No argument here. I was making a point that certain characters tend to borrow the Superman power suite and this is quite boring, a crime Captain Comet was
not guilty of. While I thought George Perez's WONDER WOMAN reboot was alright and actually an improvement in certain ways (Ares was very frightening) I did not like that Wonder Woman, who previously had various unique powers like gliding and bullet-blocking and had a telepathic robot plane, was made to fly fast and be invulnerable. Gee, how innovative.
CAPTAIN MARVEL is arguably the most influential superhero comic of all time. The acid-trip zany weirdness incorporating science fiction and fantasy elements like space travel was a prelude to the worldbuilding and enemies and situations apart from the usual golden age suite of gangsters and fifth columnists; in the Golden Age, usually the existence of the hero was the only departure from reality. CAPTAIN MARVEL is probably the direct comic that led to the Silver Age - at least the aesthetic that defined the Silver Age.
It's interesting to note that in the early days of DC comics, DC assumed all of its stories were set in the "real" world. When the Silver Age came around which followed the Captain Marvel model of goat scientists, talking tigers, and Venus ruled by the Sivanas, it was more and more apparent that the DC Earth, which featured places like Gorilla City and Aquaman's Atlantis, was clearly NOT our own world and the writers set up the concept of "Earth-1." I don't think it happened by Gardner Fox and John Broome and the others getting together around a table and saying "okay, now THIS is Earth-1." The gradual creeping in of fantasy and science fiction elements made DC-Earth so different that it just HAD to be a different place; how people thought of it shifted gradually the more lost cities of gorillas they added.
And I didn't notice the Sivana/Luthor baldness connection until you pointed it out.
As for characters that qualify as "honorable mentions" on my list of favorites and bringing us back on topic:
Silverclaw. Mr. Busiek, kudos on this original creation! Silverclaw had a wonderful personality; a charming, sweet girl from a tiny South American nation, she has a profound desire to be liked and accepted. I am by far inured to cuteness, but Silverclaw crying when she finds her "Tio Jarvis" melted even my withered black heart. Her sentimentality, youth and sparkle-eyed idealism is honest, and so she is not emotionally manipulative or cloying as she could have been. Forget the character appearing in SUPERMAN/BATMAN - Silverclaw is the REAL return of Supergirl! Her national origin (an indigenous South American) makes her different from other shapeshifters; she can turn into cockatoos, boa constrictors, panthers, and llamas (!). She is one of the more distinctive looking female Avengers, mostly because of her ethnic appearance; most other superheroines have Ms. Marvel's face and body. While in general I am not a fan of computer coloring and highlighting in the least, but it WORKS for Silverclaw, whose shiny silver skin would have been a dull gray with the four color "dot" coloring of previous generations.
Why is this character not more frequently used? Well, probably because two of the writers that took over AVENGERS later, Chuck Austen and Brian Michael Bendis, cannot write and wouldn't recognize a character with story potential if they walked up to them and shook their hand at a convention. It's worth noting that one of the few writers to use Silverclaw apart from her creator is Steve Englehart in AVENGERS: CELESTIAL QUEST.
Perhaps it is that in his Kulan Gath tale, Busiek told the definitive Silverclaw story. All I know is, if I was a writer, I wouldn't want to follow THAT one up.
Just Imagine Stan Lee's Sandman. Most of these characters were meant to be one-shots, a thought exercise centered around Stan Lee working with various famous writers, meant to show how Stan the Man would write the various DC Heroes. His concepts were good on many occasions, but really, I hope something more could have been done with this particular character. He was a tough but savvy astronaut who was on occasion, cowardly in a practical way, running away from trouble, endorsing superheroism for the love of a woman instead of for a truly altruistic calling. The "Dream World" background was intense: nightmare demons that could possess people, an entire world that can only be visited in sleep. Granted, we've seen all this before in PROMETHEA, but Alan Moore's pedantic, dry monologues about the nature of reality sucked all the fun out of the dream world (and from PROMETHEA), here it was a fun background with floating islands used for battles with shapechanging nightmare creatures.
