The Economy Is So Bad That …

The title of this issue is dreadful, luckily, the story more than makes up for it. The only place that Champions five could take place is the 1970s. Why? Because the supervillain, Rampage, is about a businessman who is getting screwed over by the crushing economy.

Stuart Clarke is a (apparently very) poor man’s Tony Stark. His company had an offer to be purchased, but Clarke wouldn’t sell out. His competition (actually, Tony Stark* himself) decided that they’d get in on what he’s doing. He came up with a light-weight exoskeleton that cops would wear so that they don’t get hurt on the job. Since Stark has more government connections than Clarke, he quickly made a crap ton of money and Clarke owes a lot of people a lot of money.

* Why didn’t he just find and fight Iron Man?

This sends him into a rage and he starts robbing FDIC-insured banks because he thinks that since they’re insured, the little guy won’t get screwed. Which, I mean, c’mon, even in the 70s people were cynical? realistic? less naïve enough? to know that the government isn’t just going to cover the bill without passing the check to John Q. Public. For a smart guy, Rampage is really dumb.

While this is going on, Warren Worthington III (aka the Angel) is in the office of his family’s accountant with Bobby Drake (aka Ice Man). For some dumb reason, they’re in their superhero uniforms, but that doesn’t matter much because the Angel just found out that he’s incredibly rich. I guess he always knew that he was loaded, but it was his parents’ cash, so it wasn’t a big deal but now he got it all.

Ice Man comments that Angel now his more money than God, which I guess means that this Angel got an incredible promotion. Wocka, wocka. Anyway, Angel says that he’s going to use his money to fund the Champions and make them a real team and hires the guy who was Hercules and Black Widow’s lecture agent, Richard Fenster, as the Business Manager of Champions, Inc.

It’s a good thing he was walking around the UCLA campus talking out loud to himself about how unlucky he was to get fired. The two mutants just happened to overhear him, picked him up (literally) and offered him a job on the spot. This is exactly how I got my second job. Weird coincidence.

While Ice Man and Angel are acting like adults and spending money, Hercules, Black Widow and Ivan are hanging around the UCLA football field. Despite not understanding football, Hercules is practicing with the “team” and he’s kicking their ass. I put team in quotes because the UCLA football team is wearing red pants, a white shirt with black numbers and a red helmet. Not to get all Paul Lukas here, but that’s more of USC colors than the Bruins’ blue and gold.

(UCLA is on the left)

Maybe the USC team is pulling a Greg Brady and is fucking with their rival. If so, consider yourselves Jerry Rogers-ed*, Trojans.

* This is such an ancient reference, that it actually happened a few years after the original Trojan War.

 

(Look at Jerry Mackin' on Marcia! That cad!)

(Caught in the act!)

(I wanted an excuse to post this picture. It rules.) 

WWIII calls a meeting of the Champions and lays it all out on the table, the Champions are going to be “Storefront Superheroes”. Of course, Hercules is confused by this too: “I care not for the thy desire to place the Lion of Olympus at the command of mere mortals.” Fucking Hercules, first you don’t understand football, now this. All the Angel was saying is that if a person needs help with extraordinary circumstances, they can call on the Champions*.  

* Basically they’re Heroes for Hire without the tiaras and slippers, though as long as Angel is around, each team both still have the groovy chest-baring shirts. I wonder if Power Man or Iron Fist sued for copyright infringement? They should have. BTW, tiara or not Luke Cage looks so much tougher than the Angel and his dopey ass. 

Bobby is on his way to the meeting (“Thanks for starting it without me guys, seriously!”) and sees Rampage robbing the FDIC insured bank. He springs into action and gets knocked through a plate-glass window. He’s about to receive Rampage’s final death blow when the Champions come out of nowhere.

Angel says it’s because the restaurant they were eating at didn’t have Muzak, but pump in news broadcasts. Which isn’t a thing. Like ever. Do you realize how annoying that would be to sit down, relax and eat some salmon and some Paul Harvey jackass prattling on about Watergate, gas lines and Jimmy Carter? No one would eat there. Ever.

The Champions fight Rampage and the battle goes back and forth. It looks like the Champions are going to win this battle but all of a sudden this happens:

And can you blame Rampage? Who wouldn't want to jam a fist into the Angel's skull? BTW, metaphor alert! Here's the down-and-out Rampage about to get revenge on the obscenely rich Angel. If you're a regular joe buying this comic in 1976, who are you supposed to identify with? The guy who was so far down on his luck that he was pushed beyond his breaking point to take matters into his own hands or the pretty boy who just had a crap load of money dumped into his lap for doing absolutely nothing? 

And there's more: Angel versus Rampage! Angel has blonde hair, Rampage has black hair! One lone man versus four powerhouses! Who's the good guy and who's the bad guy here?

It makes you think! Or not. 

BTW, Angel seems to get himself into a lot of these situations. 

What a dummy. 

A couple of things about this issue:

•   This was a really good issue. The plotting was fast, there wasn’t as much exposition, the action was there and there were some funny down time moments. Honestly, it was probably the best issue of the run so far.
•  There wasn’t a lot of bickering, Angel toned down the dickishness, Ice Man was starting to have an existential crisis and Hercules was cool. Black Widow still sorta hangs out without a defined roll (her assistant Ivan is more fleshed out).
•   Finally, the Champions are given a reason to exist! It’s not the best reason in the world but an altruistic super hero team is not bad. And everyone buys in, so there’s some sort of overarching factor that keeps this group together.
• You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Ghost Rider at all. He wasn’t in this issue and I wonder if that’s why it was a good one. Maybe old Ghost Rider is the weak link?
•    Rampage looks cool, he’s not cool; but he looks cool. He’s a two-bit anti-Iron Man.
•    The cover for this issue was a miss. It wasn’t that great, but next issue looks awesome.

All-in-all, I give this four out of five Angels!

Four Angels? I'm shocked too, guys.

Murder at Malibu!

What makes a team book a fun read? The writing and the art are good places to start. The characters need to be interesting. But the biggest reason is that there needs to be a sense of purpose or an overarching theme behind the group.

The Fantastic Four are essentially a family*, Mr. Fantastic is the husband of the Invisible Girl, brother-in-law of the Human Torch and best friend of the Thing. At its core, there’s a family dynamic. The Avengers are Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. They deal with the stuff that no one else can handle. If you’re an Avenger, you’re the best of the best (at least in theory – I’m looking at you Dr. Druid).

* My theory as to why the FF sucks as a movie: there’s not enough time to establish a family dynamic, figure out how to use their powers and deal with a bad guy. Not in two hours. It would be better as a book. When I say this, people always use “The Incredibles” as a counter argument and that kinda works. But the thing is, “The Incredibles” is about a nuclear family: dad, mom, brother, sister and baby. You already know how that works, that dynamic is practically hardwired into your brain, so you don’t need a lot of time to explain it. The FF isn’t a “traditional” nuclear family and time is needed to establish bonds. Why does Sue love Reed when he’s an obvious asshole? Why are Johnny and Ben so close? Why does Ben defend Reed despite Reed constantly fucking him over? There’s no shorthand to this and it’s not stuff that you can get across in two hours.

The X-Men are a little different. They’re together because they’re mutants and half the world hates them, the other half fears them. They needed to be brought together to be taught how to use their powers and work for the betterment of mankind. At least that’s what Professor Xavier says, I think he just wanted to look at some young tail.

Yuck.

Even the Defenders had a reason, even if it was an anti-reason: they were a non-team. That meant if the Hulk doesn’t feel like dealing with the villain of the month, he doesn’t have to. The Sub Mariner has things to do in Atlantis, get to it Subby. There were always plenty of heroes hanging around Dr. Strange’s mansion to lend a hand.

Do these teams above bicker with each other? Constantly. But there's that purpose that ties them back. Yes the Thing wants to knock the Human Torch into next week, but he won't because they're practically brothers. Wolverine routinely wants to ram a claw into Cyclops' throat (let's be honest, who doesn't?) but he won't because he believes in Xavier's message.

That brings us to the Champions. It seems that writer Tony Isabella saw that the Marvel method is, "Have teammates argue with each other" and confused it with growth or substance or something and left it at that. We’re in issue four and I still have no idea why they hang around with each other. I mean I get why Angel and Ice Man are pals and everyone probably wants to sleep with Natasha, but the others are just jerks to each other. Bobby has a hair across his ass about Ghost Rider and now Angel does too.

Before I get into that, I need to explain this month's plot a bit: Hercules and Black Widow are walking on the beach when they’re attacked by an old, crazy guy calling himself Billy. He attacks our hero without any provocation and talks about himself in the third-person, which reminds me of Rickey Henderson. Being reminded of Rickey is great.

(My brother had this poster when we were kids, it's so awesome. AND there's a bonus comics pun in there! Who says I don't bring it all home?) 

They kick his ass and are trying to figure out what to do about it when these six goons come around to bring Billy back to where he came from. Hercules isn’t too happy about this because all of a sudden, he likes Billy. The goons shoot him and Widow and the next thing you know they’re at the San Marino State Hospital. I just looked it up and San Marino is 52.3 miles away from Malibu, so I’m not sure what Billy was doing in Malibu anyway and why it took these guys so long to track him down, but comics!

Anyway, Hercules is in cuffs and Widow has a device around her neck that will fry her if either makes the wrong move. It turns out that this scientist is trying to replicate the Super Soldier Serum* and has been testing it on the mentally deranged, the old and the poor. Surprisingly, it hasn’t worked out very well for any of them.

* I love how the SSS only worked for Steve Rogers. It (at least up until I stopped reading comics in the late 80s) never worked well for anyone else. For the most part, after being injected with the SSS, it drove people insane. I think that says a lot for Steve Rogers, that he’s the ultimate American. Not just in terms of mental capacity, but in terms of will and temperament. That’s a nice idea to hold onto, especially if we use him as an avatar for America.

  

This scientist, Dr. Edward Lansing, is planning to try his experiment on both the Widow and Hercules so that they will be his slaves. Their first mission? Destroy the Champions? Why? I don’t know. They just have to, that’s why.

Herc, Nastasha, Dr. Lansing and some more SSSed-up goons attack the Angel, Ice Man and Widow’s friend Ivan. And they’re kind of kicking their asses pretty well, until Ghost Rider shows up. Remember, he’s not only the cavalry, but he’s also the friend and teammate of Angel and Ice Man.

Angel says, “How ‘bout puttin’ your money where your mouth is for once before we all get creamed?” Does the Ghost Rider need this shit? Fuck and no, he doesn’t. If I were Johnny Blaze, I’d turn my bike around and go somewhere else. But Blaze is a better hero than I would be, so he helps the two asshole mutants fight Hercules and it goes okay. Ivan has his hands full with the Black Widow who is literally choking him—like Homer does to Bart*, only less funny.

* The Simpsons are probably my favorite piece of pop culture ever, when they finally leave the airwaves, it's going to be a sad day. But the whole Homer choking Bart “joke” hasn’t really aged well, has it? I guess it’s good that it's a cartoon because seeing a real 38-year-old man choking a real 10-year-old boy would be disturbing.

This act wakes Natasha up and she kicks Dr. Lansing in the face, breaking his control box. The mutates (his words, not mine) end up turning on him and kill him. I guess that once the people under his control kill someone they are then bound to turn into brain dead zombies. Lansing wanted Hercules and Black Widow to kill their fellow Champions so they would be under his control, which seems like a dumb plan. Why don’t you just have them kill a drifter or two? Why take the gamble that they could kill other heroes – even if those heroes are Ice Man and the Angel.

In a rare moment of empathy, Hercules feels bad about these zombies. Are they zombies? I guess they are technically, though they're not dead. It sort of feels like I'm not being sensitive by lumping all brain dead slaves into one big zombie pile. Angel doesn't care for my PC musings (and you know WWIII would vote for Donald Trump and would tell everyone that he did so) and tells the Scion of Zeus not to worry that the cops will take care of them (uh, okay?). Hercules argues that these people were innocents who went to a doctor for help, only to see themselves get experimented on and altered in the worst way.

Does Warren Worthington III take stock in that and feel any empathy? Of course not. He flips the fuck out and says, “All right! There is evil the world Hercules – and Lansing is part of it. But there’s good as well – and we’re a part of that! The question is: do we do anything about it – or do we sit around crying in our beer? #MAGA*”

* He didn't really say the last thing. 

A few things, WWIII:

1. Hercules wasn’t saying let’s disband the Champions with a murder-suicide pact. He’s just bummed out about what happened to these people.
2. He didn’t say that you were the cause of this, so just relax.
3. You have wings, Hercules is one of the strongest people on the planet. He's a demigod. Maybe you should slow your roll a bit.

And that’s what brings me back to my original point: I still have no idea why these people are still together. They don’t seem to like each other too much, they have completely different philosophies for practically everything and aside from mooching off the Angel (he’s rich and underwrites everything that the Champions do and allows him to crash at his place) there’s no symbiotic relationship.

I think that the Champions stories have struggled in these first four issues because the group has struggled to find a purpose. They never answered that one important question: why are the Champions here?

This was a meh issue. The group just sorta defeated literal ancient gods, so fighting a mad scientist is not just a step down, it’s an entire building down. And again, they didn’t really defeat him, Black Widow kicked him and the mutates did the rest of the work (killing him) for them. And BTW, good job Champions of saving Dr. Lansing. No one lifted a finger to help him. At all. 

"Oh? Those screams? Just good old Dr. Lansing being torn apart by a bunch of brain-dead zombies. I wonder if Warren still has that margarita machine? Taco Tuesday y'all!"

You know you're a 90s kid when ... stupid sentence beginning but, every time I read this headline, I sing it to the chorus of the Hole song, "Malibu". I'm sure Courtney Love will be thrilled. 

The George Tuska art was a little better, but the writing lagged. The front cover is boss, so they have a four-issue streak on that. I’d have bought this book if I saw it on a spinner or the magazine rack at Mahoney’s Drug Store in Methuen, MA. I give this issue two vest-wearing Angels out of five.