Death Drone

For a comic that has a supervillain who’s a Nazi AND made entirely of bees, this was a pretty boring story.

We open with tens of thousands of bees invading the Champions building through all of the air vents. Hercules rips off a piece of the wall and pushes it against the vent, Angel yells at him for wrecking the place. Fine Warren, we’ll all just get stung a couple million times, but at least your building will be safe.

Finally Swarm, the supervillain Nazi who’s entirely made of bees, shows up and gets one of his robotic giant bees to grab Darkstar. You know, Darkstar is really becoming the lynch pin of just about every Champions plot for the last few issues. It’s a good thing that she showed up, otherwise these guys would sit with their thumbs up their asses for 20 plus pages.

Ice Man, who is smitten with the blonde Russian, sees what’s happening and yells her name. He is stung by the giant bee and both Champions are carried off. Swarm scrams.

The rest of the Champions look outside the window and citizens are getting destroyed by bees. Team leader Black Widow tells Angel and Ghost Rider to go help them. Surprisingly GR doesn’t call Black Widow a bitch for being a woman, but Angel is super mopey about helping people because his buddy Ice Man was kidnapped. Never the less he did what he was told, though he crabbed about it.

(This is a legitimately terrifying image.) 

Ice Man and Darkstar wake up in Swarm’s lair, which is a giant hive. Darkstar hasn’t paid much attention to Bobby Drake, but he still calls her honey. Which, considering where they are, is a pretty solid pun. They’re alone and if I were Darkstar, I’d use this opportunity to patiently explain to the mutant that just because he likes her, doesn’t mean that they’re going out or anything.

(Cool Dad joke, Ice Man. HA! I did it too!) 

Bill Mantlo is having a tough time writing Ice Man. He’s so god damn needy and pathetic that he makes high school me look like Tom Jones. In the last few years, the X-Men from the 1960s were brought to modern times by the Beast, Hank McCoy. It was a plan to make Cyclops realize that he’s acting like a dick. It didn’t work.

In any event, the 1960s X-Men realize that they like the future, so they stick around. In the future, Ice Man realizes that he’s gay and comes out. I guess what I’m saying is that knowing all of that and reading these issues now, it seems incredibly awkward. I’m sure that when this was first written people were just like, “That Ice Man is just unlucky in love” or “He’s trying too damn hard. Just cool it (pun) and the chicks will come running.” (I assume that the person reading this is Fonzi).

(Man, I love Fonzi when I was a kid. I really did.) 

But reading it now, it seems colored. Like this coming on this strong on the ladies (he did the same thing with Polaris back in his X-Men days too) is Bobby Drake trying to lie to himself. It’s more than a little awkward, I think.

Back to the comic. Swarm spends the next few pages giving us his origin. It’s Supervillain 101. The only thing that you need to know is that he’s a Nazi scientist who is made of bees. That’s it.

(This is what he looked liked in the comics.)

(This is what he looked liked when he debuted on TV's Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.)

He explains his plan and wants the two Champions to help him with his plan of breaking the queen of his swarm out of an amber encasement. This is what that guy, an Interpol agent, who Swarm killed last issue was carrying. Darkstar’s like, sure, we’ll do it. And of course, Ice Man goes full bat shit and starts yelling at her. Darkstar now has to explain to Bobby that this was going to be a trick and aww, fuck it, uses her darkforce to shatter the hive and release the queen bee.

(Christ, Bobby. What did I say five minutes ago about being a Fonzi?)

However, that backfires on Darkstar because the queen grows to huge proportions and starts attacking Champions. Unfortunately for her, she attacks Hercules who punches and kicks the crap out of the bee. The bee is knocked unconscious so Herc takes the bees and flings it from the Champion Building into the Pacific Ocean. The rest of the bees follow the queen and guess where that leaves Swarm? Our Nazi scientist super villain covered in bees, is no longer covered in bees. He’s literally now just a skeleton. And that’s how we end this issue with a skull—not Ghost Rider’s—staring at us with it’s mouth agape.

Like I said, this was a bit of a snooze in terms of issues. It wasn’t the worst comic that I’ve ever read, but it’s nowhere near the best. John Byrne did a fine job of penciling, but at the same time, it looks as if he’s a bit bored with his assignment. He’s still really good at what he does, it just seems that he knows what we do that this is book is pretty close to being cancelled.

I’m still not sure if Mantlo has a handle on these characters yet. I know that I complain about this a lot, but I’m still not seeing what’s keeping these people together. Aside from Hercules, most of these characters are jerks. Sure, they’re heroic jerks but they’re still jerks.

Two out of five vested Angels.

 

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!)