I just realized this thread is four pages long, and nary a reference to
NFL Superpro!
So there's this great football star in the Marvel Universe, and he injures himself and ends his career. But somehow he discovers a scientist who has developed "the football uniform of the future." It looks like a beefed-up, high tech football uniform, with NFL logos instead of team logos. It increases the wearer's strength, speed, and agility, while making them invulnerable. I am not making this horseshit up.
But it gets better. Super-powered terrorists who somehow know about the suit and want to use the only existing prototype for evil attack while the main character is visiting the scientist and kill the scientist. But the terrorists do not know where the suit is hidden, and, as he dies, the scientist begs our hero to use the suit to avenge him. Which, of course, he does.
Is the "stupid level" hurting your head yet? Well, our hero--who no one recognizes despite the fact that his face isn't covered and he's wearing essentially the same football uniform he wore as a pro, albeit in different colors and with mandatory early-90s metal shoulderpads--continues to fight for truth, justice, and good sportsmanship. Until, that is, Marvel finally realizes that no one is reading this shit (or buying it--I got the few copies I have in various lots of 30 comics that was sold at Sam's Club back in the day) and cancel this mess. Even Spidey was ashamed to make his obligatory 3rd issue guest appearance.
Thinking back that far, to memories best left buried, reminds me of the whole failed "Marvel UK" experiment in the early 90s. I put "Marvel UK" in quotes for a reason. The company, Marvel UK, had been around for a while, and had given us a real stinker in Captain Britain. American readers knew of Marvel UK, but actual copies of the comics were notoriously hard to get here.
So an imprint called "Marvel UK" is started by Marvel, geared at the American audience. (It's pretty telling that the prices on the cover were in dollars and not pounds.) But do they reprint Death's Head, Action Force, Captain Britain, the missing issues of Transformers--in short, things we want? No. They come up with a bunch of truly shitty characters, obviously British in origin, written and drawn by third-stringers from the real Marvel UK, trying to force them into American-styled stories and situations.
First, well, I should start with Death's Head. Death's Head had been a time-travelling, dimension-hopping robot bounty hunter who looked like a dude in stylized medieval armor, and he had the odd (but, apparently, damned funny to Brits) quirk of turning everything he said into a question by adding "Yes?" to the end. Death's Head was the creation of one of Marvel UK's (and then regular Marvel's) star writers, Simon Furman. He was clearly Marvel UK's version of Lobo or Judge Dredd--funny, amoral, and violent as hell. And he rocked. Period.
Which brings us to
Deaths Head II.
Did Marvel ask Furman (who was, by now, kicking ass writing American comics) to write new adventures of Death's Head? Of course not! How about getting someone else to write new adventures? No, that wouldn't work, either. Despite the fact that Death's Head seemed to score with the few Americans who knew who he was, Marvel (apparently) decided that, since the "Marvel UK" line was all about going after the guys who liked Cable and other big, brainless guys with guns, an all new Death's Head was needed!
The first problem is the design. Death's Head looked goofy, but in a cool way. Death's Head II looked like a Terminator shat out an Uruk-Hai. But the look wasn't nearly as bad as the origin.
You see, a mad scientist was busy tinkering away to build the GREATEST BOUNTY HUNTER ROBOT OF ALL TIME!
Why? It's never established! So he builds this big, ugly Uruk-Shit-1000 thing, and what's he do next? He sends it through time and space to kill all the other bounty hunters so it will be the best! (You may ask, "Anarky, if this thing was good enough to kill all the other bounty hunters, why did it have to in order to prove it was the best? Couldn't it just do a kickass job hunting bounties?") So it goes around, killing all the other bounty hunters and assimilating them, since the writer apparently watched too much Star Trek.
And, since we all know that the best way to endear an obvious replacement to existing readers is to have the new character kill the original (again
), this unnamed robot finds Death's Head and kills him in like two panels. But something goes horribly wrong. (For starters, I'd paid money for this shit.) Death's Head's personality is too powerful, and, though it can't take over this robot, it convinces him to change his name and hunt bounties without the scientist's direction! So now we have an utterly humo(u)rless POS robot running around killing people with no underlying story.
And did I mention that Death's Head II looked retarded?
Next was
Motormouth. If you thought I was bullshitting with NFL Superpro, you'll love this one. There's this evil conglomerate, see? And they've made this incredibly powerful device to transport the user through time and space. (Why are these in such demand in the Marvel Universe, anyway, since half the people seem to be able to do that on their own?) Anyway, they have implanted (again) the only existing prototype in
a pair of sneakers! to the Nth power. Somehow, these sneakers fall into the hands (or, rather, feet) of a punky British teenaged girl, and they work in the (typically unfunny to all but British folks) running gag of having her saying "&*%$ me!" on every cover.
As goofy as it seems, I could totally see this working in an underground British comic. But this was American, aimed at the people who bought fifteen copies of X-Force #1 to get every possible UPC barcode/trading card combination.
Motormouth finds herself running into the X-Men a lot (since it seemed to be a rule that each "Marvel UK" title had to feature the X-Men on the cover, usually more prominently than the title character) for no reason. And she found herself on the run from the conglomerate's assassin,
Killpower. Killpower was obviously also intended as a joke, a spoof of the burly gunmen: he was a typical 5-year old kid in a body with more straps, muscles, scars, and guns than Cable could even dream of. Being a typical kid, he decides it'd be more fun to make friends than to kill, but the editors decide he should be the focus, and the title becomes "Motormouth and
KILLPOWER" (later, IIRC, dropping Motormouth altogether).