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).