This has been a slow building rant. When I first saw this a while back, I complained about it to Ken (who occasionally updates this blog). Ken has the distinct honor (or misfortune depending on how you look at it) of being the sample group for most of my rants. So here we go, the image to the left provided by the U.S. Postal Service shows new 39-cent and 24-cent postage stamps featuring Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Supergirl and half a dozen other superheros, which was released Thursday, July 20, 2006 (hmmm, mental note: go buy a sheet of stamps). See this article if Yahoo still has it up for more details.So what's wrong with this collection of heroes. There's no stamp for J'onn J'onzz a.k.a. Martian Manhunter! How can you have all the main DC heroes up there and not include J'onn. He was a founder of the Justice League for Pete's sake. All the other founders are up there on the stamp. There's Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern and even Aquaman. Aquaman gets a stamp for crying out loud and J'onn gets shafted. He was easily the most powerful member in the League also. He has almost all of Superman's powers, like super-human strength, invulnerability, super-speed, flight, and heat vision ("Martian Vision") -- at levels close to those of Superman himself. In addition to those (as if those weren't enough) he's able to shapeshift (adopting human form, elongating his limbs, growing to immense size, and so on), turn invisible, and alter his density (increasing it to become tougher and stronger, decreasing it to become incorporeal and thus able to pass through solid objects such as walls). Then because the dude isn't powerful enough yet, he was also a very powerful telepath, able to coordinate team members across the globe mentally. He's practically a one man Justice League. His one weakness (and admittedly, it's significant) is he fears fire, that's like his kryptonite. Still, the guy was a League founder, and deserves to be on a stamp. I mean, come on, Hawkman gets a stamp? I really don't know how they came up with those choices. Plastic Man I can almost see, but he wasn't even created by DC. DC acquired Plastic Man from Quality Comics after that company went under. And if you're going to include DC owned characters that DC didn't create, then I really don't see why Captain Marvel didn't get a stamp either.
5 comments:
My son Luke went through a J'onn phase, and he wanted to be J'onn for Halloween that year. Thank God for the Internet, as I was able to get him a costume and he was absolutely thrilled. He was the only J'onn Jones in all of Loudoun County, I'm sure.
I still have the costume if you want to borrow it.
J'onn: never heard of him.
Aquaman: I know.
Nuff said.
Your post spurred my memory. Check out these pictures.
Luke was really into J.J. that year, and I decorated his birthday cake with J.J. and Batman. I think it came out reasonably well... I mean, I'm not the guy at Food Lion's bakery, but still pretty good.
Here's that costume I was talking about. Cool, huh?
Nice, very accurate.
Did you make or buy that costume? And if you made it, how did you do the mask?
I still don't see how you can see Plastic Man as being more valid than the others.... But then again I'm not the comic geek you are... perhaps it's my own dislike for plastic man (never cared much for Reed Richards either, but at least he was a scientist too).
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