strangeduckpaper
Holy Multiverse Batman!
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College student, They/them pronouns. Please forgive me if I don't always boost important posts, my mental health is pretty shoddy as is. Orcpaladinarthur AO3, and you're welcome to make fanat/podfics of my stuff as long as credit it given.
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strangeduckpaper · 38 minutes ago
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The Unsung Hero of Ben 10: Greg Johnson
Put this under Rare Facts, but this deserves its own post.
Ben 10 was pitched by Man of Action in 2002, and spent the next three years in development. Heavily inspired by Dial H for Hero, the concept started out as Ben using the watch to dial in superheroes, as seen in some of Steven E. Gordon's concept art.
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As revealed in I-10, another version was where he'd use the watch, known then as the Megawatt, to swap places between 10 versions of himself from different universes.
However, according to Dave "Devilpig" Johnson, art director and character designer of the first two seasons, a writer named Greg Johnson came up with the final push that would make Ben 10 what it is: Aliens.
However, his contribution was uncredited outside of being mentioned by Dave on Twitter years later. While I can't 100% confirm this, I believe the Greg Johnson we're looking for is the same one who wrote for X-Men Evolution, another show Steven E. Gordon worked on.
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His other credits include scattered episodes of many Marvel cartoons, even up to present day, having written (at the time of writing) 7 episodes of Spidey and His Amazing Friends.
So thank you, Greg Johnson, your idea to introduce aliens made the show into a phenomenon that it probably wouldn't have been without that additional touch.
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strangeduckpaper · 2 hours ago
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As an adult you must cultivate the skill of “Gross! Oh, well. Not my business.”
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strangeduckpaper · 2 hours ago
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Favorites from 2024 🌟
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strangeduckpaper · 2 hours ago
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nothing more sobering than realizing you'd been assuming a cover of a song was the original...like oh phew if the wrong person found out about that i couldve been killed
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strangeduckpaper · 3 hours ago
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watching gen z and millennials make fun of gen alpha has been torturous. "But they're actually stupid" 1. theyre middle schoolers 2. isn't that what older gens said about us? don't you remember being 11?
it truly is just "impulse reaction to cringe <- has not yet unlearned shame"
the cycle continues let me out of here
guys. guys I think we should kill cringe culture
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strangeduckpaper · 4 hours ago
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What's the process if you're a superhero and you come out as trans
Do you tell your villains?
Do you keep it a secret so no one can connect Spider-Man with your secret identity for a while? Or do you pop a pronouns pin on your costume and the next time you web up Doctor Octopus and he goes "I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME SPIDER-MAN" you go "Spider-Girl actually! I've been figuring out some shit"
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strangeduckpaper · 4 hours ago
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titillating
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strangeduckpaper · 6 hours ago
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Tokyo Drift Batgirl
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strangeduckpaper · 7 hours ago
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RWBY fixation kicked in again, here’s Qrow and Yang because I need them interacting more for my health
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strangeduckpaper · 8 hours ago
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I'm watching Pingu right now and wow how did I forget that Pingu once tried to recreate the Tower of Babel.
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strangeduckpaper · 8 hours ago
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Random into the Spiderverse headcanons
- Certain things, such as world religions, stay consistent across realities.
- Miles universe has two female presidents: Victoria Woodhull in 1872 and Shirley Anita Chisholm in 1972.
- Ivanka Trump is the first woman president in Gwen’s universe. Because a Trump is always president somewhere.
- Disney doesn’t exist in Gwen’s universe. However, Don Bluth Productions does.
- Miles introduces Gwen to ‘The Lion King’ and she LOVES it.
- Peni Parker is in the same universe as Big Hero 6. 
- The looney tunes are movie stars in Hamm’s universe.
- There is a Navajo Language version of Sesame Street in Spider-Gwen’s reality.
- A teenage version of Batman exists in Miles’ reality. Bruce goes to school with him.
- Miles knows Bruce Wayne is Batman and Bruce knows Miles knows.  They don’t address it.
- Teenage Riddler and Joker went to Miles’s old school. 
- Miles likes Eddie a lot but Joker AKA Jack terrifies him. 
- Peter B Parker gets confused by some things. Meme’s vary from place to place but so does history. 
-Peter was baffled to find out that WWII never happened in Peni’s universe because Hitler died in WWI or ‘The Great War’ as Peni knows it.
- In fact, maps in Peni’s reality look mostly the same as they did in 1919.
- Movies change too. 
- Miles’s universe somehow got the dark versions of Zootopia and Frozen. Peter B Parker LOVES the Frozen one but Zootopia just made him more depressed.
- The movie Aladdin with Aladdin’s mom (yes he was supposed to have a mom) is Peni Parker’s favorite Disney movie. It doesn’t exist in any other reality.
- The Legend of Zelda actually features Zelda as the lead character in Gwen’s universe.
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strangeduckpaper · 8 hours ago
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Jumping off from my previous question/suggestion, might I please ask if there are any superheroes you think would make fine Pulp Villains and any Supervillains you think would make convincing Pulp Heroes?
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I'm gonna go ahead and remark that I'd personally suggest to anyone who's trying to create pulp characters inspired by superheroes (which would be probably about 90% of you who may want to do that sort of thing) to flip the script around a little. As in, don't try to create pulp analogues to the Justice League/Avengers upfront, but play around with some of the lesser-known icons and filter those through your idea of what “pulp” means (which is gonna be quite different than my own or anyone else’s). 
I’m not gonna really mention characters I’ve already talked about before like Vandal Savage or Namor, instead I’ll pick new ones and see what can be highlighted about them.
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Regarding “Superheroes who could make fine/convincing Pulp Villains”, even though he’s a character I've read basically nothing on, Martian Manhunter definitely leaped out to me as an obvious option. He’s a Sci-Fi Superman who takes the first half of the name to an extreme that borders on comical, except he’s not a square-jawed white man, he’s a 1.000 year old green alien from Mars with shapeshifting powers who can look as monstrous as the artist desires. He’s the product of an advanced civilization and genetic modification, and on top of the Flying Brick powerset and shapeshifting, he also has incredibly powerful and extensive telepathic abilities, he can become invisible, phaze through matter, use telekinesis and other weird abilities. A lot of pulp stories closer to sci-fi were based around the idea of taking one of these abilities and extrapolating horrific consequences for them, and J’onn has those by the dozens. He also has an extremely mundane weakness that would allow him to be beaten by Macready with a blowtorch if that’s where the story ended.
He was also a law enforcement officer from Mars who became a police detective and it’s even right there in his name, and again, I have never read anything he’s in (I should probably pick the Orlando mini), I know he’s for all intents and purposes a generally nice man who tends to job a lot in crossovers and cartoons, but the idea of taking all those great vast and horrifying alien powers, combining all of them into a single character who also happens to be the last survivor of a doomed planet (and one who actually lived through it’s collapse), and then making that character a former cop trying to resume his work on Earth? 
That is a Pulp Supervillain begging to happen, and a particularly horrifying one at that. And hey, speaking of The Thing-
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Now, Plastic Man’s potential for horror has already been explored quite a bit in some of the darker DC continuities like Injustice and DCeased, and it’s quite funny seeing a lot of these turn Plastic Man into The Thing because there were quite a handful of Wold Newton pages that ran with the idea that Macready from the original story was Doc Savage, and that the secret chemicals that Eel O’Brian was hit by that gave him his powers were actually samples of The Thing contained in one of Savage’s labs. Regardless, the idea of a former street crook suddenly gaining bizarre shapeshifting abilities that allow him to reign terror on his gangster associates could make for a great premise as a pulp crime story that veers into horror as the gangsters gradually figure out what is Eel O’Brian’s deal, and then the story can take a more tragic turn.
The thing about Jack Cole’s Plastic Man that modern takes on the character neglect is that, while Plas was a lively roguish anti-hero (arguably the first of it’s kind in comics), he’s still for intents and purposes “the straight man” (HA, right, Plastic Man being “straight”). He’s the relatively sane hero who plays off Woozy’s wackier misadventures and the imaginative madness that Jack Cole paints his adventures with, and it makes for an interesting contrast considering Plastic Man is already a weird character, having to ramp up the strangeness of the world around him so that he still remains the sane man. There are ways to twist this into something quite horrifying, even tragic for Plastic Man as he either struggles to maintain coherency, or embraces the shifting chaos the world’s spiraling into for better or worse (and definitely for the worse towards those on the receiving end of his vengeance, or even his humor).
Now, onto the flipside, regarding Supervillains that could become Pulp Heroes -
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Normally I’d not mention the Batman villains here, because I already have a lot to talk about in regards to them as is, they comprise some of my favorite comic characters, but I pretty much have to make an exception for Two-Face in this topic, as not only a pretty obvious option but one with even case studies to prove it, as not only do we have The Black Bat, a 1930s costumed pulp hero with an identical origin story and several other conceptual overlaps with Batman, as well as The Whisperer, a young hotshot police commissioner who dresses up as a disfigured vigilante to kill criminals without consequence (and who’s somehow less of a maniacal asshole in his secret identity than in his regular one), but it turns out that there actually was a 1910s pulp hero called The Two-Faced Man:
Crewe was created by “Varick Vanardy,” the pseudonym of Frederic van Rensselaer Dey (Nick Carter, Doctor Quartz), and appeared in three short stories and two novels and short story collections from 1914 to 1919, beginning with “That Man Crew” (The Cavalier, Jan. 24, 1914). 
Crewe is “The Two-Faced Man.” 
He is in his forties and has gray hair and a “sharply cut and handsome profile—until one caught a view of the other side of his face and saw the almost hideous blemish that nearly covered it, and which graduated in corrugated irregularity from a delicate pink to repulsive purple.” 
Crewe is two-faced in another way. Crewe is a saloon owner in below Washington Square. But he has another identity: Birge Moreau, portraitist and socialite hanger-on. Crewe uses both his identities to solve crimes as an amateur detective.
The only person to know about both of Crewe’s identities is a police inspector who is also Crewe’s friend and who Crewe helps in pressing cases - The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heores by Jess Nevins
And speaking of obvious picks for Supervillains turned Pulp Heroes,
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Assuming I even need to make a case for Kraven the Hunter other than just presenting this cropped panel from Squirrel Girl and in particular the art painted on the Kra-Van, or even just telling you to read Squirrel Girl and it’s take on “The Unhuntable Sergei” (I had no idea most of the people saying “Kraven’s arc in Squirrel Girl is as good if not better than Kraven’s Last Hunt” weren’t actually joking in the slightest and I speak as someone who has Kraven among their absolute favorite Marvel characters, it had no right being that good), I’m going to quote the brilliant Rogue’s Review from The Mindless Ones that lays down in painstaking detail why Kraven could make a killer protagonist in that horrifically over-the-top pulp fashion
One thing that strikes me writing this, is how well Kraven could hold his own comic. There’s always room for a book spotlighting a ruthless, hardcore, gentleman bastard, and Kraven’s raison d’etre makes him supremely versatile, so well suited to any genre, any environment. It’s odd that more writers haven’t jumped on the fact that in a universe where off-world travel is possible – indeed, common – a hunter like Kraven would have a field day. 
I can just imagine the opening scene – herds of weird cthuloid bat creatures grazing in the gloomy green nitrogen fields, bathed in lethal, bone splintering fog, when, suddenly, LIGHT! from above and an unholy bellowing: “CTHGRGN fthgrgnARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHGN!”
They look up in fear and then they start to run – ploughing into and over each other, tentacles flailing, as from the space-ship’s docking bay Kraven silently plummets, barely dressed for the cold, a glowing knife smothered in elder signs jammed between his teeth. 
You should have seen him one night previous, sipping alien tokay around the Captain’s table with the other guests, discussing the morning’s hunt; and the way he insulted the Skrull dignitary by forgetting himself and accidentally sporting his favourite piece of formal wear: his boiling unstable dinner-jacket of many colours, fashioned from the hide of one of the Ambassador’s super kinsmen.
Whoops!
Midway through Kraven explaining how the best way to irreparably damage a symbiote is to wait until its bonded with you and then seriously maim yourself, the Skrull decided it might be a good idea to simmer down, while his beautiful Inhuman lover hung on every word.
The deeper I get into this the more convinced I am that the MU’s hunter-killer extraordinaire wouldn’t limit himself to bloody planet Earth. And neither would he limit himself to this dimension, or universe or timeline. The guy’d be just as at home leaping, sword raised, onto the back of a T-Rex in the Savage Land, as he would be ploughing through werewolves in the graveyards of Arkham or tracking a howling Demon across Mephistopheles’ realm. 
He’d work perfectly in all these environments because he has a damn good reason to be casting a bloody swathe through them: wherever there’s big game, you’ll find Kraven.
The next choice I guess is an oddball, but not that much of an oddball if you know already what is my main frame of reference towards Marvel
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I don’t think people appreciate enough that the main reason Shuma-Gorath has anything resembling a fanbase has nothing whatsoever to do with the comics he was in, but entirely because, when Capcom designers had a list of Marvel characters to pick from to work on Marvel Super Heroes, they took a look at the diet Cthulhu and went “gimme THAT one”, and then went all-in in giving the alien squid monster a funky personality along with a great stage and music and animations and all that great fighting game character stuff, and now he’s maybe the most popular Dr Strange villain along with Dormammu and Mordo, despite having ZERO film appearences or major showings in comic sagas.
Capcom's designers redefined Shuma-Gorath from a nebulous cosmic evil into a comically smug cartoon bastard who can rant about devouring all dimensions and souls horrifically while also cracking poses and zingers like “How do you expect to win a fight with only two arms?” and having dinners with Dhalsim or hosting Japanese game shows in his endings, and it kills me that none of this ever made it’s way into any depictions of the character outside of MvC. 
So that’s kinda what I’d go with. I’d take Capcom’s Shuma-Gorath, depower him a bit obviously from his canonical power, and run with the premise of his MvC3 ending where he decides that, well, if he's the unlikely savior of this pathetic planet and these wretched human dogs like him so much, and he’s clearly having a much better time here among them than he ever had drifting among the stars cealessly consuming life, then maybe he can take a break from all that eldritch business and keep up hosting the Super Monster Awesome Hour and maybe fight whatever PITIFUL villains think can take HIS planet. I mean, he’ll probably still end up destroying the planet by the end, but why not give this hero business a try?
Just until he gets his full powers back of course. 
I mean you can’t deny he DOES look pretty good in that bowtie, surely The Great Shuma-Gorath wouldn’t be so unmerciful as to deny these vile wastes of flesh something good to look at in their brief and miserable lives.
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strangeduckpaper · 8 hours ago
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In 1976, after Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, the most important person in roleplaying games was a Los Angeles woman named Lee Gold. She still contributes to the hobby and still runs a campaign using her Lands of Adventure (1983) game. ...
The shabby state of D&D’s original rules inspired much discussion, and Lee’s [fanzine] Alarums & Excursions served as the hub of this network. “All the role players I know, when we looked a Gary Gygax’s game with its “% liar” and all its typos said, ‘this stuff needs tinkering.’ ... Everybody tinkered with D&D because it needed tinkering to be playable. The nice part about D&D was that it obviously needed player help. ...
Soon though, Gary came to hate APAs like A&E. Partly, he seemed to see APAs as ringleaders for thieves, and not just the sort who—in Gary’s estimation—stole a ride on his coattales. Remember that Lee Gold started with a photocopy of the D&D rules. Early on, copies of D&D, especially outside of TSR’s reach in the Midwest, proved scarce. The $10 price of the original box struck many gamers as outrageous. In the first issues of Alarums & Excursions, some contributors argued that TSR’s profiteering justified Xerox copies of the D&D rules. Gary wrote a rebuttal and Lee told readers that Gary deserved to gain from his work and investment. Surely though, he remained incensed. ...
Meanwhile, Lee published A&E and began writing games. Much of her work showed an interest in history and particularly Japan, where she lived 4 months during A&E’s first year. Land of the Rising Sun (1980) extended the Chivalry & Sorcery system to Japan. Her game Lands of Adventure (1983) aimed for roleplaying in historical settings. Her other credits include GURPS Japan (1988) and Vikings (1989) for Rolemaster. ...
Meanwhile, the men in gaming tended to suppose that only men contributed to the hobby. Lee remembers visiting the Origins convention and spotting shirts for sale that identified the wearer as a “wargaming widow.” Why else would a woman attend a gaming convention?
After Lee finished writing Land of the Rising Sun for Fantasy Games Unlimited, she met publisher Scott Bizar at a local convention to sign the contract. She recalls discussing the game’s credits.
“Do you want to say this game is written by yourself and your husband Barry?” Bizar asked.
“No,” I said. “Barry didn’t write any bit of it. He did the indexing, and I gave him full credit for that. I wrote all of the game. Just say the game is by Lee Gold.”
“Most female writers say they wrote a game with their husbands,” said Bizar.
“I don’t care what other people do,” I said. “Just say the game is by Lee Gold.” And so Land of the Rising Sun came out as written by Lee Gold.
Her one personal encounter with Gary Gygax revealed a similar bias. Early on, Lee sent copies of A&E to TSR. After a couple of months, she received a phone call, which she recounts.
“This is Gary Gygax,” said the voice, “and I’d like to speak to Lee Gold.”
“I’m Lee Gold,” I said. “I gather you got the copies of A&E I sent you.”
“You’re a woman!” he said.
“That’s right,” I said, and I told him how much we all loved playing D&D and how grateful we were to him for writing it.
“You’re a woman,” he said. “I wrote some bad things about women wargamers once.”
“You don’t need to feel embarrassed,” I said. “I haven’t read them.”
“You’re a woman,” he said.
We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so I told him goodbye and hung up.
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strangeduckpaper · 8 hours ago
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Forest spirit in color, imposing yet gentle.
...sometimes anyway
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strangeduckpaper · 8 hours ago
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you know there actually is a meaningful difference between 'men's' and 'women's' deodorant beyond the selection of scents. 'mens' plays better with pit hair and doesn't pill up in it and 'womens' tends to have a more powdery finish to help prevent chafing. so really the two genders are actually hairy and bald.
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strangeduckpaper · 8 hours ago
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A group of rough looking boys walked past me today and all I heard of their conversation was “he’s got that anxiety disorder bro so I went with him so he’d be more comfortable” and it made me realise the world isn’t all that bad
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strangeduckpaper · 8 hours ago
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every time you make freezer food for dinner instead of buying takeout like you actually want you should earn two hundred dollars cash and a round of applause
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