The Invaders Take A Drive In The Country!

The Invaders fight to save Winston Churchill once again as he leaves the United States bound for England. This is a follow-up to the debut story. This sixteen-page yarn was written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Lee Weeks. FDR is present in this story as well. It's a nifty 2005 shout-out to the 1975 classic that started it all. 

Not included in The Invaders Omnibus is the wonderful story of the team which appeared in the short-lived Marvel Universe series. But I want to include that story in this series of remembrances of the classic Marvel series. 

Carlos Pacheco

Marvel Universe was one of the best ideas Roger Stern ever had. The book only lasted for a few story arcs, was to be an anthology of sorts which didn't focus on any one hero but rather used the whole splendid canvas of the Marvel timeline for source material. Roger Stern with outstanding artwork by Steve Epting and Al Williamson for the first three issues gives us a humdinger of an Invaders story.

Dick Ayers and Syd Shores

What this story is really is one more installment of the secret history of Hydra, the secret organization which was sparked by Baron Wolfgang Strucker out of the ashes of the Nazi cause which he saw as doomed to failure. One of the greatest yarns ever spun at Marvel focused on Hydra's World War II roots and ran in the first four issues of the largely forgotten Captain Savage and the Leatherneck Raiders way back in 1968. This newer Stern story uses that nigh-forgotten classic as a launching point for getting the Invaders involved.

Stern reaches back to the Golden Age of comics, specifically those of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby when he plunders the third issue of Captain America Comics for the enormous and deadly Dragon submarine used by the Japanese. This mammoth undersea device serves well as the over-the-top spectacle a good superhero story requires.

John Byrne

The story begins with intros to our heroes the Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, and Captain America. The sidekicks have been...ahem...kicked to the curb for this particular storyline.  We get some fairly clever reprises of the origins of these classic heroes as the U.S. government conducts some security checks, and we find a man named Bob Frank acting as advisor.

Dave Gibbons - Alternate Cover

We learn that Baron Strucker sees the end coming for the Nazis and has taken measures to see that the dream of world conquest does not die with Hitler, seen by Strucker as an imperfect leader at best. To that end he's funded the secret organization called Hydra who are seeking one of the war's biggest secrets, the atomic bomb. He operates with knowledge of the future stolen when he observed and followed a mysterious man who turned out to be Doctor Doom, and made use of his time machine. This is a great little call back to a vintage Invaders story and answers some curious questions that story created in the Marvel timeline.

Paul Smith

The Invaders are called upon with the assistance of The Whizzer (Bob Frank of course) to keep the atomic secrets from falling into Strucker's vile mitts. They succeed, no secret, but the getting there is a whiz-bang frolic and highly enjoyable super heroic action romp.

Roger Stern is writing on all cylinders here, creating a story which balances the nostalgia with then-modern comic styling very effectively. Steve Epting is a fantastic artistic storyteller with a handsome classic style, and having a supreme pro like Al Williamson on the inks only adds a luster to the proceedings.

This is a damned fine Invaders story, one of the best I've ever read and highly recommended. For the record the next storyline in Marvel Universe was a four-part story about a group called the "Monster Hunters" and it was a ton of fun too, though not quite as stellar as the Invaders trilogy. Marvel Universe did not find sales success and ended after only seven issues, a pity and a shame.

But the full run of the series did get collected in The Invaders -Eve of Destruction. Back to The Invaders Omnibus tomorrow. 

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Omega The Unknown!

After the demise of the Man-Thing comic, Steve Gerber was still operating on all cylinders and his most famous follow-up was Howard the Duck, the creation for which he is most remembered today. But at the same time that he kicked off Howard's meteoric career he launched another series titled Omega the Unknown, with the help of Mary Skrenes and veteran artist Jim Mooney. In point of fact this is the comic most like Man-Thing featuring the same artist and writer team and presenting a protagonist who is mute and unusually susceptible to his surroundings. Omega the Unknown is a comic which lives up to its title and is rather inscrutable even today. 

The story begins on a distant alien planet where the enigmatic figure who will be called Omega the Unknown battles against an armada of invading sentient robots. His world seems destroyed but he is able to escape. On Earth a young boy named James Michael Starling is roused by his parents and they leave their home but a car wreck ends with the boy orphaned and his parents seemingly having been robots all along. Quickly he finds himself in hospital where his unusual nature arouses the curiosity of the doctor and nurses. The same robots that invaded Omega's planet have followed him to Earth and now they attack the boy but Omega's timely intervention saves the day, though weirdly the boy is able to fire beams of his own in his defense. There is clearly a connection between James Michael and Omega. 

In the second issue things heat up as James Michael gets used to life outside his parents isolated home and Omega has to confront the fury of the Hulk. Omega also meets an old man who takes him in and calls him "Sam". 

Electro had acquired one of the alien robots that had followed Omega to Earth and he tries to get Omega to help him with reviving it. James Michael moves in with Ruth, his former nurse and her roommate Amber who is a streetwise photographer for the Daily Bugle. 

The complexities of public school afflict James Michael and some of his new friends who have to navigate savage bullies and incompetent teachers. Gerber's lack of respect for traditional education permeates much of these early issues of James Michael's life. 

Omega for his part comes into conflict with El Gato, a local warlock of sorts and crime boss. Despite some shape-changing qualities on his opponent's part, Omega still wins the day. 

The brutality of life for the elderly gets a highlight when the savage Wrench mugs old women and men for their cash. Omega is at last able to stop him, but not before some dies. 

One of James Michael's friends is brutally beaten and his life hangs by a thread. On the Omega front the Blockbuster, a villain from Captain America's magazine shows up to raise a ruckus. Omega gets public criticism when he fails to stop the villain from robbing a bank, though Omega does save lives. 

Omega finds himself in battling Captain Marvel villain Nitro in a story by Roger Stern and Lee Elias. 

Omega finishes his fight with Blockbuster though the intervention of a villain called Foolkiller creates new problems. 

In the final issue of the run James Michael's friend dies of his injuries and is buried. After the funeral James Michael decides it's best to leave town and along with his friend Dian. They head back to the boy's home. Omega battles against Ruby Thursday and her demon Dibbuk, but events unfold in such a way that he is shot and seemingly killed by police. And with that the series closes with a promise of more secrets revealed in issues of The Defenders. 

When the story finally shows up in the pages of the The Defenders the writer is Steven Grant and the artist is Herb Trimpe. Valkyrie and Hellcat with the assistance of the Wasp assist Ruth and Amber along with Rory to find James Michael and Dian. Meanwhile Omega is not exactly recovering from his wounds all that well. 

In the frand finale Moondragon shows up to fix things somewhat and we learn at long last that the alien robots are actually the makers of both Omega and James Michael. Each was a progressively improved model of being in which the doomed aliens hoped to invest the welfare of their dying race. But the plan was messed over when Omega came to Earth and triggered the events that forced James Michael to activate his powers sooner than expected. His powers are staggering and it is only the intervention of Moondragon and the Defenders that James Michael comes to finally understand his dangerous nature and or the sake of his friends destroys himself. But as the story closes Moondragon takes both his body and Omega's are dropped off in space heading into the sun. 

With solid but sadly sometimes unexciting work by the totally professional Jim Mooney this book has a visual style that feels at odds with its offbeat themes. If the intent was to create an utterly realistic setting in "Hell's Kitchen" for the characters to boil in it fails a bit in that the environment doesn't look really any different from generic NYC which adorns most Marvel books of the era. Gerber and Skrenes start the ball rolling with a very subtly done first issue but never recapture that magic as the strip gets burdened by too much of the traditional new-Marvel superhero trapping such as recognizable villains and guest-stars. This book needed really to exist outside or at a distance from the MU to be fully effective. Still it's an interesting read, if you're prepared for the sudden stop. 

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Machine Man - Mister Monster!

While on hiatus the Machine Man series gets a boost by the lead character being featured in the pages of the hot Marvel comic The Incredible Hulk.

Beginning in issue #234 of the comic by Roger Stern and Sal Buscema we meet X-51, the robot known as Machine Man who comes into conflict with the Hulk. Both are manipulated into fighting by the gangsters known as "The Corporation".

We get a few issues of wall-to-wall slam bang action as Jadejaws and X-51 battle it out. They seem well matched at first but as happens most of the time the relentless assault of the Hulk begins to win the day and Machine Man suffers significant damage.

When the Hulk ends the melee by bringing down the skyscraper which houses The Corporation, the battle ends for him while Machine Man must be repaired. More on that when Machine Man's comic is revived with a new team.

One thing that Marvel got right most of the time was that when a series ended abruptly due to poor sales, the stories were almost always picked up somewhere in the larger Marvel Universe and given a proper send off. (Warlock, It, Woodgod) The Hulk was a common place for this to happen with Machine Man getting the help here to transition from the Kirby years to what was to come.

More on that next week.

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The Once And Future Kang!

In The Avengers #267 we encounter for the first time (that we know of) the Council of Cross-Time Kangs. This is an epic which will sprawl across the series off and on until issue three hundred but here is the initial fracas.

The story begins with an Avengers which has among its members Storm and Colossus of the X-Men. Iron Man appears and brings with him a bomb which devastates the whole of New York City along with the Avengers. The "Iron Man" in question turns out to be Kang, a Kang who himself gets transported to a sitting council of three more Kangs who determine his schemes are too dangerous to the time stream for him to be allowed to live and summarily execute him. These Kangs go their separate ways but one follows another and they discuss the situation. It seems when Kang sets his plots into motion he creates alternate time lines and alternate Kangs, many of them inferior in some respect to the more or less originals. One Kang introduces his comrade to Ravonna who has been rescued in this time line and then kills him.  The story shifts to the Avengers mansion where the team (Wasp, Hercules, Black Knight, Captain America, and Captain Marvela long with new recruit Namor, The Sub-Mariner) are building a connector from the Mansion to Hydrobase. The Wasp, The Knight and Hercules encounter first the Hulk, then Giant-Man  and realize that they are in Limbo and these unconscious heroes are the evidence of the first encounter with The Space Phantom. They are then taunted by a robot Kang while the original gloats.

Cap, Captain Marvel, and new Avengers Namor the Sub-Mariner follow the first three Avengers and find nothing. Then we meet Kang and Ravonna as he builds more robot doubles.

The Black Knight, Hercules, and Wasp encounter the Space Phantom, then Dire Wraiths who want to be killed in battle and finally the Growing Man.The Earth-bound trio of Avengers build a time machine to take them to Limbo and look for their comrades. Battles rage across Limbo until the entire team is captured by Kang and put into stasis.

Once again Kang shares his elaborate history and details from his perspective his many battles and his eventual discovery of his duplicates across time and his decision to destroy them. The Avengers eventually escape captivity and confront Kang.

We then learn that Ravonna is not the loyal follower we thought and that another is in league with her. The Avengers and Kang battle until Immortus reveals himself and says that he not Kang is in charge of the situation. Unable to deal with his humiliating defeat Kang grabs a device from Immortus but it proves too powerful for him and he dashes into Limbo seemingly mad. The Avengers are sent home and Immortus and Ravonna discuss their Machiavellian methods.

This is a smooth well-crafted time travel story with good solid characters who are worthy. But this story does lack a certain excitement somehow. Perhaps it's because there is so much explanation needed to keep it all straight, I don't know. I admire this tale for its craftsmanship, but it does lack a certain magic somehow.

There are many other Kang stories, but that's all I have time for this month. Time has run out on this little visit down memory lane. Kang would forgive me, or perhaps not.

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The Marvelous Monster Hunters!

In what I now consider the final years of the Marvel Universe proper (before they began the process of "ultimatizing" the whole shebang and rebooting every few years) we got a delightful series from the hand of Roger Stern titled simply Marvel Universe. The first three issues gave us a fantastic untold Invaders story from World War II. The next four issues, the last four as it sadly turned out looked back to the Atlas years before the Fantastic Four when giant monsters roamed the Earth with apparent ease. Assembled to battle this threat were "The Monster Hunters".

They were Doctor Druid the mystic, Ulysses Bloodstone the immortal monster hunter, Zawadi a ferocious denizen of Wakanda, and Makkarri the Eternal who had been hiding among mankind as Hurricane among other names for centuries.

These four along with another repulsive man named Harvey Elder who had his own secrets, battle many of the more infamous Atlas monsters such as Gorgilla, Gigantus, Tricephalus and others.

The source of the monsters is proven to be the Deviants led by Kro who would become a major player along with Makkarri in the Eternals series by Jack Kirby many years later. This beautiful bit of retconning really sang as Stern worked in these disaparate heroes created separately over decades into a seamless story which at once felt modern and vintage.

The artwork is muscular and is provided by a several talents such as Mike Manley, Bret Blevins and Jason Armstrong as well as helping hands by Ron Frenz and Bruce Timm. The tale is full of bluster and adventure and the team finds among its varied ranks an esprit de corp which speaks well of heroes under threat.

The Monster Hunters go on to appear in Stern's series The Lost Generation which he did with John Byrne. But beyond that I suppose they've been largely disappeared from the ceaselessly shifting realities of modern Marvel. It's a pity.

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The Invaders - Eve Of Destruction!

Carlos Pacheco

Marvel Universe was one of the best ideas Roger Stern ever had. The book only lasted for a few story arcs, was to be an anthology of sorts which didn't focus on any one hero but rather used the whole splendid canvas of the Marvel timeline for source material. Roger Stern with outstanding artwork by Steve Epting and Al Williamson for the first three issues gives us a humdinger of an Invaders story.

What this story is really is one more installment of the secret history of Hydra, the secret organization which was sparked by Baron Wolfgang Strucker out of the ashes of the Nazi cause which he saw as doomed to failure. One of the greatest yarns ever spun at Marvel focused on Hydra's World War II roots and ran in the first four issues of the largely forgotten Captain Savage and the Leatherneck Raiders way back in 1968. This newer Stern story uses that nigh-forgotten classic as a launching point for getting the Invaders involved.

Also Stern reaches back to the Golden Age of comics, specifically those of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby when he plunders the third issue of Captain America Comics for the enormous and deadly Dragon submarine used by the Japanese. This mammoth undersea device serves well as the over-the-top spectacle a good superhero story requires.

John Byrne

The story begins with intros to our heroes the Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, and Captain America. The sidekicks have been...ahem...kicked to the curb for this particular storyline.  We get some fairly clever reprises of the origins of these classic heroes as the U.S. government conducts some security checks and we find a man named Bob Frank acting as a liason.

Dave Gibbons - Alternate Cover

We learn that Baron Strucker sees the end coming for the Nazis and has taken measures to see that the dream of world conquest does not die with Hitler, seen by Strucker as an imperfect leader at best. To that end he's funded the secret organization called Hydra who are seeking one of the war's biggest secrets, the atomic bomb. He operates with knowledge of the future stolen when he observed and followed a mysterious man who turned out to be Doctor Doom, and made use of his time machine. This is a great little call back to a vintage Invaders story and answers some curious questions that story created in the Marvel timeline.

Paul Smith

The Invaders are called upon with the assistance of The Whizzer (Bob Frank of course) to keep the atomic secrets from falling into Strucker's vile mitts. They succeed, no secret, but the getting there is a whiz-bang frolic and highly enjoyable super heroic action romp.

Roger Stern is writing on all cylinders here, creating a story which balances the nostalgia with then-modern comic styling very effectively. Steve Epting is a fantastic artistic storyteller with a handsome classic style, and having a supreme pro like Al Williamson on the inks only adds a luster to the proceedings.

This is a damned fine Invaders story, one of the best I've ever read and highly recommended. For the record the next storyline in Marvel Universe was a four-part story about a group called the "Monster Hunters" and it was a ton of fun too, though not quite as stellar as the Invaders trilogy. Marvel Universe did not find sales success and ended after only seven issues, a pity and a shame.

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Timely Returns - Post-Modern Edition!

Several years ago during Marvel's 70th anniversary celebration the company issued a great many one-shot issues which called back to their Timely roots. The books as are typical of the modern era of comics are wildly uneven in their quality, some with artwork which is lovely to behold and some with art that requires more patience. The covers though by and large are very handsome. I have not bothered to read these again since gathering them up and I do not have the complete collection pictured above. For better or worse here are the covers from this event.

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