Issue(s): Marvel Comics Presents #29 (Quasar)
Cover Date: Oct 89
Title: "It came from within"
Credits:
Mark Gruenwald - Writer
Paul Ryan - Penciler
Dan Bulanadi - Inker
Mike Rockwitz - Assistant Editor
Terry Kavanagh - Editor

Review/plot:
Quasar detects a an unexplained energy phenomenon, and flies down to the Everglades in Florida to check it out. He finds Jennifer Kale stuck in some mud.

She asks him to look into a problem that her friend, the Man-Thing, is having.

Turns out the Man-Thing has gotten pregnant after an unprotected encounter with something that came out of the Nexus of Reality.

Quasar helps him give birth to Quagmire, from the Squadron Supreme universe.

I love Quasar just getting overly upset about Quagmire speaking rudely to a girl that Quasar thinks is cute.

Quasar reminds Quagmire of Doctor Spectrum. I wonder why?

Since Quagmire's powers counteract Quasar's, it comes down to fighting dirty (by splashing mud in Quagmire's eyes) and fisticuffs.

That stops whatever disturbance Quagmire was causing, and Quasar gets the ok to give Jennifer a call some time before he leaves.

I've complained when this book features characters that already have their own books, but i do find that the stories that feature the current creative teams tend to be better than average for these eight-pagers. This little story really is a microcosm of the Quasar series, good and bad. Obscure character, fun battles, and awkward scripting ("Hey, she's not wearing a lot of clothes! I should ask for her phone number!")

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: Quasar's fight with Quagmire is referenced in Quasar #4, so this should take place prior to then. The MCP has it prior to Quasar's Atlantis Attacks appearances as well. Quagmire's last appearance was in Squadron Supreme #10 (he was unconscious and his powers were going out of control, so Hyperion pulled the plug on his life support, and he disappeared), so it's not necessary to worry about placement of this story vs. Squadron Supreme: Death of a Universe.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Is Quagmire still on Earth-616? Has he been seen since this story? I'd assume the Squadron Supreme would have at least looked in on him when they were stranded at Project: PEGASUS for a couple of years.

The answer is yes -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quagmire_(comics)

I don't think he ever runs into his fellow Squadron-versers again, though.

I should have been more specific -
My answer was in regards to the question of whether he had been seen since this story.

I was just adding info, not correcting you, Clyde! :-)

More evidence of Gruenwald's questionable attitude towards women- Jennifer Kale is basically a damsel-in-distress in this story. Then again, it seems like she's a damsel-in-distress in half her appearances.
"I love Quasar just getting overly upset about Quagmire speaking rudely to a girl that Quasar thinks is cute."
I think he's supposed to be trying to rape her.

There isn't a clear explanation of how Quagmire's behavior modification got reversed.

From the Wiki entry - "Quagmire's body passed through the body of a seemingly pregnant Man-Thing. This passage apparently reversed the effects of the behavior modification, restoring his old criminal, renegade personality, and he battled Quasar and Jennifer Kale."

I know that's not very clear, but at least it's something.

Well, being born out of the Man-Thing would break MY brain, so it's as good a theory as any.

I remember you once said Guenwald was a DC writer at heart, fnord. You really are right. I think thats why he was attracted to bland, straight arrow heroes like Quasar. He got to write the green lantern this way. What normal hero would shout "Unhand her at once!"? That's comicbook dialouge 101.

I was wondering why you'd bother to bring a character from one universe to another like he did with Quagmire here. I think it was because he was hoping to set Quag up as a regular foe of Quasar. I remember Guenwald writing at the time about a lack of villains who would be a good challenge for Quasar's powers (same problem with Captain Monica Marvel). He was probably trying to add Quag to Quasar's extremely limited rogue's gallery.

"Hey, she's not wearing a lot of clothes! I should ask for her phone number!"

fnord, to be perfectly honest, if I was still single, I'd probably be doing the exact same thing :)

Well, Quagmire is an infinitely better rogue than the Angler.

Yeah, but Ben Herman, you have a tattoo of Mantis, so your taste in women is a bit suspect. :)

@Erik Berk - Yes, I will certainly grant you that. And I'm not even going to bother relating exactly and I met my girlfriend :)

Quagmire was one of Gruenwald's better villains he created in Squadron Supreme. He has a unique visual, a strong power set, and a distinctive personality. He could have been a very strong member of Quasar's rogues gallery. However, he appeared in this MCP issue, not Quasar so I never knew they encountered one another, and he wouldn't appear in Quasar until 3-4 years later and not encounter Quasar himself until the book was practically cancelled. As someone from a different universe, that is a baggage to the character as he has no ties to THIS world, but it could be made to work and become interesting.

But if he intended Quagmire to be part of Quasar's rogues gallery, he really needed to have him appear once or twice more in Quasar fairly quickly. It was a standard failure of Gruenwald's work on the Quasar title that repeat villains rarely happened.

I think Quagmire and Quantum were the best of the villains we saw in the first year of Quasar. They were both powerful enough and distinctive enough that they would have been been a good beginning core. Certainly they could have been reused instead of some of the more weaker Quasar stories. Then if you added Maelstrom and the Presence as repeat villains, you'd have a strong group. He could have built Dr. Minerva and some Kree underlings as another to add a strong female antagonist. These are all people he used once and could have done again.

I think with Gruenwald, he started out with the intentions of establishing the likes of Quagmire and Captain Atlas and Minerva as recurring antagonists but he stopped doing stand-alone issuees and then got caught up in crossover mode after the Maelstrom story (Infinity Gauntlet, Operation Galactic Storm, Infinity War - all in quick succession) so when he finally got out of that (around Quasar #44) he'd lost a lot of momentum, quality art and by then a lot of readers.

AF, I agree that Gruenwald eventually meant to come back to some of the villains he introduced, but even if the crossovers had not occurred, they still would have marked several years delay before a reappearance.

In contrast, if we use Amazing Spider-Man's first two years as an example (and Gruenwald had almost that long before he started Cosmos in Collision), we see multiple repeat appearances of villains. The Chameleon, Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Enforcers, Mysterio, Green Goblin, and the Ringmaster all have multiple appearances, and I am not even counting the Sinister Six in the annual!

So he had more than enough time to establish real rivalry with a few villains before his big storyline and the crossover madness that came after it. Waiting thirty or forty issues is way too long.

To be fair to Gruenwald, he is hardly the only writer to have had the problem of failing to truly build a proper rogues gallery (which must include repeat appearances if you want them to be part of your hero's own mythos). In fact it seems many writers have this failing, and it contributes to killing many new series. You only have so much time to really draw in the readers, and identifying compelling villains and reusing them is essential.

To an extent, this is also a side effect of Gruenwald positioning Quasar as the "cosmic" book. It's hard to find a "cosmic" Marvel character who has what you'd call a rich rogues; gallery; for the most part, there're a handful of "major" cosmic baddies -- Thanos, Galactus (the original cosmic antagonist!), Mephisto, Ego, and (more recently) Annihilus, plus the Kree and the Skrulls as the nasty alien races.

But if you look at solo titles for cosmic characters, who are their rogues? In around 150 issues, the Silver Surfer ultimately just had Mephisto and Morg. (Ron Marz tried hard with the likes of Tyrant and a souped-up version of Reptyll, but they just didn't stick).

How much of a rogues gallery does, say, the Sam Alexander or event he Abnett/Lanning Nova really have? How about the ("present-day") Guardians of the Galaxy?

I will say Nova has always had a pretty decent or well-defined rogues gallery that they do usually always come back to, even in his New Warriors days. There's Sphinx, Diamondhead and even Condor has appeared in most the Richard Rider Nova series. Then ones like Corruptor and Blackout became pretty modestly known from other appearances but sadly Nova never came back to. It's a small rogues gallery, but unlike Silver Surfer, it is a lot more the case that the character's are "his". Even though Blackout only appeared in 1 Nova story, if he showed up in a Nova comic again, you'd be willing to think of him as "a Nova baddie".

Quasar actually has the makings of a rogues gallery too, it's just - as we all have said - Gruenwald didn't get back to anything fast enough or ever. Ereshkigal could've been a great villain for Quasar, someone who completely plays to Mark Gruenwald's "corners of the MU" shtick, but ultimately we only got the one issue with her. Likewise, Maelstrom was Quasar's biggest villain and he only got the one story. If you look at the ones he did get back to: Presence, Neutron, Quagmire, Angler (ugh), Blue Marvel and mix them with the solid ones he didn't get back to: Maelstrom, Ereshkigal, Overmind... you can genuinely argue Quasar has a solid potential rogues gallery to draw upon. (I've always thought a character needs at least 12 villains "unique" to them - so they can fight a different one every issue for the year - and it's easy to do this with what we got)

Nova's an interesting case, in that he wasn't played as a "cosmic" hero early in his run, and so he got a rogues gallery more like that of a conventional superhero. Only Diamondhead and the Sphinx really got pulled into his cosmic adventures.

Part of the problem in cultivating villains is that Quasar's run is full of false starts, setups that don't become established. The security business never really creates a stable situation for Wendell Vaughn and is abandoned; Eon dies partway through the run, as does his father; and, as was discussed in various Infinity Trilogy comments, the other cosmic crossovers marginalize Quasar when he should be at their center, forcing his series to carve out plots that avoid other big players in the MU cosmic scene. By the end, Gruenwald was trying to save the book with constant crossovers, stunting whatever development there might have been.

More than anything, though, I think Quasar's distinctive personality limits the kinds of archfoes he can have. Deathurge is a good foil for a character who represses his feelings, and his shadow-weapon powers are a nice inversion of Quasar's. And the Blue Marvel is another good villain-as-foil. But beyond that, Wendell Vaughn is hard to play off against the usual megalomaniac villains on one hand, and he's too analytical to really be awed by or match aphorisms with abstract beings and grand villains like Thanos. All of that makes it hard to deepen conflicts with villains and make 'em "stick."

The more powerful the hero, you need more powerful villains to present an adequate challenge. Since many "cosmic" heroes are fairly powerful, that can create problems. If they are too powerful, then either they need to be defeated for all time, or they are taken over by team books. But I really don't think that is a problem for Quasar. I can imagine all sorts of ways that he is vulnerable. I wouldn't place Quagmire on the same level of Maelstrom, but his power set is effective enough. He'd have made a nice threat on Earth for Quasar. And Gruenwald did include various characters in the title that could be at Quasar's power level.

I also don't think Quasar's personality would really hurt his ability for a good rogue's gallery. The best villains have a compelling personality/motivation. But it is not necessary to have a personal connection to the hero. As "protector of the universe", Quasar always has a reason to fight many of his villains - Eon/Epoch tells him to do so. After one or two fights where Quasar shows up and stops the villain, that villain will develop a personal animosity.

I included a half dozen villains in my list of a real rogues gallery because those were villains who had already appeared. But there were plenty of other candidates that could have been taken from previous appearances. And of course brand new characters.

I do agree with Omar that Quasar suffered from false starts that ultimately did not go anywhere. His day job as a security consultant really didn't lead to anything. It is why I suggested on several comments on Quasar's title that a better scenario would have been some affiliation with a government/scientific space research project. It would have built on established lore of Quasar's job at Project: Pegasus, been equally good if not better at giving him a normal supporting cast, and could have been used to generate more hooks for Quasar than just doing what Eon tells him to do.

Elements have to build on one another for readers to accept them as part of the character's mythos. Discarding any element early in a title's run really hurts that. Strong characters alone cannot determine a title's success. There have been many wonderful and popular characters which fail to support a solo title because it is the collective mythos around that character which sustains a title.

@Omar
"stunting whatever development there might have been" is right in more than one meaning...

Another thing I want to point out - a lot of people make, including the Handbooks, go with the assumption that Quagmire travelling between realities is what caused his behaviour modification to wear off... this isn't the case. When Lady Lark/Skylark made the same journey, her behaviour modification remained intact. I would suggest that it was his coma that did it - this actually makes some logical sense as opposed to it apparently just resetting when he traveled between realities (WHY would dimensional travel do something so specific and irrelevant?)

But it also apparently caused him to recover from his coma so...

The counterargument is that Lady Lark was transported via the Wizard Supreme's magic and Quagmire was transported via the Nexus- different methods of travel could result in different results.

But why would travelling through the Nexus remove Quagmire's conditioning? It's an awfully specific and very random effect for it to have.

Whereas him being in a coma is something that actually does affect his brain.

As a Quasar fan who has a hard time finding issues of his own series, I enjoyed this story. It helps that it's better than most of the Marvel Comics Presents one-shots. Obscure villains (Quagmire), forgotten characters (Jennifer Kale), Man-Thing... (yes, he got a 12-part story earlier, but this wasn't enough) This is the kind of thing writers should have used in this book, instead of meaningless one-shots about popular characters.

I was wondering why you'd bother to bring a character from one universe to another like he did with Quagmire here. I think it was because he was hoping to set Quag up as a regular foe of Quasar. I remember Guenwald writing at the time about a lack of villains who would be a good challenge for Quasar's powers (same problem with Captain Monica Marvel). He was probably trying to add Quag to Quasar's extremely limited rogue's gallery.

Waitaminute...of course, Quagmire is being set up as a Quasar villain. He was the enemy of the Green Lantern analogue in the Squadron, Doctor Spectrum, and Quasar's powers are also analogues of Green Lantern's. It's worth recalling that Gurenwald, in his pre-professional days, was at least as much a DC fan as a Marvel fan.