Essential Defenders volume 7

Essential Defenders volume 7 comprises New Defenders #126 to #139 plus the two four-part limited series Iceman and Beauty and the Beast. Bonus material includes various adverts for the series and Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entries for the Angel, the Beast, Gargoyle, Iceman, Moondragon and Valkyrie. The main series is written by J.M. DeMatteis and then Peter Gillis. Most issues are drawn by Don Perlin with others by Alan Kupperberg, Sal Buscema and Mike Zeck. A brief comedy piece in #127 is co-written by Ann Nocenti and Marie Severin and drawn by the latter. The Iceman limited series is written by DeMatteis and drawn by Kupperberg and the Beauty and the Beast limited series is written by Nocenti and drawn by Perlin.

Were the New Defenders created even a decade later it's very likely that the existing title would have been cancelled and replaced with a new series starting from issue #1 in spite of some continuity of personnel, as happened with later examples such as the New Mutants/X-Force or the Avengers/New Avengers. And in turn it's probable that it would have been reprinted in a different format so I wouldn't actually be writing this post. (Indeed the early issues have also been collected in the Classic-in-all-but-name format but so far there hasn't been a second volume.) But instead at the time it was more standard to continue the existing title and numbering through a bold new direction rather than rebooting the numbering and creating yet more issue #1s and volumes to confuse us all.

The New Defenders differ from the previous incarnation in having a more formalised and institutionally recognised team, though it takes some time before they sort out matters such as a leader, a fully resourced base and government clearance. By this point none of the founding members are around and instead the team is initially made up of the Valkyrie, Gargoyle, Beast, Angel, Iceman and Moondragon, with newish character Cloud subsequently joining them. Even by the standards of the Defenders this is a rather bizarre line-up drawing characters from all over and it helps to explain why this team is one of the most obscure and forgotten in Marvel's history despite having no less than three former X-Men on the team. This is also a series that tries to continue to explore the weird and offbeat rather than battling big name supervillains. It also seeks to do some things with the characters that are quite different from the norm, though it doesn't always do so in the best way.

The early issues resolve the ongoing Secret Empire saga, with the newly organised New Defenders battling alongside S.H.I.E.L.D. against a succession of agents and robots. Much of the situation is mundane apart from Professor Power now occupying the body of his son whose mind was destroyed in a battle with Professor X, fuelling a desire for vengeance against Xavier's children at the same time as wider plans for global destruction and conquest. The real emphasis is on how the team is still coming together, with the members learning the hard way that they need to co-ordinate their actions whilst the question of leadership is still unsettled. At the same time their traditional New York home is destroyed and the team relocate to the Angel's remote mountain home in New Mexico. The resolution is also a brutal introduction to the very different ethics amongst the team with Moondragon demonstrating the complexity that will recur throughout the run.

Subsequent issues have a variety of foes from the surreal to the wacky. Gargoyle is captured by a middle eastern wizard and grown to enormous size in order to battle his teammates whom the wizard mistakenly believe are demons. A visit to San Francisco sees the team working with a hard arse private detective in a run-in with drug smugglers that's fairly mundane in itself but as revenge the assassin Manslaughter is sent to their base to dispose of them and his powers and skills make for a tense issue as he sneaks through, picking off the team one by one. The base is also invaded by a set of mutant plant spores that prove nearly impossible to destroy. The nearby town harbours a criminal whose body is invulnerable to fire, making him the perfect arsonist for hire. On the sillier side is the introduction of the Walrus, a man endowed with the proportionate ability and strength of his namesake. His attack is damaging to the Beast's slowly developing career as a lecturer, with the situation made worse by the intervention of would-be hero the Fabulous Frog-Man. In times past Frog-Man would wind up on the list of Defenders members but instead the new organisation means he becomes the first costumed hero to truly ally with the team. The second is Red Wolf, who works with the team in investigating the many deaths around a silver mine that turns out to be a portal to the realm of the Asgardian trolls.

But at times it seems the biggest threat is within the team's own midst. Moondragon previously took over a whole world and as part of her rehabilitation Odin has assigned her to the Valkyrie and placed a metal band around the telepath's head to restrict her from using her power too much for personal gain. Throughout the run Moondragon frequently declares her available power is insufficient to deal with the problem at hand and urges the others to remove the band. Gargoyle eventually sees inside her mind during a link and discovers how in the past her mind was invaded by the ancient Titan demon known as the Dragon of the Moon. In fighting off the demon she has become like it, even taking its name. Eventually the trolls offer to remove the headband, bringing Moondragon's struggle to learn humility and control to the fore. There are also hints that Moondragon has used her powers to influence other team members to fall for her. Early on both Iceman and the Angel fall for her and repeatedly think exactly identical thoughts but this disappears after a change in writers.

In general the rest of the existing members are developed slowly with hints more than anything else. The Beast launches a career as a lecturer that takes him away from the team at times, though not always from danger. Valkyrie continues her mission to watch over Moondragon but also demonstrates that she still performs her mythological role when she guides the spirit of a dying heroic sheriff to the afterlife. Gargoyle continues his friendship with the Defenders' housekeeper Dolly Donahue. The Angel continues worrying about how the Champions fell apart and determining that it won't happen to this team. Iceman finds himself drawn to not only Moondragon but also Cloud, with confusion as a result. The team's eventual leader is a surprise as she's not active in the field but instead a manager who is good at organising the team and getting the base's facilities sorted, Candy Southern. It's a change from the normal type of superhero team leader, showing how things are done differently. The team is a little more conventional in having a cute pet in the form of Sassafras the dog.

Cloud, the newest member, throws up some of the most promising but also frustrating developments. A young woman with the ability to turn into a cloud (when she changes back naked there's always conveniently enough vapour covering up exactly the right places), she has been used as an agent by the Secret Empire who killed her parents and deceived her into believing Seraph was her sister. The fact that Seraph was a Soviet double agent just compounds the confusion and so it seems only the Defenders can offer a place where Cloud can truly belong. She settles in well and finds herself attracted to Moondragon, declaring her feelings for her at the end of one issue. Then it gets seriously messy. Cloud is torn between wanting to go with her feelings and her instinct that they are wrong, a dilemma many who've struggled with their sexuality will recognise. But then Cloud decides the only way to make things right is to change her human form to male. This in turn makes Iceman very uneasy as he had been drawn to Cloud, and Cloud's subsequent switching between male and female forms does not help the situation.

It's incredible that a regular Marvel comic was willing to go anywhere near these subjects in 1984 and it shows the advantages some of the more obscure titles had in being able to push boundaries. But the combination of both sexuality and transgender issues feels less like a pushing of the boat as far as possible and more like a cack-handed, and possibly editorial driven, attempt to back away from having a lesbian relationship storyline. Cloud's transformation feels not like an embracing of true identity but rather an attempt to conform to societal norms by changing gender to avoid a same sex relationship. It feels uncomfortably close to a practice that even today is still carried out in parts of the world whereby lesbians, gays and bisexuals are forced to undergo gender reassignment surgery to "cure" them of their sexuality by making them the opposite gender to those they have feelings for. Further issues try to undo some of the damage with a revelation that Cloud's true self is somehow two separate beings, one female, one male, but the precise implications of this aren't explored before the end of the volume. What's left is a bold step forward and two chaotic steps back.

Issue #127 fell in "Assistant Editors' Month" when all the Marvel editors were supposedly out of the office for a month and their assistants were able to run loose with wacky ideas. But here the sole contribution (bar a comedy figure in the cover box) is a two page comedy strip in which Ann Nocenti daydreams about having all power and transforming the line - before the production manager appears in the dream with a load of mundane tasks that need address, shocking her back to reality. Given that this really only the second issue of the new incarnation of the team (issue #125 may have sported the "New Defenders" series title but was as much about out with the old as anything else) it would have been foolish to suddenly switch away from the norm for a month, showing the problems that come with line wide events that have no respect for individual series's autonomy.

The Iceman limited series is very bizarre. It was presumably published to capitalise on the character's popularity from his co-starring role in the cartoon Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends but it really doesn't seem to know just what audience it's pitched at or just what it's trying to do. There's a basic theme of parents and children coming to understand one another but otherwise we get a turbulent adventure that goes from a Drake family party in a small town on Long Island to a city during the Second World War to the realm of the mysterious Oblivion. There's time travel, dreamscapes, self-doubt and conflict amidst what at first promises to be a bold solo adventure but turns into an introspective psychological analysis. It feels as though the basics of the story and the entity Oblivion were originally drawn up for some other character but were then used for Iceman without too much thought. The character has a long history of outwardly being the goofy light-hearted member of successive teams whilst inwardly being full of self-doubt and wondering if superheroing is the right thing for him or if he should complete a conventional education. This history is respected and expanded upon through exploring his parents' attitudes to his career choices, whilst he's once again drawn to a woman, this time literally the girl next door, Marge. However it starts going weird when she's attacked by the duo of White Light and the Idiot, goes seriously off the rails when he's flung back to the 1940s and meets his parents in his youth whilst under attack from Kali, before finally becoming a complete mess when Iceman's father is killed in the past, causing him to fade out of existence and into the realm of Oblivion. Iceman simply isn't the right character for a cosmic introspection adventure. On more than one occasion in the series he's confused with the Silver Surfer and one has to wonder if this was on the writer's mind as well. The dedicated limited series was in its early days when this was produced so it may not have been clear if this was meant as a one-off piece of character development or a test run to see if there was both creative and sales potential to support an ongoing title. But whatever the aims, the result is a complicated mishmash which can hardly have appealed to readers lured in by the character's cartoon appearances. It's presumably been included here in order to make up the page count to allow the whole New Defenders era fit two whole volumes, an unfortunate move in hindsight, but it frankly could easily have been left in a pile of long forgotten limited series that don't get dug out for complete sequential reprint runs.

So too could Beauty and the Beast. This is a very odd series that seems to have started with the title and then tried to find appropriate contents. It doesn't really succeed and winds up having to distort both title characters in order to fit into the roles required of them. The Beast takes some time out from the team and goes to Los Angeles where he surprisingly falls for Dazzler despite nothing in their histories together suggesting this and they break up at the end with no real mention of it again. Dazzler is at a low point in her career having been recently outed as a mutant and now finding her work all dried up as a result of prejudice. She foolishly accepts a job in a strange underground theatre that turns out to be a modern gladiatorial arena where she's being drugged to lose control of her powers and dispel notions of leaving. The Beast tries to convince her to leave and there's further complications with the alleged son of Doctor Doom trying to use the set-up for his own purposes plus his father making his own plans despite being dead in other Marvel titles at this time. About the only decent concept in the whole story is the Heartbreak Hotel where a number of mutants with quite ineffective powers have found a safe haven. But otherwise this limited series is a turgid mess of scenario, characterisation and continuity that really should have been completely forgotten rather than being given not one but two reprintings across the Essentials (the other is in Essential Dazzler volume 2).

The inclusion of the two limited series was presumably to help fit the whole New Defenders era into two standard size Essential volumes but with the ending of the line the result is this incarnation only gets halfway and the series as a whole stops tantalisingly close to the final issue. Consequently this volume feels somewhat insubstantial as it only gets part of the way through developing the characters and team, not helped by the change of writers midway through and the limited series having no noticeable impact in the regular title. That's a pity as, numbers aside, this is effectively the first volume of a new title and it could have used some more issues. As a result, what we get is a protracted formalisation of the Defenders that nails down the membership but is still sorting through the rest of the set-up. Some of the characters get more attention than others and the developments with Moondragon are especially strong. Unfortunately the handling of Cloud's feelings for Moondragon starts off well but is then handled in a terrible manner that suggests a sudden change order from on high. Overall this is a title that really tries to do things differently from before but isn't yet hitting stellar heights.

Essential Dazzler volume 2

Essential Dazzler volume 2 contains issues #22-42 of the character's solo series plus the four issue mini-series Beauty and the Beast, Marvel Graphic Novel #12 entitled "Dazzler: The Movie", and Secret Wars II #4. Writing wise the volume covers the end of Danny Fingeroth's run on the series and the concluding run by Archie Goodwin. In between is a turbulent period with issues written by Steven Grant, Frank Springer, Jim Shooter, Ken McDonald, Mike Carlin, Linda Grant and Bob DeNatale. Most of the issues are drawn by Frank Springer and the last ones by Paul Chadwick; other artists include Mark Bright, Geof Isherwood and Tom Morgan. Shooter writes both the graphic novel and the Secret Wars II issue, they are drawn by Springer and Al Milgrom respectively. Finally Beauty and the Beast is written by Ann Nocenti and drawn by Don Perlin. Given the page lengths of some of these the result is the single largest Essential volume to date. So it's no surprise that some of the labels are in a separate post.

This volume comes in a period when the concept of a family of X-Men titles was starting to come together, and would climax at the end of 1985 with the introduction of X-Factor. In the process Dazzler gets ever more drawn into the core themes of the mutant titles as prejudices grow. Appropriately for this shift the very last panel sees the Beast raising his new team with her, though instead a resurrected Marvel Girl would take the place. Was Dazzler axed to free up the character with the intention of using her in X-Factor? It's hard to say though as the last few issues contain all the signs of a series in desperate straits and making a last ditch attempt to turn sales around - the series had been bimonthly for a while, and now it had a new creative team, a new costume and a new logo - then it's doubtful that the series would have lasted much longer anyway.

Sadly this volume shows the series drifting, with changing creative teams changing the premise as they go. In the process Alison Blaire/Dazzler gets moved from New York to the West Coast for not particularly convincing reasons, ditching her supporting cast as she goes and never really replacing them. For most of the run the premise of a superpowered being who has no interest in being a superhero but just wants to live an ordinary life is adhered to, but with limited input as Alison drifts through life and romantic interests, with the series steadily going off the rails. Her original stage costume disappears after issue #26 (bar a brief reappearance in the Beauty and the Beast limited series) and a replacement doesn't arrive until issue #38. It's true the original costume bore all the hallmarks of the disco era that had long passed by this time, both in the series and in wider society, but it always gave Dazzler a distinctive appearance. I'm glad to see that a cover featuring it (#26) was used for the front cover of the volume, as the new costume introduced in issue #38 has dated even more and is extremely generic.

From issue #27 to #35 each issue was graced with a highly stylised painted cover by Bill Sienkiewicz. Painted and photographic covers can look amazing but they are also extremely vulnerable to publication flaws. Unfortunately the black and white reproduction is exceptionally harsh on them, turning many into very dark pages that remove the attraction of them. Worst of all is the cover of the graphic novel, though at least it hides some of the 1984 hairstyles. Is it me or was the fashion of 1984 the ultimate in bad taste?

One area where the series does improve a lot on the issues in the first volume is in having a much lesser reliance on the wider Marvel universe, with many more issues focusing upon characters original to the series. But that's not to say there aren't some appearances and at first we still have the Angel flying about in the early issues, then when in danger Alison engages the Heroes for Hire, Power Man and Iron Fist, then later she's recruited by the Inhumans and encounters practically the entire Royal Family. In the last few issues she trains with the X-Men, then has the Beast come to save her at the end. Then there's the villains such as the slightly renamed Sisterhood of Evil Mutants, consisting of Mystique, Rogue and Destiny, mutant hunters sent by regular government arsehole Henry Peter Gyrich, the duo of Moonstone and Blackout and finally Tatterdemalion. And there's even a surprise appearance by none other than Millie the Model, complete with her rival Chili Storm. Millie now runs a modelling agency that Alison signs for, only to discover sinister goings on with the finger seemingly pointing at Chili. The Marvel universe also intrudes with two wider events, one a mega crossover, the other a theme month.

Issue #30 fell in Assistant Editor's Month, when the Marvel editors went off to the San Diego Comics Convention and left power to go to the heads of their assistants. Here that's more literal than most as Alison briefly flees Los Angeles and accepts a lift to the convention with none other than editor Ralph Macchio, unaware a military group are tracking her and the second-in-command is determined to sort the problem out during his brief period in charge. Meanwhile in New York power has also gone to the head of the assistant editor, a young Bob Harras as he gets ever more dictatorial, demanding all manner of bizarre changes on his titles... until Ralph phones in and suddenly the power drains away. All these years later and Harras has since  been Editor-in-Chief at both Marvel and now DC, so I wonder how he and other creators now feel about this portrayal. Amidst all this the main story of Alison fighting a soldier who is mutated into a dinosaur man due to a military device is almost an afterthought.

The other wider Marvel event the series ties into is Secret Wars II. Issue #4 is included here and it sees the Beyonder trying to understand the concept of "love", picking on Alison to woe. Eventually she seemingly succumbs and he empowers her to be his equal but then he realises his mistake and releases her form his mind control. He then returns her to her previous situation in issue #40 but gets briefly tied up in a battle in her own series. This particular Secret Wars II crossover is frankly a distraction from the regular series, neither offering a special character piece that shows the series's star in an enhanced light nor a one-off adventure that can be easily brushed aside but instead just adds a needless element to the series's final storyline. All in all it demonstrates the tick-box approach to crossovers that seek to take in every series no matter how awkward this is.

In the meantime the series introduces some more original characters but with one exception it doesn't really develop them. Early on Alison befriends Lois London, her half-sister who turns out to be another mutant. Lois is horrified when she discovers she has the power to generate energy in moments of stress, and believes she's killed a man. This causes her to flee, with Alison leaving New York to help her, but even after Lois is cleared, Alison doesn't return home. In Los Angeles Alison befriends Janet McEntee, one of her aerobics students but not much comes of this. Then at the end she is captured and then aided by O.Z. Chase, a grizzled bounty hunter, and his fierce dog Cerberus, who has a strong appetite for beer and cigars. Chase and Cerberus make for a slightly comical pair as they drive across the country in pursuit, with Chase often declaring how much he hates the dog yet he can never get rid of him.

There are also a number of new foes include Flame, an arsonist for hire and Revenge Inc, a group of mercenaries who carry out elaborate retributions for clients. There's also less superpowered ones with Alison having to handle a deranged obsessive stalker, soldiers sent to tackle the mutant "threat", and the Racine Ramjets, a nasty all-female gang. Finally in an extended story at the end of the series, Dazzler is pursued by Dust and Silence, two individuals who survived horrific drug experiments that have left them trying to survive by bizarre means, and the hordes of offspring of others subject to the drugs, arranged as the "New Wave" including Deathgrip, the Outriders, a trio a powered motorcyclists, Jared and Chunk. And then there's a succession of Hollywood sleazeballs in the graphic novel.

I've written about my dislike of graphic novels in previous posts (namely Essential Killraven volume 1 and Power Pack Classic volume 2) so I'll refrain from going through my general criticisms of the format yet again. However here we see some specific problems caused by using them to feature major events in the life of a character with an ongoing series. As well as all the accessibility problems, any delay on such a graphic novel forces a series either to have a jump in the narrative or else to tread water for up to months on end. The latter seems to have been the strategy adopted here, with the result that Alison has been in Hollywood and around Roman Nekoboh for a while, making some of her naivety hard to swallow whilst his pursuit of her seems even less natural.

"Dazzler: The Movie" frankly isn't worth the build-up or any contemporary extended wait. Whilst the art looks good even when muddied by the reproduction that turns the unremovable colour into an excess of grey, the story is very pedestrian, focusing upon the sleazy side of Hollywood and the way Alison lets it consume her. Men try to indirectly buy their way into bed with her, and she eventually succumbs to the advances of Roman Nekoboh after he showers her with attention and gifts, fakes an affair for the media to get her to play along, chases her, commits sexual harassment if not sexual assault and fakes a heart attack to make her care for him. Nekoboh (the name is Hoboken backwards - Frank Sinatra's birthplace - and the forename is the clincher) is an aged once-great movie star who doesn't realise that he's in the has-been phase of his career. Bald, overweight and short-sighted, he wears a wig, corset, contacts and false teeth to present a younger, slimmer image to the world, a sign of the fakeness of the environment Alison has stepped into. Her submission is a sign of the poor way she's handled here. Moving beyond her singing career she tries her hand at acting - a combined career that's surprisingly common in the industries - and winds up making a movie with Nekoboh. But her naivety persists and she finds herself taking part in a stunt to reveal her to the world as a mutant, in the hope of boosting the movie's profile and overcoming prejudice by showing the capacity for mutants to do good, but it backfires spectacularly when her powers overload, causing fear and hatred. It's possible to see foreshadows of more recent storylines that focus on how the world reacts to having potentially dangerous superpowered beings in their midst, as well as a parallel to the real life problems many LGBT celebrities have faced when they've come out or been forced out. But the graphic novel is let down by the poor treatment of the central character, showing her as a fool who succumbs to the sleazy side of Hollywood, to the point where she takes a look in the mirror and sees herself as an ever fattening smoker, realising what's she's become and hating it. (It also misses a trick by not exploring the obvious comparison with her mother's life.) Eventually she discovers how she's been manipulated all along by a man whose advances she rejected when working at a gym club and then quit her job when he purchased the club to try to have her. What we're left with is some good ideas but badly executed with a fall out on the main series, both by forcing it to tread water to line up with the graphic novel but also by shifting the character away from her roots and pushing her into a marginalised existence as she tries to survive despite infamy and prejudice, making the series into something very different from before. And Alison doesn't learn all her lessons with the Secret Wars II issue, also written by Jim Shooter, showing her once again quickly succumbing to the advances of a man who abuses his power to shower her with gifts and fakes being in danger to get her to care for him.

As well as the graphic novel, the end of 1984 also saw the launch of a limited series. Beauty and the Beast is an odd little series that appears to have been named first and only then had the contents devised. It sees Alison and the Beast (Hank McCoy) drawn into a theatre comprised completely of mutants, a hotel for other mutants to hide at, and a struggle between Doctor Doom and his alleged illegitimate son. (Doom's presence in the story was a major continuity mess as it came in an extended period when the original Doom had been killed off, bar his explained appearance in Secret Wars.) Hank is drawn to pursue Alison for no particular reason though the two find themselves falling for each other, seemingly just to meet the demands of the story. All in all this is a convoluted mess that distorts characters and continuity in order to tell a rather turgid and forgettable story.

Looking at the main series the same thing happens with the biggest problem being the abrupt shift away from New York. Initially this appears to be only temporarily as Alison helps Lois run away, since Alison has a highly successful album out. But she soon settles on the West Coast and drifts into a succession of other jobs whilst waiting for her career to take off again. The graphic novel and limited series then forcibly drag the regular series into the realm of anti-mutant prejudice but it feels off. Finally the last issues see a new creative team effectively abandon the singing and move Dazzler ever more towards being a conventional superhero, with an extended struggle against powerful foes during which her father is killed. It's all rather jarring and the result is a meandering before a final crash. The last issue also sees her death faked with the result that she believes she can have freedom from prejudice and the ability to continue her singing career - but it's never easy to climb back into the closet so just how is she going to sing in public without being recognised? It seems more likely she is going to be a regular superhero, though not on the initially planned team.

And so a once promising series crashes upon the rock of creative and editorial incompetence. Given the graphic novel was written by the-then Editor-in-Chief, it's easy to guess where the forced new direction came from. Sadly it left the character and series wrecked and attempts to either salvage the mess or move beyond it just didn't come off. The cover of the final issue declares "Because you demanded it! The last issue of the Dazzler". Despite the length of the volume I wasn't screaming for it to end, but the sad state of the series makes it hard to mourn too much. It's a pity because the series had launched so well, offering something different from the norm and giving us that extreme rarity, a female lead who existed for more than just intellectual property protection.