wavelength that alters peoples perceptions of you. Blur your image in your target's memory, or erase it altogether. Make yourself appear as someone's most cherished person, or appear as a horrific nightmare. You also gain the power to erase any evidence you might leave, whether it be physical or electronic.
Dark Ravager: this suit belonged to a force of darkness, who targeted both hero and villain alike. The suit grants you the power to be empowered by malice and evil (whether your own or your enemies); you can use this malice/evil to create weapons and armor, generate energy attacks, and power your signature ability. The signature ability is the DARK TENDRILS, which can not only physically restrain and attack your enemies, but also enter an enemy's body spiritually. Once penetrating a enemy's spirit, you can sense and reveal an enemy's inner malice and evil, and from there a variety of options open up: you can drain their lifeforce and malice to empower yourself; try to corrupt and infect your target with malice and evil; or turn their malice and evil against them, destroying them from within. While it was never used for this purpose, it should be possible to try and purify/purge/cleanse them of malice and sin, redeeming your target and turn them good.
Special Suit - Resurrector; this suit belonged to one of the mightiest heroes, who was also one of the most dangerous villains. The main power of this suit is that it resurrects you 24 hours after death, back to your prime and in perfect health. This activates regardless on whether or not you were wearing the suit at the time. The only way to stop resurrecting is to bestow the suit to someone else, and they must accept willingly. Whenever you resurrect, you come back stronger than before, and can even gain new abilities and skills (you won't be able to gain immortality). However, whenever you die and come back, your morality will shift between good and evil, and this morality shift grows stronger with each resurrection. You can count this suit as either a "hero" or "villain" suit.
As a special Bonus, you will also receive a special device known as a Super Gate; this device will allow to travel to any known world in the multiverse, as long as there are "Superheroes" and "Super Villains". You can decide on the time and place you'll appear in when you visit the new world (the timeline will be fixed upon your first visit, so you won't be able to travel back and forth through time. When travelling through the gate you will gain a translation ability, as well as match your appearance to the locals. The device has a recharge time of 1-week, and each year you can change the world you want to travel to.
There are some special Side Power-Ups you can choose as well. You can select up to 2:
Spare Suits: select 2 more super suits to keep (one hero and one villain suit)
Instant Switch: you receive an accessory of your design that stores your suits; while wearing/holding the accessory you can instantly switch between your suits at will.
Mish Mash Suit: fuse 2 (or more) suits together into one, combining the abilities and powers. You can decide and describe how the abilities work together, and/or what new abilities might be formed upon the fusion.
Power Upgrade: by sacrificing one (or more) suits, you can power up and upgrade your remaining suit, greatly enhancing it's power. Keep in mind, however, that this will also cause the previous owner of the upgraded suit's personality and morality to be infused into the suit as well, which can affect you if your not vigilant.
So, which Super Suits did you choose? How will you use your newfound powers?

Title

Hello Comic fans.
While we all occasionally get event fatigue and would rather things slow down on the reboots and resets.
If you could have your way with the next crisis event, but you had to use a different character as the protagonist/main focus of your hypothetical crisis, what would it be? What would you name it? What would the theme be
To get us started, since the most recent crisis even had Wonder Woman as the protagonist with the lead up being a Batman centered threat (Batman who laughs), so Both Batman and Wonder Woman are out of the running.
Dark Crisis has Superman (Jon) and Nightwing as Protagonists.
I would have a Green Lantern focused Crisis even on the same scale of Blakest Knight, including the newer lantern rings and concepts introduced recently. It would focus on the Hal, Kyle and John as the headliners and the new villains could be related to the Monitors but have the ability to manifest new emotional/power sources and energy streams etc. maybe even threaten the Emotional spectrum which gives life to the universe in some way.
While this is a tough start, what sort of Crisis would you have take place if you had full control?

The film's protagonist is Superman, but he has Robin Williams Hook syndrome in that he doesn't remember that he is Superman. We also never see Superman in person so it is kind of a twist when he finds out the truth. If there has been an adaptation similar to what I describe, forgive me. This is my idea:
Private Investigator Clay Elton is approached by editor-in-chief of The Daily Planet, Lois Lane. She wants Elton to find the whereabouts of Clark Kent, a reporter of hers who vanished five years ago. Elton is skeptical why someone in Lois' position can't just use her contacts and resources to find out where this Clark Kent is. She wants no one to know and asks Elton to investigate discreetly.
It is later revealed in the story that Lex Luthor became President of the United States and waged a governmental war against Superman. To protect the lives of Lois and others, Clark voluntarily underwent a procedure at the Fortress that basically gave him amnesia and gave him temporary depowerment in the form of a Blue Kryptonite ring.
Lois sent him on a wild goose chase in the hope that something would snap him out. Like he would activate like a sleeper agent. The reason that no one recognizes that Clay Elton is Clark Kent is because this contingency plan to hide his identity was through the use of a Pseudoderm mask. It has been bound to his skin for five years.
Be gentle people. This was an idea I had so I made this post. Would you be interested in a story like this?

[Part 2] You ever look into a window and wonder what’s on the other side? I mean, a room, obviously, but what’s in it? Who lives there? How do they live? For as long as I can remember, that was my fascination. It started innocently, if creepy; I used to peek into people’s windows when I was a little kid, back when I had to get on my tiptoes to peer in through a kitchen window. I’d see the light reflecting off tile and appliances, and sometimes people would be moving about, living their lives. In a sense, it’s sort of like an ant farm; the windows people use to see out provide a small vertical slice of their inside life. I never got caught or scolded when I did this, even though I instinctively knew it was wrong. It was the same reason my parents chided me for peeking in the door when they’d use the restrooms; people liked their privacy.
But you know what happens when a bad habit is allowed to fester, don’t you? It escalates. When I was twelve years old, I broke into a house for the first time. Not for criminal reasons, mind you, I simply wanted to get a more… tactile appreciation for someone’s life. It was a house that had overgrown grass and sometimes had a beat-up old Buick out front that needed a wash. I’d never met whoever lived there, but I knew they did.
There’s a fatal flaw with burglar alarms: the infrequent nature of burglary. Potentially 365 days of a year, the homeowner is paying for a service that ideally won’t be used. But the device, it never sleeps unless you let it. Eventually, turning it on in the morning when you leave for work or off when you come home becomes such a hassle that in some neighborhoods, people just use the sticker as their ward against burglars. This person was one of those people. And he was also one of the people who failed to lock their windows.
It didn’t smell great in that place. I let myself in through the kitchen window and I just stood there, taking it all in. It was cluttered, lived-in, but not hoarder-level crazy. There was a fat stack of shitty self-help books on the dining room table, and more than a few pizza boxes crammed into an overflowing trash bin. The floor was once, presumably, a nice carpet, but decades of neglect had rendered it crusty and brown. In retrospect I recognize the smell as marijuana, but at the time I thought it was a skunk. I could almost see the guy who lived there wandering around, mired in the detritus of an unkempt house. I could imagine him pouring over those dog-eared self-help books, eating pizza for the fifth time this week, wondering how his life went so wrong.
There wasn’t much to do. Like I said, my intentions were curiosity, not theft. So I went back out the way I came. That night, when the shitty old Buick rolled up onto the driveway, I watched the guy. He was shorter than I’d imagined, and he had thick glasses and thinning hair. He wasn’t super fat, but he wasn’t skinny; all in all, a fairly normal individual. Yet from that moment I spent in his home, I knew so very much about him. I think that’s where the problem started, really.
I got really, really good at it. Sneaking into people’s homes. Walking through undetected. Again, I never took anything, just explored the place and drew connections about their life. Creepy, yes, and very illegal, but I rationalized it at the time as being functionally identical to being invited in. It’s not creepy when a guest looks around, and since I wasn’t doing anything untoward, I was basically a guest, right? I even got so good I could do it when they were home. A lot of close calls, but those were the most exciting. Again, at this point I had yet to steal anything. I was chasing the high of just sneaking around, going where I wasn’t supposed to.
When I got into high school, however, I started wanting things. I wasn’t poor, but there was always something I wanted that was just out of reach. Well, I made the logical leap that my hobby and my desire could aid each other.
I prepped by “mock-robbing” my own house. When my parents were out, I combed through their things, looking for stashes of goodies. Naturally I wouldn’t steal from THEM, mind you; I hadn’t done that since I took a five-dollar bill out of my mother’s purse when I was six. Sure enough, I found the classic sock-drawer with the stash in it. Wasn’t much, just a couple documents. A xerox of my birth certificate, a copy of my grandparents’ will, some insurance papers, and a single hundred dollar bill, all rolled into an old black tube sock at the back of my father’s sock drawer. My mom’s nightstand held a bunch of her old expired credit cards, receipts for purchases deductible as work expenses, and her old earrings she’d worn before her earlobes had healed over. The kitchen junk drawer tended to be where lost coins were deposited, and by quarters alone I reckoned around 50 dollars had accumulated over the years. Finally, under my parents’ bed, I found the real stash: bonds given to them by my grandparents, the deed to the house itself, and my grandfather’s old ring. Worthless to me, obviously, but it proved that humans and dragons both choose to sleep atop their riches.
I chose my mark well; a large house, and one I’d already familiarized myself with on the inside. Once the geriatric woman had left to go do whatever octogenarians do on Thursday afternoons, I stole into the building and rifled through her things. It was a completely different experience to go in with the intent of robbery. I felt heightened. Paranoid. Instinctively I shied away from windows and lights like a scuttling rat, and any time the house shifted or settled, I dove for cover, cramming myself into cabinets or closets. The place was big, but sure enough, I found the old cigar box under the bed. It didn’t have money or jewels, but rather pictures. Grainy, faded, black-and-white pictures of a man in a naval officer’s dress, and a girl in a skirt with frizzy brown hair. I realized with a start that it was her, and who I could only assume was a late lover. There were family pictures on the walls, but none of them featured her with a man at her side. An elderly spinster, clinging to a love who no doubt was long gone. When I discovered that, I shook my head. No way I was going to rob her, even if I’d found gold bullion in the box. So I tidied up the place, making sure to wipe away the places where fingerprints could have been even though I was wearing latex gloves, and put her secret box back where it belonged.
For a few weeks, I didn’t do any B&E. Truth be told, I was disgusted at myself. Every house I’d snooped through, every life I’d reverse-engineered in my head… to think that I’d rob them, make those pristine little lives worse for my own benefit… I couldn’t stomach it.
Looking back, I wish I’d just abandoned that moral hang-up. Because it was that morality that led me to the Mortheimer house.
In the state of California, where I live, burglary is a felony. I think it’s that way in most places. Now I didn’t consider myself a burglar, because in order for it to be such, I had to be entering with the intent to do a crime. As of yet, save for the old woman’s house, I had never entered for any reason save to observe, so in my mind I was not a burglar.
I heard about the Mortheimer house from a friend. He said it had been owned by the bank for some time, after the owner had lost everything to a gambling addiction and shot himself in the building. It wasn’t called the Mortheimer house at the time, though; that wouldn’t be until Jason Mortheimer moved in and bought the old, buttress-ridden house for next to nothing. For weeks, my friend said, they had done construction; as to what they were doing, he couldn’t tell. Aside from cleaning, repainting, reshingling, and repairing the windows, the old house looked practically unchanged from the outside. Yet power tools could be heard from dawn until dusk within the old place, and construction teams came and went with clockwork regularity. Jason Mortheimer was an oddball in the neighborhood; he was never seen during the day, save peering out from his windows to watch people on afternoon strolls. By night, he’d wander and be cordial to passersby, but he walked stiffly, leaning heavily on a mahogany cane. Between the constant noise of construction and the leery glances he was caught giving joggers from behind heavy curtains, it was safe to say Jason Mortheimer was unpopular.
My friend wanted to know what was going on in the house, nothing more. We’d talked about my interests and he’d been understanding; on some occasions, he’d paid me to snoop on romantic interests, to find out their sexual preference and availability. Usually, I’d take his money and not even break in, simply observing the individuals and using the key context clues that he so clearly had missed. His current boyfriend, who like him will remain unnamed, was a closeted individual who I’d been hired to snoop upon; now he was out of the closet, and happier than ever before. Good for the two of them. But this was the first time my friend wanted me to snoop for anything approaching a benign curiosity, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also curious.
It wasn’t until the construction had stopped, about a week after the last team had left, that I made my move. I was going to enter the Mortheimer house, I was going to take this rich eccentric menace for everything that I could, and I was going to satisfy my curiosity.
The smell was, as it often is, the first thing I noticed. In most places, it’s a very human smell; scented candles, food, soaps, or even unwashed individuals sweating in the summer heat. This place, however, smelled sterile, and vaguely metallic. Like the smell of dentist’s tools, fresh from the sealed pack.
The interior was lavish, but just as odd as the man who inhabited it. Oil paintings of gargantuan scale leered down at me, Bavarian dukes and kings with severe faces glowered from antiquated frames. The floor was mostly granite, covered by a single crimson velvet rug that spanned the various landings. Dim halogen bulbs lit the corners of the halls, leaving the rest of the walk in murky near-darkness. Only the front of the house, as I would come to learn, had windows; the rest of the rooms were the same tiled, featureless rooms with odd decor. I passed no less than three bedrooms, each pristine and untouched, and entirely identical. Even the paintings began to loop, but those were more noticeably wrong, as the individual texture of the brushstrokes would differ between rooms.
The upper floors to the house were bizarre. Dining rooms and redundant kitchens on second-floor landings. An attic with a bathroom in it. Bedrooms so close as to be functionally adjoining. And all of them without so much as a sign of life. I checked three separate refrigerators, and while they were indeed cold, there was not a crumb of food in any of them. Drawers in the bedrooms would be completely empty, just varnished wood staring up at me where some evidence of habitation should have been. The attic bathroom was functional, I was surprised to see, and I marveled at the sheer ridiculousness of it. How much pipe the drains must have had.
When I reached the ground floor once more, I saw him. Jason Mortheimer, staring out the window as he always did. He was hunched, lame almost, as he peered from curtains of the same velvet as the rug. Without a sound, I descended the stairs and entered the first sub-level.
Roland Wood died two years ago. I feel this is important. You must understand that Roland Wood, captain of the volleyball team, was struck by an 18-wheeler and given a closed-casket funeral two years ago. I was there. I hadn’t been close to Roland, or Rollie as he was called by his friends, but the family had invited my family and we weren’t so disrespectful as to ignore the grief of our neighbors. I watched the pallbearers put Rollie in the grave, heard his mother’s hysterical sobs as the burial continued, and saw the grave covered in the cemetery.
Roland Wood, two years dead, body irreparably damaged by the crushing force of an 18-wheeler truck, stood before me as I rounded the corner into the first room. He wore a dress shirt and pants, and he stared straight ahead, eyes glassy and unfocused. It was all I could do to not yelp in surprise as I saw the slack features of a dead teenager in the first room of this strange place. Thick, iron staples perforated the skin everywhere, and numerous discolored teeth shone unblemished white alongside the rotten and deteriorated others. His skin, usually so tan from the volleyball games in the summer sun, was pale and slightly blue, riven with lumps and thin patches where the impression of bone could be made out.
Rollie wasn’t alone in that room. A dozen others stood still, staring at the wall, similarly dressed in formal wear. Women wore elegant dresses and pearls, men wore dinner suits and tuxedos, and all stood like mannequins in the cold, bare room.
“Admiring them, are we?”
I spun as Jason Mortheimer limped into the room, looking straight past me at the ghoulish tableaux.
“I- I-,” I began, but he jerkily raised a hand and shook his head.
“Don’t speak, lad. I heard you on the stairwell. Now tell me, what do you think of my merry little gathering?”
I swallowed and looked back over the legion of corpses.
“Are they… alive?”
Jason chuckled and shrugged.
“In a way. Although you’ll find they’re quite poor conversationalists. Everyone,” he called out, clapping his hands together, “please greet our new guest.”
In unison, the corpses turned to face me, their jaws opening with a creak and their eyes locking onto mine.
“Greetings,” they all intoned, a single voice coming from numerous throats. It cared not for the gender of the body it spoke from; they were all the same dolorous rasp, forced from lips that did not match the words spoken.
“Listen, Mr. Mortheimer, I didn’t come here to-”
“-rob me? Oh, I don’t believe that, friend, and neither do you.”
“Please, sir, I’ll just leave, I won’t tell a soul what I’ve seen.”
Jason shrugged, a jerky spasmodic gesture.
“It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t, dear boy. Nobody will believe you. So, you may go.”
I looked at him. He still didn’t meet my gaze, staring intently at his grisy arrangement.
“That’s… it? I can just leave?”
“Of course. I would prefer you to.”
“You’re not going to hurt me or something?”
Finally, Jason turned his gaze on me, an insincere grin twisting his features.
“Everything I can do has been done.”
With that, he turned away, jerkily climbing the steps. I ran past him, bolting for the door. It wasn’t far, and he made no move to stop me. I flung the old door wide and sprinted out into the daylight, gasping and shuddering as I ran. Confused passersby blinked as I stormed past, sprinting in the direction of home. Relief and terror warred in my mind as I reached my front door, and I threw it wide, startling my parents from the couch.
“Jacob?,” My father asked, “where’s the fire?”
I panted my excuses and sat at the kitchen table. I said I’d had a fright, thought I was being followed, because someone put a note in my locker.
“Speaking of notes,” said my father, gesturing to where the mail lay piled on the counter. There, a yellowing envelope had been opened.
“What’s this?” I asked, dread settling in the pit of my stomach.
“It was an invitation,” my father answered, “to a party. Fancy dress. It’s at that old… oh, what’s the name of the guy who owns it now?”
“The Mortheimer house?”
He nodded and smiled.
“That’s the one. Your mother and I are planning on going at the end of the month. Do you want to come along?”
I smiled weakly, my mind racing.
“I… I guess.”

Hi everyone, I am new to role-playing on Reddit and thought I would try my luck on here.
Preface:
I go by PST!
I request all my partners be over the age of 18. I am an adult, and therefore request that all my partners be adults as well.
I sometimes get busy and cannot reply straight away. However, I am almost always open to out of character chatter!
I can reply anywhere from 200-400 words (faster replies that require back and forth between our characters) to 500-1,000 (slower replies that take time).
For this search thread, I am looking to double. Most likely, I will request M/M on my side. For your side, I would be happy to play anyone for any type of pairing you'd like!
I look forward to hearing back from you!
Fandoms:
Black Clover
Looking for: Asta, Yami, Yuno
Avatar the Last Airbender
Looking for: Sokka, Zukko, and Jet
Plot idea: As Yue is about to sacrifice herself to revive the fallen moon spirit, her twin, offers a part of their life to keep Yue alive.
Fairytail
Looking for: Laxus, Gray, Gajeel, Natsu
Invincible
Looking for: Mark
Plot idea: Mark witnesses the untimely demise of a young man he was unable to save. His death allowed his alternative counterpart to possess his body.
Detroit: Become Human
Looking for: Hank or Connor
Plot idea: A CIA agent steps in to aid Hank and Connor on their investigations.
Dragon Age
Looking for: Cullen, Alistair, Dorian, Ironbull, Varric and maybe even Zevran
Final Fantasy XIV
Looking for: Thancred or Ardbert
DC
Looking for: Batman, Nightwing, Red Hood, Aquaman, Superman, Superboy, Flash
Bonus points for Young Justice knowledge!
Jujutsu Kaisen
Looking for: Nanami, Megumi, or Yuji
Plot idea for Nanami: A low ranking sorcerer has a hidden innate ability that allows him to make accurate predictions of the future. His scrying led him to the conclusion that Nanami will die.
Lord of the Rings
Looking for: Legolas
Marvel
Looking for: Star-Lord, Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor
Fire Emblem
Looking for: Dimitri, Claude, Xander, Chrom, Robin, Ryoma
Star Wars
Looking for: Obi-Wan, Anakin, Cal

I'm going to do something a bit different and take a close look at two major works from the DC Universe: Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier, and James Robinson and Paul Smith's The Golden Age. If you're playing along at home, the texts I'm using are The Absolute New Frontier from 2006 and The Golden Age trade paperback from 1995.
First a bit of personal context: I didn't enjoy The New Frontier when it first came out, serialized in six quite expensive installments. I loved Cooke's art, I loved the use of some of the more obscure DC war characters, and I loved the characterization of the Martian Manhunter, but the narrative didn't work for me when read in small monthly doses back in 2004. I had read all of the full-length work Cooke had done up until 2004, and none of it had disappointed me at all. But The New Frontier seemed to read more like a tour through the 1950s and 1960s than an actual story. It wasn't until the final issue that I really understood what Cooke was leading up to, but then it was over, and I didn't have the time or the inclination to dig out the back issues and read the whole thing in one sitting. Even when I got the two-volume trade paperback collection a couple of years ago (in an eBay lot of trade paperbacks I bought off of none other than comic book scholar George Khoury), I still didn't bother to read it. To paraphrase Hemingway's Frederic Henry, we don't do the things we want to do.
So I never actually read the entire text of The New Frontier until this past winter, when I was able to sit down with the luxurious Absolute edition and dive into Cooke's illustrated world. I enjoyed it immensely, enough that I wanted to reread it again this summer, which is what I have just done, and now I want to talk about it. But I don't want to talk about it in isolation, and I'm interested in the connection between texts, so I'll also talk about its logical precursor: The Golden Age.
Like The New Frontier, Robinson and Smith's The Golden Age deals with the era between the 1940s and the 1960s. The era in which the comic book Golden Age grew into the comic book Silver Age. The era in which America was undergoing its own transformation, moving from threats abroad to suspicion at home. And just as I had difficulty enjoying The New Frontier as a serialized comic, I couldn't appreciate The Golden Age in that manner either. I only bought the first two issues, actually, back in the early 1990s, and then I lost interest, vaguely thinking that I might buy it as a collected edition some day (even though collections were not guaranteed the way they are today). I did buy it when the trade paperback was released, and because I had never finished it originally, I read the collection immediately. And I liked it. But I thought it was deeply flawed.
I reread The Golden Age yesterday, after thinking about it in regards to The New Frontier. It's not a surprising connection, after all. Cooke himself claims The Golden Age as an inspiration for his own work. But my memory of The Golden Age was a bit hazy, and I recalled it being a much more cynical view of the territory than what Cooke achieved in The New Frontier. My recall was pretty accurate--Robinson and Smith present a quite cynical view of the late Golden Age America.
Now that I've read both works back-to-back, I'm interested in exploring what each says about super-heroes, what each says about America, and how each achieves its (very different) effects. These are the kinds of things I'll be looking at over the next few days.
James Robinson's use of History in The Golden Age
One of the things that strikes me about both The New Frontier and The Golden Age is the way the creators weave American history into their stories. On the surface, such a technique might not be surprising, especially considering that both tales take place in the past. And while it may be true that a so-called "historical novel" or "period film" would be amiss to neglect the details of history which fit its setting, the same isn't always true for comics.
In comics, stories set in the past tend to take place in some vague memory of the past, without any apparent intent in locking the stories into a particular date or era. Take the typical origin stories, or "Year One" stories which DC Comics' creators have retold again and again. In such a story, whether it be Miller and Mazzuchelli's take on Batman, or Waid, Augustyn, and Kitson's take on the Justice League, the setting lacks a distinct time stamp. The characters are younger, true, but the setting lacks specific period detail. The reason for this isn't at all surprising, because locking the characters' past into a specific date would require some major explanations about their ages in the present. Had Miller time-stamped the date on Batman: Year One, and included captions saying "May 3rd, 1980," or whatever, then that might have worked for a few years, but even if we assume that Batman was only 23 when he took inspiration from that window-smashing flying rodent, according to that temporal continuity, he'd be 50 years old in the current stories. And he's clearly not.
So we expect stories set in the past to avoid any kind of specific references to contemporary history, at least in comics. A recent jarring exception to that can be found in Diggle and Jock's newly released Green Arrow: Year One, in which a young Oliver Queen references the "Kevin Costner" Robin Hood. That means Queen must have become Green Arrow sometime in the mid-1990s, which might explain his age today (if he was 22 in 1992, he'd be 37 today, which might be right), but it also implies that his son Connor must only be a teenager today, and he's clearly older than that. Perhaps the reference will work better 10 years from now when the Kevin Costner reference will become part of the vague historical past, but right now it seems too current to make sense.
Anyway, the other MAJOR exception to the rule of not using historical references in comics is the case of stories set during World War II. Even comic books written at the time of WWII regularly included time-stamp references in a way that later comics tended to avoid. Yes, since then, Superman has met Kennedy, and you might see analogues of Bill Clinton or George W. in a story or two, but in the 1940s heroes came face to face with major historical figures (contemporaries to them) on an almost daily basis. Here's FDR! Here's Superman grabbing Hitler on a cover! Here's Tojo! Here's Hawkman enlisting in the army to fight overseas! Etc. Such close ties between "comic book reality" and real-life events never matched the heights of the WWII comics.
And that's why later writers, Roy Thomas MOST prominently among them (he practically invented the whole idea of historical nostalgia super-hero comics), felt compelled to weave actual historical events into the retelling of stories from the WWII era. Thomas's Invaders for Marvel and his All-Star Squadron for DC playfully fit the timeline of actual US history into the fictional timeline of the past super-heroes. In his letter columns, Thomas would often explain (or justify, for the more contentious fans) how the chronology worked.
But, other than WWII era-stories, most comic book stories that take place in the past (unless they are time travel stories, which have their own rules) DO NOT USE SPECIFIC HISTORICAL REFERENCES. It's weird to imagine novels or films avoiding such references—they would surely be criticized for it—but in comics, it's commonplace.
So, in the case of both The New Frontier and The Golden Age, you have two rather significant violations of that standard "rule." And both of which seem deeply indebted to the type of approach Roy Thomas favored so much.
Let's take The Golden Age first, since it was published a decade before Cooke's work. The Golden Age seems like a logical off-shoot of Thomas's All-Star Squadron. It features many of the same characters, and Johnny Quick, a relatively obscure DC character from the past, would certainly not have been a suitable narrator for the story without the characterization Thomas provided in years of All-Star Squadron stories. James Robinson is clearly building on the foundation Thomas created. So, it's not surprising that he would, like Thomas, blend US history into his story. Yet Robinson's approach differs in two distinct ways: (1) He doesn't seem interested in the exact historical details and how they fit into his timeline—he seems more interested in the general sense of historical forces of the time, and (2) Unlike Thomas, who was writing out of a Golden and Silver Age optimism and a belief in the American Dream, Robinson was writing from a post-Watchmen perspective, as a foreign-born writer, who could play with the cynical expectations of the time.
Thus, Robinson gives us coke-sniffing "super-heroes," corruption, brutality, and sex in a tale which features the "pure" heroes of the DC Golden Age of comics. Robinson's approach is not to use specific elements of McCarthyism or the Red Scare (even though those ideas are referenced at least once), but to use the general sense of paranoia and panic, the cynical manipulation of the public for personal gain, and the looming threat of the bomb.
Ultimately, however, Robinson uses all of this as a backdrop for a traditional super-hero romp. The coke-sniffing "super-hero" turns out to be Hitler in disguise!!! (Well, actually the brain of Hitler in the body of a former kid sidekick—talk about a symbol of corruption!) And the hero-turned-power-hungry-politician in the form of the patriotic Mr. America turns out to be old JSA villain the Ultra-Humanite, who knows a thing or two about brain transplants. So, in the end, it's just a classic Golden Age story about punching Hitler and defeating an evil genius.
But it's Robinson's historical subtext which makes the story resonate. It's his use of those undercurrents of paranoia and despair which make these formerly perfect heroes of the past seem flawed and human. His story starts dark and becomes darker but, by the end, Robinson's veil of cynicism falls away, and he reveals himself to be a humanist, if not an optimist. His reverence for these Golden Age characters would not let them be truly corrupted—it had to be evil masterminds and Hitler all along.
And that, perhaps, is one of the failures of The Golden Age. The shock of the initial chapters is just a ruse, and as low as these characters seem to sink, everything can be explained by pseudo-science and comic book logic.
It's just another Justice Society of America story, ultimately, but it's a good one. And Robinson's use of the undercurrents from that era of history make it work, even if it never transcends its roots.
The New Frontier and Camelot
While The Golden Age used the historical subtext to evoke currents of paranoia and doom in a super-hero story, The New Frontier approaches history with a different agenda. As Ultimate Matt pointed out in response to yesterday's post, The Golden Age is labeled an "Elseworlds" title, which not only grants it an exemption from DC continuity, but it allows more freedom for the creators to take the characters and setting in a fresh direction.
The New Frontier, however, is not labeled as an "Elseworlds." And yet, it strays far more from the currently accepted version of continuity than The Golden Age does. The key word there is "accepted." Darwyn Cooke, in his annotations, states that he approached The New Frontier with a set of rules:

1. The timeline is real and covers 1945 to 1960. Silver Age characters appear at the time DC started publishing them.
   
2. Retcons haven't happened yet.
   
3. No New Frontier retcons could contradict original continuity—they had to complement existing continuity or show a fresh point of view.
   
4. When the story ended, everything had to be as it was when the JLA debuted in Brave and the Bold #28.
   
5. Snapper Carr does not exist.
   

In other words, you should be able to pull out your original comics from that era (or the Archive editions) and read them concurrently with The New Frontier and nothing Cooke does should contradict what happens in those old comics.
The problem with the continuity is that the comics from that era didn't have any continuity. It was never explained how a character could be on the moon in one issue of his own comic, and under the ocean in the same month in his Justice League adventure. All Golden and Silver Age DC continuity is a retcon. So what Cooke did was create his own continuity—he made his own sense out of the various adventures as they were originally published, although the bulk of the book deals with the time between major events. Just like The Golden Age, The New Frontier is about filling in the gaps.
While James Robinson filled the pre-Silver Age gap with an almost allegorical tale of Cold War paranoia and corruption, Darwyn Cooke fills the gap with a sense of wonder and idealism, and he uses his attitude toward history to solidify that tone.
Cooke's approach takes three strands: (1) The Right Stuff-inspired history of that era, embodied by the test pilots and early astronauts, (2) The early promise of the Kennedy administration, and (3) The strange DC comics history as seen in the stories published during that time. Cooke uses the first two strands to illuminate the latter. He puts the Silver Age ascension into perspective as part of a generation of hope and achievement. He shows that the formation of the Justice League was not a random incident, but part of a larger historical movement which led (in our reality) to things like the Peace Corps and Apollo 11.
Cooke ties together such disparate elements as The War that Time Forgot, The Challengers of the Unknown, Dr. Seuss, and all of the characters who would join the initial incarnation of the JLA into a single narrative. And although it takes quite a while before the villain emerges and the heroes band together, the narrative is structured around the real historical forces that would have shaped the creation of these characters. John Broome doesn't wax poetically about the symbolism of Hal Jordan's career as a test pilot in the original Green Lantern run from the Silver Age, but Cooke takes the fact that he was a test pilot and places him in the actual context of such a man. He even includes a scene where the young Jordan meets Chuck Yeager.
That's quite a different approach to history than we saw in The Golden Age, which covers a very similar time frame.
Although Cooke didn't intend (according to his "rules") to change any of the original stories, his interpretation of "fresh point of view" allows him to add things which would have been more historically true even if they weren't addressed in the comics of the time. For example, he not only changes Wonder Woman into an almost plump, hawkish, zestful character (to signify her Greek origins and Amazon heritage), but he creates an entirely new character to illuminate the civil rights struggle of the time. Since he had no black DC characters to draw upon, he created a Silver Age analogue to Steel, the black Superman ally. The Silver Age Steel, unlike his modern equivalent, isn't a technological marvel. Instead, this earlier incarnation of John Henry suffers at the hands of the KKK before taking vengeance, and ultimately dying when he's betrayed by an uncaring white America (symbolized by a blonde little girl, who points out his location to his pursuers). John Henry never meets the Justice League or teams up with any heroes. His death doesn't affect them at all, really, since they didn't know him. But Cooke includes a scene where Edward R. Murrow mourns the fallen hero and laments the state of the country, bringing an actual historical personage into the DC story.
The civil rights subplot, although powerful, is overwhelmed by the exceeding optimism of the other plot threads. Cooke's America, as full of conflict as it might have been, is one of scientific progress and movement toward a brighter future. His villain, ultimately revealed to be Dinosaur Island itself (a sentient being who has unleashed monster after monster), is even more absurd than the Hitler-brain-transplant nemesis in The Golden Age, but because Cooke accentuates the fun and spectacle of the super-heroes (and, to be clear, his emphasis is on the men and women in the costumes, and the risks they take for their heroism), the absurdity of the villain doesn't detract from the story.
Both The Golden Age and The New Frontier end with similar images (the first appearance of the Justice League banded together) and similar sentiments (hope for the future), but where James Robinson built that hope out of the wreckage of the 1940s, Darwyn Cooke builds it out of the dreams of the men and women who sacrificed for the promise of tomorrow.
Both books end with optimism for comic books and optimism for our country, but they took starkly different approaches to get there.
The Unstoppable Force of Progress: Characterization in The New Frontier
Since both The New Frontier and The Golden Age re imagine comic book chronology through one part actual US history, one part comic book history, and one part imagination, it's not surprising to find both Cooke and Robinson taking liberties with the characterization of these pre-Silver Age heroes. Both creators ask the question asked by any creator attempting to retell stories from the past: Okay, this is how they were portrayed, but what were the characters who did these things REALLY like?
I'll start by looking at The New Frontier. Cooke doesn't focus his story on one dominant point of view the way Robinson does (with Johnny Quick), but he tells his story through a few central characters:
Rick Flagg: Leader of the WWII-era Suicide Squad (and presumably the father, or grandfather, of the Ostrander-penned incarnation). Cooke presents him as a tough guy cliché. He's a Hemingway hero—he does what needs to be done and doesn't whine about it or waver in his determination. In Act III of the narrative, his position in the story is replaced by the similarly-characterized King Faraday, who also does what needs to be done, although he seems to have more internal conflict than Flagg. Faraday is a spy, after all, not a soldier. But both characters represent a government which has the best interests of the country in mind. If they hurt a few individuals along the way, that's a necessary sacrifice for the good of the many.
Hal Jordan: The man who would be Green Lantern is NOT portrayed as a cocky rocket jock, as he usually is in contemporary interpretations. Cooke turns his lack of fear into a self-destructive streak stemming from his face-to-face act of self-defense in Korea. In Cooke's universe, Jordan doesn't immediately become a hero just because an alien handed him a ring. It takes time for Jordan to learn that he deserves to be a hero, and that's a large part of what The New Frontier is about. He doesn't reveal himself in Green Lantern costume until AFTER he risks his life to save the world working as a pilot. The two-page "hero shot" of the characters walking towards camera (a la The Right Stuff) shows some costumed heroes, but Jordan is wearing a flight suit. Cooke seems to be showing that he needed to prove himself TO himself before he could accept his new identity, but his reluctance to use the power of the ring leads to Nathaniel Adam's death. (Adam is later reborn as Captain Atom in the comics, but that doesn't happen in this story, and as far as Jordan should be concerned, Adam is dead.) Cooke doesn't provide Jordan with any time for remorse, though, since he needs to use his ring to kick alien butt. The ring, by the way, is also shown as a symbol of destructive energy. When Jordan first uses it, he cannot control it, and it causes great damage. Cooke, then, seems to indicate that the ring might symbolize nuclear energy, and the subtext would be that Jordan's hesitance to use it led to another hero's death. Ultimately, Jordan is Cooke's symbol of the Kennedy era: conflicted, yet determined to bring forth a positive future—harnessing great powers for the good of the nation (and the world).
John Jones, the Manhunter from Mars: Jones says, "...this is a world where good and evil struggle in all levels of existence. I want to be a force for good." That's a simplistic view of humanity, but it's one seemingly shared by Cooke throughout this work. Good and evil may not be easily discernible on the surface, and Cooke gives us the threatening-looking John Henry (with a hangman's hood) as a hero and a little blonde girl as a villain, but the line between good and evil is absolute (and, in fact, John Jones assumes the role of a film-noirish detective so he can find the evil beneath the surface appearance of the world). Jones defines this ethical stance for the reader, and it represents the code of Golden and Silver Age comic books, which lacked anything but absolutes. Even though Cooke might try to provide some not-so-subtle shades of gray (Jordan as a murderer, Wonder Woman as feminist avenger, an undercurrent of xenophobia), his view of history seems to echo the simplicity of the comic book stories of the era. Individuals may not have always done the right things at all times, but it was an era of progress, and good triumphed over evil. The subtext could also indicate that governmental order triumphed over chaotic nature, with the unified heroes, under the leadership of the US government, destroying a threat that wasn't so much malicious as it was animalistic.
Even though Cooke's characterization of some of these characters, Hal Jordan in particular, might not match traditional representations of these individuals, I think it works in the context of the story. The characters serve the story and add a few layers to the text, but it's primarily a historical action spectacle, a celebration of progress over stagnation, and Cooke's characterization unifies the text. I don't think his characters have many hidden depths, but I think their lack of depth matches a story which is primarily about the grand force of history.
As one final observation: Cooke is actually better at small character moments with the minor characters than he is at developing convincing lead characters. The death of Johnny Cloud, Jimmy Olsen's eagerness, the sassiness of Carol Ferris, and several other character bits show Cooke's facility on the small scale, even if his epic narrative doesn't provide the opportunity for subtle nuances with the major characters.
Characterization in The Golden Age: Dragging Heroes to Earth
While Cooke ignores anyone else's retroactive continuity to graft archetypal personalities onto the early Silver Age heroes in The New Frontier, Robinson takes characters straight out of Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron (like Johnny Quick on the left here) and Young All-Stars and sends them on a dark journey into the 1950s. Robinson does not re imagine these characters drastically, although he seems to do so with Mr. America (but that's part of his narrative ruse). Instead, he takes their established characterization and expands upon it by adding seeds of self-doubt, paranoia, and despair as the characters face a world in which the villains are not as easily identified as they once were. Robinson misdirects the reader at first by pretending to adopt a simplified Watchmen approach, pretending that he's showing what these characters would have been like without costumed villains to fight or gangsters to punch, when, in truth, he's simply changed the nature of the evil to something more covert and less easy to spot. (Which might seem Watchmen-esque as well, except Alan Moore showed us that the heroes were the villains in that story, and here, Robinson ultimately reveals that secret villains with brain-transplant powers were behind the whole thing from the beginning.)
Here's a quick rundown of the central characters in The Golden Age:
Johnny Chambers, a.k.a Johnny Quick: Johnny not only provides the book-ends to the story but, as a documentary filmmaker, he provides the exposition which sets up the story context. One of the things Robinson does NOT do well here, by the way, is clearly distinguish between narrative voice (provided through white, rectangular caption boxes), and newsreel voice over (also provided by white, rectangular caption boxes), although perhaps the colorist was supposed to use different color cues for each and didn't. The CHARACTERS who narrate, like Johnny Chambers, each have their own style of caption—Johnny's are rounded and blue, as you can see in the image. Actually, it's not that it's so difficult to identify the narrative voice, it's just that there is an omniscient narrator who pops up every once in a while for no good reason, and tells us things about the story sometimes, while other times he sounds like he's trying to give us character thoughts but not really: the highly subjective "fingers...fumbling...focusing...trying to..." immediately follows the objective "a photographer lurks among the rubble." The photographer is the one who's fingers are supposedly fumbling as he tries to snap the photo, so why does the caption sound like a bad Batman internal monologue? This really has nothing to do with Johnny Chambers, but I just wanted to point out this major flaw in the narration throughout. With so many characters (Johnny being one) actually providing narration through captions, why does Robinson add an omniscient narrator also? It's jarring and ineffective. It's like he took the strategies of Watchmen with the multiple points of view, and then spliced the conventional narrator on top of it. It just doesn't work.
But a few more things about Johnny: He smokes, and he wears glasses. He still has his powers, but even though they would help him in his day job, he doesn't use them. And he's incredibly suspicious, which is the characteristic that makes him the character the reader most identifies with. He's also lost the woman he loves because he works too hard, although he gets her back in the end. In short, he's a slightly older (although he actually seems to get younger as the story progresses, perhaps symbolizing his return to heroic stature), slightly more sullen, slightly more flawed version of the character we saw in the comics produced in the 1980s (even though those stories were set in the 1940s). He refers to his costumed self as "That Jerk!" at the beginning of the story, but ends on a hopeful note as he describes a "new age...fresh and clear and bright...as sterling silver!" He's never really a cynic, but his pessimism and self-loathing turns to optimism in the end (even quickly dismissing the threat of McCarthyism to look ahead to the glowing future of super-heroics).
Paul Kirk, a.k.a Manhunter: If we play out the James-Robinson-is-trying-to-do-Watchmen-but-not-as-well game a bit more, we could say that if Johnny Chambers is the Dan Dreiberg analogue (the low-self-esteem voice of reason and calm) then Paul Kirk is clearly the Rorschach character. He's the crazy one who will surely upset the apple cart, yet isn't that what has to happen in order to get to the truth? That's his role, anyway. Unlike Rorschach (in his insane way), Kirk doesn't have a methodical approach to uncovering the truth. In fact, he's tormented by the truth, which lies buried beneath mind implants, exploding into awareness only through a series of horrible dreams. He seems deeply disturbed because of the War, but he's actually deeply disturbed because of the secrets he knows. He's another character, like Johnny, who seems to become more youthful and vibrant in the final Act, when he is able to unleash his demons through old-fashioned fisticuffs. Unlike Johnny, though, he visibly suffers for a long time before he reaches the point of action. Here's a sample of his internal monologue from one of his many tortured dreams: "Save the eagle. Save it. Save—n...no...nooooohhhh!!" Then he wakes up and thinks, "Still afraid." That's about the extent of his characterization. He's tormented, fearful, and knows he should be better than that. And, "save the eagle?" Geez, I wonder what in the world that could possibly mean in a book about corruption within the American government. Clearly, even though this book is directed at an older audience than the original Golden Age tales, Robinson keeps his symbolism quite simplistic.
Tex Thompson, a.k.a. Mr. America, and Daniel Dunbar, a.k.a. Dan the Dyna-Mite: These are the two characters most radically changed from their Golden Age counterparts. Mr. America was a whip-wielding patriotic hero and Dan was a kid sidekick who later, under Roy Thomas's writerly guidance, became one of the lead characters in Young All-Stars. In Robinson's story, Mr. America becomes a corrupt politician who seeks power by any means necessary, and Dan the Dyna-Mite becomes America's beloved Dynaman, the only active costumed crime fighter of the time. And he snorts coke. And he's evil.
Neither of these two characters have internal monologues via captions for the reader, because that would give away the twist. Tex Thompson is not really who he seems, for he has the brain of the evil Ultra-Humanite (who has in previous stories adopted the forms of a gigantic white gorilla and a hot ex-starlet, among others). And Daniel Dunbar, who has fallen so far from grace in our eyes (a former teen sidekick with a drug problem whoring around) actually has the BRAIN OF ADOLF HITLER!
So there's not much to say about the characterization here, since these are two evil characters in the most simplistic way. What is interesting, though, is that (a) Robinson chooses one character, Thompson, who seems vaguely sleazy to modern readers anyway, what with that whip and the mustache, and when he's shown to be corrupt, we can buy into it, falling into Robinson's trap of thinking that it's just a regular dude becoming corrupted by power; and (b) Robinson's use of the pure and innocent Dunbar is also a good choice, because it is not only shocking to see him corrupted so extremely (before the truth of the brain-swap is revealed), but it's a nod to cultural expectations about former child stars, who, by the 1990s, were expected to grow up and become criminals or drug addicts or worse, at least by our tabloid-fascinated society.
Like a director who makes his film better through excellent casting, Robinson uses the right two ex-heroes in the apparent role of the villains. His bait-and-switch works, although I was personally disappointed that the threat turned out to be external (evil villains) and not the corruption of these characters from within.
Robinson uses other characters to show the corruption of innocence and loss of the heroic dream. Robotman, so noble in Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron, has lost any humanity by the time of this story—he's pure machine, while Alan Scott, Green Lantern is conflicted about his duty as a business leader and law-abiding citizen and his passion for ring-slinging and butt-kicking. Hourman is shown to be addicted to his Miraclo pills, while the man once known as the Tarantula is an egoist with writer's block. Ted Knight, Starman, who Robinson would go on to write with great depth and sensitivity in the ongoing series about Jack Knight, is a mad genius who is trying to put the pieces of this shattered world together through science.
I should add here that Robinson, unlike Cooke, isn't drawing from the original sources as the basis for his story. He's adapting his characterizations from the work done during contemporary comics, as Roy Thomas provided retroactive characterization (and explanations) for the WWII-era heroes. Robinson is building on the layers which Roy Thomas built upon the layers which Gardner Fox (among others) built.
Overall, Robinson does provide a sense of disillusionment in his characterizations in this story, even if his narrative technique is sometimes sloppy or inconsistent. Cooke tried to add a bit of humanity to iconic characters in his work, but he was mostly interested in the icons of the era. Robinson drags his characters down into the muck and then builds them back up again, hoping to show how their inner humanity wins out (with all of its flaws) in the face of systematic adversity. Cooke's characters inhabit the skies, the stars. Robinson's characters live on the ground.
So, the final verdict, after looking at The Golden Age and The New Frontier for a week: Not much different than my initial assessment after reading them both last weekend. The Golden Age is flawed because of its inconsistent narrative point of view and it's cheap, brain-swapping revelations. Robinson and Smith capture the disillusionment and paranoia of the time quite well, but it all amounts to nothing except a superhero slug fest in the end. It's 80% of a great work, and 20% of stuff that doesn't quite fit (including the optimistic ending, which seems unearned). As part of a larger, genre-wide trend to make super-heroes more "realistic," violent, and depressing, I'm not a huge fan of its influence.
The New Frontier is flawed, but it's a flawed masterpiece, and I can imagine revisiting the story many times in the future (and I can't say the same about The Golden Age). Cooke tries to include too much in the narrative, and the main threat of Monster Island isn't presented as well as it needs to be, but the book contains dozens of amazing sequences, and it features sharp, engaging characters who flash in and out of the story. The speed of the narrative demands that the book be read quickly, and it works best when read this way, not because it allows the reader to gloss over the weak parts of the story, but because The New Frontier is an overture, and can be best appreciated when all of its notes are heard in rapid sequence. I didn't love it when it first came out, in the completely inappropriate floppy installments, but I loved it after reading the Absolute version a week ago, and I love it just as much after studying it closely all week.
As one final thought: Both The Golden Age and The New Frontier tap so deeply into comic book lore, and I am so deeply embedded in it myself, that I wonder if either of these works has any merit for a "civilian" reader. And I wonder if, perhaps, the darker, more "realistic" tone would be appealing to a non-comics fan, more so, perhaps, than the wide-eyed optimism (tinged with bits of darkness) seen in Cooke's work. Or would the non-comics fan find both stories completely useless and without merit? Are both works examples of the snake swallowing its own tail? I've already been swallowed by the snake of comic book geekery, so I can't answer that one.
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