A puppet elemental. A criminal entomologist. Brother and sister computer nerds. An animal master. A Thanagarian shape-shifter. Which are hot, which are not? The Girls of the Hot Squad complete their assessment of Who’s Who #3’s entries based on sheer datability.
Featuring permanent panelists Isabel, Nathalie, Josée, and Amélie.
Listen to Episode 18 below (the usual mature language warnings apply), or subscribe to the feed on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!
Relevant images and further credits at: Who’s Hot and Who’s Not ep.18 Supplemental
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I’ve read that when Joe Simon created Brother Power, he planned to title the book “Brother Power the Freak,” but the higher-ups at DC thought that the word “freak,” in the context of the story’s hippie milieu, might have drug-related connotations. I don’t know how much truth there is to that story.
In the actual comic, he gets his nickname shortly after he comes to life, when one of his hippie friends wonders “Is it evil? Or good? Or just a geek?” In the second issue, Brother Power says that he is “known as The Geek because I am a sub-human man” (I always thought it was odd that he so readily admits to being “sub-human”), but he asks to be called Brother Power because he detests the name “Geek.”
Even though the original comic had Brother Power getting captured by a circus and put on display in a freak show, he wasn’t literally a “geek” in the chicken-biting sense…at least not until the ’90s Vertigo one-shot by Rachel Pollack & Mike Allred, which revealed that he WAS forced to be a literal geek during his captivity.
Before the site migration ate the comment, Anj said: Thought for sure Brother Power the Geek would be a hot. But I guess moldy-smelling hay and rags is a bit of a turn-off. I never knew the origin of ‘geek’ until I watched Nightmare Alley.
I don’t know if you do ‘other takes on costumes’ for this show like you do OHOTMU, but Byth in Tim Truman’s Hawkworld is particularly grotesque and horrific.
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my answer: We ARE doing a fashion show NEXT MONTH that covers the last issues of both OHOTMU and Who’s Who, but I’m not sure Byth is making the cut, which is why I described it (give or take the shapeshifting ugliness).
Bug & Byte: they really would have been great villains for the TRS-80 Whiz Kids. (I think I have one comic featuring them from Radio Shack back in the day.) The surprint image is a lot like a 1950s-60s Batman issue with an oversized everyday object, so that’s more fun than it should be.
B’wana Beast: Merging two animals together. I’m sorry, that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Where’s the consent for this transformation? What does it do to their thoughts? Do they really go on with their lives afterward like “well, that was weird, but guess I’ll eat me some grass”, or are they “what the F@%#! I was merged with a lion?! They eat us zebras! Seriously, I’m freaking out here!”
Byth: I’ve mostly read him in the Hawkworld series, where his shape-changing was off the chain and he acted like an addict, so that was creepy. This version is mostly meh, but then I noticed his evil eyes in the big-head surprint image! Those eyes is evil!!
Thanks for the laughs, hot squad!
I want to read that story of Bug and Byte time travelling to the present and trying to figure stuff out. It would be like us Gen Xers trying to do social media without the time to adjust to new technologies!
And the oHotMu squad makes Bwana Beast sounds exciting with all their discussions of different animals they would merge together.
This episode gave me the heebie jeebies. Bugs. Creepy dolls that come to life. Robot bugs. A kind of questionable sibling relationship. A crotch forward bald guy. A white guy named B’Wana.
Seriously, these entries made me B’Wana hurl!