Last year, I had the pleasure of having my first book, The League of Regrettable Superheroes, published by the fine folks over at Quirk Books in Philadelphia, PA. Although the cat has been out of the bag for a little while, I'm nonetheless proud to announce that the logical sequel -- The Legion of Regrettable Super-Villains -- is slated to debut on March 28th! You can now pre-order the book over on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and probably on the weird superhero book black market. It does thriving business!
To whet your appetite for the new book, every Friday leading up to the release date, I'll be providing brief snapshots of just some of the 108 (!) historically effed-up bad guys covered in the book (and that's not even counting the sidebars).
"My only vice is that I have no vices." You know who said that? A jerk is who. Everyone's got a vice, but not everyone chooses to wrap their whole identity and modus operandi around it. Here's a trio of villains whose greatest enemy is after-school specials and anti-smoking commercials ...
Created by: John Romita and an uncredited writer
Debuted in: Spider-Man, Storm and Power Man (single issue) (Marvel Comics, June 1982)
Some bad guys' plans involve illegally cornering markets, assassinating political rivals, stealing artifacts of power and attempting to conquer the world. Smokescreen's big game was to try to get teenage athletes to smoke. The overall goal was to ruin their health and, therefore, allow him to make a killing by betting on their games. Regardless, there was really no reason to wear an actual super-villain costume to do that. Probably he could have been in cargo shorts and a popped collar, for all I care.
Created
by: Sam CooperDebuted in: Dynamic Comics #16 (Harry “A” Chesler, October 1945)
Hey man, why all the stress? Why not just mellow out and do some crimes? Reefer King takes advantage of the wartime tobacco shortage to launch a criminal empire of reefer badness. This is, for the sake of clarity, not the "relax and watch daytime game shows" kind of marijuana, but the "This is good weed, I should put the baby in the microwave" kind of marijuana. You know, the kind you need a prescription for. He's basically El Chapo for the Forties, which means he wore a hat and told people "See?" a lot, I reckon. Anyway, look around you, he clearly won.
Debuted in: The New Guardians #2 (DC Comics, October 1988)
God you guys you know what would be a great superpower I mean just a awesome superpower like no fuck seriously I'm not shitting you here what if you could snort cocaine and then when you snort cocaine the cocaine gives you some kind of like superpowers that you got from the cocaine and those superpowers like you could make flame from your body except like the flames are cocaine and the cocaine that like you have the cocaine anyway man I'm not describing it right but you get what I mean like right cocaine super powers fuck man I mean FUCK man that is like I gotta get me some of those cocaine superpowers all right let's get back to the trading floor I got pork futures to sell is my nose bleeding?
Snowflame also had a solid 90 pages of fan manga written about him, so there's that: http://www.snowflamecomic.com/
ReplyDeleteI already have to watch the Swamp Thing TV show and read longford Jack Chick comics and now you lead me to a 90-page Snowflake fan comic. Are you trying to kill me, Tom?
ReplyDelete