Gadget Spotlight: Lola

This is a short entry because there's not much to say.

The Agents of SHIELD pilot (2013) introduced Lola, Agent Coulson's flying car.

Lola later made an appearance in Deadpool #22 (January 2014) of all places, flown by Agent Coulson. Side note: it'd be great if this season of SHIELD had Scott Adsit playing Agent Scott Adsit.

Lola has since appeared in several issues of SHIELD volume 3.

Character Spotlight: Jiaying

I recently mentioned that Quake has moved a lot closer to her tv counterpart, Skye (and I didn't mention it, but Skye is also moving closer to her comics counterpart, Quake). And this month's Quake: SHIELD 50th Anniversary Special #1 (September 2015) continues that trend.

In SHIELD #7 (June 2015), we learn that Quake's mother is an Inhuman. This month, Quake meets an Inhuman named Jiaying who implies she knew Quake as a little girl.

If that name sounds familiar to you, it's because Jiaying is the name of Skye's mother (an Inhuman) in Agents of SHIELD. She first appeared in the episode "The Things We Bury" (November 2014).

Relationship Spotlight: Mockingbird and Lance Hunter

Mockingbird, aka Bobbi Morse, and Commodore Lance Hunter have a lot of things in common. They're both secret agents (Morse works for SHIELD, Hunter is the head of STRIKE). They both debuted in the 70s. And they both made their first appearances in England: Bobbi at the front door of Ka-Zar's mansion, Hunter in the pages of Captain Britain.

And that's about where their similarities end. They certainly don't have a similar number of appearances; Hunter has only shown up in a handful of issues since his debut, and the majority of those were in the spring of '77. Other than that, he's only appeared in a Civil War tie-in in 2007 and one issue of a miniseries involving Marvel UK characters called Revolutionary War in 2011. That is, until this month's Mockingbird: SHIELD 50th Anniversary Special #1 (September 2015). Which is the most important.

See, last year - for whatever reason - Lance Hunter became a recurring character in Agents of SHIELD season 2 (2014-2015). He wasn't the head of STRIKE; heck, he wasn't even a member of STRIKE, which in the MCU is an elite subgroup of SHIELD. He was just a mercenary. But he was British. And as a new wrinkle in his backstory, he took Hawkeye's place as Mockingbird's ex (as Hawkeye was in the movies and off-limits, and - as we'd later learned - married with kids anyway). Over the course of the season, we see them move slowly from angry exes to a love/hate relationship.

That relationship, at least to some degree, is now codified in the recently mentioned Mockingbird special. Whether it'll continue remains to be seen, but as Hunter seems to have been de-aged (no more combover) to more closely match his tv depiction, I think it's likely.

Daisy Johnson...or is it Skye now?

ComicVine posted an article yesterday about some new information coming out of SHIELD #7 (June 2015), which you can read at http://www.comicvine.com/articles/shield-7-merges-the-marvel-tv-and-comics-character/1100-152710/

But the jist is that Daisy's mom was an Inhuman, and Daisy is nicknamed Skye now (for a dumb reason). Mr. Hyde was also drawn to look like Kyle MacLachlan in this issue, but I don't think that'll stick.

Secret Wars's Weird Shield Things

As you may or may not know, Secret Wars started out as a toyline, and the miniseries was only made to promote the toyline. The action figures came with a pretty odd accessory: a shield that displayed one of several images.

These shields didn't factor into the comic book storyline at all, so it's anybody's guess what the intention was. Fortunately, during Marvel's NEW Secret Wars event, Deadpool's Secret Secret Wars #2 (June 2015) gave us the answer...sort of!

Blade's Powers

Comics Should Be Good has written a great article showcasing how Blade went from having just immunity to vampirism to full blown "all of the powers, none of the weaknesses" after his movie came out. As usual in cases like this, anything I said on the subject would basically be plagiarism, so here's a link.

One thing it doesn't mention is that these powers first appeared in season 2 of Spider-Man: The Animated Series (1996). This episode was supposed to tie in to the movie, but production trouble meant the movie would get released two years later.

The Maybe File: Wayne-Powers

Posts on this site are not always cut-and-dried. I wish they were. And there are definitely a lot of entries that should either clearly be on the site or should clearly not be, but there are also a lot of maybes, and including them comes down to a judgment call. This one is by far the maybe-est. In fact, I'm creating a new category just for it, because it's close enough that I wouldn't feel right not including it, but still hazy enough that I feel like including it is cheating a bit. So I'm including it with a big caveat.

This week in The Maybe File: Wayne-Powers.

Wayne-Powers first appeared in the first episode of Batman Beyond (1999) as a future version of Wayne Enterprises that had merged with Powers Technology (I can't find a picture of a sign, unfortunately). It was decidedly less well-intentioned than Wayne Enterprises, which makes sense since it was run by a supervillain called Blight.

In this month's Free Comic Book Day Divergence Special #1 (May 2015), we find out that two months from now, Batman has died and a company called Powers International, run by Geri Powers, has taken over Wayne Enterprises.

Now here's the question: does this count? It's not in the future, it's not (yet) officially called Wayne-Powers, and Geri Powers may or may not be related to Derek Powers. That being said, I think the intention is there, and I think the recent popularity of Batman Beyond backs me up. It's basically just like the Kingdom Come kick DC got on in the 2000s. So like I said, I'm including it, but there's a big ol' asterisk on this post for now.