Lies! The deerstalker is the greatest of the Holmesian fetishes, as laid out by the dreck Young Sherlock Holmes. The others are the pipe, the conspicuous magnifying glass and an enemy with the name of Moriarty. Only the deerstalker has no possible redeeming qualities and just no reason to exist at all! The magnifying glass makes practical sense and the pipe is a period thing that's actually major.

I wouldn't have it any other way. It also has the advantage of ruling out Holmes as being a goddamn literal robot.

I've noticed that other than Wolverine*, we've spent this entire thread talking about DC characters.

Regulus Tera mentioned wanting to change Stephen Strange which made me think of this post by Mightygodking, which took me like 10 minutes to dig out of his archives.

*(Another Wolvie idea: use him as Marvel's Lobo aka 90's parody guy.)

That was me, but that's actually a great article.

I suppose my problem is how he's been written the last few months, what with his involvement-not-involvement in the Civil War and the Mighty Avengers. I need to go find a Dr. Strange solo book to see some good writin'.

See, I think it's sometimes the things that get attached to a character for no good reason that have a lot of potential to become really nice little bits when handled the right way -- like Bruce's affection for the dog that's totally supposed to be Ace the Bathound in Batman Beyond, or the invisible plane becoming the invisible pony in that Wondy-as-kid-cowgirl sketch I linked to a while ago. I don't exactly know how the deerstalker could be made to fit better into the Holmes universe, because sadly my acquaintanceship with the character is limited to having read Caleb Carr's professional fanfic the Italian Secretary, Data and Geordie's incredibly fruity Holmes and Watson LARP on Star Trek, and maybe like an episode of Wishbone or something as a kid, but still, I bet someone could make it work. There's nothing good or bad but crappy writing makes it so, I sez.

I think that's probably because DC's big names tend to have been created much earlier than Marvel's, and so have had more time to accumulate even more of the same kind of seemingly irrelevant baggage to carry around. Plus it sort of feels like DC itself treats them like these untouchable sacred idols who mustn't be screwed around with or allowed to really evolve much, so that baggage never gets turned into anything interesting except maybe in an Elseworlds title it can safely ignore. As dumb and ridiculous and poorly-conceived as its decisions can be, at least Marvel is sometimes happy to break its toys to see what happens.

Also the best version of Doctor Strange is Doctor Orpheus from Venture Brothers, end of discussion.