Seriously, They Need a Union or Something
June 26th, 2009 by Esther Inglis-Arkell |A few weeks ago I made a post about how most comics had a ‘shoot-yer-henchmen’ scene, a depraved act of violence to show that the bad guy meant business and to angry up the reader’s blood.
Alert reader Alex Nuan sent me these:
In Lobo The Duck #1, Alan Grant and Val Seimeks make a passionate plea to the reader, which I display to all creators everywhere.
Do not add to their suffering!
Hath not a minor character brains? If you point a laser at him, do they not boil? If you drop him out into space, doth he not scrabble pathetically at your sealed space-power-dome, trying to get back in? For a while, at least? And if you summarily execute him as a way to demonstrate your villain’s power, shall he not revenge?
Arise oh those abused by storytelling! Arise and be free!
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I don’t suppose that mechanic bloke comes out of this issue a winner, by any chance? Does he get to do in the villain who sent those chaps to capture him, or something like that?
Y’know, I always wanted to see a villain repeat the old “kill a subordinate for failing” cliche so many times that they eventually find themselves so understaffed that they can’t fend off their enemies, or their troops eventually turn on them and do them in.
It’s probably been done before, mind you.
@VersasoVantare: Well, I do remember this one time…
Knowing Lobo, he probably appeared in traction half a dozen issues later, convalescing in a hospital, just as Lobo dropped an atomic bomb on that very same hospital.
“Lobo the Duck” was part of a succession of one-shots merging Marvel & DC characters together, e.g. Wonder Woman & Storm, and in this case Lobo & Howard the Duck. Mechanic-Guy-Who-Resembles-Jack-Kirby never appears again in the issue, though Lobo does machine-gun the villain – Gold-Kidney-Lady – into a bloody mess, five seconds before she throws a switch and pulls the moon into the gravitational pull of Earth as a cliffhanger that would never be resolved.
It was a fun issue.
Alan Grant reaaalllly doesn’t get enough credit for the good stuff he did.