Brother Voodoo was a third-tier character and even considered kind of a joke for a long time. I was never sure why, I always thought he had a cool look and I liked the connection to his departed sibling. Fortunately he has gotten much more of a push in the lat decade or so, and It's cool to see him finally getting the respect he deserves in the Marvel Universe.
Come on, Brother! Give Fate a hand and help him do that voodoo that you both do so well.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Ross. I just _had_ to get that out of my system. ;-)
How much do I know about Voodoo?
ReplyDeleteMainly, that "Possession is nine-tenths of the Loa"...
^_^
Brother Voodoo did have a predecessor in the brother-possession bit. Waaay back, there was a hero called Captain Victory, who was a normal person, and whose brother had been killed. But his brother could merge with him to make him a pseudo Captain Marvel.
ReplyDeleteSo maybe sometime, you could do a brothers cover... Captain Victory, Brother Voodoo, Kid Eternity and Captain Marvel Jr., etc.
Actually that was Captain Triumph... :)
ReplyDeleteMarvel also had a "brotherly possession" character, of sorts, called 'the 3-D Man'.
ReplyDelete@Simreeve: regarding your first missive? LOL; good one!
ReplyDeleteWhy was Brother Voodoo considered a joke? Well...
ReplyDeleteWay back in the 70's, Marvel and DC announced they would do a crossover book with Superman and Spider-Man (I'm sure you're familiar with it). Marv Wolfman and Len Wein were doing a Q&A at a convention, when a kid asked why they decided to team up those two characters. Jokingly, one of them responded "It was either that or the Brother Voodoo-Brother Power the Geek Team-Up".
In the audience was one Fred Hembeck, not yet working in comics professionally. Years later, when he was a professional, he was hired to do comics for Marvel Age (Marvel's 80s hype book). Remembering that comment, he put Brother Voodoo into a strip. He then became a running gag for Hembeck, who portrayed him as kind of a lame character trying to gain respect (and failing). But because Brother Voodoo hadn't made regular (or just about any) appearances in, like, the previous decade, Hembeck's strips became BV's only introduction to many readers, who thus considered him a joke character, not being familiar with his original appearances.
So, basically: Brother Voodoo became considered a joke character because Fred Hembeck liked him enough to use him in comedic strips.
And now you know... the rest of the story.
^^^^^ This is Paul Harvey...... Good day!!!
Delete^^^^^ This is Paul Harvey...... Good day!!!
DeleteCaptain Triumph - yes, of course. There were so darned many captains running around in the 40s, it was hard to keep 'em straight...
ReplyDelete'Sides, I think it was Major Victory. Musta got promoted... :)
@ ELS: Nope! Sorry. Major Victory was the leader of the Force of July, which was DC's plagiar---I mean, pastiche!---of Marvel's Freedom Force. In other words, a group of super-powered patriots who would only perform those superheroics deemed politically correct by the largely right-wing Federal government of the late 1980's/early 1990's. The name for the character was taken from a non-DC Golden age superhero (Chesler Comics, I believe) who's now in the public domain.
ReplyDeleteCaptain Victory (and the Galactic Rangers) was a Jack Kirby creation in the 1980s. When Phil Dunlap introduced a character called Captain Victory in his humorous newspaper strip Ink Pen, he got a letter from Kirby's estate. Dunlap wrote the incident into the strip (with the estate's approval), having his Captain Victory receive the letter and change his name to Captain Victorious.
ReplyDelete