A World Lost!

When I was in grade school, I liked comics. My father got me into the hobby and not only did it fulfill my love of reading and weird stuff* but it also satiated my artist side. I loved drawing and creating and doodling and art, basically. Comics did two things: it allowed me to read and allowed me to look at cool pictures.

* I remember being in second grade and going through my school library’s entire collection of real ghost stories, UFO tales and cryptozoology books. I was obsessed with scaring the shit out of myself. I loved it. It didn’t stop when I went through Amesbury Elementary School’s “weird shit” (real name of the section) shelf. I went to the Amesbury Public Library and read through their stuff too. If I had the internet back then, I would have exhausted that too. While most kids were buzzing about Jude Blume or Beverly Cleary, I was stuck on ghosts.

In my neighborhood, all of my friends liked comics. Of course, they did, there were only three of us. If one of us liked comics or He-Man or Transformers or baseball cards; the others usually followed suit. At school, it was a different story. Nobody liked comics, so I had to find kids who did. In the early 80s, comics and sci-fi weren’t considered cool or mainstream like they are now. You could get your ass kicked if someone heard you talk about Wolverine or Spider-man or Bat Man.

Other than me, the only person that I knew who liked comics was a girl in my class named Robin. She liked all of the weird stuff that I liked, therefore she was one of my closest friends. I’d go over her house and we’d read and trade comics and she would do the same at mine. It was cool.

I told this story before way back in the first entry on the Champions, but one day I was looking through her books and I saw this comic, Champions 16. At the time, I thought that I knew everything there was to know about Marvel comics, but I never heard of this team. Two ex-Avengers, two ex-X-Men, Ghost Rider and some Russian girl? What the heck were they doing? Why hadn’t I heard of them before? Why aren’t they still around?

I read the book and was blown away by the action. The Champions were under the control of Doctor Doom and fought Magneto and the Beast. Oh yeah, the Hulk and Jimmy Carter were there too. It was crazy, just how much stuff was going on. I had to have it. I don’t remember what I traded her, but this comic was now a part of my collection and I must have read it 50 times. I didn’t even know that it was part two of a two-part story.

When I read this book the other day, I was a little apprehensive. Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “You Can’t Go Home Again” and from my perspective on a lot of stuff, he’s right. When revisiting things you once loved, chances are you’re going to be disappointed. I had built this book up so much, honestly it’s one of the main reasons why I bought this collection, I didn’t want to be let down.

It didn’t. This issue was bonkers from the first page to the last and I loved every minute of it.

The book opens up with the Champions fighting Magneto and the Beast. The LA super group is still under Dr. Doom’s mind-control and they’re not sure why they need to beat these two, only that they feel compelled to do so. The fight stalemates after a few pages so Magneto decides to go to Washington DC and take Doom head on. The Champions follow.

Doom is sitting in the Oval Office and he’s surrounded by President Jimmy Carter and all of his advisors. They’re all kissing Doom’s ass, which pisses him off because he doesn’t know whether they’re still under his control or whether they’re just covering their asses. The more things change, Victor. Instead of John Byrne drawing this tale, we have Bob Hall. Unfortunately, Bob can’t quite get Carter’s good side. Instead he looks like Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman’s older brother.

(Pissed off Doom is the best Doom.)

Doom storms out and summons the Hulk. He doesn’t say exactly why he summons the jade skinned monster, but he does, which is good news because Magneto and the Beast show up to kick Doom’s ass. At the same time, the Champions show up too. Magneto is still pissed off at the good doctor for humiliating him in Super-Villain Team-Up and is planning on beating Victor Von despite having to go through the Secret Service, the US Army, the Champions and the Hulk first. Plus, he’s convinced that he took the wrong Avenger in the Beast and keeps shitting on him throughout the entire issue (which, despite me loving Hank McCoy, is kind of funny because Magneto had the choice to choose whomever he wanted).

Magneto throws the Hulk into Hercules which prompts these two titans to start fighting. Of course, most of that action happens off panel, which is pretty dumb. Ghost Rider doesn’t breathe like most people so he’s not affected by Doom’s mind-control gas and realizes that Magneto and the Beast have been telling him the truth. Shit runs downhill, so the Beast starts making fun of Johnny Blaze, who ends up getting angry.

I am not joking when I say each page has a pretty decent fight on it and this goes on until the Beast falls on Doctor Doom. Doom is starting to choke the furry blue mutant out, when Ghost Rider jumps into action. He brings literal hellfire down on Doom’s mask which really makes the ruler of Latveria angry. He scorches Ghost Rider and then takes off his mask. That was a mistake because a. it breaks his mind control over every one and b. allows him to breathe his own gas. This turns his brain into a Mobius Strip of himself trying to control himself. It’s pretty cool, actually.

As the battle dissipates, Hercules isn’t mad that he had to fight the Hulk, in fact he was pumped that he got to fight him. Magneto is down-right giddy that he beat Doctor Doom. So happy, in fact that he tells the Champions that he could kick all of their butts if he wanted to (and he probably could) but he won’t because he’s so happy that Doctor Doom isn’t the ruler of the Earth and a babbling lunatic. He takes off.

(I bet Doctor Doom turns out to be an android. No one makes Doom look dumb!)

I love this issue but there are a few plot holes (which, BTW, are fine. This is a comic):

• The cover is boss as hell. I wonder who is going to get the business end of that chunk of rubble the Beast is going to throw? BTW, Ice Man looks completely useless. He's not even wrapped up, he's just sleeping.
• Why did Doom bring the Hulk to DC? I still don’t really understand that.
• Don’t dis Magneto. He’ll go to the ends of the Earth to reap his vengeance. Jesus.
• Doctor Doom already has the Avengers under his control, he should have called them to DC when it looked like Magneto was out for blood.
• No one respected Jimmy Carter, huh? That’s too bad. He turned out to be a pretty great guy.

There aren’t a lot of comics that take me back to my childhood, but this one did. If all of the Champion issues could be as half as good as this one, I wouldn’t be surprised if there would be a Champions movie. There’s no bickering, no unrequited love, no grousing; it’s all action. I loved it.  

All these years later, I still can’t believe Robin traded me her copy.

Unsurprisingly, this gets FIVE disco Angels out of five.

A World for the Winning!

Let me explain why I’m reviewing Super-Villain Team-Up under the Champions blog banner: it’s the beginning of a two-part arc that starts in SVTU, the Champions don’t even arrive until the very last panel.

Here’s the deal: Magneto is in Dr. Doom’s home country of Latveria where he’s pushing through the streets demanding to see their ruler. Everyone ignores him because they’re in the middle of a giant party because Dr. Doom defeated the Red Skull and if they stop reveling, they’ll be in deep doo(m)-doo(m). This is the one thing that I like about Victor Von, he likes partying so much that if you stop, you’re going to die. He’s like one of those 24-Hour Party People that ran around New York City during the 1990s. He even murders like one of them.

This pisses Magneto off and rips down a Dr. Doom statue which freaks everyone out. Magneto finally just makes his way to Doom’s castle where Doom is chilling out with a chess set made up of Marvel Heroes. There’s Captain America, the Beast, Spider-Man’s a rook but Doom is talking to the Mr. Fantastic figure. It’s adorable.

("DOOM WILL PLAY WITH HIS MEGO FIGURES NOW!")

For some reason Magneto has chosen today to ask Dr. Doom if they should team up and take over the world. He’s also surprised, and a little flattered, that Doom knows who he is. Magneto starts rambling on about kicking the X-Men’s ass and Doom is just staring at a statue he made of Valeria, his one true love. Finally Magneto stops talking and Doom is like, I don’t need you to conquer the world I have these neuro-canisters (spelled incorrectly in the book, BTW) that has this gas that will get people to do anything that I tell them to.

Magneto calls bullshit and the next thing you know, the Master of Magnetism is on his knees bowing to doom before trying to kill himself. Doom intercedes then gives him some wine, which is drugged, and Magneto is down for the count. When he wakes up, Doom says that he’ll have his mind back and he can do what he wants.

The first thing he does is breaks into Avengers Mansion and fights the Avengers instead of telling him what Doom has up his sleeve. Magneto pretty quickly kicks their asses—and this is a power-packed line up of Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Wonder Man, the Vision, Scarlet Witch, Beast, Wasp and Yellowjacket—before Earth’s Mightiest Heroes listen to him. Doom shows up, via hologram, and tells the Avengers that what Magneto says is true and makes them bow down to him. And they stay bowed down, though Doom says that Magneto can take an ally in defeating him.

Magneto chooses the Beast ,calling him “the weakest Avenger”, which is kind of shitty, you know?

(That's cold, Maggie. Real cold.) 

The Beast suggest to Magneto that they need more heroes to stop Dr. Doom so they go to the Baxter Building and the Xavier School for Gifted Children and both the Fantastic Four and the X-Men aren’t home. Before deciding to see what the Micronauts or the Defenders are up to, the Beast tells Magneto to hoof it to the West Coast where they can find the Champions.

The Champions have no idea what’s going on and they want to kick the Beast’s ass for brining Magneto to their headquarters. That’s the cliff hanger.

Like the Champions, Super-Villain Team-Up is a book that sounds really cool in theory, but it never really delivers. I bought and read the entire of the SVTU run a few years back in one of the Marvel Essentials trade paperback. I remember being really excited about reading these stories because they were ones that I wanted to read when I was a kid, but they weren’t that great.

They all star Dr. Doom, who is cool, but he mostly teams up with Namor the Sub-Mariner for a lot of the run. When that happens it’s like 15-pages of dick swinging in the third person that would make Rickey Henderson blush: “Von Doom is the best ruler there is!” “No! No King is better than Namor!” “Dr. Doom is the master strategist! Heed Doom’s words!” “Nay, the Avenging Son of Atlantis has no peer when it comes to the mastery of war! We do what Namor says!”

It’s like reading the argument of the two biggest assholes on the planet. When they finally fight whomever they’ve teamed up against, it takes like a half page to wipe him off the planet. Then they bicker again. Which, comes to think about it, is my main complaint with the Champions. For some reason, Marvel thought that 15 pages of bickering was cool.

The idea is actually pretty good, get two villains together and see how they act and how they’d plot, but it kind of runs out of gas every issue. They never fight the good guys, they fight other bad guys; which is lame. I’m sure there was a perception problem in that, you’re never supposed to let the bad guys beat the good guys. And I get that. I also understand that you can’t have the stars of your book get their butts beat every month. But at the same time, it might have been a cool idea to delve behind exactly why villains would team up. Set the paradigm on its ear a little bit.

Have Doom talk about how much he hates Reed Richards and tell the Sub Mariner that he can have the Invisible Girl for a wife if he aids (Dr. Doom needs NO HELP FROM ANYONE) him in destroying the Fantastic Four. Or team up Baron Zemo and the Red Skull to go kick Captain America’s star-spangled butt. They’re both Nazis, they have something in common. Or spend a few issues with Baron Zemo going to different villains and getting them to buy into a new Masters of Evil. Once assembled, they can fight the Avengers in their book or something.

There was a lot of really cool ideas that could have been done with this book that never happened.

Speaking of cool ideas, I never quite figured out why Dr. Doom needed Magneto to light the fuse of his plan. For one thing, how did he know that Magneto was on his way to visit him? How did he know that Magneto would go running to the Avengers? What if Magneto was like, “Meh. Good luck to the world, I’m going back to my asteroid and wait around until the whole shithouse goes up in flames.” There are a lot of variables here that Doom couldn’t have accounted for.

The cover, a John Byrne special, is really terrific. I like how all of the Champions and Avengers are bowing to the good Doctor and Doom is just standing in a B-Boy stance saying, “Yup. This is good.” If I saw that book on a comic spinner at the local drug store, I’d buy that thing in a second.

As far as a Champions story, there are no Disco Angels. Mainly because the Champions aren’t in it at all. But as a Super-Villain Team-Up story, it gets two Doctor Doom pinups. The plot is pretty damn flimsy, even by 1970s writing standards (Champions scribe Bill Mantlo writes it) and the art is pedestrian at best. Also, it was announced as the last issue of Super-Villain Team-Up ever, but there are three after it. They don’t come out until the following three years though (once a year). 

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!)

 

The World Still Needs Champions!

For some strange reason, I have been obsessed with the mid-70s Marvel Comic superhero team, the Champions. I’m not sure exactly why because I came of age reading comics in the 80s, well after the Champions’ “hay day” – and hay day is in quotes because they never really had a hay day. But I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I had heard of all the members, but I never really heard of the team. This was pre-internet days and I didn’t know anyone who knew anything about them. And then they were gone only two years after they showed up.

I remember getting issue 16 in a trade with my friend* once and it blew my mind. Ghost Rider, Hercules, Black Widow, Darkstar, Angel and Ice Man fighting Magneto AND Doctor Doom, with an assist from the Beast and the Hulk? I must’ve read it a dozen times. It was bananas. The team itself was such a randomly thrown together crew: two ex-X-men, a couple of old, not-too-popular Avengers (this is before Scarlett Johanson was Black Widow), a Soviet Super Soldier and Ghost Rider? The hell was this about?

* My friend just wasn't "my friend", she was a girl for one thing and the first girl that I remember liking. This trade was made in fourth or fifth grade. I don't remember what I gave her for it, I just remember being alone in her room and making the deal. 

I just wrote a few paragraphs about this team and if you’ve scratching your head wondering why you’ve never heard of them, don’t be discouraged, like I said not many people had. They weren’t that popular. When people did bring them up (in both comics and real life), they were usually the butt of a joke.

So they’re not the Avengers or the X-Men or even the Defenders, but I kept thinking about this weird team. Even when I stopped collecting comics, this was the one comic that I’d think about. Maybe I just wanted to know more about them, make some sense of this crazily constructed roster. I read as much stuff as I could find on the Internet (not a lot) and with an Amazon gift card burning a hole in my pocket, I ended up buying “Marvel Masterworks: The Champions Volume I*”. What I plan on doing over the next few weeks is to read all of those issues and write them up on this blog.

I’m sure you’ll love it, so stay tuned.

* I’m not sure why Marvel felt the need to include “Volume I” in the title. This book has literally every single appearance of the Champions in it. I don’t think that there is anything left.** And I know that Marvel just put out a new Champions team last year—this team is made up of younger heroes—but that wouldn’t count here.

** This just in, I guess the Champions were also in a Marvel Godzilla comic, but Marvel's rights to Godzilla lapsed, so they aren't included in this treasury. I guess I'll have to search for that one.