InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "long and hard hours"

batcookies (batcookies) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-04-19 02:35:00

Entry tags:

char: angle man/angelo bend, char: captain cold/leonard snart, char: catwoman/holly robinson, char: catwoman/selina kyle, char: hugo strange, char: wonder woman/diana of themyscira, char: zatanna zatara, creator: david lopez, creator: pete woods, creator: phil jimenez, creator: robert kanigher, creator: will pfeifer, in-joke: get thee to an editor, publisher: dc comics, series: world of wondy, title: catwoman

Wonder Woman Villains - The Aggravating Case of Angle Man, part 2
In this post we look at some appearances of Angle Man which contain very bad writing.

Sorry.

To review:

In 1954, Robert Kanigher created "The Angle Man" a criminal mastermind that mobsters used to try to come up with plans to vex Wonder Woman.

Now what sort of "angles" did Angle Man play?

Well there was the time he tried to get Steve Trevor hooked on pills that gave people superpowers (yes, having gotten his hands on pills that give people superpowers, Angle Man decided to give them to good guys)

There were the times he tricked Wonder Woman so he could tie her up, which was her pre-Crisis weakness.

There was the time he tried to exploit her inability to fly.

There was the time he tried to manipulate her by kidnapping Steve Trevor, her one true love.

There were the times he tried to discover her secret identity...

There was the time he almost got away with it, because Wonder Woman magically altered her body to become really fat and then really thin, in order to teach Steve Trevor a lesson for always talking about how great Wonder Woman looked while out on dates with Diana Prince...

Are you noticing a pattern here? His plans tended to be things that wouldn't work on post-Crisis Wonder Woman. They tended to be things that just plain couldn't have happened post-Crisis, no ifs ands or buts.

Near the end, he got a weapon that let him bend time and space...

And then came 1985 and "Crisis on Infinite Earths"

Pre-Crisis Angle Man was dead. Apparently it's a bad idea to use a device for dimensional travel while a Multiverse is being destroyed.

Wonder Woman was rebooted from scratch. She and all her supporting cast and villains were introduced "for the first time". None of the pre-Crisis stories were canon any more.

For 14 years nobody mentioned Angle Man.

Then, in Flash #155 (1999), something happened which didn't make sense.

Flash had a villain called Replicant, that was going around stealing/absorbing villains' superscience weapons. And he ran into... Angle Man?

Again: the above scene made no sense. But we forgive Waid, because it was so very pointless and easily ignored, yes?

3 years pass, and in 2002 we meet the Post-Crisis Angle Man, in the pages of Wonder Woman. You saw him in my last post. Here he is, risking his own life for Donna Troy.

He appeared in comics printed in 2002-2003.

Then, in 2005, "Angle Man" showed up in Catwoman of all places.

Writer Will "Amazons Attack" Pfeifer wasted no time letting Wonder Woman fans know exactly where they stood with him.

Yes, that was Cheetah, a character that trades punches with Wonder Woman.

Yes, that was Batman, beating her with one punch.

A bunch of criminals are trying to take over Gotham's East Side. They're quite notable in just how badly chosen they are.

I'm going off topic here, but this scene drives me nuts.

Captain Cold wouldn't be interested in "ruling" part of Gotham, and wouldn't take orders from anyone. His home is Central City/Keystone, leading the Rogues.

Hugo Strange is a crazy psychologist obsessed with killing Batman and thus BECOMING Batman. He'd have even less interest in this scheme than Captain Cold would.

Cheetah? A British archaeologist with a mad-on for mystic artifacts? What the hell is she doing there?

Losing easily, as it so happens.

Handcuffs. Someone with strength comparable to Wonder Woman's, and Pfeifer has her knocked out with one punch then handcuffed to a streetlight. bluefall had a lovely rant about this, and I look forward to seeing it again...

Catwoman agrees to join this little crew, undercover, intending to destroy them from within. But...

How did she survive?

Here's a hint: did anyone here read Hush? I think Will Pfeifer did.

That's right, it was a Clayface.

Selina takes out the gang. Angle Man ends up in jail. Cue Pfeifer mocking Angle Man through his characters (he does this a few other times)

Smart Bomb is an undercover cop, and the son of Selina's friend Slam Bradley (He also ends up the father of Selina's baby after a one-night stand, but that's a whole different reason I want to say things about Pfeifer that our "hate the writing, not the writer" rule prevents me from saying).

Slam gets kidnapped, although Smart Bomb thinks the one to get kidnapped was one of Selina's other friends.

He stops it.

Black Mask is taken down, and then Selina kills Black Mask. Good riddance to thrice-killed rubbish.

A year passes, Selina ends up pregnant, her friend Holly becomes Catwoman.

Holly pounds the crap out of Angle Man, and its all recorded by some guy with a video camera, that sells the tape to a movie-obsessed creep called "Film Freak".

Film Freak teams up with Angle Man

They locate Selina because her new identity is a movie reference that frankly a LOT of people would have figured out.

The bad guys lose, of course.

Selina brings in Zatanna...

Okay, again? Angle Man never fought Wonder Woman post-Crisis, and his pre-Crisis stories wouldn't have worked with the post-Crisis Wonder Woman.

Yeah, no. Angle Man never fought Flash. Not even pre-Crisis.

That's right. This whole mess is because Will Pfeifer wanted to use a Wonder Woman villain, and decided a two-page nonsensical appearance in Flash matters more than a much more recent and important appearance in Wonder Woman.

So here's the thing... according to Pfeifer, this "Angle Man" never had his superpowered Angler after Replicant destroyed it.

Meaning, basically, that even if you ignore the gross differences in personality, style, goals, facial features, country of origin and everything else... the guy in Catwoman couldn't have been the guy in Wonder Woman. Because the guy in Catwoman claims he hasn't had powers for years, even though there was an "Angle Man" in Wonder Woman, recently, that could walk on walls. It's a contradiction to the point where you either have to pick one story or the other, or else there has to be two different guys using the name "Angle Man". Cool Angle Man has an alibi: he was using superpowers when the uncool Angle Man claims to have had no such powers.

(Sheer bloody minded incompetence.)

If you're curious, Zatanna erases their memories of Selina's secret identity, then sends them off to the police to confess to their crimes. Film Freak, being a Batman villain and not a lowly Wonder Woman villain, proves too strong/crazy for this and escapes, while Angle Man does what he's told.

...Oh, and in OYL Wonder Woman Heinberg gave us Angle Man back in his pre-Crisis costume, with superpowers. Sure, why not, not like it makes the mess any bigger.

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icon_uk
2009-04-19 01:54 pm UTC (link)

So many levels of fail here, though I particularly like the police giving a supervillain his superweapon BACK because, despite it having no apparent controls "They've deactivated it".... (Probably the same techs who installed Indigo, the 25th century android, with limiters that guaranteed her loyalty and ensured she couldn't kill again.. and we remember how THAT turned out)

The supervillain team is memoraly awful, and the the only positive spin I can put on this whole thing is the notion that, on first reading this, I thought he meant the Catwoman Angle Man was supposed to be the pre-Crisis Angle Man, whose last space-time re-angling sent him there without his weapon or at least burned it out. Thus there are two of him, the suave Wonder Girl one who WAS kind of cool, and has the angle weapon, and this one, who remembers fights that could now never have happened (but did in HIS past), and now has no powers.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	blake_reitz 2009-04-19 04:31 pm UTC (link)
	That would be a very elegant solution to this whole mess. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

bluefall
2009-04-19 05:16 pm UTC (link)

Seconded. I don't know how much virtue there is in pre-Crisis Diana getting her profile raised like that - seems like an invitation to Geoff Johnsing - and I can't think of much reason that anyone would want to use this (frankly rather stock and boring, "fallen bigshot" angle notwithstanding) Angle Man again anyway, but as a way to cleanly isolate this stuff and remove it from the table for Jimenez' Angle Man to come to fore it works very well.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	icon_uk 2009-04-19 06:12 pm UTC (link)
	I feel suitably honoured! :) (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	bluefall 2009-04-19 06:38 pm UTC (link)
	... your icon is unholy cute. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	icon_uk 2009-04-19 06:45 pm UTC (link)
	Isn't it though? :) It's one of my favourite sketchcard pick-ups from the Batman Legacy set, and I save the icon for special occasions! (Reply to this) (Parent)

psychop_rex
2009-04-20 03:28 am UTC (link)

That hypothesis works very well - certainly since this guy's Angler appears to have different powers than the Italian guy's has; he can defy the laws of physics, but he can't teleport - except for one little thing: his real name. Angelo Bend is a post-Crisis name - the Pre-Crisis version was never really given a name, other than 'Andrews', as in 'Angles' Andrews, who he was in his first appearance. So if this guy's name is Bend, he can't be Pre-Crisis.
There is, however, a simple and elegant solution to that - having 'ported in from Pre-Crisis, Angle Man realizes that he has no name or reputation here. He ALSO realizes that there is another guy, using his same M.O, who has achieved quite a reputation as Angle Man, and whose name, by the way, is Angelo Bend. 'Nothing to it', thinks our boy. 'I'll just start using his name, and people will think I'm him - and bingo, instant reputation'.
So he starts trading on Bend's name and reputation, which obviously doesn't work very well, and he rapidly gets a reputation of his own, that of being the slimeball loser that he is. The real Bend, meanwhile, is centered in Europe, and is too busy being suave and Italian to notice that his name is being purloined - and given the imitator's lowly status, almost no one else notices, either.
It would seem to work. This AM is clearly enough of a dirtbag to try such a thing, and he even admits to the cops that, no, Angelo Bend is not his real name. So I guess I was wrong - there is no problem. Your hypothesis works just fine.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	batcookies 2009-04-20 05:09 am UTC (link)
	Pre-Crisis Angle Man was eventually given the "real name" Angelo Bend. It wasn't in any of the scans I posted, but it happened. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	bluefall 2009-04-20 10:47 am UTC (link)
	Oh, have no fear, it will eventually be revealed that his last name is ~~Nashton~~ Andrews after all, because "bend" is just too convenient and hokey for serious comics. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	batcookies 2009-04-21 12:13 am UTC (link)
	Ah, a pet peeve for you too? Although it would almost be worth it to find out that Angle Man's real name is "Angelo Nygma" (Reply to this) (Parent)

	psychop_rex 2009-04-20 02:50 pm UTC (link)
	Oh. OK. Well, that still works, then - there are two Angelo Bends out there, neither one of them quite well-known enough to attract the other's interest. It's not impossible - stranger things have happened, especially in the DCU. (Reply to this) (Parent)

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