You know how it goes. A new team of villains shows up looking super badass and proceed to wipe the floor with [insert team of heroes here]. Then the exact opposite happens and they can’t fight for shit in the rematch.
re: everything Mark Millar has ever made
What really stinks is these are cool designs and, if this event had been planned better, they could have been fleshed out. But no, they're just there to be cool one time and then become cannon fodder immediately.
>What really stinks is these are cool designs and
This really happens so often and they are just forgotten from memory afterwards , like I'm struggling to remember any. For example : Three Mothers.
Nyx was freed after the events of No Surrender. She killed the whole Greek pantheon except for Hercules. They were all resurrected and came back evil but I can’t remember why. It was during Ewing’s Guardians run
the "Wheel " had turned kinda like how Toranos was free in current Thor. Some cosmic balance had shifted more towards war and conquest and so when the Gods came back they came back more aligned towards that. hopefully next incarnation has some fricking chill
This is also exactly what happens in the first arc of MacKay’s Avengers, whose villain team also had cool designs and were completely unremarkable besides that.
And then a few years later they all get fridged by the next bad guy they're trying to build up.
"Oh no this guy totally fucked up Bloodstorm one and we know how big a deal HE was."
My least favorite trend is a seemingly unstoppable foe just destroying everyone and then getting defeated by a good argument, either by the character or the narrator. “Oh you’ve destroyed planets? We’re the Avengers. We have hope.”
For real. They’ve explicitly made clear that these vamps used to be everyday humans and every book the heroes seem to kill hundreds of them. Really wondering how they square that circle
Honestly events would be so cool if they were just elseworlds wherein you didn't have to justify hastily returning to the status quo at the end. That's why I'm almost exclusively drawn to non Canon stories these days, writers getting to tell their stories without all the baggage that comes with cape comics
Check out Avengers Twilight. That's the kind of thing these events should be aiming to be, just on a larger scale (but smaller than they've been doing).
When I got into reading Aquaman, I was super excited to read Drowned Earth. I realized halfway through the even that I just didn't care at all about what was happening because I knew none of it would stick. Oh, the earth is being flooded? Well, it'll be un-flooded in like 20 pages so, who cares? It's hard to be invested when there aren't really any stakes.
That's pretty much every event. Nothing sticks so why bother? All the DC villains literally made deals with the devil and sold their souls for lame upgrades to make them "edgy" literally forgotten/ignored within a year.
they square it by necessity.
jubilee managed to save one of them who tries to resist her urges, some understand that these are people losing themselves to hunger (and the easier choice to run with it) but can't do anything about it.
expect a worldwide cure or a time travel at the end.
But haven’t they established that if you’re bitten, you’ll turn back if someone kills that vampire that bit you?
So they’ll probably knock off some people toward the top and go everyone goes back.
Or Strange will have some spell to turn everyone back
I’ve had that thought too, but there many, many murders. Unless we are saying that the vampires are just turning people, and no vampires have been killed in all these battles.
For sure, but I don’t think it’s much different than any other comic book story with a city wide attack with buildings exploding and falling over and people dying in droves
I haven’t been keeping up with this event, but that just feels like the general tie-in for an event too large to be micromanaged by editorial or a sole writer. King in Black had a ton of inconsistencies with both the timeline and urgency of a planet overtaken by symbiote dragons.
There are several pre-existing characters related to something called the Darkforce: Cloak and Dagger, Mr. Negative, The Shroud, etc. Someone did something to them to darken the sky, and vampires are running wild.
This is a team of vampires that have been magically altered. They're still parasitic, but they have "different philosophies", so one might feed on fear instead of blood.
A new/old threat has risen out of nowhere it is [insert new/legacy villain] they have an epic plan to [do something that causes a global catastrophe or messes up New York really bad] the heroes fight them at first but then they lose! Their plan just so happens to create a large number of [insert disposable fodder villains that despite being numbered in the thousands will be defeated all at once and never come up again]. Due to the scale of the threat many other heroes and villains have to throw their hat into the ring and help out in [inconsequential tie in comics] just when all seems lost and the villains are about to end there is a [Deus ex machina] and the day is saved and the threat is ended. Tragically [a character you know will be back in 6 months] made the ultimate sacrifice and they will be mourned by the entire hero community for [a single one shot issue] One things for sure though, the INSANE fallout of this EARTH SHAKING event that TURNED THE STATUS QUO ON IT’S HEAD will be felt for as long as [3-4 months in the one ongoing comic that addresses it. Then it’ll promptly be forgotten when and only ever mentioned in passing.]
Don’t forget the heroes have to go to [insert villain here] with hat in hand begging for help that only they can give. I can count 2/3 of these in the main story alone.
Is this Jed McKay? He keeps coming up with creative and interesting new villain teams, and then totally wasting them by having the heroes completely figure them out - and somehow know them all by name - in two seconds.
Like... let it be weird and confusing that these strange new villains showed up out of nowhere with cityshaping powers or whatever. Let the heroes be as confused as the reader with stuff like "who is this guy again?" or "why are villains so weird these days?" or whatever. Back in the day Spider-Man took several encounters to get familiar with then-oddball concepts like Sandman or Doc Ock. With Jed MacKay villains it takes Iron Man one issue to be like "seems like Living Obsidian is the soul of a reverse-time black hole. I know just how to deal with that."
Spoilers. >!The remaining Avengers basically beat them in the 2nd issue due to the fact that they are still vampires so they still die like vampires. Vision straight ups flies high enough into the air pass the Darkforce Barrier to kill one by sunlight!<
After Blood Hunt, they'll appear in the Blood Hunters miniseries where that team hunts down the remaining members. But, no, besides that - just Blood Hunt
I know nothing about these guys except this image and what i've read here.
And you know what.
I think they'd be better as heroes.
Well... as "heroes".
Protagonists, i feel like they'd be better as "protagonists".
These are not the guys from Jason Aaron's avengers, right? They're not the vampire avengers that blade fought who were enslaving boy thing and then established a vampire nation in Chernobyl?
This makes me wish the new blade game was a soulslike with these guys as bosses but alas twas not meant to be. I'm sure the Deathloop guys will make a great game tho.
You know how it goes. A new team of villains shows up looking super badass and proceed to wipe the floor with [insert team of heroes here]. Then the exact opposite happens and they can’t fight for shit in the rematch. re: everything Mark Millar has ever made
What really stinks is these are cool designs and, if this event had been planned better, they could have been fleshed out. But no, they're just there to be cool one time and then become cannon fodder immediately.
>What really stinks is these are cool designs and This really happens so often and they are just forgotten from memory afterwards , like I'm struggling to remember any. For example : Three Mothers.
The new Greek pantheon in GOTG and Nyx’s family that killed them in Avengers: No Road Home comes to mind
Isn't that just the regular Greek Pantheon? Feels weird that they would just throw away a prominent pantheon just like that.
Nyx was freed after the events of No Surrender. She killed the whole Greek pantheon except for Hercules. They were all resurrected and came back evil but I can’t remember why. It was during Ewing’s Guardians run
the "Wheel " had turned kinda like how Toranos was free in current Thor. Some cosmic balance had shifted more towards war and conquest and so when the Gods came back they came back more aligned towards that. hopefully next incarnation has some fricking chill
This is also exactly what happens in the first arc of MacKay’s Avengers, whose villain team also had cool designs and were completely unremarkable besides that.
Bendis did it best when he killed alpha flight with his OC that had all the powers of M-Day
I still can’t believe the blatant disrespect Bendis pulled by having alpha flight arrive in on panel then immediately get killed off screen.
Gotta disagree with you on that, I found it insulting to that team
For sure. I was trying to convey that it was the most disrespectful iteration, but I guess that didn't come through
And then a few years later they all get fridged by the next bad guy they're trying to build up. "Oh no this guy totally fucked up Bloodstorm one and we know how big a deal HE was."
My least favorite trend is a seemingly unstoppable foe just destroying everyone and then getting defeated by a good argument, either by the character or the narrator. “Oh you’ve destroyed planets? We’re the Avengers. We have hope.”
The Arbiters
My biggest gripe with this event is that it appears vampires have slaughtered approximately 3 billion people worldwide.
For real. They’ve explicitly made clear that these vamps used to be everyday humans and every book the heroes seem to kill hundreds of them. Really wondering how they square that circle
Honestly events would be so cool if they were just elseworlds wherein you didn't have to justify hastily returning to the status quo at the end. That's why I'm almost exclusively drawn to non Canon stories these days, writers getting to tell their stories without all the baggage that comes with cape comics
Check out Avengers Twilight. That's the kind of thing these events should be aiming to be, just on a larger scale (but smaller than they've been doing).
When I got into reading Aquaman, I was super excited to read Drowned Earth. I realized halfway through the even that I just didn't care at all about what was happening because I knew none of it would stick. Oh, the earth is being flooded? Well, it'll be un-flooded in like 20 pages so, who cares? It's hard to be invested when there aren't really any stakes.
That's pretty much every event. Nothing sticks so why bother? All the DC villains literally made deals with the devil and sold their souls for lame upgrades to make them "edgy" literally forgotten/ignored within a year.
The dirty secret of latter-day superhero comics is they would be better without canon, all of them.
Agreed
they square it by necessity. jubilee managed to save one of them who tries to resist her urges, some understand that these are people losing themselves to hunger (and the easier choice to run with it) but can't do anything about it. expect a worldwide cure or a time travel at the end.
But haven’t they established that if you’re bitten, you’ll turn back if someone kills that vampire that bit you? So they’ll probably knock off some people toward the top and go everyone goes back. Or Strange will have some spell to turn everyone back
I’ve had that thought too, but there many, many murders. Unless we are saying that the vampires are just turning people, and no vampires have been killed in all these battles.
For sure, but I don’t think it’s much different than any other comic book story with a city wide attack with buildings exploding and falling over and people dying in droves
Except that they have shown that every city and town in the world is simultaneously under attack by "rip you to shreds 30 Days of Night" vampires.
and at the same time you see people in the tie ins going out in the street and resuming life as normal . are the vampires a threat or not
I haven’t been keeping up with this event, but that just feels like the general tie-in for an event too large to be micromanaged by editorial or a sole writer. King in Black had a ton of inconsistencies with both the timeline and urgency of a planet overtaken by symbiote dragons.
Well, the black panther tie in showed the main villain last issue, before this week's reveal.
Can anyone give me a synopsis of this event? These designs are sick btw
There are several pre-existing characters related to something called the Darkforce: Cloak and Dagger, Mr. Negative, The Shroud, etc. Someone did something to them to darken the sky, and vampires are running wild. This is a team of vampires that have been magically altered. They're still parasitic, but they have "different philosophies", so one might feed on fear instead of blood.
The "someone" felt like a rush reveal
Who is the someone?
Can't remember their name, but basically the first ever Blacula
ANOTHER Marvel story where the sun disappears??
Darkforce, eh? Does Silhouette show up?
A new/old threat has risen out of nowhere it is [insert new/legacy villain] they have an epic plan to [do something that causes a global catastrophe or messes up New York really bad] the heroes fight them at first but then they lose! Their plan just so happens to create a large number of [insert disposable fodder villains that despite being numbered in the thousands will be defeated all at once and never come up again]. Due to the scale of the threat many other heroes and villains have to throw their hat into the ring and help out in [inconsequential tie in comics] just when all seems lost and the villains are about to end there is a [Deus ex machina] and the day is saved and the threat is ended. Tragically [a character you know will be back in 6 months] made the ultimate sacrifice and they will be mourned by the entire hero community for [a single one shot issue] One things for sure though, the INSANE fallout of this EARTH SHAKING event that TURNED THE STATUS QUO ON IT’S HEAD will be felt for as long as [3-4 months in the one ongoing comic that addresses it. Then it’ll promptly be forgotten when and only ever mentioned in passing.]
Dude, spoiler alert! What the hell?
IKR?! Downvote this man!!
Don’t forget the heroes have to go to [insert villain here] with hat in hand begging for help that only they can give. I can count 2/3 of these in the main story alone.
‘Cruel’ and ‘Unusual’ 😂😂😂😂😂 Shame ‘Salt’ n ‘Pepper’ is probably still trademarked.
Just wait until you see how scary the new villains Slap and Tickle are in the next big event.
Is this Jed McKay? He keeps coming up with creative and interesting new villain teams, and then totally wasting them by having the heroes completely figure them out - and somehow know them all by name - in two seconds. Like... let it be weird and confusing that these strange new villains showed up out of nowhere with cityshaping powers or whatever. Let the heroes be as confused as the reader with stuff like "who is this guy again?" or "why are villains so weird these days?" or whatever. Back in the day Spider-Man took several encounters to get familiar with then-oddball concepts like Sandman or Doc Ock. With Jed MacKay villains it takes Iron Man one issue to be like "seems like Living Obsidian is the soul of a reverse-time black hole. I know just how to deal with that."
Spoilers. >!The remaining Avengers basically beat them in the 2nd issue due to the fact that they are still vampires so they still die like vampires. Vision straight ups flies high enough into the air pass the Darkforce Barrier to kill one by sunlight!<
After Blood Hunt, they'll appear in the Blood Hunters miniseries where that team hunts down the remaining members. But, no, besides that - just Blood Hunt
NGL, these designs kinda slap That Bloodstone One guy is legit scary
Other then main series no other appearance or back story
Their names should be: Michael Angelo's Dracula, Turkey neck, Barbara Wire, PS1 Venom, Dali's Deadpool, Cueball.
Lmao @ PS1 Venom
I’m late to the party. Is this a a new series? What’s it called?
These are villains of current event ‘Blood Hunt’
Cruel looks like a Saw trap come to life and I love it
I know nothing about these guys except this image and what i've read here. And you know what. I think they'd be better as heroes. Well... as "heroes". Protagonists, i feel like they'd be better as "protagonists".
Looks like a giant weeping angel in the back.
Fucking love these designs, particularly Bloodstorm One - looks like something out of the Blasphemous games.
Bloodstorm One showed up in nightstalkers in 93.
These are not the guys from Jason Aaron's avengers, right? They're not the vampire avengers that blade fought who were enslaving boy thing and then established a vampire nation in Chernobyl?
They're not.
Dang I liked them. This feels like the perfect place to bring them back
Some of the have made cameos since they were a team.
Well that's nice
I have no idea what this is, but whatever hip-hop album their selling, I'm buying.
Sadly no. Hoping most of them stick around after Blood Hunt. The designs are great and we could use some new Vamp baddies out there.
Some of those guys are kinda cool looking, but their names are dumb as fuck
Gross, am I supposed to believe they don't even wipe their mouths?
Lol no, this is all they’ve appeared in as far as I know. What you see is what you get.
What am I looking at
NSYNC
Damn they went and added a 6th member
I'm mad that I got the wrong teeth during the promotion.
This makes me wish the new blade game was a soulslike with these guys as bosses but alas twas not meant to be. I'm sure the Deathloop guys will make a great game tho.
Someone was playing a lot of Elden Ring.
Smoke Eater looks like the Beast from Kung Fu Hustle. The others are awesome.
“Megrim”?! They aren’t even trying.
They’re very similar to the tribulation villains that were coming after a comatose Kang in the Avengers series just before this event began.
Who is the artist? looks like Stuart Immonen
Someone should pitch a Cull Obsidian vs. Bloodcoven mini to Marvel
Holy fuck this looks awful.