Saturday, February 10, 2007
Comic Art
We return this week to our series on speedsters and turn our attention to the Marvel variety. Unlike the DC Universe which is littered with them, Marvel really only has a few. The most notable is pictured here racing with Flash, DC's preminent speedster. His name is Quicksilver. Real name: Pietro Maximoff he is the son of the X-Men's greatest rival, Magento and is as big an egotist as his father, without the charm.
Quicksilver is in my opinion a character that has never really reached his potential, and I am not sure why. He is a mutant with all the baggage Marvel has placed on that label which is where his best story lines have come from, but as he has moved from his father's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to the Avengers, married an Inhuman, and now serves as an enforcer for his father's mutant nation of Genosha, he has never really been more than a really fast errand boy.His powers, in comparison to the DC variety speedster, are quite limited. The DC speedsters bend the laws of physics pretty severly. Pietro just runs fast. I have always wondered if that was a function of Marvel not wanting to be appear to do blatant rip-offs (although they did it so often...?) or they really thought about the fact that a mutant origin for superspeed would manifest quite differently than the origins used in the DC universe, which are born in physics, not biology. Boy, how's that for utter comic geek speak?!
This page is put of the story that made Qicksilver an enduring character, even if without his own title. When he and his sister Wanda (The Scarlet Witch) broke away from daddy Magneto, it made for great comics. But their father haunts them still today. Pietro works with his father to build a world separate for the much maligned mutants while Wanda is carefully kept sedated after completly destroying the Avengers in a fit of madness. A flawed father has produced flawed children. They did not know they were Magento's children when they broke from him, but one often wonders if these stories influenced George Lucas, vice versa, or if it is just the old classic tale of family and flaws.I have always liked Quicksilver's look if not his personality and story. The lightening bolt is the classic speedster motif, but it is well executed in Quicksilver to be distinctive, attractive, and not derivative. Someday, he may get what he deserves out of the comics.
Related Tags: comics, comic art, comic books, speedsters, Flash, Quicksilver
