We interrupt this regularly scheduled Super-Blog Team-Up for an nWo-style takeover featuring some very bad dudes from the DC Universe! Cue the music!
I was pleased & privileged to accept the return invitation to 'stand in' for the dearly (at least for now) departed Super Bloggers - and to mark the occasion, I thought I'd adapt an unused Where's The Trade? idea with a brief profile of some of my favorite comics 'stand-ins' - the bad boys from the planet Angor, THE super-villain team to beat in early 90s Justice League comics & cheeky Marvel villain analogs: The Extremists! I'm amazed that, for a group based on such a throw away idea (analogs of 4 top Marvel villains -- and Dormammu), creators have been using some version or another of the Extremists in comics for almost 30 years!
Before I cover the publishing history of these true Harbingers of the Attitude Era, I invite you to check out the other late spring offerings from some fellow blasts from the #SuperBlogTeamUp past:
The Extremists 1st appeared in Justice League Europe #15 (June 1990) in the first of a 5-part story called 'The Extremist Vector' - but the roots of this villain team date back much farther than that. In comics cover dated Feb. 1971, DC & Marvel - or maybe I should say Justice League writer Mike Friedrich & Avengers writer Roy Thomas - exchanged charming, naughty swipes at the competition with the introduction of a team of super doppelgangers in their respective books. In issue 85 of the Avengers, Thomas debuted The Squadron Supreme, a team of alternate dimension JLA analogs including Hyperion (Superman) , Nighthawk (Batman), Lady Lark (Black Canary) & The Whizzer (Flash), among others. This Squadron Supreme was a revised version of a villain team of JLA dupes Thomas introduced in the Avengers about a year and a half previously called The Squadron Sinister. Meanwhile, in Justice League of America #87, Friedrich introduced a doppelganger Avengers in The Assemblers (later, the Champions of Angor, The Justifiers & The Retaliators - no one could seem to keep this straight), whose membership included Wandjina (Thor), The Silver Sorceress (Scarlet Witch), Blue Jay (Yellowjacket) & Jack B. Quick (Quicksilver). Each team of analogs met, misunderstood, and fought their respective series' stars, before in each case parting as friends.
