While Marvel Comics try and get the world excited about their summer shapechanging alien invader storyline Secret Invasion, it's perhaps time to consider reviving Britain's very own little-known human-hating, shapechanging alien comic character Doomlord. With a name like that and writing from Judge Dredd and Batman veterans John Wagner and Alan Grant, you know that quality sci-fi schlock is on the menu. Find out more about the aliens that threatened all human life without you knowing about it in the 1980s after the jump.
Doomlord started life as a photo-strip in 1982's relaunch of the weekly comic Eagle; the plot was surprisingly simple: Shape-changing telepathic alien comes to Earth armed with a magic ring that allows him to teleport and fire disintegration rays, to judge whether humanity should live or die. Of course, he decided that we should all be killed - which, really, is the decision you'd expect from someone calling themselves "Doomlord". Luckily, a plucky young reporter managed to kill him with a deadly virus that somehow never managed to leak past a locked door, and the world was saved. Or something.
Of course, this being comics, it turned out that Doomlord was only one of a number of Doomlords, and over the course of the next nine years, various aliens came to Earth to try and carry out the judgement only to meet similar ends. Not all of them wanted to kill us all, though; the second one decided that he liked his landlady and became a superhero until he saw the light and realized that Doomlord wasn't just a title, it was a calling. He ended up wanting to destroy humanity as well, in the end. The only reason we're all still around? Eagle was cancelled in 1991, and the character disappeared into limbo.
But in this post-Lord Of The Rings (He has a magic ring, people), post-Battlestar Galactica era, is there any one character that sums up the pop-cultural zeitgeist as an alien disguised as anyone who wants to kill us all for just being human? With a magic ring? I think not. And that's why I'm asking whichever movie producer happens to be reading this post to at least consider these four words: "Doomlord. Coming Summer 2010."
Doomlord [International Hero]