Thursday, July 11, 2013

Tales From The Quarter Bin--The Power Pachyderms!

Oh, Quarter Bin, the painful memories you manage to evoke!

Such as the time Marvel tried to hop on the late 1980s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze:

Oh, dear, I thought I had suppressed that memory forever.

You see, on Earth-12927, there's a familiar mishap at a gamma bomb test site:

 Meanwhile, a circus train car of pregnant elephants had been rolling by,,,

...resulting in:

And, after communing with four of the Three Stooges (for gods' sake, DON'T ASK) those elephants became...

No, I don't know why an Elektra analogue is in an X-Men parody...

They did, however, have a pretty bitching HQ:

And they end up meeting their arch-foe in their very first mission:

During the battle, Electralux falls into a vat of radioactive make-up (?)...



Ah, there's a female X-Man...

OK, that mock-Claremontism made me laugh.

Anyway, they beat the bad guys, save Electralux, go back and beat the crap out of the Stooges (DON'T ASK), and we leave them...

This sad little enterprise, from 1989, was pretty dismal. It couldn't make up it's mind whether it wanted to be a straight-up pastiche, a wonky 1950s-MAD style "throw everything-at-wall-and-see-what-sticks" style romp, a funny animal book, or a parody of the X-Men. It didn't do any of those terribly well, and sort of stunk.

The credits read "Created by" Tom DeFalco and Adam Blaustein, written by Roger Stern, penciled by Blaustein, inked by Jon D'Agostino. All of whom probably hate me right now for bringing this book up. Sorry.

The Power Pachyderms have pretty much faded from memory...until Jonathan Hickman revives them for an important role in the upcoming Infinity event (OK, probably not...)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Okay, now you've gone & done it. No matter how ridiculous this looks, now I want to find a copy of this comic. Yeah, it seems really silly, but it's still probably a better read than most of the DC New 52 books.