Did Someone Say … the Stranger?

First off, cool title. I think it’s magnificently dorky. That’s the good news.

The bad news, aside from the art and a few cool moments, this book is a bit of a mess. We open with the Stilt-Man and Black Goliath are trading fists over Los Angeles. The Champions are coming back from last issue’s adventure with the Warlord Kaa.

Black Widow is driving so the rest of her teammates (Ghost Rider, Hercules, Angel, Ice Man and Dark Star) all get out and lend Black Goliath a hand. Go back and count how many heroes it takes to knock the Stilt-Man down. Stop, I’ll do it for you; it’s six. Six heroes (including one with Class 100 strength) to beat up a C-level villain that is normally laughed at by literally everyone.

(This is the Stilt-Man. Terrifying, isn't he?)

Aside from being really tall, Stilt-Man has a gun called the Z-Ray, which he proceeds to drop four panels into the story. Darkstar envelopes that thing into her Dark Force power and crushes it. So now, Stilt-Man is just a tall guy. Advantage Champions? You would think, but no.

Ice Man tries to put ice under the Stilt-Man’s stilts. It does nothing. Hercules knocks him over, but as the Stilt-Man (I love his name, BTW) lays on the ground, he telescopes his legs out donkey kicking Hercules AND Black Goliath. The Angel is like, I’m going down to kick his ass but Stilt-Man knocks him out of the sky with literally one punch. This was after being yelled at by Black Widow not to get too over confident.

The Ghost Rider takes a shot and rains hell fire. The Stilt-Man is like, eff this and takes off. Black Goliath tells the team that he’s going after them, so they should all go inside.

That’s where they meet Reggie Clayborne. It turns out that the Stilt-Man wanted a box that she had, but she didn’t want to give it to him because she thought it was bad. Reggie is an African American woman (stay with me, because this is kind of important to the point I’m going to make) and she tells the Champions about what’s in this McGuffin.

Turns out her “old man” Jerry was into drugs (of course he was) and he got “his-self messed up with a bunch of … well, gangsters, to get money, y’know? Anyway, he done stole this box from Stark International! I tol’ him to take it back, an’ I walked out on him when he wouldn’t! … An’ then I remembered hearin’ about the Champions on the TV. How you help the ‘Common Man’ an’, well I’m common, an’ I need help!”

First off, ugh. Secondly, from all accounts writer Bill Mantlo is a really nice guy, but he has to widen his social circle if he thinks that all black people talk like bit characters from “Good Times”. I mean, “he done stole”? C’mon man, that’s terrible writing. And way to boil down everyone to a stereotype: her boyfriend not only is into drugs, but he also steals. And he steals so indiscriminately that he takes something he has no idea what it is from Tony Stark. Alright. Sure. Fine. Let’s move this piece of shit along.

As if on cue, the cosmic entity known as the Stranger shows up. He’s like, I need that box because there’s a bomb in it. The Champions don’t even stop for a second to wonder whether this guy is telling the truth, they just start unloading on him.

Everyone except for Ghost Rider, because he’s still stuck as Johnny Blaze. Apparently Blaze can only turn into GR when there’s danger present—it’s kind of like his Spidey sense. The Stranger isn’t setting off any danger alarms, so he tries telling Ice Man that. Blaze starts to tell Bobby, but all Ice Man can say is, “Shut up Blaze! This big weirdo messed with a lady I like!”

Really? Fuck you, dude. Number one the lady that you like, Darkstar, a. doesn’t like you and b. started fighting the Stranger within seconds of him showing up. So he retaliated. Kind of sucks, but your “lady” shot first, Greedo. This is also not the first time that Ice Man is disgustingly hitting on Dark Star while they’re in the midst of a battle. Relax man, what is your deal. Wait until the fight is over before you start draping your icy meathooks all over her. Gross.

So Ice Man is being a dick to Ghost Rider. While they were fighting Stilt-Man, Black Widow warns Angel not to go into battle too over confidently. He responds by essentially telling her to get off his back, he’s done this a long time and blah, blah, blah. He gets his ass handed to him, really quick. So good job listening to your team leader, Warren.

By the way, Black Widow hasn’t done a hell of a lot of fighting during the last few issues. She’s either shouting vague orders, driving the Champion Car or hanging around in the background. I don’t think Mantlo had a plan for her yet.

Back to the fight, Ghost Rider tries going toe-to-toe with the Stranger who is like, forget this crap and just chucks GR out of 15-story window. Darkstar saves him before he snaps his neck and is Johnny Blaze happy? Nope. He accuses her of saving him because she’s a spy and she’s trying to get all of the Champions’ secrets. Darkstar is acting as a proxy for the audience because we’re all like what the fuck are you talking about, Johnny?

Black Widow is not too keen on Darkstar either. She’s a bit concerned as to how easy the team took her country woman in. It reads like she’s jealous, but that’s kind of dumb. Well, it should be dumb – but we just saw how stupid Mantlo managed to make a black woman sound. So it wouldn’t be surprising if he thought that the first emotion a woman experiences when a new woman joins a group is jealousy.

As this is going on Reggie’s bomb, called the Null-Life Bomb, is growing bigger and bigger and bigger. According to the Stranger, it’s now triggered and it’s going to blow up. Not only will Earth be lost, but the rest of the universe will be too. The Stranger has seen this before, but some guy sacrificed his life to stop it. It is implied that that the guy who did that is Reggie’s boyfriend. At least, that’s how I’m reading it, they never come out and explicitely say it.

The Stranger says that in order to disarm the bomb, all six of the Champions have to go inside the Null-Life Bomb and fix it. The book ends with them inside the bomb, ready to fight whatever comes their way.

I said that there were a few cool moments in this comic.

One of them was the way that Mantlo handled the Stilt-Man/Black Goliath fight. It was broadcast over the Champion TroubleAlert TV screen. They trade punches until BG gets fed up, rips off one of the Stilt-Man’s legs and beats him with it. Once he gets him off the ground, he rips off SM’s mask and bashes him in the face. It is what should have been done by the six of these guys in the first half of the book.

We also got another great cover by Dave Cockrum. I know that when Byrne politicked to get Cockrum off the X-Men, Cockrum still drew covers and it used to infuriate Byrne. I wonder if the same thing went on here? Byrne is doing the yeoman’s work of drawing 20+ pages and Cockrum does the covers. That would probably piss me off too, now that I think about it.

This was a bad comic. Not just for the dialogue but for the logic of it. Six Champions couldn’t get out of their own way to beat up on a guy like the fucking Stilt-Man. Anyone can beat up the Stilt-Man, he’s just a dude who grows tall. Then the Stranger comes into their headquarters and they fight him to a stand-still. The Stranger. He’s not Galactus, but he’s a pretty big hitter in the Marvel cosmic universe.

The Stanger is a weird looking guy. He has a stark white pointy mustache, a weird white beard and a red shirt without sleeves, plus a speedo hidden by a towel. He kind of looks like your drunk uncle who forwards racist emails and posts a lot of Breitbart articles on Facebook, commenting, "Makes you think ..." In other words, he doesn't look like he's tough. But he is. 

Looks aside, how can the Champions fight the Stranger to a draw and get stymied by the Stilt-Man in the same damn book? That makes zero sense. And I get it, you need to make the villain appear to be powerful, but not the Stilt-Man. He gets tall, that’s literally it. If you put him in an Uncle Sam costume, he’d be like the tenth coolest thing at a fair.

And the constant bickering is getting old. I know that Marvel loves to make a big deal about how their heroes act like real people, so sometimes they don’t get along, but do these six jabronis even like each other? Why are they hanging around with each other at this point? It’s not like the Fantastic Four where they’re family or the X-Men where they’re classmates. They’re just a bunch of randoms who all happen to live in Los Angeles.

There is never any time when they seem to genuinely like each other.

I give this two vest-wearing Angels. And that’s being kind.

Next entry, I’m going to get into how the Champions should be a lot more powerful than how they are written. It’s kind of bullshit, to be honest.

 

One Man’s Son is Another Man’s Poison

I know that it’s been a little while since I last wrote about the Champions. I’m sorry that I left you all hanging with this issue wrapping up this four-issue run of the Champions versus three Russians and a Griffin. I truly apologize.

But that title is absolutely dreadful, no? It’s supposed to be a pun of some kind. But it’s not. Unless we’re comparing one man’s son to the son of another man’s poi. Poi being the native Hawai’ian dish that mainlanders try at a luau and then promptly spit into the nearest hollowed-out coconut. If you haven’t had the root of the taro baked, pounded, moistened, and fermented (thanks Dictionary.com!) then take it from me, it’s disgusting.

Titles aside, this was the weakest issue of this run. Mainly because the Champion men were literally stuck inside a box for three quarters of the issue. As you may recall from last issue, the boys got their collective asses handed to them by Titanium Man, Crimson Dynamo, Darkstar and the Griffin. In order to keep the good guys away from taking Black Widow, Ivan and Alexi Bruskin (Natasha’s former KGB trainer) back to the USSR, the bad guys stuffed them into a box deep below the Earth.

I know what you’re thinking, the Champions have Hercules, he should just punch his way out. Which he does. And that caused the Earth to shake. According to Titanium Man, unless Darkstar gets the Champions out, any violent move that they make will cause an earthquake. I forgot, the box is wedged on the San Andreas fault line. It’s a tale as old as time, true believers.

No one really explains how the Russians were able to do this, it just sorta happened. One minute they’re fighting, the next minute the Champions are in an earthquake box. Comics, y’all.

Hercules isn’t having any of this crap and he starts punching his way out, despite the fact that it will cause an earthquake. He said, in so many words, that this is a bunch of bullshit and he doesn’t care what happens to California. “HERCULES WILL NOT BE SHACKLED!”

You know who does care? Ghost Rider. I don’t think that any writer, up to this point, has a handle on good old Johnny Blaze. Whether it’s Tony Isabella or Bill Mantlo, GR’s syntax changes from panel to panel. One minute he’s talking like a demon “If you knew the source of my power frozen one (Ice Man) – you would not question its manifestation!” the next he’s calling Hercules “muscles” and claiming that Los Angeles is his “hometown”.

Blaze said the he doesn’t need “the spook act” all the time, which suggests that he talks like a demon on purpose and that the breezy, more colloquial diction is his normal patter. But that seems wrong to me. The incongruence of seeing a flaming skull speak like Peter Parker doesn’t mesh. At all. He talks like Poochie.

What I mean is this, everyone has their “voice”. For some reason, Hercules talks like he’s from the middle ages, even though he’s from ancient Greece. But whatever, it's consistent. Black Widow peppers a lot of simple Russian idioms in her speech. Even the Angel and Ice Man have distinct ways of talking: Warren Worthington III talks like a blue blood  prick investment banker and Ice Man whines. But with Ghost Rider speaking two different ways, it’s just disjointed and feels like the writers don’t have a handle on him yet.

The rest of the Champions jump on Hercules and tells him to cool down, they have to think of a way out of this box; not just smash their way out. Hercules is pissed at Ghost Rider and wants to kick his ass. Okay, dude. Do that once you get out, alright Prince of Power? You have bigger fish to fry right now.

Crimson Dynamo has revealed himself as Ivan’s son, which has shocked Ivan into silence (which is a big deal because this guy won’t shut the hell up, ever). That silence allows CD to explain his origin, which takes up a pretty big chunk of this book.

His origin as about as convoluted as the bad guys’ plans to keep the Champions at bay: basically a couple of “American” guys ask Ivan to defect and bribe him with American money (which, I’m not sure why they’re doing this in 1956 Russia, but they are). Ivan tells them to pound sand, he didn’t serve Russia in World War II to sell out his country. Ivan tells his wife and Yuri (Crimson Dynamo) to get out of Moscow because these guys mean business.

They show up and gun down Ivan’s wife, but kidnap Yuri. For the next nine years, the two “Americans” keep Yuri holed up in some West German safe house and educate/brainwash him into turning against Mother Russia. It doesn’t work because as soon as Yuri gets a second, he makes a ham radio and calls for help. I’m not sure who he calls, but they were on the line long enough to have cool code names: “Caged Bird” for Yuri and “Home Perch” for his saviors. They never explain exactly who Home Perch is, but they bust down the door, shoot the American dudes and bring Yuri back home.

While this is going on, some American planes are looking to take down the Russian jet, so CD tells Titanium Man to go take care of their problem. TM promptly blows all of the planes out of the air, which freaks Crimson Dynamo out. He didn’t want that at all! He goes out to talk some sense into the Titanium Man. As CD leaves the plane, Bruskin tells everyone that there’s another part of the story that Yuri doesn’t know about.

Mainly that Bruskin was one of the “American” guys that held Yuri captive for nine years. You see, it was all a big KGB plot. When CD comes back inside, Darkstar tries to tell him that there’s been a big misunderstanding (just like in Three’s Company) but instead of striking Darkstar, Yuri slugs the Black Widow (just like in Three’s Company. You recall that Jack never hit Chrissy but he beat the crap out of Janet all the time). Things go crazy and Darkstar needs to break hold of the Champions to deal with the advancing Ivan and Black Widow.

Guess who ends up in the jet? The Champions!

They kick everyone’s asses, pretty quickly and then hand Titanium Man and Griffin to the authorities. Darkstar tells everyone that she’s sorry and the group seems cool with that. Black Widow lets Crimson Dynamo go, but won’t tell them why. Most everyone is cool with that but the Ghost Rider is like, “Guys! We’re a team and we shouldn’t be keeping secrets from each other!” Between this little hissy fit and Hercules almost knocking his skull off his shoulders, it wasn’t a great day for Johnny Blaze.

This issue wasn’t exactly great. From the San Andreas fault prison to the incredibly convoluted reason why the KGB kidnapped Yuri to the perfunctory and flaccid fight at the end to the fact that 80% of the team were off panel while the Black Widow was handcuffed, this was not a good showing for the team.

The only reasons why the bad guys lost was because of Darkstar’s mistakes, there was a lot of expository backstory to a villain and the entirety of the Champions looked more like Chump-ions (SWEET PUN!) with how easy it was to capture and sideline them. I mean, the bad guys practically defeated themselves (though Hercules beat the crap out of Titanium Man, which was cool). And the tension between Ghost Rider and the team and Hercules and the team, was boring.

This was a really cool run of comics, probably the best of the book, but Mantlo simply could not stick the landing. Two Angels out of five.

BTW, another great cover. This one by former X-Men penciler Dave Cockrum. I love his heavy lines and angled perspectives, he really draws a hell of an Angel. It's all just great.