Character Design Challenge #332: Twins!

Your CDC this week is to create a pair of twins; one good and one evil.

Rules for posts, contests, and challenges: Original characters only, no copyrighted characters, no characters based on copyrighted characters, no characters based on RPG’s or other games. The characters must be your own design and not based on any character that might be copyrighted in any way. Please keep all submissions PG13: full or partial nudity is prohibited. I have the right to delete any post that I believe crosses this line without warning. Only post characters that have been created solely using Hero Machine, and that you know for certain have never been entered in a contest before. If you aren’t certain, don’t enter it, because I’m not going to go back through all of the contests and check.

All entries must be in JPG or PNG form (BMPs are too big), posted to a publicly accessible website (like the HeroMachine :,ImageShackDeviantArt, or whatever - Please do not use Photobucket);

  • Entries must be made as a comment or comments to this post, containing a link directly to the image and the character name;
  • Please name your filesas [your name]-[character name].[file extension] before you upload it. So DiCicatriz, for instance, would save his “Bayou Belle” character image as DiCicatriz-BayouBelle.png.

Please make the link go directly to the image (like this) and not to a hosting jump page (like this). *

This contest will close on Sunday, August 13 at 9:00am Eastern.

The Dark Tower Spoiler Free Review

Well, it’s finally here. The moment of truth. The Dark Tower is here. Due to work schedules we hit up the Thursday night screening, so we got to see the very first showing in our theater. That was pretty cool in itself; me and the other half, my fellow Dark Tower nerd sister, and our elder spawn whose namesake is the main character of this series. This was a big night, and some of us were quite nervous to see how it would turn out. How could we possibly flesh out a world with such dense lore and connection to so many other things and make a satisfying movie with only 95 minutes of runtime? Well folks, that’s what we’re here to talk about today. This is a spoiler-free review and I’m going to try and keep it a little more succinct than some of my other ones. Because this is The Dark Tower though, I will also be posting a second review which will be spoiler-heavy, lore-discussing, and hardcore nerdy. I’ll link that separately. So let’s get to it.

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Who Is The Best Batman Villain?*

So, I've had something I've been wondering for a while now and I thought I might as well put the question to the community. You see, when it comes to discussing the best Batman villain, there's always one single answer. Joker. And that answer is probably right. He's the guy who's been around the longest, is the most recognisable and has done the most to hurt the Dark Knight out of any of his numerous enemies. But just saying Joker is the best does hurt the discussion of what is The greatest rogues gallery in any medium (comics, film, TV, video games, books you name it). So what I want to do is pose the question, who is the best Batman villain (not including Joker)? Think of it as we're deciding the number 2 spot as it were. I've put together a fairly comprehensive list of the Dark Knight's greatest enemies and I want you guys to tell me who is best.

You can add your own entries, but I'm not accepting any villains who are famous for fighting Batman but were originally villains for other characters (e.g. Soloman Grundy, who was originally a Green Lantern villain, or Deathstroke, who started out as a Teen Titans villain and is generally more of a Justice League adversary more than anything). You can vote for your top 10 once a day over the next week.

[polldaddy poll="9803472"]

What Were They Thinking?: Finger gets Kane’d

When it comes to great comic book characters, their creation is invariably a team effort. None of Stan Lee's Marvellous menagerie would be as popular as they are today without the contributions of Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko and there would be no Superman without both Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. But why exactly are we bringing the creation of classic characters up on What Were They Thinking?, the place where we look at all of the stupidest and most ill-advised things in comic book history. Well, there is one comic book character with a dark side to their creation and it is less ill-adivsed and stupid as it is confusing and downright deceitful in places. I am, of course, talking about na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na this guy:

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Caption Contest #99 Results

Last week I asked you guys to come up with the best replacement dialogue for this panel:

And our top 5 are:

MLS: Firestar is hopeless in the kitchen and Iceman still isn’t back with the beer. ‘Amazing Friends’ my ass!

The Atomic Punk: Oh yeah, MJ is gonna kiss this cook!

Rekulhs Nathe: I’m just like Walter White

Delanie kartheiser: My cooking is so great even the smoke alarms cheering me on 

HerrD: . . . two cups flour, one egg, one fire extinguisher? What?

But, of course, there can only be one winner and this week that winner is...

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Atomic Blonde Spoiler Free Review

Look at me, back again with more movie reviews! There’s always a busy time of the year when it seems like there’s a new movie we want to see every week, and it seems like this is that time. Today we’re going to talk about another one that I was really excited for: Atomic Blonde, which is based on the graphic novel The Coldest City. No spoilers ahead, so let’s jump right in.

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Free Fire Quick Review

Hey everyone, thought I’d do a quick little blurb here. We watched Free Fire tonight, and while I wasn’t planning to do a review for it, after it was done I thought maybe I’d hammer out a few thoughts for it. I didn’t even take any notes, so this is all off-the-cuff here. No spoilers, as usual.

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What Were They Thinking?: Crisis Identified

We've covered a lot of bad storylines here on What Were They Thinking?. That's only natural, seen as this is the place where we look at all of the stupidest and most ill-advised things in comics history. But we've never covered a storyline that has been refered to as "the comic that ruined comics". Now what storyline could have recieved such a negative accolade? Perhaps it was something from the 90's, like The Death Of Superman, which ironicly killed off the concept of death in comics. Or maybe it could be refering to One More Day, the Spider-Man storyline that more closely resembles excrement than Fearful Symmetry. Or maybe it is refering to something like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns or Crisis On Infinite Earths, which are absolute classic storylines but had a negative impact on the direction the industry would take as a result. Well, actually it's none of those. We are in fact taking a look at this:

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Caption Contest #99

Ok guys, time for another caption contest, where you have to come with the funniest replacement dialogue for a random comic panel of my choosing. This week you have to replace the dialogue for this panel:

Everyone can have a maximum of 3 entries, entries must be in by next Wednesday (Aug 2nd) and All Entries Must Be PG-13.

Dunkirk Spoiler Free Review

Hey again, everyone! Well, July’s been pretty busy for movies and it isn’t slowing down yet. Today we are looking at the latest effort from director Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk, based on the evacuation of soldiers from Dunkirk, France during the Second World War. As always, no spoilers ahead.

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