Saturday, December 8, 2012

What the hell?

The cover for issue #3 of Threshold, out in March, I believe. Thanks to Shag Matthews for leading me to this over on Facebook.

Threshold #3
Cover by HOWARD PORTER & Hi-Fi.
• Former Green Lantern Jediah Caul leads an assault on the powers behind the game...a very ill advised assault.
• Introducing CAPTAIN K’ROT!


I am weeping right now. Weeping for my childhood.

They didn't even buy me dinner before they...well, you know.

4 comments:

  1. This is so ridiculously gratuitous, but unfortunately so in keeping with DC's current trend of giving well-known names to unrecognizable and unrelated characters, that I'm afraid that this cover and many like it will be recycled for years to come for camp humor purposes. It has become so predictably routine for DC to count on free advertising via outrage that it has became the default editorial policy to rend existing characters beyond recognition first and maybe craft plots around them later, if at all. This is going to very quickly cause the stories published during this time to become seriously dated and misappropriations like this will be laughed at the way we now look back at the 'talking primate' covers of the 1950's and 1960's and roll our eyes and think "Once or twice maybe, but why do this fifty or sixty times?"

    Immediately before reading this I was reading a blog where someone mentioned plans for Wonder Woman's name to be changed from Diana to Iris. Could imagine Spielberg working on the current Abraham Lincoln movie telling his crew, "I'm not comfortable with his wife being named Mary Todd. I think 'Bernice' works much better." Or, "How about if we have a detective named Dr. Mudd track down the conspirators?" Or, "How about if we give Robert a romantic rival named Ulysses Grant?" It's astonishing that DC doesn't seem to care how transparent they're being about all this.

    If someone at DC genuinely wanted a space rabbit privateer/swashbuckler type, there have been plenty with their own names already:

    http://www.comics.org/issue/30692/cover/4/

    http://www.comics.org/issue/31977/cover/4/

    http://www.comics.org/issue/64496/cover/4/

    They seem to multiply like... well, rabbits. There's no need to name a science fiction character after a super-hero. Of course they did once name a Lensman rip-off after that guy with a magic ring. But expecting to get away with this twice, let alone dozens of times every month for a year and a half is just turning the DC imprint into a punchline.

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  2. I'm changing K'Rot's name to Crotch. Captain Crotch, that is.

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  3. This looks like the kangaroos from Tank Girl. Not Captain Carrot. No reason. No rhyme.

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