Groin Injury Saturday: Henry Peter Gyrich

The sometimes Avengers-liaison and full-time Government ass-bite, Henry Peter Gyrich, has been portrayed much more sympathetically of late. He's being shown more often not as a jerk, but rather as a man with over-whelming responsibilities trying to keep the lid on 20 pounds of mutant worms in a 10 pound can.

Screw that. Back in the 80's Petey was an irredeemable anus, and that's how I like him. To hell with character evolution. In Doctor Strange terms, Gyrich is the Universal Aspect Personification of the Bureaucrat-with-a- personal-grudge. I think it all stems from when the Beast humiliated him in court in a classic sequence drawn by John Byrne.

In Marvel's Damage Control (v2, #4) Ms. Hoag, the former owner of aforementioned Damage Control, is confronted by a shapeshifter disguised as Gyrich who plans to to kill her during the 'Acts of Vengence' tie-in. Don't get excited, it isn't Mystique.



But feisty Ms. Hoag won't have any of it. The ersatz-Gyrich not only gets pistol-whipped by his own gun while he is still holding it (added humiliation), but Ms. Hoag slams one of her tree-trunk like legs up into his crotch REAL HARD. Just imagining how violently you have to hit a shapechanger in the groin to prevent him from an immediate recovery by shifting away the injury makes me strain to breathe. If I could change shape I'd be shifting some dermal ridges and thick bone plate to protect the vulnerable parts before I got into a fight.

It wasn't the real Gyrich who got the groin injury, but it was him in spirit. There wasn't much difference between the real and faux-Peter, so I say it counts.