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Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Essential Defenders review
Seeing how we got a little talk of ‘70s Marvel yesterday (thanks for the birthday greetings everybody!) I’d thought I’d share my thoughts on the recently published Essential Defenders. A lot of us here love those post-Lee/pre-Claremont Marvel books (Mike can talk to you about these books for days and Kevin is like me as were both discovering these books through the Essential line). This book was one of the best so why not come up with a 1,300+ word review?
Take a good look at the cover of Sub-Mariner #34, included in Essential Defenders. There you have Hulk, Silver Surfer and Prince Namor himself all in action above a gathering of some type of army. The three of them cry out that they must destroy these humans “else a planet dies!” The great thing about that cover is that you have three of Marvel Comics greatest superheroes and they’re in their best respective forms, going up against the human race. Marvel has had a rich history of anti-heroes dating back to Bill Everett’s Sub-Mariner. There is a character, at least in his earliest appearances, which spent most of his time fighting against humanity, not saving it. Jules Feiffer declared, in The Great Comic Book Heroes, that if Namor didn’t join in the fight against the Nazis like all the other Golden Age heroes he would go on to become “comics’ Black Muslim.” Well, it took the wild and wacky years of Marvel in the 1970s for that anti-establishment vigor to manifest itself fully into one of the most striking Marvel comics of the time. A whole non-team that fought against evil baddies like Xemnu and The Undying Ones but also did a lot of fighting against themselves as a super team that never truly incorporated.
By the early ‘70s Roy Thomas had taken over Stan Lee’s job as the writer of every Marvel comic. Thomas took this position as a chance to really create a cohesive sense of a “shared universe” by having the stories bleed into different titles. It’s a style that’s abused now in superhero comics but for the purpose of Essential Defenders it works alright as Dr. Strange and Namor team up against some mystical no-goodniks and later the Hulk and Silver Surfer join in for the fight against some weather machine in South America. Throughout the comics we find out that the stories work because the group is made up of anti-social malcontents who have no interest team spirit. Namor’s first priority is his undersea kingdom; Hulk’s childlike mind makes him quite the impatient one, the Surfer is never comfortable hanging around a bunch of Earth-born creatures and Dr. Strange’s efforts to keep the group together always comes off as arrogant and foolhardy. It is silly fun to see these guys be more interested in battling each other than super-villains and keeping some sense of their own individuality. They never become an official team like the Avengers, there’s no way the public would accept a team of Namor and Hulk. The X-Men might have been a team of superheroes made up of people shunned by humanity because of their genetic make up but the Defenders are shunned by humans because they’re freakish nuisances.
These comics are firmly entrenched in the “Marvel house style” of the time with its grimacing heroes and explosions of verbiage. It all depends on your personal tolerance for such a style (I’m the kind that’s quite enamored with it) but the comics here are of a much better example of that style than most other comics of the time. It starts with the mind-blowing and beautiful cosmic artwork of Gene Colan but the rests of the artists keep it far more traditional. The second real triumph in the book in terms of art comes when the Defenders get their own feature in Marvel Feature. The first issue has Ross Andru and Bill Everett teaming up to come up with this weird style that has disturbingly shaking lines to go along with the strong anatomy and exciting action. The fact is that the style looks a bit “off” works wonderfully for the gathering of this bunch of characters. Unfortunately that style only lasted for that one issue of Marvel Feature, with Ross Andru working with different inkers. His style is still fine but far less weird.
The book is fine superhero retro fun at that point but then the Defenders get their own title and things really start getting wacky. Still fun, mind you, but Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema are the minds behind these stories and they are two of the best creators Marvel had at the time. Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael write in their book Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book how by the time the ‘70s rolled around, Marvel’s office was filled with younger guys who grew up on the Marvel books Stan Lee wrote. Now they were coming up with their own stories fed through the fan’s mind of what those original stories with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were like. There was an ironic distance to the Marvel zip now and a sense of out-doing what was done before. The note worthy thing about these books is how funny they can be. Hulk’s dialogue just gets more and more insane. The captions get wittier too with shout-outs to letters and an amping up of the manic pace. Personally, I always get a kick whenever Hulk admits to understanding none of what’s going on around him.
Buscema is truly the glue that keeps these stories entertaining. His skill at panel-to-panel transition, pacing and continuity were one of the greatest of the time. Like all Marvel artists at the time he did his best to recreate Kirby’s powerful action, and he doesn’t do a bad job, but Buscema also adds a bit of elegance that rivals John Romita Sr. Since he’s so able to take all these ingredients and make them into one unified style he has no trouble dealing with anything Englehart throws at him. That meant a lot of wacky and cosmic stuff and Buscema had no trouble having the Defenders end up in some extra-dimensional tornado and then switch to Silver Surfer’s pining for another world within a few pages.
Michael Chabon recently wrote how Marvel didn’t have any real stand-out female characters until the Thomas/John Buscema creation of Valkyrie came about. She was a character that was inspired by the social upheavals going on at the time, shouting out “up against the walls, male chauvinist pigs!” It was cool that there was a superheroine who would fight sexism as vigorously as her male counterparts fought Dr. Doom but the stories would always cop out in the end by revealing that the character was the creation of Thor villain Enchantress. Englehart does away with that by recreating the character as a character independent of any supervillain master. The politics were tuned down so she can add a little more depth into the team dynamics by being someone who actively wants the Defenders to be a true team. This heightens the drama coming from the tension of a team that doesn’t truly like each other and makes the book better and weirder.
The book’s conclusion is the superhero epic that is the Avengers/Defenders Clash. It is basically the Marvel version of those great old JLA/JSA team-ups Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky used to do. Englehart and Buscema create something that feels like a grand battle even though the plot that started the whole shebang is rather flimsy. That’s all right; it’s just the joy of seeing the Marvel establishment take on these outsiders in their over-the-top superhero ways that makes it all work. There is a problem in Bob Brown’s artwork. While his panel layouts do predict the “widescreen” method that would be used in the late ‘90s, his composing of figures in panels is clumsy and there isn’t much in the way of dynamic visuals (save the last Avengers issue) that are pulled off well. The book ends with a few stories written by Len Wein, where Buscema seems to have had a partner who brings out even better artwork in him. They’re fine stories, following in the dizzy frivoloity these comics hold for readers.
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