Prepare to meet the baddest supervillain from the age of perma-grimace, overhatching, & holo-foil covers. He's the worst, a relic from a future of dudes in costumes fighting dudes in costumes with no substance or reason past the cover and splash page sent to a world of Silver Age throwbacks (Good & Bad) to assassinate the character and career of our anomolous hero, The Apparition!
Y'know, they say superheroes are costumes & concepts and although that sounds a bit reductive I tend to agree. I guess that's what made this guy so easy to think up... I think I got every piece of stupidity I could out of my study of characters like Cable, Bane, Carnage, Doomsday, and whatever other awfulness boom & bust "Image", Marvel, & DC pumped out.
I mean, Image is fine now and those founding years were extremely important for independent publishers, but trust me, most of that stuff is pretty bad. It could have gone differently too, but at the time of the Image exodus Marvel failed to see (or ignored the fact) that their creators were what was selling the books, not the characters and DC unfortunately cashed in with stuff like "Death Of Superman", reinforcing this notion and inflating the speculator bubble to its thinnest skin. Then "Pop!" But at least DC was also growing Vertigo to justify its existence the whole time...
So yeah, here's a character steeped in the non-substance of the 1990s... It's all there, a name with "Blood" in it, hands that morph into weapons, a stupid asymmetrical eye thing, lots of pouches, and don't forget the shoulder pads. If there's one thing I learned from Liefeld, it's that shoulder pads are not optional...
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