The Shocker.

Whenever I think of The Shocker, I am reminded of a quote from Happy Gilmore:

"If I saw myself dressed like that, I'd have to kick my own ass".

So that pretty much sums up my thoughts about The Shocker, he's got costume that causes people to go into epileptic shock when they see him. Let's see, what else do we have here...you know what? I don't even know why he's called The Shocker, because his "power" is that he can "project a concentrated blast of air that vibrates at an intense frequency". And I had to use "power" in quotes because he is just a normal dude; he built some gloves that shoot air out of them whenever he holds down a thumb trigger. Apparently, the feedback from these gloves can get pretty intense so he made a costume with a heavy amount of insulation to protect himself from the shock. Hence the name, The Shocker. Pretty lame explanation if you ask me. You kind of expect a dude with a name like The Shocker to have some kind of powers that involve electricity, but since he mainly fought Spider-Man, that idea probably got thrown out the window, because by the time his character was introduced, Spidey was already spending a lot of his time kicking Electro's ass on a regular basis. And I guess having two villains that have electrical powers would just end up confusing the readers, and "Wind Guy" just doesn't have a good ring to it, so they named him The Shocker. I think it's actually a cool name, but then they gave him the ugliest costume they could come up with, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because with a name as cool as The Shocker, you'd think he'd also have a super cool costume. I guess there's a reason I don't work at Marvel.

Anyways, so the one thing that really annoys me about some of these super-villains from the Sixties is the amount of times they went to jail and the fact that they kept getting paroled. I mean, I know this is comic book logic we're dealing with, but The Shocker went to jail like three or four times and got paroled each time and went right back to super-villainy. And he didn't even bother to change his horrible costume each time, he'd just go out and commit crimes. I mean, once Spider-Man or the police noticed that The Shocker was going around committing crimes, wouldn't they just contact Herman Schultz's parole officer and have him sent back to jail?

You can read about the rest of The Shocker's bio on Wikipedia. Apparently for some reason, they even bothered to make an Ultimate version of The Shocker. I am going to ask a simple question: does the world really need an Ultimate Shocker? My answer is no. Marvel needs to really stop the madness sometimes.

So to wrap this thing up, we salute you The Shocker (and I guess you too, Ultimate Shocker) for your ability to suck while wearing a costume that looks like you bought it from a Stryper estate sale. Bravo, sir.