#superhero squad

[proselfship-huggies]

Hi! Is it alright to ask for a CG! F/O hug from Silver Surfer from The Superhero Squad? I've loved him beyond words since I was little but i know the show isn't incredibly well known so If you want I can pick another character and it's fine! 😅😅

“Well, of course you can get a hug little one! C'mere!” *hug* “There there, I’m right here for ya, okay? I’m here, I promise. Things will be okay, please remember that. You can always ask me for assistance, whether that’s hugs or comfort, I’ll be happy to give it to you, my dear. I care about you so so much.” - Silver Surfer

[shadow-coolness]

These 2 are dating in this continuity…remember that because if i had to then so do you.

[mischief-lies-and-stories]

Reacting to Animated Marvel Shows 6/?

Again, no context for this show. Spoilers for Superhero Squad 1x20 (though on IMDb it's 1x07 so it might be mixed up on Disney+).

I'm afraid of what cliched writing I'm about to get myself into.

Hey, hey, Marvel? Would it kill ya to give us an animated Loki that isn't, or at least doesn't stay, the villain? Just once?

Here comes my boi!

That is a disturbing uhh post-modern industrial take on Cthulu?

THE FUCK IS M.O.D.O.K'S VOICE???

THAT'S STITCH!!!

Oh shit Loki's a little one in this

I mean, they're all kinda chibi-ish, but my boi is YOUNG

FUCK OFF, creature from the black lagoon, only Loki gets to make that stupid pun

I take issue with "wicked" and I take issue with "half-brother". It's "anti-heroic adopted sibling," M.O.D.O.K.

Oh my god, we're going Batman rogues gallery levels of nonstop shitty name-related puns, huh?

Also god I hate the voice this actor is doing for him but it is pretty camp, so I guess it's accurate in that respect.

Whoa Loki flirting with Doom is a very bold choice [please I want to see this in the MCU please]

Characterization? On point. Fight skills? Horrendous. No magic, whatsoever. Voice? Makes me want to chew glass. Like Kronk coming off of helium while starting a sugar rush. Laughter? I'm gonna hit him as hard as I can and I will not resent the consequences, it's so fucking grating. Who is this voice actor and why did they think it was good casting?? At least he has green eyes this time.

Why does he have one of those handheld devices from Cyberchase???

Why is Falcon fighting over a ball with a kid? Sam, it's a game and Reptil is like 15.

Hulk spit it out oh my god

Ironman's like "All right time to stage an unprompted invasion. You know, like how heroes famously always do?" Tony, please stop violating the Geneva Convention

And then Hulk recreated the story of John Henry

Hey guys, where's Loki? He's kinda the whole reason that I'm here. Not that Tony starting a war isn't fascinating and very original...

Tony is warmongering and horny

Tony, you literally watched Thor jump onto her horse and hug her immediately. I'm gonna guess she's not single.

Falcon I am begging you to grow up

Heimdall stop with the Lord of the Rings references

Heimdall is also a voice I recognize. Hang on. Well I was on IMDb for like 10 minutes because the man was in a lot of video games (which is not helpful because I only play Animal Crossing), but the only thing I recognized was that he played Santa/Jolnir in Frost Fight.

Wolverine's voice is so funny!

Fandral! Volstagg!

It has taken me an embarrassingly long time (15 min in) to realize that while Travis Willingham does not voice Thor in this show (I looked that up immediately), he does voice Hulk.

Noooo Volstagg!

Thor: This is your fault. Dad asked me to stop you.

Loki: Yeah, he always loved you best.

Loki, I'm with you, usually, but that's not the point right now. You're leading a fucking coup, you don't exactly get to play the "Daddy's choosing sides" card here.

He's got a point, Thor. It is coming off the "Thor is a baby" schoolyard taunts, but he's not wrong about the inaccurate Elizabethan English.

"Take it back!" Take what back, Thor? That you talk like a middle schooler playing dnd for the first time? He's making an observation, and frankly, the shit I've said about your jargon is ruder than what he did.

Most accurate representation of sibling squabbles, but y'all aren't twelve

I'm SQUAWKING! Never have I been so excited over a typo before.

Doom watching TV Guide is the best joke in this episode

Ruh Roh

[maxwell-grant]

There's a trend people have pointed out in superhero stories over the past 20 or so years that is the death of "regular" supporting casts, an increasing absence of un-powered sidekicks or people involved who aren't in the thick of the action or in the hero's secret. Everyone who interacts with superheroes is a couple issues away from becoming one, every story involves a supervillain encounter or several dozen, every hero's gotta have a lunchbox-ready "superhero family" made from these characters, and every side character that doesn't join them is either going to die or become a supervillain.

The defining example people use for this is Spider-Man's supporting cast, with every Spider-Man cast member short of Aunt May and J Jonah Jameson getting some kind of powered upgrade or symbiote, and I'm gonna say Amanda Waller is an excellent case study of how this kind of thing happens, and I think it helps to explain why Amanda Waller has been, Like That, for the past 30 years.

She’s wearing a grey shirt underneath a blue blazer and it’s tucked into a similarly blue skirt that stops at mid calf. She reminds me of the neighbourhood aunties I used to see leaving for church every Sunday morning.

My mom used to say that you are the company you keep. So what kind of person does it take to keep a variety of bruised, battered, and dangerous personalities in check? - Amanda Waller: DC's Most Terrifying Woman

To those of you who haven't read John Ostrander and Kim Yale's Suicide Squad, there once was a time where Amanda Waller was something more than a powerful antagonistic force able to butt heads with the biggest superheroes, and something other than a heartless establishment face out to make superheroes miserable for ill-defined reasons. Structurally speaking, Suicide Squad is a comic about marginal DCU characters forced to deal with actual real life problems, and it's central character is a marginalized person forced to deal with DCU problems and characters. The members of the Squad are a rolling parade of costumed misfits and maniacs assigned to go around the globe to fight and kill and die on dirty missions to deal with dirty laundry and stop war zones from erupting, while Amanda Waller is forced to shuffle around her cadre of D-list supervillains and disgraced superheroes and get into stand-offs with secret spy societies, living nukes, voodoo cartels, and Batman.

Amanda Waller neither looks nor acts like the kind of character that stars in a superhero comic, and she is the central character throughout the 66 issues of the run and we follow her character arc from beginning to end as she's forced to spin plates to accomplish her goals and prevent bad situations from getting worse. She is the most fully realized character in the run and everything rests on her shoulders. We spend a lot of time inside her head, her team, her associates, she is the center holding together an extremely chaotic book with no two characters on the same page. She is, and has to be, an extremely powerful person, someone who stands her ground no matter what, an unbeatable force of will because that is the only way she's going to survive the situations she's in, the only way she can be "The Wall", the kind of person who can repel Batman, command a platoon of monsters, talk her way out of Deadshot's contract, someone who can stare at Darkseid and credibly threaten the President into letting her live.

That's the part that everyone is more or less familiar. But there is, or at least used to be, much more to Amanda Waller than just being The Wall, not in the least because being The Wall is also hampering her effectiveness as well as straight up killing her.

"Amanda's toughness has taken her a long way" "It's taken her as far as it can. But it can't take her no further. It's actually starting to drag her down. I'm scared for my baby sister, rev - scared that the anger in her is congealing into hate." - Suicide Squad #31

We get to know her backstory, her plans, her points of contention with the system, her relationships with people around her, and how deeply she cares about things and people even as she sends them to the meatgrinder. From the start we learn that Waller staffs her team with people she's prone to getting into disagreements with, like Simon LaGrieve and Rick Flag, specifically so they can cover her moral blind spots and pick up the slack in emotional intelligence she's lacking, be the heroes that she can't afford to be. It is unspeakably crucial that the Squad is led by Rick Flag as well as Bronze Tiger, a fallen hero who owes Waller for his recovery who eventually takes Flag's baton. Waller stands up for her team, gets into fights with her superiors when they decide to terminate them, and takes the fall for them when necessary. Waller is a person who does Bad Things - but she is not a Bad Person.

The book in no uncertain terms frames the Suicide Squad's existence as monstrous in a scale Waller doesn't understand until the very end, and it digs deep into the unethical things Waller has to allow for and perpetrate in order to keep it running no matter how many lives it saves, and she spends the first half of the book on a downward spiral. But then there's the 2nd half of the book:

In the first 39 issues, Amanda’s flaws are her undoing. As she pushes away the people she hired to act as a balance, she grasped tighter and tighter to her uncompromised vision of the Suicide Squad despite the constant changes and derailment. Her choices had consequences: the death of Rick Flag, her demotion, employees quitting, and finally, the disbandment of the team.

The last 27 issues have Amanda rising up from the ashes after a year in jail. She’s less in her own way – she communicates, her anger isn’t driving her, she’s more receptive of alternative perspective and recognizes when she’s wrong in real time – but she’s still just as scary.

Waller rebuilds her relationships with the people she drove away, takes a different tack to how the team works, and starts going out into the frontlines with the Squad. She brings Oracle (who actually made her debut in this comic) into the fold, saves her life and plays a big role in Barbara making progress in overcoming her Joker trauma. She genuinely puts in the work to improve as a person and do things a better way than before, even if there is an inescapable immorality to the very existence of the Squad and what they do. That immorality never goes away, and it only further horrifies her when learning how badly her project has gone. In fact, it's that very inescapable immorality that ends her arc.

She learns that the CIA has started using a new Suicide Squad to support a brutal regime in South America, and when faced with the full extent of her complicity in Western imperialism? She decides right then and there to end the Suicide Squad for good after they liberate the population of said regime from said Squad. She is the only person who gives a shit about the country enough to start the assignment for free once she knows about it, force the Squad along, lead the mission in field, and personally (and even gently) usher the villain to his death at the end, to end what began with her.

She does bad things, and she does good things. She cares about people, and she uses people. Her decisions ruin as well as save the world. She spins a million plates to match wills and wits with the strongest, wickedest, most cunning humans and superhumans alike, and she still has superiors to answer to and people close to her she hires to judge her for what she does. She endured racism and misogyny and poverty for decades and rode whatever she could to attain as much power over her own life as someone like her could possibly attain, and to have it, she must be a willing tool of the state and bend the knee to Ronald Reagan, the man she derides for what he did to her community, hating every minute of it.

She lost her family to sexual and racial violence, and now she wrangles a penal battalion comprised of some of the worst people on the planet to inflict violence on her orders. She has saved and redeemed people, and she's haunted by the corpses she's left in her wake. She is oppressed and oppressor, someone who could only escape the ravages of American imperialism by becoming one of it's chief enforcers, and still she rebuilds herself into a better person from it upon confronting and challenging her role in it. She is not a bad person, she is not a good person either, she is just afforded a degree of agency and complexity unpowered characters in superhero books simply don't get.

Okay cool, now what is she up to these days?

That, I guess. That is what a strong but unpowered person who does not allow themselves to be bossed around by superheroes or supervillains looks like now. Everytime there's a call for a military bad guy, Waller gets tagged in to be DC's Henry Gyrich. There was a point where Waller was made to contrast the likes of Sarge Steel and Wade Eiling, someone who butted heads with them because she was a well-meaning person working for and committing evil as often as she attempted to stop it. These days, the most consistent beat with her is that she is the most dangerous person alive and worse than the villains she wrangles into working for her. She is a thing to be overcome, a hypocrite to be exposed, a challenge to the natural order of the universe, and she is too terrific at it to be shuffled off quietly. She is a Bad Person and so everything she says and does is Bad (and thus can be ignored).

Integral to Suicide Squad's structure was the fact that Waller was the center holding everything together, the ultimate third party: spinning plates working with, for and against all of the others so she can bend rules and be bent by them. Bent, but never broken, because The Wall doesn't break, others break first. Waller was a one-of-a-kind character, and that broke her, because beating Sarge Steel and Wade Eiling at their own game means replacing Sarge Steel and Wade Eiling. Waller doesn't look like them, she doesn't look like the superheroes either, and so she can't be one of them. She can't even look like herself a lot of the time, they try to slim her up everytime they think they can get away with it.

Suicide Squad was preoccupied with exploring a perspective from a world outside the superhero worldview, but we no longer have her perspective or that of people around her, we only know her through the superheroes she inherently defies and has had an adversarial relationship against from day one. She is someone with a viewpoint that is charitable to neither superheroes nor institutions, and thus, the universe is increasingly less sympathetic to her, the less utility she has to the grander narrative where everyone has to pick between one of two options. If she wasn't powerful and assertive, she'd be another Leslie Thompkins, another Jiminy Cricket the heroes passively ignore. But because she is powerful and doing morally compromised things without asking Batman's permission, she must have a personal grudge. She must be a government monster. She must attack the superheroes for no reason, no ideology, no motive.

So now she's just The Wall 24/7, the mean icy establishment boot who is strong and clever and cruel and hates superheroes and wants to destroy superheroes and rule the world from the shadows. Everything she does is a fuck-up she refuses to take responsability for, everyone is right to hate and distrust mean old Waller, and now everyone gets to look good by dunking on her. They couldn't make her a superhero, so they made her a generic supervillain instead. And now that she's a bad guy, she no longer has to believe anything, she doesn't really have to mean anything, they don't have to write stories about something other than superheroes and supervillains, and they don't have to let a fat woman of color take up space and screentime they could be giving to Harley Quinn and Slade Wilson instead.

Even by the time of Waller's debut on the tail end of the 80s, her career opportunities were on their way to extinction

Days Of Future Past marks the triumph of the superhero comic that's pretty much concerned with no-one but superheroes. Where Ditko and Lee's Spider-Man featured a single costumed crimefighter in the context of a commonplace existence, the X-Men of the 80s focused on a huge cast of mutants who had little if any lasting involvement in the everyday world.

By the 21st century, the corporate superhero comic would largely - if not exclusively - concern itself with little beyond a large class of superhumans and their fantastical existence. I suspect there's a significant correlation between that and the continuing cultural  peripherilisation of the superhero comic - Colin Smith

Amanda Waller is one of the strongest characters in all of comics, she was as powerful as an non-superpowered character given center stage could possibly be, a perfectly designed character from which an entire corner of a shared universe was developed out of with her as the center making it work, but as the room for civilian casts and unpowered protagonists got smaller and smaller, so did Waller's options. If she was a Spider-Man character and somehow didn't get killed or made into a villain, they would have slimmed her up and given her a symbiote, because you're nobody unless you're web-swinging. Characters didn't look or act like Amanda Waller, and unfortunately, they still don't. It's just instead of making more characters like her, they gutted Waller to be more like the rest. If she couldn't make it, who else even could.

Keep your eyes peeled for this summer when she'll team up with two meaningless robot baddies to burn down the Justice League and I guess the universe for the next reboot or something.

[dailyflicks]

The Suicide Squad (2019) dir. James Gunn

[knave2427]

Wonder Woman gifs from SS:KTJL; vault scene. Hopefully these come out better than the last gifs. Still trying to figure out how to make these things look good on mobile.

[kingoftheu]

Superman fans I am pleased to report: we are so fucking back

many are saying we never even left

[strawberrylind]

midnight rendezvous

[ducktoonsfanart]

Darkwing Duck and Duck Avenger (PKNA) with their families as superheroes in action (redraw) - Darkwing Duck, Duck comics and Quack Pack AU - Duckverse - Happy my birthday!

I haven't contacted you for a long time because of my problems, but here I am to say that the day has come, that is, today is my birthday (5th April). Yes, I celebrate the same day, when Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball, the best manga and anime for me, was born on this day. Certainly a big thank you to him for that!

Well, considering that most people don't know about it, I'm going to publish my tribute, i.e. a redraw of my drawings and that I drew what I like the most. This is a redraw of an old drawing where I drew Duck Avenger (Donald Duck) and Darkwing Duck (Drake Mallard) together in action along with their wives, partners and their children as superheroes. By the way, it's part of my fanfiction that I'm currently writing and it's about that crossover between Duck Avenger and Darkwing Duck. For more stuff see my old drawing code: https://ducktoonsfanart.tumblr.com/post/666638654144446464/ducklooney-now-a-big-surprise-especially-for

Yes, Drake and Donald have similar personalities and have the same angry jerk ego that puts them at odds together (and I love that), but they are also great superheroes and protect their towns (Duckburg and St. Canard) from various villains. And then there's Morgana Macawber, a witch from Transylvania and sometimes Drake's love interest who mostly deals with magic, Daisy Duck as She-Wenger (Paperinika, Super Daisy) as a special version, Uno (One-Uno Ducklair A.I. duck who helps and tasks Paperinik ), Launchpad McQuack, Gosalyn Mallard as Quiverwing Quack (yes Gosalyn is a teenager here and is the same number of years as HDL) and of course Donald's nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie (they are teenagers as from Quack Pack) as T-Squad superheroes (my version). Huey is the Red Shadow, Dewey is the Blue Cyclops and Louie is the Green Avenger. Similar to the old drawing, but significantly modified which I did in my own ways by combining various styles into one. I hope you like it! Also Happy Anniversary Darkwing Duck and PKNA Version Duck Avenger!

If you want to see more of this and if you liked this drawing, feel free to like and reblog this, but please don't use these same ideas and versions without my permission and without mentioning me! Thank you! And it's time for action! Let's Get Dangerous! And happy birthday to me!

[tragically-jane-doe]

I've gotten obsessed with SuperBat but I simply do not have it in me to become obsessed with marvel I just dont

The superhero puns and the insanely bad alter egos are infact driving me insane

Anyways if anyone has some good SuperBat or more importantly Brucie Wayne fics drop em here please

Someone put me out of my misery please

[literaryspinster]

I just saw a commenter annoyed with Marie for being afraid to use her powers and... the only time i can recall her being hesitant to use her powers was when she didn't want to hurt Cate. Also, even if she was always afraid to use them she has a good damn reason because she's killed and maimed several people completely by accident. People are so goddamn weird on Twitter.

[cryoverkiltmilk]

Much like dinosaur chicken nuggets and plastic dinosaur toys, I feel we have crossed some kind of threshold with this, because all I can see is a Horikoshi bonus art of Toga and Monoma in westbo cosplay.

[maxwell-grant]

Who's to say which of them had it worse in the late 80s

[dailyflicks]

THE SUICIDE SQUAD (2021) dir. James Gunn

[knave2427]

[extraordinary-heroes]

Suicide Squad #20 (Cover art by Otto Schmidt)