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The Vegetable. He fought the Mighty Crusaders back in the '60s (Archie Comic’s attempt knock off the Avengers. Featured The Shield, Fly Man and Fly Girl, etc).
He looked like a giant cucumber with teeny little arms and legs and had all the powers of…um…a vegetable.
Trust me. This guy makes the Rainbow Raider look like Dr. Doom.
I join in Master Wang-Ka’s defense of Arcade. Sure, the guy was a tad unrealistic, but he was *interesting, and his storylines were always great. He always took the classic hero-in-deathtrap thing to greater and greater heights. I’m kind of sorry he’s considered kind of passe nowadays.
I always kinda liked Arcade, too. And just because he (repeatedly) failed to off the X-Men and Spider-man (did he ever face anyone else? The Avengers, maybe?) doesn’t mean he never succeeded for less important superpeople.
Archie Comics had a Fly Girl? I always wondered what they did before they showed up on In Living Color.
Daredevil went toe-to-toe with him on at least one occasion.
I believe you mean the “Obnoxio The Clown” one-shot. He was the Alfred E. Newman of Crazy magazine.
The X-Men’s contribution to Assistant Editors’ Month was one page of Professor X kicking the Assistant Editor in the butt. (taking too long measuring the Blackbird)
As long as we’re bringing up Assistant Editor’s Month, can I nominate [http://www.samruby.com/MtuC/Large/MTU137.JPG]Golden Oldie, the Galactus-powered alter ego of Aunt May Parker?
Sure, she didn’t do anything particularly villianous, but being a herald of Galactus ought to count for something. And you gotta admit, the idea was FUN!
Which still doesn’t explain why he didn’t use those nifty kidnap tricks to just plain kill his victims. You don’t pay an assassin to give the target a chance.
That’s explained at the link I gave for him. After a while, he began hiring out Murderworld as a training ground.
Firstly, seriously? Wow.
Secondly, there’s a really tasteless Christopher Reeve joke in there somewhere…
Yup, although I was mistaken: he didn’t fight the Mighty Crusaders, he fought The Web (another forgotten Archie superhero character). IIRC, it was in Mighty Comics #40 or so.
That year’s Uncanny X-Men Annual was also released during Assistant Editors’ Month. It featured the X-Men taking on the Impossible Man, who was participating in a scavenger hunt against the other members of his species and traveling around Earth stealing items from various superheroes. These items included the X-Men’s mansion, Nick Fury’s eyepatch, all of the Wasp’s old costumes, and the Hulk’s pants. Very funny story.
A couple of years ago, The Tangled Web of Spider-Man featured a story about Rhino. After a particularly humiliating capture he laments, “Aw jeez, even Rocket Racer and The Gibbon are laughing at me.” And lo, indeed there was Rocket Racer and The Gibbon right there on the panel, laughing at him while they were being led away in handcuffs.
The lamest villain I can recall was Slyde. He was a scientist searching for the secret to non-stick cookware, but a vicious corporate merger left him jobless. Seeking startup capital to create a non-stick cookware empire that would make the fools who opposed him tremble, he turned his non-stick powers toward evil.
Re: Golden Oldie.
Actually, that joke was stolen from a half-page gag in What If? (Vol. 1) # 34, the all-joke issue.
Man, back then, comic creators actually allowed themselves to have a sense of humor about their creations. I miss that.
I had that one! My favorite part: in one scene of the amassed scavenger hunt items he’d collected was (rather inexplicably) the key to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.
