Deathlok The Demolished Man!

Rich Buckler's Deathlok the Demolisher for certain was in part inspired by Mary Shelly's infamous creation, the dead body of a man from disparate parts (in this case metal) and decaying flesh is brought back to life by a perverse scientific means and let loose upon the world. The story of Deathlok is how that man, Luther Manning, deals with the dark strange transformation. He has become wedded to a computer which yammers at him incessantly while losing his wife to his best friend. He's been dead five years, but it only feels like moments. Unlike Frankenstein though, the creator of Deathlok, a mad military scientist named Ryker is all too keen to look after his creation for grim purposes, hoping to create a killing machine. He does just that but loses control. The struggle for control between Manning and Ryker is what most of the Astonishing Tales issues are all about. 

This struggle takes place in a dystopic 1990's (the near future when this comic came out, but alas the distant past for your reviewer). Deathlok was a story what the world might become if we allowed military might to rule the day, a world devastated by war, writhing with battling gangs of men seeking safety and men seeking other men for nourishment. It's a pretty grim future that Buckler and writer Doug Moench paint for in the Astonishing Tales debut. 

The late Rich Buckler has always been one of my favorite artists. He was a massive talent who brought to any company who hired him a wide array of styles as well as his very own distinctive look. He's not aping Adams or Buscema or Kirby in the Deathlok series, he's fusing his influences into fresh whole which is at once eye-catching and in need of firm attention. 

Doug Moench's scripts are complex as they try to showcase the incessant struggle in the mind of Deathlok between his Manning psyche and the computer which speaks to him relentlessly, a computer buried in his gut. He is a former man bristling with machine parts who nonetheless rejects that side of himself and so resorts sometimes to weapons of an earlier age. 

The Deathlok character continued to meander though issues of Astonishing Tales, but the adventure became increasingly hard to fathom. The "Dreaded Deadline Doom" rose up more than a few times to squelch the momentum of the story and even talents liked the always underrated Bill Mantlo had a hard time finding footing. 

By the time it was decided to move Deathlok beyond his personal war with Ryker and introduced new characters such as the robotic Hellinger and blonde primitive Godwulf, the die was cast. The series was on the way out, but not before it took a few turns back into time. 

Despite the creation of a healthy Luther Manning clone, Deathlok was still presented as a tragic character almost beyond redemption. While in the then modern Marvel universe he teamed up with Buckler's other creation Devil-Slayer. 

Before being captured and programmed to kill then President of the United States Jimmy Carter. As with many of the Bronze Age characters which saw the light of day in this fecund Marvel period he found his story getting snipped off in the pages of Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Two-In-One. 

Until in MTIO during the excellent "Saga of Project Phoenix" he was utterly destroyed. The end had come at last for Deathlok and he was at once at peace in a world in which contentment was never his to claim. 

The J.M. DeMatties and Mike Zeck decided he deserved better and in an elegant time travel story brought Captain America into the near future with a reconstructed Deathlok and there he found not onl victory over his enemy Hellinger but a pice of soul gifted to him by his clone. He was, as much as he'd ever been a complete man with a mission again, one to save the world. 

This volume also treats up to a nifty little glimpse back to Deathlok's sad old days when writer David Anthony Kraft and artist Michael Golden tell an untold tale of Deathlok's days of torment in the nads of Ryker's researchers. This story was tucked neatly inside an issue of Marvel Fanfare. 

So, in spite of everything we see that Deathlok, at least when we see him last in this collection does find some measure of peace. That's more than Frankenstein's Monster was able to discover, so maybe the comparison between them is limited at best. Deathlok has outlived his creator Rich Buckler, and that's not nothing in this ephemeral world we live in. 

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Morbius - The End Of The Living Vampire!

Clearly Marvel had high hopes for Morbius the Living Vampire. He's given a color series in Adventures into Fear and a black and white series in Vampire Tales. The latter turns out to be pretty good, but the latter suffers badly from a rotating army of artists and different writers as well. The strip spends most of its time in sci-fi wonderlands and seems to forget, unlike his B&W companion that vampires are a horror convention. Sadly, as the color series winds down, things don't improve all that much. 

Frank Robbins nails down the art for a few issues doing a good job in my estimation. The story by Doug Moench begins as a horror story but quickly dives down the science fiction route that had hampered the series to this point. 

Don Heck and Bill Mantlo step in as the Living Vampire finds himself in yet another weird dimension, this time battling a godlike creature with countless eyes. The police officer from the Man-Wolf series Simon Stroud is added to the cast and begins a hunt for Morbius as he had for Man-Wolf. He boisterous but just as effective. 

George Evans steps in to do the art as the story returns to Earth but keeps on pumping along. Martine who had been supportive of Morbius but often been used by his enemies against him, suffers a final indignity when she becomes a vampire herself. 

Frank Robbins returns for the final issue as Martine is at long last saved from her vampiric fate and Stroud for some reason lets Morbius fly away in the final panel of the color series. I'm often struck in these vampire tales how our heroes have such little regard for the nameless victims of characters like Morbius. 

In Vampire Tales things are much different. The series is written by Doug Moench and the art chores now fall to Sonny Trinidad who does an outstanding job. Under a striking Richard Hescox cover we find a compelling story of a lonely widow who is struggling alone against a desperate group of miners. She is kind but sadly her good intentions are not enough to spare her from tragedy. 

Under another Hescox cover we find a second story by Moench and Trinidad which has the Living Vampire battling the "Legion of the Undead", a gang of rich vampires who want to rule the world. There's some spicey treachery in this one before Morbius is able end the threat, at least some of it. 

This is all reprints but Bob Larkin's cover featuring Morbius is one of the finest images of the character ever done. 

In Legion of Monster, the Morbius story has our blood-thirsty protagonist up against a werewolf in a final story by Moench and Trinidad. I should also point out that these black and white stories share space with many ads and articles in which Morbius plays a role. 

Morbius is just one monster among many in this Marvel Premiere tale by Bill Mantlo and Frank Robbins which has this assembled group of creatures battling a demi-god from space. 

Mantlo is the writer again in this Marvel Two-In-One yarn which pits the Thing and Morbius against one of the craziest villains in Marvel history -- the Living Eraser. Arvell Jones and Dick Giordano supply the art. Morbius ends up using the Eraser's tech to send himself to a distant dimension at story's end. 

The story picks up in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man when Morbius seeks to return to Earth. The first part of the story is a three-page frame which sets up a reprint of Marvel Team-Up number three. 

In the subsequent chapters written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Sal Busema we find out that Morbius is under the influence of an ancient artificial lifeform called the Empathoid which lives off emotions. It possess Morbius and forces him to return to Earth where it can feast. At story's end Spidey lets Morbius fly off yet again after the Empathoid is defeated. 

He's back still sucking the blood of innocents in a story by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema. This time though at the end of the yarn a stray lightning bolt hits Morbius and mysteriously cures him (seemingly) of his vampire curse.

The follow-up is in four issues of The Savage She-Hulk. Mostly these are tales detailing the various woes of Jennifer Walters as she tries to cope with her still relatively role as the green bombshell. A potential cure though might be found by a researcher named Michael Morbius who is trying to find a lasting cure for himself as he lives under house arrest. Ultimately Walters becomes his attorney and gets the former "Living Vampire" off on manslaughter charges for his many crimes. These stories by David Anthony Kraft and artist Mike Vosburg are pretty good and deal with some complex issues but it seems a bit anti-climactic after all that has been written and drawn concerning Morbius. 

I got around to seeing the new Morbius movie a few weeks ago and I rather liked it. I know a bunch of these flicks get slammed for not having an upbeat theme, but this is a vampire movie. and I don't expect things to work out for the best in this universe. I was struck after reading the stories again after so long how close the movie was to the original source material. I'd forgotten all the stuff about the experiments on the ship. There are changes of course, but I expect those. Jared Leto was quite effective as the tortured "Living Vampire".  

No more Morbius to come, but reading through these two somewhat overpriced Epic volumes has really taken me back to a time when Marvel's ambitions often were grander than their capabilities. But in the dross, there are some amazing gems. Those stories in Vampire Tales have a lasting effect. 

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Doc Savage - It's Clobberin' Time And Space!

In 1975 Marvel published Giant-Size Doc Savage #1. It's tied into the movie which was hitting theaters, and it's essentially a reprint of issues #1 and #2 of the original series. But there is substantial redrawing of Doc throughout the story to make his image more consistent with what was appearing in the B&W magazines. (More on that later.) There are also a couple of pin-ups of Doc from the B&W magazines here in color. The comic closes with an article by Robert Sampson called "Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze" which gives brief character sketches of Doc and his team. 

(Look for Doc hanging between the Vision, Thor, and the Human Torch.)

But Doc Savage made a few guest-starring appearances while he was hanging out at the House of Ideas. 

Giant-Size Spider-Man #3 is titled "The Yesterday Connection!". It's written by Gerry Conway and features artwork by Doc Savage's main man Ross Andru this time inked by his longtime partner Mike Esposito. The cover is by Gil Kane. The story begins in 1974 with Spidey on patrol when a flickering light catches his attention. He gleans it's a message for help and off he swings to the location of a vintage 1930's building about to be demolished. Suddenly he's attacked from the shadows but a backflip later he sees his attacker is a stunning blue woman clad in strategically placed straps. She says her name is Desinna and by using a translating device she tells Spidey a story from 1934 when the building was just being constructed. 

We cut to 1934 and find Doc Savage and his team (Monk, Ham, Renny, Johnny and Long Tom) attending the dedication when a mysterious gunman tries to kill Mayor La Guardia. Doc dispatches the villain but isn't at all convinced that that threat was the reason they'd been summoned to the building the night before. They return to the Doc's headquarters and after some lab tests determine the message they received came from another world. Back to 1974 and Spidey and Desinna come under seeming attack by a giant ghostly image resembling a satyr. After some fisticuffs, Spidey determines the creature is electrical in nature and uses a jackhammer to short the being out. Then Desinna reveals she was there in 1934 with Doc Savage. The story cuts back to 1934 and Doc and his men are searching the building site when they encounter Desinna who tells them of her other-dimensional world that exists alongside Earth but in such a way as time effectively is absolute. She speaks of a scientist named Tarros who has an experiment go wild seemingly killing him but creating the electrical creature Spidey had fought earlier (or later depending on how you view it). She claims she needs Doc's help to capture the creature and after much ballyhoo Doc and his men succeed in trapping Tarros inside the building's keystone where he will be trapped until the building is torn down. Back to 1974 and after jackhammering the keystone, Spidey frees Tarros but in a twist he's realized that Desinna is the villain, something that Doc and his guys weren't culturally capable of detecting (or so claims Spidey) and her story is not true completely. Tarros takes Desinna and the pair disappear. Spidey prepares to swing away and in the background is a nodding Doc Savage. 

Marvel Two-In-One #21 happens two years later. The story is titled "Black Sun Lives!" and it's written by Bill Mantlo. It's drawn by Ron Wilson with Pablo Marcos on inks. The cover is by Wilson with Joe Sinnott inks. This one begins 1976 and 1936 respectively. Two tales are told simultaneously so be patient as I wind through this saga. In the Baxter Buidling in 1976 The Thing and The Human Torch get a visitor; likewise in 1936 in the Empire State Building HQ of Doc Savage, he and his partners Monk and Ham get a visitor. The Thing and Torch welcome in a beautiful woman; likewise, so do Doc and his men. The woman in 1976 collapses; so does the woman in 1936. The woman in 1976 named Lightner tells of her twin brother named Tom who is obsessed with the scientific work of his father and has bankrupted them to follow his passions; the woman in 1936 is also named Lightner and tells of her husband and how his scientific work has overcome his reason. 

Both women tell similar stories of how the two generations of scientists work to complete the sky cannon, a telescope affair that apparently can tap the power of the stars. Then in 1976 the sky goes dark and a glow in the distance seems to come from the location of the sky cannon; likewise in 1936 the sky goes dark and there is a mysterious glow in the distance. The Thing and Torch along with Miss Lightner take the Fantasticar to investigate; Doc Savage and his aides along with Mrs. Lightner do likewise. When the two aircraft reach their respective targets a ray blast envelops both and suddenly the limits of time are broken and the members of the Fantastic Four and the Fab Five and Doc find themselves together confronting a menace composed of both the father and the son called BlackSun. The teams quickly come to terms with the peculiar situation and work together against the seemingly all-powerful villain. After much battle Doc finally notices that the absence of starlight weakens their foe and so when the Human Torch enlightens the environment with his flame BlackSun becomes weakened enough to be captured. With his fall time's limits reassert themselves and Doc and his men fade away while Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm plan to take the injured Lightner to a doctor. 

And that's a wrap on Doc Savage's color comic book career at Marvel. Soon I'll begin to examine the Black & White run of magazines featuring Doc Savage. 

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