Malcolm Duncan Pro/Con Workshop

[warzon]

They recently gave him sonic powers based til he gave them away to the fearsome five.n afterwards he was dressed in a costume designed by nightwing but had no code name.so personally I would like to see him as the Guardian again with his wife Bumblebee leading a L.A. based Titans Team.

[Jim Kelly]

Isn't opening dimensional portals with sonic power what Tyroc does?

[CRaymond]

Isn't opening dimensional portals with sonic power what Tyroc does?

I know they make jokes about black heroes and electricity, but there’s a few too many with sound powers for it not tone a trope. Cyborg’s handcannon was sound based at first.

[Robotman]

I would immediately ditch any traces to the Herald character/concept. The hornblower gimmick is just brutal. I would make him The Guardian again.

[Anthony Shaw]

They recently gave him sonic powers based til he gave them away to the fearsome five.n afterwards he was dressed in a costume designed by nightwing but had no code name.so personally I would like to see him as the Guardian again with his wife Bumblebee leading a L.A. based Titans Team.

DC could have their own versions of Captain America & the Wasp with those two.

[K. Jones]

I know they make jokes about black heroes and electricity, but there’s a few too many with sound powers for it not tone a trope. Cyborg’s handcannon was sound based at first.

I'll give them this - sonic/sound-based powers combined with his recent focus on being a musician certainly works perfectly with my holistic approach to him, using his Herald moniker and Gabriel's Horn stuff to connect him to Morrison's Pax Dei and heavens and Silver City and such. Those angels were essentially living music, and multiversal musical frequencies and sound and "The Voice" of the entity known as God are all music based, much moreso than any of the other Fifth-Dimensional god-realms. The Angels and "heavenly" magical beings are musical, and the devils of Hell are more about discord, like Neron, but even Etrigan factors in, as he's a rhyming demon, which makes him a strange "lord" among demons. Perhaps a touch of the heavenly music lies upon the pseudo-heroic rhymers.

Obviously that means if I'd be going for a Mal Duncan who embraces the zany Morrison angel stuff and the zany Kirby Guardian stuff, he'd have to have an encounter with Jason Blood and Etrigan, some of the properly zany Kirby Hell-based stuff. Links then to Seven Soldiers' Guardian Jake Jordan but also Klarion the Witch-Boy seem very easy to make once that happens.

Not that I'd be having Mal summoning angelic hosts or anything, though. I dunno, it'd be weird - I'd still kind of want to keep him street level, so like ... more focus on Jason Blood himself. More focus on the Guardian's street-level heroics if Jim Harper or Jim Harper 2.0 show up. Various Newsboy Legions could tie into Kirby Cadmus Cloning, obvs. Maybe Etrigan himself has some thoughts about cloning.

It would be a weeeeeeeird book.

But kind of perfect. And very black. There's a lot of great black culture that could be front and center in those concepts - the famous singing of black churches, for instance, would tie in perfectly to a musician with a heavenly connection. And Kirby-style cloning being used and maybe agents from heaven or hell in "street guise" trying to help or hinder freaky deaky cloning stuff would just heavily reference "The Omen", or maybe stuff like "The Prophecy". Only maybe imagine you've got like, a real young Tony Todd in the lead role - very sort of academic and "talky" in his approach to tackling weird supervillainous stuff. Sure, it's a smidge like Morrison's Mister Miracle series (also part of Seven Soldiers), but it works better here, I think, even than for Shilo.

So I could see a weird story where there's a good guardian angel like Zauriel - though I'd say it's gotta be Gabriel himself, incarnate in a Harlem resident, then the archangel Azrael (where Mal got the horn from - not to be confused with J.P.V.) is incarnate and is villainous, then Jason Blood represents the more demonic side of things. And it plays out with the original and incredibly aptly named street gang that featured in Mal's introduction to the Titans - the Hell Hawks. I mean their name has "Hell" right in it!

There's a lot of solid movies out there with this sort of iconography, where angels and devils are warring but the characters appear human. The Devil's Advocate, so on.

Oh a team-up with the Guardian of Manhattan, Cyborg, Black Lightning, and Shilo Norman would just be kick-ass, too.

[CRaymond]

It would be a weeeeeeeird book.

Are you by chance following the Gateway City threads on the Wonder Woman CBR forum? At this point, I'm considering mirroring Jake Jordan as "The Manhattan Guardian" with Malcolm Duncan as "The Gateway Herald", with drone cameras, a YouTube channel, hanbo sticks, and a ram's horn trumpet that summons storms, sonic booms, biblical plagues, and Zauriel.

[4sake Baned]

I'll give them this - sonic/sound-based powers combined with his recent focus on being a musician certainly works perfectly with my holistic approach to him, using his Herald moniker and Gabriel's Horn stuff to connect him to Morrison's Pax Dei and heavens and Silver City and such. Those angels were essentially living music, and multiversal musical frequencies and sound and "The Voice" of the entity known as God are all music based, much moreso than any of the other Fifth-Dimensional god-realms. The Angels and "heavenly" magical beings are musical, and the devils of Hell are more about discord, like Neron, but even Etrigan factors in, as he's a rhyming demon, which makes him a strange "lord" among demons. Perhaps a touch of the heavenly music lies upon the pseudo-heroic rhymers.

Obviously that means if I'd be going for a Mal Duncan who embraces the zany Morrison angel stuff and the zany Kirby Guardian stuff, he'd have to have an encounter with Jason Blood and Etrigan, some of the properly zany Kirby Hell-based stuff. Links then to Seven Soldiers' Guardian Jake Jordan but also Klarion the Witch-Boy seem very easy to make once that happens.

Not that I'd be having Mal summoning angelic hosts or anything, though. I dunno, it'd be weird - I'd still kind of want to keep him street level, so like ... more focus on Jason Blood himself. More focus on the Guardian's street-level heroics if Jim Harper or Jim Harper 2.0 show up. Various Newsboy Legions could tie into Kirby Cadmus Cloning, obvs. Maybe Etrigan himself has some thoughts about cloning.

It would be a weeeeeeeird book.

But kind of perfect. And very black. There's a lot of great black culture that could be front and center in those concepts - the famous singing of black churches, for instance, would tie in perfectly to a musician with a heavenly connection. And Kirby-style cloning being used and maybe agents from heaven or hell in "street guise" trying to help or hinder freaky deaky cloning stuff would just heavily reference "The Omen", or maybe stuff like "The Prophecy". Only maybe imagine you've got like, a real young Tony Todd in the lead role - very sort of academic and "talky" in his approach to tackling weird supervillainous stuff. Sure, it's a smidge like Morrison's Mister Miracle series (also part of Seven Soldiers), but it works better here, I think, even than for Shilo.

So I could see a weird story where there's a good guardian angel like Zauriel - though I'd say it's gotta be Gabriel himself, incarnate in a Harlem resident, then the archangel Azrael (where Mal got the horn from - not to be confused with J.P.V.) is incarnate and is villainous, then Jason Blood represents the more demonic side of things. And it plays out with the original and incredibly aptly named street gang that featured in Mal's introduction to the Titans - the Hell Hawks. I mean their name has "Hell" right in it!

There's a lot of solid movies out there with this sort of iconography, where angels and devils are warring but the characters appear human. The Devil's Advocate, so on.

Oh a team-up with the Guardian of Manhattan, Cyborg, Black Lightning, and Shilo Norman would just be kick-ass, too.

I'd love to read this..

[Aahz]

I would immediately ditch any traces to the Herald character/concept. The hornblower gimmick is just brutal. I would make him The Guardian again.

Him becoming the Guradian felt for me allways very random, since he had no connection to that character at all.

I feel like they have dropped the ball with that character long ago, this character is arround for amlost 50 years and still doesn't really even have and iconic identity or costume, it is imo to late to change that.

[Jim Kelly]

I think super-hero-izing Mal Duncan was an early instance of this growing impulse to super-hero-ize everyone surrounding the central super-hero characters. So that soon you lose any people in the ensemble who represent us normal folks.

There's no reason that Mal has to have a costume or super-powers, except that comic book creators don't have any confidence in the attention span of the readers. They think we'll lose interest in any characters that don't have a gimmick.

And maybe they're right--given the number of times I see some poster make a weak critique that this so-and-so is boring, without explaining what they really mean by that. I think what they mean is they can't sustain an interest in any charactter that isn't always hyped up.

[CRaymond]

What's the deal with that 5 year break anyway?

Introduced in 70 as a deuteragonist to the O5 Titans, then nothing(?) for 5 years, until he's given 2 false starts as Guardian and Hornblower?

Was he the team's Rick Jones/Snapper Carr/Wendy & Marvin... and then thrown a (super)bone when the editors wanted to elevate a side character?

[Jim Kelly]

TEEN TITANS was cancelled for about four years: 1973 - 1976. But let's back track . . .

With Batmania in the mid-'60s, the costumed super-hero trend took hold of comics where even non-super characters like the Archie gang got in the act. Then when Batmania went bust, the public repudiated costumed super-heroes--and everybody tried to get out of their gaudy oufits.

And so, in the late '60s/early '70s, the Titans went through some serious, relevant stories. Just like Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Deadman, Hawk & Dove, Justice League, mod Diana Prince and others. But that didn't translate into sales. So I guess that was one reason why TITANS ended. Probably also to clear the way for other titles.

Mal was sort of like a Snapper Carr figure, except in the relevant stories there was a period where the Titans gave up their costumes and were depressed about things they had done. So in that grounded reality you had folks like Mal and Lilith. While Lilith had psychic powers, she didn't wear a costume or go by a super-hero codename.

Then in the second half of the '70s, when DC books were much more light and fantasy-driven, DC revived the title and went in a less serious direction--with some influence from BATMAN FAMILY, for which Bob Rozakis was also writing. But that also didn't last--which left the Titans open for Wolfman and Perez to revive a few years later.

[CRaymond]

Thank you very much!

[astro@work]

I've followed Mal since the '76 "revival", and am sad he doesn't get used more. I think a big part of the problem is lack of consistency with his hero identities. Each writer needs to quit trying to reinvent Mal, instead of building on what's been established.

Honestly, I don't hate his Herald powers/i.d. (Maybe I'm alone on that one, haha). Historically, my favorite was the Guardian i.d. because it made him feel more street level, which is in keeping with his early non-powered appearances. But if he IS going to be powered up, I say stick with the Herald stuff and be consistent about it so each new writer isn't tempted to re-write him from scratch.

[Incognito]

I'll give them this - sonic/sound-based powers combined with his recent focus on being a musician certainly works perfectly with my holistic approach to him, using his Herald moniker and Gabriel's Horn stuff to connect him to Morrison's Pax Dei and heavens and Silver City and such. Those angels were essentially living music, and multiversal musical frequencies and sound and "The Voice" of the entity known as God are all music based, much moreso than any of the other Fifth-Dimensional god-realms. The Angels and "heavenly" magical beings are musical, and the devils of Hell are more about discord, like Neron, but even Etrigan factors in, as he's a rhyming demon, which makes him a strange "lord" among demons. Perhaps a touch of the heavenly music lies upon the pseudo-heroic rhymers.

Obviously that means if I'd be going for a Mal Duncan who embraces the zany Morrison angel stuff and the zany Kirby Guardian stuff, he'd have to have an encounter with Jason Blood and Etrigan, some of the properly zany Kirby Hell-based stuff. Links then to Seven Soldiers' Guardian Jake Jordan but also Klarion the Witch-Boy seem very easy to make once that happens.

Not that I'd be having Mal summoning angelic hosts or anything, though. I dunno, it'd be weird - I'd still kind of want to keep him street level, so like ... more focus on Jason Blood himself. More focus on the Guardian's street-level heroics if Jim Harper or Jim Harper 2.0 show up. Various Newsboy Legions could tie into Kirby Cadmus Cloning, obvs. Maybe Etrigan himself has some thoughts about cloning.

It would be a weeeeeeeird book.

But kind of perfect. And very black. There's a lot of great black culture that could be front and center in those concepts - the famous singing of black churches, for instance, would tie in perfectly to a musician with a heavenly connection. And Kirby-style cloning being used and maybe agents from heaven or hell in "street guise" trying to help or hinder freaky deaky cloning stuff would just heavily reference "The Omen", or maybe stuff like "The Prophecy". Only maybe imagine you've got like, a real young Tony Todd in the lead role - very sort of academic and "talky" in his approach to tackling weird supervillainous stuff. Sure, it's a smidge like Morrison's Mister Miracle series (also part of Seven Soldiers), but it works better here, I think, even than for Shilo.

So I could see a weird story where there's a good guardian angel like Zauriel - though I'd say it's gotta be Gabriel himself, incarnate in a Harlem resident, then the archangel Azrael (where Mal got the horn from - not to be confused with J.P.V.) is incarnate and is villainous, then Jason Blood represents the more demonic side of things. And it plays out with the original and incredibly aptly named street gang that featured in Mal's introduction to the Titans - the Hell Hawks. I mean their name has "Hell" right in it!

There's a lot of solid movies out there with this sort of iconography, where angels and devils are warring but the characters appear human. The Devil's Advocate, so on.

Oh a team-up with the Guardian of Manhattan, Cyborg, Black Lightning, and Shilo Norman would just be kick-ass, too.

Awesome idea, man.