Saving Churchill

 

cover art by Jack Kirby

Invaders #4 (January 1976) picks up right where the previous issue left off. In fact, a few pages in, after Captain America and the two Torches commandeer a plane, we get a handy map that recaps the situation.

I love maps.

Last issue, we learned that a traitorous Atlantian, called U-Man, had been given super powers by the Nazis and was planning on ambushing Winston Churchill. Namor and Bucky were heading to the ambush location in Namor's plane. The other three Invaders, without time to wait for red tape, steal a dive bomber and head out in the same direction.

In the meantime, the U-Man arrives along with a few minions near the battleship H.M.S. Duke, which is awaiting Churchill's arrival. He captures a patrol boat, aboard which is Betty Dean, Namor's one friend among the surface people. 

U-Man turns out to be something less than a tactical genius. He recognizes her value as a hostage, but makes her a prisoner in the cabin of the boat right next to a working radio. She alerts the Allies to what is going on just as Churchill's plane is landing. That plane immediately begins to take off again.

U-Man manages to board the plane before it can gain altitude. Namor arrives and the two Atlantians begin to duke it out atop that plane. Remember that there's also a battleship nearby. There's some Atlantian minions handy and there's no reason to think the Nazis don't have one or more U-boats nearby. The rest of the Invaders are just arriving. We are all set for an epic fight scene in an unusual setting with enough super-humans, humans and weaponry to make it interesting. Roy Thomas and Frank Robbins can really go to town here.

But this doesn't happen. I am a big fan of Roy Thomas' writing, but someone makes a terrible editorial decision here to use this issue to plug another comic book. Skull the Slayer, about a group of people thrown into the distant past by a time warp in the Bermuda Triangle, had debuted a few months earlier. 

And the U-Man vs. Invaders fight is also set in the Bermuda Triangle, where it is interrupted by a time warp. The Torches save Churchill's plane from being sucked into the past and the good guys and bad guys end up seperated. Just like that, the fight is over. What was potentially one of the greatest comic book fights ever is nipped in the bud by the decision to cross-market a completely unrelated title. 

I don't know whose idea this was. Roy Thomas edited The Invaders as well as wrote it. Len Wein had edited the first issue of Skull the Slayer, but by this time Marv Wolfman had taken over. And (if I've got my editor-in-chief timeline correct), Wolfman had recently taken over from Wein as editor-in-chief at Marvel, who had in turn taken over that job from Thomas a year or two earlier. 

But whomever it was decided to stop a fight that could have easily been continued into the next issue and would have unquestionably been wonderful--well, I'm still mad at that guy 45 years later. I'm not knocking Skull the Slayer--that book had a disjointed story arc because it kept switching writers, but it was still fun. But a random shout-out to it in a World War II-themed book made no sense at all and gave the Invaders story a weak ending. 

Next week, we'll jump back to the Old West to look at another story from Dell's Indian Chief. 

Invader Fights Invader!

 

cover art by Jack Kirby

Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, doesn't think much of us surface people. How deep-seated this hatred is pretty much depends on the writer of any particular comic book, but in general he just doesn't like us.

But during World War II, after the Nazis attacked Altantis, he quick understandably and quite appropriately decided that he really, really hated the Nazis and he would be willing to work with the Allied nations to defeat Hitler.

All the same, Namor still has a quick temper and will occasionally strike out on his own. 

That's the premise of The Invaders #3 (November 1975), written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Frank Robbins. The team is returning to the U.S. after a mission in Europe when they spot a ship being torpedoed by a U-boat. The U-boat crew soon discovers that it's a bad idea to attack Allied shipping when a team of superheroes is nearby.

The U-boat commander is captured alive and the good guys discover he's carrying a coded message. So it's off to Washington to get it de-coded.

This doesn't take long and the Invaders learn that a super-powered being called U-Man, who is apparently an Atlantian with enchanced size and strength, has been assigned to kill Winston Churchill. The Prime Minister has been in the U.S. meeting with Roosevelt. The Nazis plan to tag him during his trip home. And he's already left.

The idea that one of his people might have turned traitor ticks off Namor and he immediately decides that he needs to deal with the U-Man on his own. Sadly, Namor isn't good at reasonably explaining his intentions, so the situation soon deteriorates into a brawl over the streets of Washington. At least it's not New York this time. Even as early as 1942, New Yorkers must have been getting tired of super-hero battles taking so frequently over their city.

Roy Thomas tosses in an interesting twist here. Captain America's sidekick Bucky sympathizes with Namor and takes his side in the ensuing fight, spraying Toro with a fire extinguisher before punching out his fellow sidekick. This nearly results in Captain America and a stunned Human Torch falling to their deaths, but Bucky sticks to his guns regardless. He's able to join Namor on the Atlantian plane/sub the Invaders have been using for transport. The two fly off alone to battle the Nazi supervillain.

The remaining Invaders get ready to follow, ready to battle both Nazis and Namor.

It's a strong story, coming up with a situation that, combined with Namor's temper, believably pits the heroes against one another. (Though the situation did devolve into a brawl too quickly--probably because Thomas only had so many pages in which to tell the story.) The other Invaders are shown as being sympathetic to Namor, but (except for Bucky) they realize they can't let personal feelings put their mission at risk. And for Bucky--well, the first page of this issue shows him bonding with Namor as the Atlantian instructs him how to fly the plane, providing a proper motivation for his decision to side with Namor. 

All this leads into the next issue, which we'll look at next week.

Time Travel and Misplaced Vibranium

cover art by Jack Kirby

I imagine that writer Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema has several reasons for coming up with the story they used in 1976's Fantastic Four Annual #11.

First, they wanted to tell an entertaining story. Any creative person in the comics industry will need to be conscious of marketing, sales and cross-promotion. Thomas was editor of the FF as well as writer at the time, so these issues would have been of particular concern to him. But I think he is also an excellent storyteller who was always concerned about his craft on a creative level as well.

But I have no doubt that this annual, in which the FF travel back to 1942 and team-up with the Invaders, was also intended to generate interest in the Invaders' own ongoing series. And, as long as the story is a good one and it's not a multi-part crossover that forces you to buy other titles, this is perfectly legitimate.

Also, Thomas is known for loving Golden Age characters and for appreciating a strong continuity within the Marvel Universe. As we'll see, this story finally gives us the specific details of an incident from Captain America's war-time career that had been hinted at but never fleshed out. I think Thomas would have jumped at the chance to do something like that.

Anyway, on to the story, which begins with the FF in a training session, giving us some strong action to start things off and allows the character dialogue to give us a little exposition. Most important here is the remainder that Ben Grimm has reverted to human form--perhaps permanently--and is using a Thing exoskelton to remain a part of the team.

After the training session ends, the action continues when a hoarde of Nazi soldiers are found to be infesting the Baxter Building. Don't you hate it when that happens?

The soldiers are quickly subdued and the story slows down a little for a massive information dump to set up the main plot. It's my only criticism of an otherwise excellent story--it takes Roy Thomas a good half-dozen pages (and an appearance by the Watcher) to get a lot of addtional exposition out of the way before Reed figures out that some Vibranium fell into the FF's time machine during a fight a few issues back and now the Nazis have won World War II. To be fair, though, Buscema's art and some frightening images from the past of the Nazis conquering the world do liven things up a little.

That means the team has to go back to 1942 and recover the Vibranium. (I'm assuming that very few people who read my blog don't know what Vibranium is, but check HERE if you need to. Pretend the entry is being spoken to you in a snooty, know-it-all, nerd voice.)

As is apparently required by law in any Comic Book Universe, when the FF meet the Invaders in 1942, there is a misunderstanding and a brief fight before they realize they're all on the same side. Soon, the two teams are working together, infiltrating a Nazi castle where the French Underground is reporting some weird stuff is going on.

I really like the structure of the story from this point on. Once inside the castle, the heroes break up into three teams, each one a mix of FF and Invaders, giving each team a nice dynamic. Reed wonders about time paradoxes (why didn't Namor remember them when he met the FF in the 1960s?) while Namor muses that Sue is really hot and it's too bad she's married. Johnny agonizes over the fact that Bucky will be dead in a few years and he can't do anything about that and Ben simply enjoys the opportunity to smack down Nazis.

Reed's team trashes a lab full of superweapons, while Captain America encounters Baron Zemo, who is in charge of the castle.

This is the continuity detail I mentioned earlier. It had been established in Zemo's first appearance, in Avengers #4 (1963), that Cap was responsible for Zemo's mask being permanently affixed to his face. Now we get to see the actual mission in which this happened. It isn't something that affects the main plotline as well, but I'll be that Roy Thomas enjoyed filling in that minor gap in Marvel history.

Ben and the WWII Torches find some huge V2 rockets about to launch. They manage to quickly trash all but one. That one, though, launches with Ben hanging on to it, so he simply reprograms it to turn back around and blow up the castle. Ben doesn't expect to survive when the rocket hits, but that Ben would exhibit self-sacrifcing heroism to save the world from the Nazis is not at all surprising.

Reed, though, has found the Vibranium and the heroes have all escaped the castle. So just before the rocket hits, an automatic recall on the time machine sends the FF home, saving Ben's life.

But half the Vibranium is missing. Reed assumes that this was used up when the Nazis were experimenting with it, but a visit from the Watcher convinces Ben that another trip back to the War is needed. This leads into yet another time travel story featured in Marvel Two-in-One Annual #1.

I suppose that technically this means the story does indeed cross over into another title, which is a pet peeve of mine. But the FF story here is significantly independent of the Two-in-One story to the point where it doesn't bother me this time. You can read either tale by itself without missing out on any important plot points.

So I think this story is still an example of cross-promotion the way it should be done. It's a well-told, entertaining tale that features characters from another book, but doesn't force you to buy that book against your will to get the full story. It simply reminds you that those other characters exist in the hopes that you will freely choose to buy their book. That's fair. Capitalism at its best, by golly.

The story does leave a couple of minor questions outstanding. In the end, Reed figures out that Namor and Cap won't remember them because their adventure took place in an alternate universe. So does that mean we really aren't getting the full story on how the whole Zemo/mask thing happened in their home dimension?

Also, everyone seems to have forgotten that there are a bunch of bruised Nazi soldiers locked in a closet in the Baxter Building. Gee whiz. What ever happened to those guys?

I think we will look at Ben's further time travel shenanigans. We'll do that in a couple of weeks. Next week, we'll visit again with Tarzan as he again visits with dinosaurs. Because mixing Tarzan with dinosaurs is always--ALWAYS--a wonderful thing. It's an eternal truth of the universe.

Back to World War II: The Invaders

During his long career as a writer with both Marvel and DC, Roy Thomas had a number of opportunities to indulge in his love of Golden-Age characters--characters he loved as a kid.

This can be dangerous, since even good writers can go astray when they become pros and begin writing for characters they loved as a kid. Nostalgia can cloud over their talent and the results can be awkward.

But Thomas never allowed this to happen. Both with Marvel's The Invaders, which he began writing in 1975, and DC's All-Star Squadron from a few years later, his skills at charactization and plot structure allowed him to play in the Golden Age sandbox while still producing excellent tales.

Both series were retcons of sorts, bringing World War II-era superheroes into new groups. But at the same time, he kept nearly everything he wrote within the bounds of Golden Age continuity.

This week, we'll look at the first appearance of the Invaders. In the mid-1970s, Marvel was often publishing Giant Size issues--pretty much the same as the annuals that Marvel had been producing for many of their titles, but with a cooler name. So the Invaders premiered in Giant-Size Invaders #1 (June 1975), with Frank Robbins providing the art for Thomas' story.

Robbins got his start in comic strips, most notably drawing an adventure strip titled Johnny Hazard from the strip's inception in 1944 until it ended in 1977.  His work on this strip is excellent--Robbins is a fine artist whose career is one in which he could take pride.

But I admit I never really cared for his comic book work with Marvel in the mid-1970s; neither on The Invaders nor on Captain America & The Falcon. To steal a sentence from someone in Facebook's Comic Book Historians group: "But, seriously, it's all about styles, and Robbins was never suited for super-hero work." 

On the other hand, a fan of his work posted:  I must admit I despised Robbins' work at the time, (as a 10 year-old Kirby, Kane and Buscema fan) and hated his Invaders art. But today I love it and it makes total sense in context. I do still think that, as an aesthetic choice, it seemed a little out of place in the contemporary Cap strip, but it entirely suited the 1940s stories. It's beautiful stuff.

Take a look at the above double panel, in which Cap and Bucky are taking down some Nazi saboteurs not long after Pearl Harbor was bombed.  One person in the Comic Book Historians group declared it to be one of his favorite images ever. For me, while I love the overall composition, Cap and Bucky seem awkwardly posed, as if they are doing badly-timed ballet moves rather than taking down Nazis.

But if you accept Robbins' art for what it is or like him as a superhero artist more than I do, then the story is great. We soon learn that the Nazis have a plan to try to recreate the Super-Soldier formula that made Cap, then use the resultant "Master Man" to carry out a particularly important act of sabotage.

As the story progresses, Cap and Bucky team up with the Human Torch and Toro, then later run into Namor. But Master Man is powerful enough to take them all on while attacking a British warship. Fortunately, the Nazi version of the Super Soldier formula is flawed and Master Man reverts to a puny guy before he can complete his mission.

Namor then ensures that a nearby U-boat also fails to complete the mission. And what was that mission exactly? Winston Churchill was aboard the ship, coming to the U.S. to make war plans with F.D.R. Churchill suggests they form a team---a sort-of pre-D-Day invaders. And not even Namor is going to turn Winston Churchill down.

The story is very well-constructed, with the various heroes meeting each other at logical points in the story and the action scenes are imaginative and an integral part of the overall tale.

But I'll never be a huge fan of Robbins' superhero poses. But at least I don't hate him as much as my brother does. When I told him I would be reviewing this issue on my blog, he (who has been training his children since birth to be old-school Marvel fans) emailed me this:

Frank Robbins ruined not just my childhood. but [my son] Josiah's as well.  Not just the Invaders title, but most notably, the Cap and Falcon Nomad story line.  I've never really recovered from that and nobody understands my pain. Tell the world of my pain. 

Next week, we'll pay another visit with Tragg and the Sky Gods. In two weeks, we'll look at Roy Thomas' visit to World War II via the DC Universe.

Frankenstein's Monster vs. Nazis

The website tvtropes.com has a page labeled "Cool vs. Awesome," listing various movies, books, comics, etc in which unlikely opponents are tossed together into the same story. So we get cowboys vs. dinosaurs (or aliens) and King Kong vs. Godzilla and flying saucers vs. Spitfires and Abraham Lincoln vs. a Klingon and pirates vs. zombies and so on and so on.

Whether or not it's well-executed, the basic idea is nearly always appealing. It's something that's especially easy to do in a comic book universe, where time travel, lost worlds and mad scientists can result in countless unusual match-ups. Want Wolverine to fight a velociraptor? Well, toss him back in time or have him visit the Savage Land. No problem.

The Invaders #31(August 1978) is a great example of trope. The series was set during World War II and usually written by Roy Thomas. This issue, though, was written by Donald Glut.

Glut is a writer who clearly understands the appeal of Cool vs. Awesome. He wrote a series of books set in present day, but starring Frankenstein's Monster--the creature is found frozen in Arctic ice in the first novel and revived by the human protagonist. Over the course of the first novel, the human guy is dodging Eskimo assassins who are ticked off at him for taking the Monster, while the Monster is placed under the sway of an evil hypnotist who is clearly a shout-out to Dr. Caligari.

The second novel involves a James Bondish evil organization who want to use the monster for their own nefarious purposes. Later books in the series feature Dracula, the Wolfman and dinosaurs.

In this issue of The Invaders, Glut also calls upon the services of the Monster. Well, actually, he doesn't quite do this. A new monster, built by an ancestor of Victor Frankenstein, fills in for the original.

This might be bad enough, but Basil Frankenstein is also working for the Nazis. He manages to capture the Human Torch (this is the original android Torch) and Toro, with a plan to siphon off the Torch's "android energies" to give his creature increased size and power. He'll then build an army of monsters to serve as Nazi stormtroopers.

All this is taking place in Castle Frankenstein, which is located in the Swiss Alps. Captain America and Bucky show up looking for the Torch and Toro, but they get captured to. Then Namor shows up with a bunch of the local villagers. The locals decide they really don't like Nazis and start fighting the soldiers guarding the castle. Namor, in the meantime, frees the other Invaders. But the Monster has already received his power-up, so defeating him is no easy task.

The issue is just-plain-fun. It has a well-constructed plot and a contextually logical reason for tossing Frankenstein's Monster into the same story as World War II-era superheroes. It's got several other nice touches that give it more atmosphere. Basil, for instance, has had a lab accident and is confined to a wheelchair with hands to damaged to allow him to perform any more surgery. But a beautiful Japanese surgeon is doing the operations for him and plans on transferring Basil's brain into Captain America's body.

That also explains why Cap is kept alive after he's captured. (Though no reason for keeping Bucky and Toro alive is given--though I suppose they might be potential hostages if Cap or the Torch got loose.)

Another good touch: The Human Torch shows a natural empathy for the Monster. After all, they are both artificially created beings.

The issue ends when Namor lands a solid punch on the Monster. This doesn't hurt the creature, but it does damage a mind control implant--it turns out that Basil was using this to keep the Monster under his control. Now free of this, the Monster grabs Basil and the Japanese surgeon and leaps off a cliff to his apparent doom.

I don't think this Basil-created version of the Monster ever reappeared. But his one appearance was pretty darn cool. This is a story that really does understand the concept of Cool vs. Awesome.



Facebook Group: DC and Marvel World War II-Themed Comic Books