This is awful. I mean really, really awful. And yet…It’s also fantastic. It’s all the reasons comics are better than movies: They can tell over-the-top, stupid stories and go completely nuts with them.
“The one where Captain America becomes a werewolf.”
It’s also the one that rebooted Doctor Druid. So…Two reasons never to read these issues.
The tale starts with Wolverine hunting a werewolf and John Jameson (formerly Man Wolf) having gone missing. We then meet a new character…
Sigh. A werewolf hunter called Moon Hunter. Not only does his name not make sense, but we already have a moon-themed werewolf hunter, and you can’t tell me Moon Knight is too busy to join this story when Wolverine is in it and is also in no less than a dozen other comics in the same month.
But I guess Moon Knight doesn’t have armored underoos.
Now, about that Doc Druid reboot…
Somehow, he’s younger and has a lot more hair.
Wolverine meets Moon Hunter.
And really??? He can defeat Wolverine????
So Moon hunter is working for Nightshade, and she can mind-control Wolverine.
She also dresses in an S and M outfit now.
And so Cap is captured too.
And I’m sure you know what comes next….
Bondage! Good thing she’s got that black leather costume now!
Cap is transformed. He meet other mutated werewolves.
And learns to speak werewolf. From Wolfsbane. I know that the below pic doesn’t look like her, but it is her.
Rahne being prisoner means we get a few panels of Cable and Shatterstar. But they don’t get involved.
Meanwhile, Dr. Druid tries to figure out how to help…And meets Druid!
Druid has the moon gem that changed John Jameson into Man Wolf, and he’s been mind-controlling Nightshade as well. I don’t really understand why he needs to work through Nightshade, but apparently he does. So she’s not the villain we thought she was. I wonder if he also got her to dress up like a femdom?
Nightshade puts him in a cage with the other werewolves and he becomes their Moses, rallying them to fight for freedom.
They get free and they go to rescue Dr. Druid, only to find that Dredmund Druid has accessed cosmic werewolf power.
Cosmic werewolf. Is this worse than black Punisher? Better? Bad and good for all the same reasons?
All this AND an Infinity War tie-in when Cap’s Magus doppleganger shows up for a bit.
Cable and Feral show up at the end to help with the big finale.
And in the conclusion, in a bizarre piece of Gruenwald randomness, Jack “Werewolf by Night” Russell drives off riding bitch behind Wolf from Team America!
Cap has to recover from all this. I mean, it was a lot to go through in six issue.
But at least it ends with Falcon and Cap being a duo again.
In the backups, Diamondback is still being held by Crossbones and no one cares. D-Man fights his Infinity War doppleganger and no one cares.
And Mother Night and Crossbones seem to … Getting it on?
Really, the only part of all this mishmash I objected to was the “hunkafication” of Dr. Druid. Where did he get all the new hair, and how did he lose the Dad-bod-?? Dr. Anthoney Druid may not be the Character-find of ANY year, but at least he was relatable. A superhero who is not A) Young B) Ridiculously buff, and C) Bald! Of course, all that detriment eventually worked against him, because nobody liked him and he never caught on, but at least he was realistic, as superheroes go. Always a pleasure to see Deadly Nightshade. Between the little black leather bikini she first showed up in, ( in ‘Captain America & The Falcon’# 164 ) and the black leather jumpsuit she’s rocking here, something tells me Nightshade, Queen of the Werewolves would be one fun girlfriend! Plus, she’s super-smart! Super-smart is sexy!
Doctor Druid sucks.
This is something that annoys me and perplexes me: when somebody reads an entire comic book cover to cover, reads all the word balloons and captions, reads the comics that came immediately before and after as well, and then…when they write a summary of the plot…they get something very important ENTIRELY wrong.
You wrote that Cutthroat wanted to kill Crossbones because he was jealous, because he thought that Crossbones was a romantic rival. There is no mention of the fact that Cutthroat is Diamondback’s BROTHER! You say that nobody cares about Diamondback being held captive by him, but I’ve read this story twice and Cutthroat VISITS her and gives her a big speech about how he’s going to save her from Crossbones.
Look at the name you have listed for Cutthroat. Daniel LEIGHTON. Look at the name you have listed for Diamondback. Rachel LEIGHTON. Believe it or not, I’m trying very hard not to be rude here, but that’s the kind of thing that should jump right out at you…assuming that you didn’t bother to read Danny’s scene with Rachel, which I’m almost 100% sure is in the same issue where he tries to kill Crossbones.
Why does Cutthroat want to kill Crossbones? I knew this backstory even before I read digital copies of these stories, thanks to Wikipedia and other sources. It isn’t included in the digital copy of the Galactic Storm tie-in issue that it originally appeared in, but by now it’s well known and easy to find scans of.
Diamondback, when she was a teenager, had older brothers who were in a gang. The leader of the gang was Brock Rumlow, the guy who would go on to become Crossbones. Poor little Rachel wanted to be part of the gang too and, with NO idea what she was getting herself into, broke into their clubhouse hoping to impress Brock. She then said that she would do anything to join the gang with her brothers, who were absent at the time.
You see where this is going, right? For a ’90s comic, even the edgy ’90s, this gets fucking DARK.
The future Crossbones, who is several years older than Diamondback, rapes the poor girl off-panel. And he beats her up some as well, because apparently that’s the kind of POS he is, the kind of POS who did things like abuse underage girls in more than one way even years before he joined the Red Skull. The next time we see the future Diamondback, she is in her home being treated for cuts and bruises and such, looking traumatized, and when her older brothers see what their gang leader did to her, they quite naturally go berserk and head out to confront him.
Unfortunately, Rumlow manages to kill two of Diamondback’s brothers before they can kill him. The third one is Danny, who runs away after all of this happens. As I recall, but I’m not 100% certain of, he ran away initially because he didn’t think he had any chance of beating Rumlow after seeing his two brothers get taken out (one was killed immediately, as I recall, and the other one ended up DOA at the hospital, and then he kept on running and didn’t go back to his remaining family, because he was ashamed of how he had failed to avenge his sister and ashamed of how he turned tail and ran instead of putting up a fight like his brothers.
He went on to become a mercenary/hitman, finally showing up as Cutthroat in a Marvel Team-Up where he fought Spider-Man and Nightcrawler, and then did nothing of note for many years until Gruenwald brought him back to join the Skeleton Crew.
I’m annoyed because all of this matters a LOT, and I feel that if you’re writing a blog that summarizes all of these comics, that accuracy is very important. Saying nobody cares about Diamondback? FFS, Gruenwald wrote several pages of Cutthroat telling Diamondback “I’m sorry that I let you down when I was a kid, but don’t worry, I’m gonna get you out of here and I’m finally going to give Crossbones what he’s had coming for years!” Cutthroat cares a LOT about Diamondback!
So even if you’re trying to make a joke, to say that nobody cares about her is simply wrong. It’s important to future issues as well, because part of what makes Diamondback finally snap out of Crossbones’ brainwashing and turn on him is her learning what he had done to her last surviving brother.
This not only skips over the very significant part of Diamondback’s backstory where she was horrifically abused by a major Cap villain, but I’ve seen other posts by you where you say that a character was raped when they were not.
In your post about rape in comics, you talk about how a depowered Rogue got raped in Genosha. And granted, that is what it looks like happened…but you also cover this issue of UXM:
https://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/uncanny_x-men_244.shtml
And while there’s no scan of it, here’s what the Carol Danvers persona says to the rest of the team about Rogue’s life being pretty rotten lately. I remember this quite well because I read a physical copy of it. Exact quote from that site:
“Carol says, ‘Things got a little fresh. Nothing serious happened. But that wasn’t the point. Rogue suddenly found herself helpless — out of control — completely and utterly at someone else’s mercy’. After that Rogue managed to get things back under control ‘until Inferno reopened all the old wounds’.”
Unless we consider Carol an unreliable source, “nothing serious happened”. Claremont wrote that, and considering the way he wrote the real Carol Danvers (the one with her own body) getting techno-roofied by Marcus and everything Carol had to say about how deadly serious THAT was, I have a hard time believing that Claremont would gloss over a separate rape with “nothing serious happened.” If Rogue had been raped, her Carol persona would not have minced words and she certainly wouldn’t have downplayed it.
I don’t know if I’m just coming across as a lunatic in a comments section with too much time on his hands here, but right now I’m thinking “I found this blog. I read a number of posts on it because I like old comics and I like reading reviews/summaries of what happens in them. What I don’t like, what I absolutely hate in fact, is when somebody writing a synopsis not only gets details of the plot wrong, but when they get such IMPORTANT details wrong. Important stuff like whether or not a character did or did not get raped. In this case, I’m angrier about Diamondback’s rape not even getting acknowledged in this post, because my god, if ANYTHING should be acknowledged then it’s goddamn rape. Especially when that’s primary motive for an attempted murder here.
Hey, when you’re right, you’re right. I didn’t read carefully enough here and I apologize.