Review by Win Wiacek
For Marvel, the outsider super-group must have seemed a conceptual inevitability – once they’d finally published it. Apart from Spider-Man and Daredevil all their heroes regularly teamed up in various mob-handed assemblages, and in the wake of the Defenders’ success even more super-teams comprised of pre-existing characters were mustered, but never with so many Very Big Guns.
The genesis of the team in fact derived from the Hulk, Sub-Mariner and Silver Surfer being publicly distrusted “villains”. Add Dr. Strange, and Roy Thomas tested the waters far more comprehensively than the equivalent colour presentation of these stories in Marvel Masterworks format allowed for. That only covered 1971 onwards. This selection opens in 1969 when Thomas and Gene Colan introduce a deadly menace for Stephen Strange in the Undying Ones, an elder race of demons hungry to reconquer the Earth. Thomas wasn’t disheartened when Strange’s title was cancelled, he merely transferred the story to Sub-Mariner, now drawn by Marie Severin, a sterling tale of sacrifice in which the Master of the Mystic Arts seemingly died holding the gates of Hell shut with the Undying Ones pent behind them. The extended saga concluded in The Incredible Hulk as Thomas and Herb Trimpe dispatched helpless Bruce Banner to the nether realms in an attempt to undo Strange’s sacrifice. Luckily cultist Barbara Norris had last minute second thoughts and her own dire fate freed the mystic, seemingly ending the threat of the Undying Ones forever.
We then have an ecologically aware Sub-Mariner recruiting the Hulk and Silver Surfer to prevent a malfunctioning nuclear-powered weather station from accidentally vaporising half the planet, before a more formal three chapter teaming replacing the Surfer with the Master of the Mystic Arts. There is a meandering quality to the first official Defenders stories, but new writer Steve Englehart hits the ground running.
He adds the newly created Valkyrie to the team and has the unfortunate Black Knight transformed to stone, which launches a hugely ambitious crossover experiment that would turn the comics industry on its head. Over an entire summer of crossover issues in 1973 he set the Defenders against the Avengers. Dormammu and the Asgardian god of Evil Loki unite to search for an ultimate weapon to give them final victory against their foes. They trick the Defenders into securing the six component parts by “revealing” the reconstructed Evil Eye can restore the petrified Black Knight. Want to see how that panned out in colour? It’s available as The Avengers/Defenders War, the second Defenders Masterworks, the 12th Avengers Masterworks and the Epic Collection also titled The Avengers/Defenders War.
Sal Buscema and Bob Brown end up drawing the most here, the latter by virtue of being the Avengers artist at the time. Both are unfussy and clear storytellers.
For the final content Len Wein assumes the writer’s role as a more pared-down cast of Strange, Valkyrie and the Hulk began a run of more traditional fights‘n’tights capers. There’s a return for Xemnu the Titan, and a save the world struggle against the villainous Squadron Sinister, during which Batman-analogue Nighthawk joins the Defenders to defeat his murderous ex-team-mates and the aquatic alien marauder Nebulon, the Celestial Man.
With Vol. 2 under Steve Gerber the Defenders would become one of the best and weirdest superhero comics in the business, but to get there you really need to observe this unruly, uncomfortable selection of misfit heroes in their salad days. So the fact that their widespread and far-reaching origins and the battle against the Avengers are still eminently entertaining is both a relief and delight.
