The Creature Called … Swarm!

Champions number 14 opens up with Hercules fighting a building and it moves along from there. Let me try to explain this a little bit better, he’s not fighting an actual building; he’s fighting the security system of the Champions building. It’s gone whack-a-doodle and thinks that everyone inside Champions HQ is an enemy.

I’m burying the lede here—and I’ll get back to Herc in a second—which is that the heroes not fighting a building are fighting a new menace. A guy made up of a hive of thousands upon thousands of bees, a guy who goes by the name of Swarm. If you’re like me, that sounds awesome. But not unexpected, because I met Swarm from the cartoons. He was a featured bad guy on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, which also starred Ice Man as an amazing friend.

The difference between cartoon Swarm and comic book Swarm is that cartoon Swarm only said, “Swarm, swarm, swarm.” He was like Groot only a million times less charming. The comic book Swarm can speak more than one word and actually has some pretty compelling conversations. But he’s also a Nazi scientist, so he’s probably not a person you’d like to spend a lot of time talking to.

But on the other hand, he’s a guy made out of bees and he has gigantic robotic bee drones, so I mean, he’d probably the Secretary for Defense in this present presidential administration. Fox News would probably spend a few days convincing everyone that we don’t know the real Swarm and that if we give him a chance, things will turn out okay. I bet they’d even call him a “honey of a guy” and those morons on the morning couch show would laugh and laugh and laugh.

Back to Hercules. As our favorite Greek demigod is battling the Champions Tower, Ice Man is talking to himself in the mirror. He has a new costume that looks a lot like his old X-Men costume except it’s light blue and white and instead of an “X” on the belt, there’s a “C”.

“Soon the whole world’s going to sit up and take notice of Bobby Drake – the new Ice Man!”

A new costume is cool and all, it’s done wonders for the Angel, but for Ice Man, I don’t think that it matters that much. Mostly because no one ever sees it because the Ice Man is covered entirely in ice. He spends about a page whining about not being taken seriously and how he’s practically the team mascot and why won’t Darkstar go out with him. Pretty much all the stuff that a mascot would say, but then he suits up in his new uniform and he’s ready to take on the world.

At some point, way after the Champions were over, Ice Man returns to the X-Men and some of the writers decide that he’s an Omega-Level mutant. This means that he’s one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe. Professor X, Phoenix, Magneto are all examples of Omega-Level mutants. The reason is because Ice Man turns water vapors, which surround him and all of us, into ice. Theoretically, he has the power to completely alter the ecosystem of the entire planet. In other words, if he wanted to, he could plunge the Earth into a second Ice Age. Therefore, if he can do that, kicking the crap out of a guy like Rampage should be no problem.

For Champion-age Ice Man, it’s a huge problem as we will see.

Ice Man finally notices that Hercules is in some sort of a bind as a steel girder goes flying past his head. It’s about to crush some civilians when Bobby “catches” the girder by freezing it mid-air before it crushes anyone. Like a true hero, he leaves the scene saying, “The Police can figure out what to do about the ice pylon obstructing the sidewalk.”

Bravo, dude. Bravo.

Darkstar, Black Widow and Ghost Rider are at the docks saying good bye to BW’s friend Ivan. He’s going back to Russia to patch things up with his son, Yuri aka the Crimson Dynamo. We haven’t seen Ivan in about four issues, or eight months real time, so him being written out of the book isn’t a huge surprise.

Speaking of written, for some reason Ivan’s dialogue is always Moscow via Columbus, Ohio. He’s like a Soviet Humphrey Bogart. There’s a lot of dropped g’s and d’s, calls Black Widow and Darkstar either “kid” or “princess” and uses a lot of old, but very American phrases. Not every Russian has to sound like Colossus, but most Russian comic characters are written in a very particular way. When they aren’t written like that, it’s a bit strange.

As Ivan departs up the gangplank, another man is leaving the boat with a briefcase. All of a sudden, he’s attacked by giant bees. Darkstar springs into action, which freaks Ghost Rider out. He calls her “woman” and tells her to stay back with the Black Widow because he can handle this stuff. Unsurprisingly, this pisses Black Widow off.

“Johnny, I’m beginning to resent your attitude of superiority towards the women of this team,” she says.

And Black Widow has a point. For a guy who recognizes that he doesn’t mesh well with his other teammates, Ghost Rider has been acting like a real dick these last few issues. And I’m not sure why. When Black Widow as named team leader, I thought that it was going to be Hercules that would have a problem with it. You can’t get much older than Herc and he’s always thought of women as primarily damsels in distress; so you can see why that characterization would be appropriate.

But Johnny Blaze, the Ghost Rider? Why is he a male chauvinist all of a sudden? There’s nothing that explains why he’s this way. I’m not sure whether writer Bill Mantlo thinks that he needs to add another layer to GR’s character, but turning him into a flaming headed Archie Bunker is not the way to go.

In one panel, GR is stung by one of the giant mechanical bees and Darkstar destroys the robot so Blaze can get his shit together. Does he thank her? No. Of course not.

“Blast you,” he says. “I don’t want your help! Stay away from me!”

Darkstar turns to him and yells, “Why do you hate me so much?”

And in an inner monologue, Blaze whines about how the Champions accepted her so quickly while they still fear him. I mean, I can kinda see where he’s coming from, but he’s still acting like an asshole. Maybe instead of being a jerk, perhaps he could be a nice guy around his fellow Champions? Bring them to dinner, offer to light the Champions' grill, allow them to roast marshmallows off of his head. Chill things like that. 

I think that’s one of the problems with this book, most of these characters are assholes (except for Hercules, though he can go turbo dickhead at any time). Black Widow just barks orders, Angel is a rich prick, Ice Man whines and mopes, Ghost Rider is a chauvinist. Is there anyone you root for here?

The Champions continue to fight the robot bees when all of a sudden, they fly away. They find the guy who left the boat and he’s dead, his face completely swollen with bee stings. While the team was dealing with the robot bee diversion, Swarm popped up and stung the guy in the face about a thousand times. It’s a pretty brutal way to go, to be honest.

Widow calls Champions HQ tyring to get Hercules and Ice Man to the scene for back up. They aren’t answering the call because they’re still fighting the building. Things are going from bad to worse for the duo because not only has the building’s security system attacked them, but now the Rampage armor has become sentient and it bashed Bobby in the back of the head. The armor has Ice Man cornered and is about to punch him when Bobby ducks and the armor hits a power source, short circuiting the entire building.

According to Ice Man and Hercules’ explanation, it was faulty wiring. Like the Champscraft debacle from three issues ago, it appears that the plans were fine, the people who built the thing cut a lot of corners.

Black Widow, Darkstar and Ghost Rider show up to a busted-up building with zero lights. Instead of asking what happened, BW starts yelling at the Herc and Icy that they missed a priority alert and better have a good explanation for doing so. As if on cue, Angel—who has been missing this entire issue—comes barreling through the window telling his comrades to look out the window.

Hercules is like, “Dude it’s a storm cloud, chill thy self out.”

And Angel’s like, no it’s not. Look again! And WWIII is right, it’s a gigantic swarm of bees coming to destroy Los Angeles. I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but I bet Swarm is behind this.

This was an issue that could have only been made in the 1970s. Sometime in the middle of that decade people got really scared of killer bees. It was a huge thing. And there was a lot of popular culture springing up talking about killer bees. Movies, TV shows, books and now comics all explored the possibility of a killer bee attack. Judging this story 40 plus years later, it’s a bit silly. The waves of killer bee attacks never happened and the hysteria fell off – I guess people got worked up about shark attacks, thanks to Jaws. But for a while, bees were public enemy number one.

This issue was fine, I suppose. They finally got around to tying up the Ivan issue, though there were two Soviet agents in his room, but other than that, it’s more of the same. The Champions fight something that probably shouldn’t be a big deal, but it gets stretched out to 20 plus pages. The characters are still jerks and I’m not sure if they even like each other. I don’t understand what is keeping these people together.

As far as the cover goes, it's okay. The more that I look at it, the more that I like it and maybe with bees on the brain, it would have affected 1970s readers more. I do like that the Ghost Rider is helping a teammate. That seems nice of him. 

On the plus side, there was barely any Angel in this issue. That’s a bonus!

Two out of five disco-vested Angels.

(Man, I wish I knew about this image before I was using the other ones. This is just great!)

 

Kirk Gibson 1988 Topps Traded

On June 8, 2016, I received the above card in my mailbox. That same day I wrote this on Facebook:

Look who showed up with the mail today, the patron saint of Michigan: Kirk Gibson. Aside from hitting one of the most notable home runs ever, since retirement Gibson has defined himself as baseball's answer to Mike Ditka. 

So you'll hear a lot from Gibby about "playing the game right", "unwritten rules" and bullshit like that. Even though a 14-year-old Byron Magrane woke up just in time to see that dinger--and it was pretty epic--if I knew that he'd be around this long yelling at kids to get off his lawn, I'd have just as soon as seen Eck strike him out. 

Thank you BCB for sending over one of baseball’s most annoying hard asses.

Before we get into the post, you know what's bananas? That Kirk Gibson Topps Traded card, looks almost like his regular card. Only the uniform is different. Uncanny!

(Maybe not exactly the same, but pretty close!)

Even when I was a kid, I didn’t really like Kirk Gibson very much. He always struck me as a man who wasn’t very pleasant, took things way too seriously and was probably just kind of a mean guy to be around. Not only that, but I was pretty sure that Kirk Gibson probably wouldn’t have liked me too much either.

Gibson was the type of player that sports writers loved and they always used words like “gamer” or “hustler” or “intense” when they wrote these loving stories about him. Like Gibson was some sort of hulked up avatar for themselves. Like if they were athletes, they would be Kirk Gibson: clutch, tough, not afraid to call out a teammate for being lazy, stuff like that. Kirk Gibson was a real man.

Though I could be just projecting. Who knows. 

Kirk Gibson looked like the type of guy who lived in the woods. The only time he came out to pleasant society is when it was time to hit some cowhide with a hunk of wood real far. He had a permanent scowl to go along with his perpetual five o’clock shadow and longish hair. His hair wasn’t long because he was a hippie, it was long because it appeared that he hadn’t had the wherewithal to find a barber. So he cut his shaggy mane with a pair of rusty scissors so that the damn stuff didn’t get in his eyes when he tried to mash homers at the most opportune times.

If Kirk Gibson was a state, he’d be Michigan. It wasn’t just the fact that he went to the University of Michigan (what the hell did he major in there? Did he just hang around the anthropology department as proof of the ‘Missing Link’?) and played for the Tigers. As a kid, when I heard Michigan I didn’t think of Motown or Detroit, those were civilized areas of another place. I thought of Gibson. I thought of woods. Hunting and fishing. I’m not sure why, but I did.

So when Gibson left the Tigers for the Dodgers, that was a real shock to me. Kirk Gibson is going Hollywood? Oh, this is going to end really poorly for the Dodgers. Why would they make such a dumb move? They just picked up Jay Howell and Mike Davis and Alfredo Griffin. I had a weird sense of who really was a good baseball played back when I was a kid. BTW, weird meaning bad. They have Orel Hershiser and Steve Sax and Mike Scioscsca. Why do they need Kirk Gibson?

Like Andre Dawson, Gibson was also a victim of ownership-based collusion in the mid 80s. Unlike the Hawk, an arbitrator decided the Gibson and some other players were automatically free agents due to owners being jerks and trying to destroy free agency. The contracts they signed were voided. He went to L.A. and immediately became their team leader.  The Dodgers imported veteran reliever Jesse Orosco from the Mets. He thought that it would be a funny idea to put eye black in Gibson’s hat. It’s kind of a lame prank, mostly because baseball players have lame senses of humor, but Gibson went fucking crazy.

He said that the Dodgers sucked, they were a bunch of clowns, this is why they were in fourth place the year before, they weren’t professional and more. He pretty much had a hissy fit and normally most people would be like, “Man, this asshole is wound a little tight.” But this is sports and people loved this. They thought that this was the greatest thing in the world. People were lauding Gibson from coast to coast, saying that baseball needed more people like him and other things that sportswriters write when an athlete rips another athlete.

Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda love this too. He thought it was great because he can be the cool guy and Gibson could be the hard-ass. That worked well for Lasorda. 

(Hello Katarina Witt!) 

The thing is, it worked. The Dodgers won the west, beat the heavily favored Mets in the playoffs and then shocked the mighty Athletics in the World Series. As I wrote above, he hit one of the most dramatic and famous homeruns of Dennis Eckersley in the ninth inning of Game One. I know that these things tend to get blown out of proportion, but this was a huge homer.

Eckersley was on another level that year and he was mowing down people left and right, he had 45 saves, a 2.35 ERA (which seems high, to be honest), he struck out 70 guys and walked five. All year. He wasn’t THE Dennis Eckersley yet (he’d get better in subsequent years) but he was pretty damn close. The fact that Gibson took him deep, just like he did to another Hall of Famer Rich Gossage in the 1984 World Series albeit in a less dramatic fashion, says something about Gibson.

I recall where I was when he hit that homerun. I was home, asleep with the TV on when I woke up after Mike Davis walked. Then Gibson came up as I was rubbing sleep from eyes. This seemed big and I wanted to watch it. Gibson wasn’t even supposed to play that night, and in fact, it was his only at bat of the Series – Gibson got hurt a lot. I was a big time A’s fan back then and I couldn’t believe it when Gibson hit that dinger.

The great thing about that moment is that no one believed it could happen. You can see cars pulling out of Dodger Stadium in the background, just beyond the bleachers, as Gibson is rounding the bases.

Gibson won the National League Most Valuable Player that year, though the award should have gone to Mets outfielder Daryl Strawberry. If only Strawberry pulled a shit fit at the beginning of Spring Training that year, perhaps he’d have that award on his mantle today. Interesting trivia: Kirk Gibson is still the only MVP who never played in an All-Star Game. Not one. Ever. It wasn’t because he wasn’t invited, he made sure everyone knew that he wasn’t playing. He was using the three days off to go home and rest.

Gibson was never the same player as he was in 1988. Injuries took his toll, aside from playing 132 with the Royals and 116 in a second go-around with the Tigers, he never played more than a 100 games in a season again. He bounced from the aforementioned Royals to the Pirates back to the Tigers and then called it quits. He managed a couple of years in Arizona, winning the Manager of the Year in his second season, but I don’t remember him being very good. Maybe he was too much of a hard-ass, maybe the players didn’t give a shit what he had done, maybe he just couldn’t manage a pitching staff. I don’t know. But as of this writing, he’s been unemployed for three seasons and I’ve never heard a rumor of him being considered for a job.

Whether that’s because that’s his decision or the baseball world’s, is unknown.

Andre Dawson 1986 Topps

On June 4, 2016, I received the above card from the Baseball Card Bandit. That day, I wrote this on Facebook:

After about a week of hiding, the Baseball Card Bandit reappears with Hall of Famer and subject of an awkward rhyme: Awesome Andre Dawson. (Awesome and Dawson don't rhyme.)

Anyway, what the BBC doesn't know is that I witnessed Dawson's 400th homer in person as a young college lad. The Hawk and I are connected via round numbers.

For a long time, I’m not so sure if it’s true now, the mantra for every comic book writer was something to the effect of, this issue could be someone’s first issue, so you have to explain everything. This is why if you binge read a collection of comics from the 60s, 70s or 80s, it seems incredibly repetitive. Plots are retold, powers and secret identities are re-explained and things don’t seem to really get going until page 5 or 6. They didn’t want to lose readers.

The same mantra should have been uttered by baseball card photographers during those times too. Andre Dawson was an incredibly exciting player who happened to play in baseball Siberia: Montreal. It was dark, dreary and growing up an American League city, I didn’t get to see them play that much because the Expos were rarely on Saturday’s Game of the Week*.

** The wasn’t exactly true. Since there once was a high population of French Canadians that settled in my town, Amesbury’s cable company (this was before there were three or four national cable providers, most towns had their own little mom and pop operation so channels varied widely from town-to-town) had a Montreal station as part of its basic package. The entire channel was in French and not only did they show those terrible old Marvel Comics cartoons from the 1960s dubbed in French, but they also ran Canadiens games and once in a while, Expos games. I would never watch the games though, for some reason seeing the quality of the broadcast combined with the French language, freaked me out. I’d change the channel immediately. Other than that, I do remember in 1987 when the Expos were on NBC’s Saturday Game of the Week. Tim Raines was making his return to the Expos lineup after being held out of games for a month. Back then, if you were a free agent and didn’t sign with your team by mid-January (I think), you weren’t allowed to negotiate with your team until May 1. Which is a fucking insane rule, but with owner collusion (they all decided not to sign free agents) and this rule, Raines wasn’t able to rejoin the Expos until the beginning of May. The day he returned, he destroyed Mets pitching going 4-4 and hitting a grand slam in the top of the tenth inning. He was awesome.

Damn, that was a long detour. Anyway, the point was this baseball card sucks. It’s Dawson, without a hat in a blue practice jersey in front of a blue wall. He looks like a regular dude just sitting around. When I first pulled this card from a pack, I hated it. It’s boring and I never heard of him before, which meant that Andre Dawson must not have been very good. I was incredibly wrong. Dawson didn’t suck, he was actually incredibly good. I just didn’t get it then.

Like Raines, Dawson was part of that 1986-87 free agent class of players who were found by a court to be unlawfully colluded against. Aside from Raines, Red Sox catcher Rich Gedman was in the May 1 situation, and it seemed as if he never bounced back from not having a spring training that year. He was terrible in 1987, worse in 88 and was relegated to a backup for the rest of his career. As a two-time All Star in 1985 and 86, this was an ignominious way to end his career. But unlike Gedman and Raines, Dawson didn’t wait until May 1 to return to the Expos. Unlike fellow free agent, Jack Morris, he didn’t crawl back to his old club and accepted whatever pittance they gave him.

Dawson believed in himself and knew that he was getting screwed, so he did what he felt was best: he went to the Chicago Cubs and basically said, “I need to get off of the turf in Montreal (it completely destroyed his knees) and I want to play for the Cubs. Here is a blank contract, fill it in for what you think I’m worth and then we’ll renegotiate.” The Cubs were over a barrel here, on one hand the team felt that they had to be loyal to the rest of the owners but on the other hand, they were terrible and Dawson was practically giving himself to them. They settled on a $500,000 contract plus bonuses if he played well.

Dawson played out of his mind in 1987.  He led the National League in home runs with 49 and runs batted in with 137 (this is when people gave a shit about RBIs). Writers were so impressed that despite finishing in dead last place, Andre Dawson won the National League’s Most Valuable Player. And he only made $700,000. The following offseason, the Cubs signed him to a much better contract and all was right with the world. Aside from the homers, the one thing that I remember most about Dawson is when he got drilled in the face by Padres pitcher Eric Show. Sports Illustrated captured the picture and put it on that week's cover:

From what I remember Eric Show was a bit of a prick.  He hit Dawson on purpose because the Hawk had hit three homers in five at bats against San Diego. Seems like a good reason to break a guy's cheek bone. But according to Wikipedia, Show was busted using meth a few years later. So, there may have been a reasons for this. 

After his seasons in Chicago, he went to the Red Sox where he played on some truly terrible teams before ending up going home to his native Florida and playing out the string as a Marlin. By the time he played for those two organizations, he was in his late 30s. Age and injuries robbed these fans of seeing the vibrancy of a young Andre Dawson, instead he plodded along occasionally hitting a homer, trying to fight the inevitable one at bat at a time.

Andre Dawson had a fantastic career, he slugged over 400 homers, stole over 300 bases, and had a career OPS+ of 119. He ended up getting the call to the Hall of Fame in 2010 and he’s widely considered one of the all-time great outfielders. But there are always the questions of what if that plague him. What if he didn’t play in Montreal? What if he didn’t play 81 games on the turf of Olympic Stadium?

When he was younger, Andre Dawson was amazing. He could run, he could hit for power and average, he had a plus arm and was a tremendous defender. By playing in Montreal and especially on the “turf” (which seemed to be green-painted concrete) Dawson’s knees were brutalized. He was always hurt, or when he was “healthy” he spent hours icing his knees and legs to make sure that he was ready to go the next day.

Imagine if Dawson played his entire career in a big baseball mecca like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles? More people would know the Hawk and dopey kids in Amesbury, Massachusetts wouldn’t look at his baseball card and immediately assume that he stunk based only on a terrible photo.