As Krinn mentioned, Moondragon is a Marvel character. She's a bald, scantily clad telepath with an impossibly twisted backstory, and, as with every other character Jim Starlin's ever created, she owns everyone else in a most Mary Sue-like manner. When Starlin's writing something, Moondragon's a goddess; when he's *not* writing something, the whole Marvel writing community either tries very hard to pretend Moondragon doesn't exist, or she gets bitchsmacked *hard*. (There's one issue of _Web of Spider-Man_ where Spidey owns Moondragon for the whole issue. It's *really cool*.)
>> SAMAS: I'm getting a strong R.A. Salvatore vibe from all of this.
Salvatore's responsible for first unleashing Drizzt Do'Urden on the world, and then writing about him at copious length until everyone wants to scream.
>> ICE: Hey! That's Banishing Blade! Put that back!
Auron's third Overdrive from Final Fantasy X.
>> SAMAS: So Misty grew up, went off, and became Cate Archer?
Sort of an obscure "Preacher" reference, taken from the second-to-last TPB. Eisenstein's the man who recruited Starr into the Grail.
>> ICE: No! Despero! Despero is attacking!
He's an old JLA villain, I think.
>> EON: Frederic Wertham, call your office.
Wertham wrote _Seduction of the Innocent_, the book which called everyone's attention to a bunch of homosexual subtext in comic books that wasn't there, and to a bunch of gore that *was*. He's more or less why there was a Comics Code Authority.
>> ICE: He uses that thing more often than Kan Konar, man.
In Michael Reaves' _The Shattered World_, Kan Konar is the biggest non-mage badass in the world. He's sort of got this bushido thing going on. He fights with his hands, feet, and these really sharp and heavy blades woven into the edges of his cloak. In other words, he kills people with his cape for *two hundred pages*, and he *still* doesn't use it as much as Ashura does.
>> [This is one reference verbatim from one of the older captions from the "Dysfunctional Family Circus." God knows how
THAT got there...-rJ]
I'd imagine *you* put it there, John. I know I didn't; the only deliberate DFC reference I ever made was the list of possible meanings for "PJ" in ep. 102.
>> MARK: NO! Not Jay Garrick, too!
Props to Krinn: Jay Garrick is the Flash with the pie plate on his head.
>> MARK: The Baxter Building?
>> ICE: Four Voyagers--I mean, Four *Freedoms* Plaza?
>> ???: Pier Four?
The Baxter Building was the Fantastic Four's headquarters until it was destroyed about halfway through the John Byrne run on the book. Four Freedoms Plaza was the building that replaced it, and, when the Thunderbolts destroyed the Plaza after "Heroes Reborn," the FF moved into Pier Four.
The Four Voyagers Building, on the other hand, is the New York base of operations for the "Four," a megalomaniacal band of "adventurers" and the chief villains of Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's _Planetary_. The Four are genocidal monsters who just so happen to share the appearance, origin, and general powers (although it's a Warren Ellis book, so *everyone* ages really slowly, has superhuman strength, and is incredibly fast) of the Fantastic Four.
>> MARK: This is similar to J'onn J'honnz Oreo Habit.
It's "J'onn J'onnz," I think. The Martian Manhunter. The Oreo bit refers to one of the "wacky" characterizations that J'onn had during the Keith Giffen run on "Justice League International."
>> TBS: That's no ninja! That's Kayin Amoh!
Kayin's the "Ken clone" of the mostly-overlooked PSX fighting game _Battle Arena Toshinden_. He, like the ninja in the relevant scene, is most notable for the fact that he bothers to bring a damn sword to a fight (specifically, he brought *Excalibur*), and then spends the whole round kicking people in the face 'til they die. The rising splits kick was a particularly vivid parallel.
Thomas Wilde
a.k.a. Wanderer
that's evolution, baby!