General Marvel Legends

Daredevil was my constant when I was reading floppies consistently through the oughts. Easily my number one. Doesn’t mean he’s the most recognizable iconic character. He alone can’t represent Marvel in the same way Spider-Man can. But he may be Marvel’s best character.
 
Right... In my mind the must haves are everyone from the original Secret Wars (along with team members who weren't in it but were part of the teams at the time, like Sue and Kitty), AND Daredevil. But he was in the toyline at least heh.
 
Unfortunately with Punisher, though, a lot of the folks who know him well nowadays seem to completely misunderstand his character and associate him with certain real-world movements that he would want nothing to do with. So I always wonder with the folks who really like Punisher whether they truly like the character, or if they like what they think he stands for.
 
Xavion2025 said:
I still have a hard time seeing Carol Danvers as a top tier Marvel character. I’m not saying she isn’t. That’s just my perception. I think in my mind, I still keep the MCU and the comics separate. Carol Danvers is definitely top tier in the MCU, but has she ever sold comics? Maybe she has. I haven’t actively read contemporary comics in over 20 years.
Click to expand...
The last 20 is mostly where she's become a higher tier. And I feel like she got there from the comic end of things first, as opposed to Iron Man, whose status definitely raised after the MCU.
 
joshsquash729 said:
Unfortunately with Punisher, though, a lot of the folks who know him well nowadays seem to completely misunderstand his character and associate him with certain real-world movements that he would want nothing to do with. So I always wonder with the folks who really like Punisher whether they truly like the character, or if they like what they think he stands for.
Click to expand...
True. But some of those same people completely miss the message in X-Men and think that Captain America would be on their side because 'Murica, nevermind that he fought Nazis.
 
Out of curiosity, I asked my Nibling, who isn't really into the MCU, but is pretty big into the comics, about their favorite/most well-known female characters, and they mentioned that both they and almost all their friends at school are into Squirrel Girl and Spider-Gwen. For whatever that's worth. Maybe not a good representation of Marvel overall, but perhaps for this newer generation?
 
Last edited:
joshsquash729 said:
Unfortunately with Punisher, though, a lot of the folks who know him well nowadays seem to completely misunderstand his character and associate him with certain real-world movements that he would want nothing to do with. So I always wonder with the folks who really like Punisher whether they truly like the character, or if they like what they think he stands for.
Click to expand...
One of the things I'm glad the more recent TV portrayal of Punisher does is show that Frank is just completely busted as a normal human being. He's not even the edgy brooding guy Batman is often portrayed as, he's effectively not a person anymore aside from looking for villains to kill and it's really clear that he's basically going for suicide-by-gangster.

Seeing cops and military folks with the patch at least let's you know right up front who doesn't have media literacy.
 
CTV said:
What a sausage fest
Click to expand...
Oh, it's a big time sausage fest. If I did this for DC, Wonder Woman would absolutely be included. It's not my fault Marvel does not have an equivalent female superhero :)
JakeEkiss said:
The only one I disagree with is Thing. Everybody else has a solo title (often more than one) and you can have them in isolation or groups and it's fine (villains don't have to have their own series, they just need to be big time enough they've menaced more than one team of superheroes)

If you have a Ben Grimm and not the other 3 you're a madman. That's like representing The Beatles with only Ringo. Best to have no FF than anything less than 4 of them. You could have an alternate 4. But you can't have just one FF member. That way lies chaos and damnation.
Click to expand...
FF, as Marvel's first book, is too important to have no representation. And if I go with all four then we are getting away from "bare minimum" territory. Yes, Cap,Thor, IM, and Hulk are all Avengers, but they are all also iconic stand alone characters that have held their own solo titles consistently for decades. Avengers gets default representation through them.

TheSameIdiot said:
It gets unwieldy very quickly.
Click to expand...
It sure does. Going one character too many creates a slippery slope very quickly.

Xavion2025 said:
I still have a hard time seeing Carol Danvers as a top tier Marvel character.
Click to expand...
They pushed her for many years, it never really stuck.

Resilient said:
Also, I don't see a lot of talk about Daredevil here,
Click to expand...
He was hard to leave off the list, but I needed Spider-Man to carry the street-level representation.

The "bare minimum" Marvel action figure list is not the "perfect" Marvel action figure list. It's not for the weak of heart and hard choices have to be made :). All completely hypothetical and subjective but it was fun reading peoples' thoughts on this.
 
CTV said:
What a sausage fest
Click to expand...

I hear you and I feel you on that. Sadly, a sausage fest is what it is if you started reading comics from the Golden Age on through the 90's.

Wonder Woman was probably the only real female archetype in the world of comics for decades. She was created by the educational consultant for DC Comics, psychologist William Moulton Marston. The good doctor wanted to create a hero that didn't always use his fists to solve problems, but rather do it with love. It was Marston's wife Elizabeth (Also a psychologist) that suggested this new character be a woman. Marston loved that idea and so Wonder Woman was created. Diana's personality was based on Elizabeth and the Marston's life partner, Olive Byrne. Yes, the Marston's were in a polyamorous relationship. A "throuple" if you will (Hey, I don't judge. The world got a great iconic female character and one that's still popular to this day).

But Diana was the exception. The prevailing wisdom among mainstream comic book publishers in the 40's, 50's and 60's was that only children from the ages of 6 or 7 to kids in their early teens read comics. Once you entered adolescence that was it. As soon as you discovered the opposite sex, the comics collection went right in the dumpster. (Stan Lee always felt differently about that. He always believed that more young adults would read comics if you wrote stories that were geared to them. His publisher, Martin Goodman, felt differently. Stan eventually won that argument but it would take a while.)

The publishers knew that girls read comics. I have four sisters and they all read comics. Half the comics readers in North America were girls. BUT ... the publishers believed that girls read romance and teen comedy books, boys read superhero, war and horror books and never the two shall meet. There were comics for girls and comics for boys and that was that. That's why you never saw Nick Fury or Daredevil guest star in Millie The Model.

And so when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Marvel Age of comics in 1961, there was no Marvel equivalent of Wonder Woman. There was no title that featured a female protagonist. Each group of heroes got one female member and that was it. And I'm sure the only reason Stan put a girl in each group was to raise the tension level. It added to the drama. The boys were always fighting over the lone girl in the group. Reed and Namor slugged it out over Sue, all the boy X-Men fought over Jean, and on it went.

The FF had Sue, the X-Men had Jean, the Avengers had Jan and later Wanda, The Inhumans had Medusa, SHIELD had the Countess, Sif was allowed to hang out with the Warriors Three and Balder, and I think that was pretty much it. Natasha was around back then but she started out as a commie spy. She didn't have a change of heart and become a hero until later, when she eventually joined SHIELD and the Avengers.

But that was at the beginning. The years and decades rolled on and times, mores and attitudes changed. There are a lot more women in the Marvel and DC Universes now. These days there are groups of heroes comprised of four or five females and one or two males. It took awhile but we got there.

True story: Stan Lee was kind of a progressive thinker for his day and age and he always wanted to see more female characters in the Marvel Universe, but he hated, hated, HATED female characters that were based on an existing male superhero. DC had Batgirl, Supergirl, Hawkgirl and Element Girl and Stan never liked that. He considered it lazy writing. He was all for more female superheroes but he wanted them to be original. He wanted the ladies to stand on their own and not be dependent on a male counterpart. I totally understood that and I agreed. That's why you should have seen the look on my face when Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk and Spider-Woman were released. I wasn't expecting that. I found out a few years later that the creation of those characters had more to do with protecting trademarks and copyrights than selling new comics, but that's neither here nor there. I'm glad all three of those characters came along because they've added a great deal to the Marvel Universe and I'm thankful for them, derivative or not.

Anyway, to sum all this up, if you were to ask me to name the 10 characters I think represented Marvel, they would surely all be straight white males. That's because when Marvel first launched their universe it was the early 1960's and straight white males were what we had. And that is when I first started reading comics. Cap, Thor, Iron Man, the FF ... those are the icons to me. If I had started reading comics 20 years later, I'm sure that list would be different.

I give Marvel credit. They've always been way ahead of their competition when it comes to diversity. They created the Black Panther, the Falcon, Luke Cage, Wyatt Wingfoot, Shang-Chi and the White Tiger to name a few. Nothstar was an openly gay superhero. And the first interracial kiss in mainstream comics history was in a Marvel comic. It was Amazing Adventures 31 in 1975. It was between Killraven and Carmilla.
 
Last edited:
PanchaMaestro said:
I lived thru the Mego kid years painfully realizing the X-Men were B or C tier characters that were never getting toys. I was a committed reader. Lots of my friends made fun of it; said they were losers.
Click to expand...
When Mego launched World's Greatest Superheroes in 1972 the X-Men were effectively on reprints being published bimonthly, so the lack of them in that line isn't surprising to me.

I couldn't include Wolverine in the top 3 given he wasn't around from the start in the 60's. He's insanely popular now so I get it, but it would be like putting Elmo as a top 3 Muppet and leaving off one of Kermit, Big Bird or Oscar who were core from the start.
 
Dan Yun posted on Twitter:
"Next week some Marvel Legends reveals."

Last week he teased Inhumans. What else might we see?
 
JakeEkiss said:
The only one I disagree with is Thing. Everybody else has a solo title (often more than one) and you can have them in isolation or groups and it's fine (villains don't have to have their own series, they just need to be big time enough they've menaced more than one team of superheroes)

If you have a Ben Grimm and not the other 3 you're a madman.
Click to expand...

Yeah.. I mean it's not like Thing had a series where he teamed up with non FF characters that ran for 100 issues and then a solo title that ran for three full years and then he joined the West Coast Avengers for a stint...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top