Ambush Bug

Long before Deadpool or She-Hulk, only one character was breaking the fourth wall, talking to the reader and acknowledging he was in a comicbook. Irwin Schwab is deeply delusional, morally ambiguous, and obsessed with superheroes. As Ambush Bug, he sought to join their rarefied society in a bodysuit that he claims fell to Earth from the planet Schwab. Harassing superheroes including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Kobra, he displayed the abilities of teleporting and healing from any injury. Failing as a villain and faring no better as a hero, he briefly found his niche and a measure of stability as A. Bug: Superhero field-correspondent for Channel 52 News. He still maintains that he has cosmic awareness and that reality is merely comicbooks being read by extra-dimensional superior beings. Oh sure, Superman can get a baddie named after Phymata americana, but Marvel still refuses our call to have Spider-Man fight one based on Anairetes parulus! In need of a villain to fight Superman and the Doom Patrol in DC Comics Presents #52, writter Paul Kupperberg asked artist Keith Giffen for input. Giffen recalled a character he'd tried to introduce at Marvel, Lunatik; after the Marvel incarnation "went radically wrong" (his words), he used some of that character's traits for this new creation. Fun fact: the other half of the character, all the stuff unused for Ambush Bug, became Giffen's other major creation, Lobo. Holy cow! The bio quoted above (copied by Todd from the 2021 DC Comics Encyclopedia) is correct: Ambush Bug's costume is from space. When the planet Schwab was about to be destroyed, Brum-El sent his wardrobe off-world in a rocket so it would survive. It was eaten by a space-spider. So only the suit and one other garment made it. Fashion on Planet Schwab must have been very strange, because this is an all-green suit with a pair of yellow antennae on the forehead and distinctly Kirby-Fourth-World-style markings on the face. He's sculpted with a big smile on his face, the perfect choice since Ambush Bug is one of the few comic book comicbooks. His antennae are molded from a surprisingly stiff ABS plastic, rather than flexible PVC - not stiff enough to easily snap, but not as bendy as you might expect from seeing them, either. This is one of the simplest figures McFarlane Toys has released in the DC line: there's a sculpted collar below the neck, and a single wrinkle across his chest, but otherwise this is just an anatomical figure with no costume elements and no paint. How did Mattel never make an Ambush Bug when they were doing the DCU Classics line? Not sculpting anything new was their bread and butter! The toy's articulation is as good as current-day McFarlane always provides: hinged toes, swivel/hinge/swivel ankles, double-hinged knees, swivel thighs, swivel/hinge hips, a balljointed waist, balljointed chest, swivel/hinge/swivel wrists, double-hinged elbows, swivel biceps, balljoint/hinge shoulders, and a barbell head. We still find the detents in the wrists and ankles (the positions the joints "snap" to when you're moving them) are a bit too far apart, so even moving them between one spot and the next means the piece will feel like it's jumped too far. You always have to work around that when you're playing with modern McFarlane Toys action figures. Once Ambush Bug decided to be a hero, he knew he needed a kid sidekick, so he did what anyone would do: he adopted a young ward to join him in his fight against crime. In his case, though, that wasn't a human boy, but a doll: one he dubbed Cheeks, the Toy Wonder. So does the inclusion of Cheeks here count as an accessory, or does it make this a two-pack? He's unarticulated, just meant to be carried around by his little arm, but has the exact kind of jowly look as the comics. Ambush Bug's hand is shaped to hold it, but the set also includes an alternate fist if you don't want that. As for why the fist is in a plastic bag taped to the cardboard insert rather than given its own space in the tray... eh, we couldn't guess. McToys could have foregone the closed hand and given us one more character, to really make this set outstanding. Like we said, the Ambush Bug suit was only one of two pieces of clothing that made it to Earth: the other was a single argyle sock which had gained sentience. After being shredded by a cat, the sock built itself a Dr. Doom mask to hide its disfigurement, and became Ambush's Bug's sworn arch-enemy, Argh!Yle! If this set could include a Cheeks the Toy Wonder, it could have included an unarticulated Argh!Yle, molded with a little base on his feet to keep him standing. Probably would have been expensive to paint his pattern, though. But then again, they were already saving money since Ambush Bug is solid green from the chin down. Keith Giffen was young and brash when he originally worked at Marvel in the '70s. He thought he knew better than everyone else, and generally acted like an ass. The story that was supposed be published in 1977's Defenders #52 had to be split in half and padded out with backup stories in both issues, because Giffen only mailed in pages at random, rather than in order, so writer David Kraft couldn't do his job scripting the story, and eventually had to call in other, more reliable artists to complete the missing pages. One of those pages saw the reveal of Lunatik, who had yet to be designed, which means a character Keith Giffen created was never actually drawn by him! If Giffen had been more professional, Lunatik may have debuted as intended, Giffen may have never had to work his way back up from the bottom at DC, and the world would have neither Lobo nor Ambush Bug. I'm not sure what the moral of that story is. -- 12/18/24 Who's your favorite (intentionally) funny comic character? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.