The Most Fabulous Fighting Team Of All!

(The dates for 1975 and 2025 are identical.)

The Defenders were provided some of Marvel's most entertaining stories in the 70's. This supergroup made up of some of the most erratic and unpredictable characters in the Marvel Universe was brimming with raw power. And that made writing them trickier I suspect. 

If there could be only one, I might choose Marvel Feature #1 as my all-time favorite comic book cover. This dynamic Neal Adams illustration features three of Marvel's most potent offbeat characters in a design which leaps off the stands at you. Great stuff! But it wouldn't have been possible I suspect if Doctor Strange had not been cancelled.

Doctor Strange #183 was the final issue of that run ending the Strange series as well as the venerable Strange Tales run which numbering the good Doctor inherited. In this issue Doctor Strange gets a new secret identity thanks to the cosmic changing powers of Eternity. He is now known to the world as Doctor Stephen Sanders allowing him to put some distance between himself as a magic warrior for Earth and the sometimes adoring  public. An old friend sends him a telegram and he heads off to see what he can do. He finds his friend in poor health guarded by three men who turn out to be demons, servants of the The Undying Ones, ancient godlike beings who once ruled the Earth but who were sent into another dimension a millennia ago and now seem to want to return. He cannot save his friend but Doc does vow to save Earth.
 

But the cancellation of his own book meant that he had to do that saving in the pages of other heroes as a guest-star. He shows up in Sub-Mariner #22 and conscripts Namor to help him uncover the ancient idol of the Nameless Ones, the leader of the Undying Ones. This seems key to bringing those old gods back. After a furious battle against some shape changers they win the day but it seems Doc must stay behind and sacrifice himself to save Earth.

In Hulk #126 Jadejaws ends up captured by the cult of the Undying Ones and himself is catapulted into the Dark Dimension to battle the Night-Crawler an enemy of the Undying Ones who is able to block their path to Earth. Hulk finds Doctor Strange captive and a girl, regretting her role with the cult frees Doc by taking his place in a trap which blocks the Undying Ones from their goal. Doc and Hulk head back to Earth and Doc seems to give up magic and walk away, the threat ended for the time being.

A little later in Sub-Mariner #34 Namor discovers that a weather machine being built by the United Nations might be a threat to the planet and so he gathers together the Silver Surfer and the Hulk to help him investigate it and destroy it if necessary. First they battle a tinpot dictator and free his people.

Then in the next issue they turn their attention to the weather machine and must battle the Avengers (Thor, Iron Man, and Goliath). In the end they save the day, and their short-lived alliance is at an end.

All of this was written by Roy Thomas and he must've liked the idea of these heroes working together. They were all distinctly non-team members, so he decides to create a "Non-Team" and dubs it The Defenders. But first he has to bring Doctor Strange out of retirement.

That happens in a story called "The Return" by Don Heck in Marvel Feature #1 which shows Stephen Sanders wandering back to his Greenwich village house and finding it not locked as he expected. Inside he finds Wong and another Doctor Strange entirely garbed in his infamous blue mask. This turns out to Baron Mordo who has taken advantage of Strange's retirement. When Doc comes back it's for good and he ditches the skin-tight blue mask look.

And that brings us to the lead story in  Marvel Feature #1 and  "The Day of the Defenders". A threat from Doc's past, the "Scientist Supreme" Yandroth presents the Omegatron, a doomsday device which will destroy the Earth when Yandroth dies. When he does die Doc races to find allies to stop the machine which is disguised as a lighthouse on the northern Atlantic coast. It takes the combined might of Subby, Hulk and Strange to stop the post-mortem menace.

After that the "non-team" reassembles to battle Dormammu who seeks to once again enter the Earth dimension,  this time by stealing and inhabiting Doctor Strange's body.

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On Halloween in Rutland Vermont the battle rages as Clea and Wong recruit Namor and Bruce Banner to help. Dormammu is stopped once again, but barely.

And then it's "Hulk" versus "Hulk". At least that's the gag that inspired Roy to pluck Xemnu from the pages of Atlas monster comics.

He was called "Hulk" there and now dubbed Xemnu the Titan he possesses the body of an astronaut and along with is pal these two go on television and concoct a kiddie show to lure children to a rocket site so that Xemnu might repopulate his dead world. The Defenders get drawn into this and have to stop the forced migration.

When The Defenders left the cozy pages of Marvel Feature to venture off to their own title a lot of things changed. Roy Thomas and Ross Andru left and Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema came aboard. Englehart was just getting his motor revving when he took over the "Non-Team" and this first storyline showed off well the kinds of things he produced. Neat exciting stories rich in Marvel lore and crisp characterization.

In the debut issue Namor is literally thrown from the skies and it's up to Hulk and Doctor Strange to get to the bottom of it. They find a member of the Undying Ones cult named Necrodamus and it's a slugfest to the end. But surprisingly we learn that it was former ally the Silver Surfer who had beaten Namor and cast him out of the sky. The non-team vow to learn why.

Their quest takes them into the far reaches of the north where they find the Surfer, who is unwittingly the mind-controlled slave of a whole coven of Undying One worshippers. The fighting is fierce and we really get a chance to see each character shine as they battle one another and ultimately the evil they must confront.

This leads them to venture once again into the dimension of the Undying Ones where they find the young girl Barbara who had sacrificed herself before to stop the menace has gone mad and joined forces with the demons who want to take over the Earth. They stop the evil but at the cost of a young girl's sanity. The Silver Surfer is sick and tired and flies off in a huff. The three remaining heroes and the girl are left to wonder what comes next.

We see that they grew out of the final gasps of Doctor Strange's final issue and final threat, and then with Doc as the organizing core a new team is founded, one made up of misfits and outsiders and not a team which will ever have a charter. But there was one final piece still missing. 

Who knows what larger plans might've been percolating in the mind of Roy "The Boy" Thomas when he concocted a delightful lark of a story for The Avengers #83.

He had our assembled heroes (Goliath, Vision, Quicksilver and Black Panther) attend the Rutland Halloween parade and we meet not only the writer and his wife of the time but Tom Fagan, fan supreme.

At the same time this is happening the women of the Marvel Universe (Scarlet Witch, Medusa, Black Widow, and Wasp) fall under the spell of an enigmatic woman called the Valkyrie who convinces them that they have been held back by the male chauvinistic attitudes of the men in their lives. Weirdly they all agree to to go to Rutland and attack the male Avengers. The battle rages briefly before Wanda gets a clue that the Valkyrie is actually the Enchantress, and they have all been her pawns to help her get over the loss of her boyfriend the Executioner who ditched her for another dimensional queen. Like I said it's a hootenanny and a half.

Nor do I think it was part of some master plan when a year later in The Incredible Hulk #142 Roy revives the Valkyrie, this time as a personality which dominates the feminist -- Samantha Parrington. In a story titled "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?" which is mostly satire (Tom Wolfe has a cameo), we have the Hulk taking a nap in the Statue of Liberty and some upper crust society snobs named Parrington decide to use him as their next cause around which to have a fancy party and make a splash in the society pages.

Their daughter Samantha, a devoted feminist is appalled by this lame behavior and ends up getting enchanted by the Enchantress and becomes the Valkyrie just in time to battle old Greenskin. It all just rather ends, and the Hulk and Samantha go on their merry ways. I don't think we learn if the party was a hit. The comic was beautifully drawn though by Herb Trimpe and John Severin.

And that brings us to The Defenders #4 when the Enchantress pops up yet again. This story is by Steve Englehart with very attractive art by Sal Buscema and Frank McLaughlin (Judomaster's daddy). This time we get some resolution to the problem she has with the Executioner, and we see her take her revenge on the Queen who snatched him up. We also see her infuse the personality of Valkyrie into the body of the mad Barbara Norris, creating seemingly a whole new person. All this takes place in the castle of the Black Knight, who himself has fallen under the spell of the Enchantress and ends up transformed into a statue for his trouble. This is a terrible thing for a great character, but it does set up one of the most famous stories in Marvel lore. Valkyrie by default ends up with the Ebony Blade and the flying horse Aragorn.

The story of Valkyrie really continues into the fifth issue of The Defenders when as she is attempting to find how she fits into this new world, the Valkyrie becomes embroiled in a threat the Defenders put down once before. Doc Strange had ended the threat of the Omegatron by slowing time down to an impossible degree, but changing circumstances had speeded it up again and the threat to the world was very real. The Omegatron teleports both Namor and the Hulk to use their fighting energy to fuel its ultimate transformation and only the intervention of the Valkyrie and Namorita who wake the Sub-Mariner, and the Hulk saves the day...literally.

Valkyrie has found a home of sorts and will become one of the core elements of the Defenders as the non-team moves into the future.

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Captain Britian - Before Excalibur!

Captain Britain as first designed in the late 70's was not quite the hit Marvel hoped for. I personally always liked that original look, but it's safe to say that his original adventures despite some good talent were less than stellar. But the 80's changed all that. 

It began in a book called Daredevils where Alan Davis took hold of the character. Joined by writer Alan Moore and others he recreated Captain Britain, making him more physically imposing. While I like the original look, there's no doubt this revision is better, more powerful. The world in which Brian Braddock lived was also transformed, becoming less like a British version of Peter Parker's and into something and quite evocative. 

Following on after that shake up the Captain was given a slot in The Mighty World of Marvel for a short spell before getting his own title once again. Writer Jamie Delano came aboard and the Captain Britian stories bloomed into full flower. The tradition of weirdness which had marked the earlier efforts in Daredevils was continued in this new book and made even more so. Enemies spilled out from across multiple dimensions, bringing both life and death to those around the Braddock clan. We learn dark secrets that some of the family hold. Death is not an uncommon visitor in the book, which plays for high stakes all the time. The Brian Braddock gets a strange love interest in the werewoman Meagan, a strange creature who comes into her full powers as the series continues. We encounter other "Captains" from other places, some with murderous intent. Brian's sister Betsey even becomes Captain Britain for a short time. 

Below are the covers by Alan Davis for this potent run of the series. 

The series does find an ending with old foes finding some peace. New missions are given to those who have lost their way and Captain Britain seems for a brief time to have found some measure of contentment. 

This collection features the blurb "Before Excalibur" and while the issue above is not in the collection, it is clearly the purpose of the trade to put into readers' hands those Captain Britian stories which will impact the fledgling Brit X-team. It was a time when Marvel was all about all things X-Men, and squeezing Captain Britian into that frame was better than losing him all together. 

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Doc Savage - It's Clobberin' Time And Space!

In 1975 Marvel published Giant-Size Doc Savage #1. It's tied into the movie which was hitting theaters, and it's essentially a reprint of issues #1 and #2 of the original series. But there is substantial redrawing of Doc throughout the story to make his image more consistent with what was appearing in the B&W magazines. (More on that later.) There are also a couple of pin-ups of Doc from the B&W magazines here in color. The comic closes with an article by Robert Sampson called "Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze" which gives brief character sketches of Doc and his team. 

(Look for Doc hanging between the Vision, Thor, and the Human Torch.)

But Doc Savage made a few guest-starring appearances while he was hanging out at the House of Ideas. 

Giant-Size Spider-Man #3 is titled "The Yesterday Connection!". It's written by Gerry Conway and features artwork by Doc Savage's main man Ross Andru this time inked by his longtime partner Mike Esposito. The cover is by Gil Kane. The story begins in 1974 with Spidey on patrol when a flickering light catches his attention. He gleans it's a message for help and off he swings to the location of a vintage 1930's building about to be demolished. Suddenly he's attacked from the shadows but a backflip later he sees his attacker is a stunning blue woman clad in strategically placed straps. She says her name is Desinna and by using a translating device she tells Spidey a story from 1934 when the building was just being constructed. 

We cut to 1934 and find Doc Savage and his team (Monk, Ham, Renny, Johnny and Long Tom) attending the dedication when a mysterious gunman tries to kill Mayor La Guardia. Doc dispatches the villain but isn't at all convinced that that threat was the reason they'd been summoned to the building the night before. They return to the Doc's headquarters and after some lab tests determine the message they received came from another world. Back to 1974 and Spidey and Desinna come under seeming attack by a giant ghostly image resembling a satyr. After some fisticuffs, Spidey determines the creature is electrical in nature and uses a jackhammer to short the being out. Then Desinna reveals she was there in 1934 with Doc Savage. The story cuts back to 1934 and Doc and his men are searching the building site when they encounter Desinna who tells them of her other-dimensional world that exists alongside Earth but in such a way as time effectively is absolute. She speaks of a scientist named Tarros who has an experiment go wild seemingly killing him but creating the electrical creature Spidey had fought earlier (or later depending on how you view it). She claims she needs Doc's help to capture the creature and after much ballyhoo Doc and his men succeed in trapping Tarros inside the building's keystone where he will be trapped until the building is torn down. Back to 1974 and after jackhammering the keystone, Spidey frees Tarros but in a twist he's realized that Desinna is the villain, something that Doc and his guys weren't culturally capable of detecting (or so claims Spidey) and her story is not true completely. Tarros takes Desinna and the pair disappear. Spidey prepares to swing away and in the background is a nodding Doc Savage. 

Marvel Two-In-One #21 happens two years later. The story is titled "Black Sun Lives!" and it's written by Bill Mantlo. It's drawn by Ron Wilson with Pablo Marcos on inks. The cover is by Wilson with Joe Sinnott inks. This one begins 1976 and 1936 respectively. Two tales are told simultaneously so be patient as I wind through this saga. In the Baxter Buidling in 1976 The Thing and The Human Torch get a visitor; likewise in 1936 in the Empire State Building HQ of Doc Savage, he and his partners Monk and Ham get a visitor. The Thing and Torch welcome in a beautiful woman; likewise, so do Doc and his men. The woman in 1976 collapses; so does the woman in 1936. The woman in 1976 named Lightner tells of her twin brother named Tom who is obsessed with the scientific work of his father and has bankrupted them to follow his passions; the woman in 1936 is also named Lightner and tells of her husband and how his scientific work has overcome his reason. 

Both women tell similar stories of how the two generations of scientists work to complete the sky cannon, a telescope affair that apparently can tap the power of the stars. Then in 1976 the sky goes dark and a glow in the distance seems to come from the location of the sky cannon; likewise in 1936 the sky goes dark and there is a mysterious glow in the distance. The Thing and Torch along with Miss Lightner take the Fantasticar to investigate; Doc Savage and his aides along with Mrs. Lightner do likewise. When the two aircraft reach their respective targets a ray blast envelops both and suddenly the limits of time are broken and the members of the Fantastic Four and the Fab Five and Doc find themselves together confronting a menace composed of both the father and the son called BlackSun. The teams quickly come to terms with the peculiar situation and work together against the seemingly all-powerful villain. After much battle Doc finally notices that the absence of starlight weakens their foe and so when the Human Torch enlightens the environment with his flame BlackSun becomes weakened enough to be captured. With his fall time's limits reassert themselves and Doc and his men fade away while Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm plan to take the injured Lightner to a doctor. 

And that's a wrap on Doc Savage's color comic book career at Marvel. Soon I'll begin to examine the Black & White run of magazines featuring Doc Savage. 

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