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Post by redsycorax on Jan 4, 2024 3:13:22 GMT
This year, I intend to write a series of Horned Owl and Midnight Angel stories set after the Second World War. Are there are any Earth-Two communist supervillains or metahumans who could be enlisted as protagonists in the stories I intend to write? There's going to be quite a bit of nuance in these ones, with some of the Soviet protagonists engaging in severe doubt about the morality of the Stalinist regime and there may be one or two defections. And I'm not going to flinch from the damage Cold War paranoia did to western societies either.
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Post by johnreiter902 on Jan 5, 2024 0:02:01 GMT
I know an Earth-2 version of Steelwolf was introduced in one our Times Past stories. I'm not sure if there were any others
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Post by DocQuantum on Jan 5, 2024 0:07:17 GMT
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 5, 2024 0:27:18 GMT
Thank you both. Is there any prospect that my version of the UBA/"Axis Amerika" and Victory Legion characters could be made canonical? I intend to strongly follow established WW2/1940s-50s Earth-Two continuity strongly in the stories I'll be writing. As you may remember, I've argued before that there were probably metahumans outside the United States and Germany during WW2 and afterward, given the probability that (a) Winston Churchill and the UK military hierarchy would regard the UBA as a clear and immediate threat and (b) Roy Thomas would probably have recognised the logic and necessity in establishing such groups if the Crisis on Infinite Earths hadn't mangled 1940s DC continuity. Given the non-existence of Fury in the Young All-Stars, the circumstances of Fledermaus/Willi Von Tregor's death are somewhat different. Added to which, my past fiction about Horned Owl/Georg Von Tregor fleshes out the character somewhat- he has a strong Catholic faith, he's not a fanatical anti-Semite and unthinkingly supported Hitler because he thought he'd make Germany great again. When his beloved son dies, it turns him against the Nazis and he defects to the Victory Legion. Over the next two years, he and Rosalie Ashley/Midnight Angel fall for one another. They finally declare their love for one another in May 1945. So Horned Owl undergoes a redemption journey, primarily because after what happened to Fledermaus in Frankfurt, he deserves a happy ending.
The real true believer in the UBA was Ubermensch and he ends up a pathetic roid rage psychopath as Nazi Germany disintegrates around him in May 1945.
I've already done one Horned Owl and Midnight Angel story in the Infinite Earths thread, utilising Graham Greene's Third Man storyline (filmed memorably with Orson Welles as Harry Lime) and set it in Vienna in 1948. They're a husband and wife partnership, in a milieu akin to the Sandman Mystery Stories. As with that one, it'll take me some time to establish the scaffolding for the story. Probably a couple of months.
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Post by johnreiter902 on Jan 6, 2024 1:10:25 GMT
For my part, I'd like them to be canon. I particularly love the work you have done on the UBA. You took my original seed of an idea, and made it blossom in ways I would not have dreamed.
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 6, 2024 23:11:42 GMT
Ah, but that wouldn't have been possible without the exceptional quality of your seeds in the first place, John.
Added to which, given the continued existence of the UBA, the non-existence of the Golden Age Fury, the need to differentiate Horned Owl, Fledermaus and the UBA from Batman, Robin and the JSA, the pragmatic need for non US Allied metahumans, the real world crimes that occurred in Nazi Germany, there is potentially fertile terrain
available.
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Post by DocQuantum on Jan 6, 2024 23:30:20 GMT
On our Earth-2, the Golden Age Fury does exist, albeit with a slightly different history. Axis Amerika also. And Iron Munro and Flying Fox II.
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 7, 2024 2:06:19 GMT
I take it that it's still possible that someone else might kill Fledermaus, however, even if the Golden Age Fury does still exist. John suggested that he die as a consequence of discovering the truth about the Nazi Holocaust. I took that idea and had the SS murder him, turning Horned Owl against the Nazis, as well as arranging for the disintegration of the UBA. Usil leaves to join the Italian Resistance and Valkyrie returns to Valhalla. As for "Axis Amerika", I think there is some dissension over its name, given that while it certainly used Axis metahumans and costumed adventurers, the term "Amerika" sounds clumsy and inappropriate. So I proposed UBA as a German term to describe the organisation. If Iron Munro and Flying Fox II can be used in this context, great.
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Post by dans on Jan 7, 2024 2:47:02 GMT
if your stories don't violate established continuity, but instead extend it, I vote to make them canonical.
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Post by DocQuantum on Jan 7, 2024 4:28:24 GMT
Well they used the Axis Amerika name temporarily at least. Doesn’t mean it was permanent.
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Post by johnreiter902 on Jan 7, 2024 16:58:01 GMT
Well they used the Axis Amerika name temporarily at least. Doesn’t mean it was permanent. I though the only time in our continuity they used it was in the battle against the Suicide Squad. From my reading of the story, it sounded more like it was a nickname the Squad gave them |
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 7, 2024 22:22:31 GMT
Just to remind ourselves- UBA refers to Ubermensch Beschützer der Achse ("Overmen Protectors of the Axis"). I suggested the name because it sounded more logical than "Axis Amerika". It uses the Nietzschean concept of the "overman", protecting Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and (theoretically) Italy from the Allied powers (although Usil is the only Italian member and he defects to the Allies at the same time as the UBA disintegrates after Fledermaus is murdered.
NB: As for the continuity angle, note my "Fall of Ubermensch" story, set at the close of the European phase of WW2 in May 1945. It rigorously accounts for where the JSA were at the time, as well as Superman and Batman, based on contemporary DC comic appearances and why the Victory Legion (UK) subbed for them.
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 28, 2024 1:26:37 GMT
Stalnoivolk/Steelwolf seems to be just the character I'm looking for and it's interesting he's a conservative Stalinist who disapproves of Khrushchev. I think I'll have him encounter Horned Owl and Midnight Angel earlier in the fifties and flesh out why he has those attitudes. The story's working title is "Chill in the Wind."
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Post by dave on Jan 28, 2024 20:29:35 GMT
He had a very brief encounter with Bart Regan in 1936 in one of my tales
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 29, 2024 1:44:58 GMT
Okay, so how does this sound as a motivation for Steelwolf's actions? He lost most of his family, including the woman he loved, during the Russian Civil War of the early twenties. It convinced him that Stalin was the only way forward for the Soviet Union, so he turned into a conservative regime loyalist. He managed to survive most of the purges, and then witnessed the murderous actions of Nazi Germany in the forties. Given that he lost a second woman he loved during the Great Patriotic War, and the Soviet Union became a superpower, he was confirmed in his beliefs. He was a core figure at Stalin's state funeral in 1953 and reacted badly to the destalinisation process. Horned Owl and Midnight Angel have both lost loved ones in the course of war (the SS killed Fledermaus and Rosalie's vicar father when the Nazis attacked Coventry), so they understand the underlying reason for his motivation, even if they don't agree with the philosophy he serves. It's not so much that he's a blind patriot, it's that he's lost so much beforehand, he cannot bear to acknowledge that he served a lie all those years. When he dies in the late sixties, Brezhnev sees to it Steelwolf himself gets a state funeral.
By comparison, while Fireball (Sonya Chuikov) and Steelwolf started out on the same side, she witnessed things he didn't, such as mass starvation in Ukraine due to Stalin's wretched and destructive agricultural policies. Because Sonya is Jewish, she was a fervent opponent of Nazi Germany, but felt deeply ambivalent about Soviet society and the rise of the USSR as a superpower. She was disgusted at what happened in Hungary in 1956 and took the opportunity to defect to the West. She then saw active service in the Federal Republic of Germany, but tragedy intervened. Outraged at what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968, she took the opportunity to cross the border and fell victim to an anti-metahuman device. The Johnson administration covered it up, already overcommitted in Vietnam. Sonya and Rosalie (Midnight Angel) are friends.
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