Review by Win Wiacek

Last of the big star conglomerate super-groups, the Defenders were initially composed of the company’s bad-boy antiheroes: misunderstood, outcast and often actually dangerous to know.

For kids – of any and all ages – there is a primal fascination with brute strength and feeling dangerous, which surely goes some way towards explaining the perennial interest in angry tough guys who break stuff. They’re best exemplified by Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner and the Incredible Hulk, and when you add the mystery and magic of Doctor Strange, the recipe for thrills, spills and chills becomes simply irresistible.

Although the genesis of the team may have derived from their status as publicly distrusted but well-selling “villains”, originator Roy Thomas shares his own recollections and deeper ruminations in an informative introduction. He wrote the team’s initial outings, and it should be noted Essential Defenders Vol. 1 not only reprints this content in black and white, but also includes earlier stories uniting the cast.

The Defenders story officially begins here with Sub-Mariner being an early advocate of the ecology movement. He fractiously recruits the Hulk and the Silver Surfer to help him destroy an American Nuclear Weather-Control station. The trio battle a despotic dictator’s troops, the US Army, UN defence forces and the mighty Avengers to prevent the malfunctioning station from accidentally vaporising half the planet. It proved successful enough for a tryout wherein Dr. Strange recruits the Avenging Son and the Jade Giant to help him stop the deathbed doom of crazed super-mind Yandroth.

They’re reunited when Dormammu captures arch-foe Dr. Strange, only to be savagely beaten back by the mage’s surly sometime comrades. Next up is Xemnu the Titan, an alien super-telepath seeking to repopulate his desolate homeworld by stealing America’s children, but older fans may recognise him from a 1960 mystery short.

An assured hit, the Defenders then exploded into their own title to begin a bold and offbeat run of adventures scripted by Steve Englehart. As a group of eclectic associates occasionally called together to save the world (albeit on a miraculously monotonous monthly basis) they’re billed as a “non-team”, but it didn’t affect the quality of their super-heroic shenanigans. With Sal Buscema as regular penciller a three part adventure ensues as sorcerer Necrodamus attempts to sacrifice Namor to free an ancient evil.

Clearly a fan of large casts and extended epics, Englehart adds a fighting female to the non-team with ‘The New Defender!’ as Asgardians exiles Enchantress and Executioner embroil the antiheroes in their long-running and lethal love-spat. The fallout includes bringing the Black Knight briefly into the mix and turning Barbara Norris into the latest incarnation of Feminist Fury (these were far less enlightened days) the Valkyrie.

Englehart then begins a long-running plot thread with major repercussions. The previous tale left the Black Knight an ensorcelled, immobile stone statue, and Strange and Co. search for a cure that will lead to a clash with the Avengers in Volume 2. This collection concludes with the increasingly isolationist Silver Surfer momentarily “rejoining” as new lightweight magic menace Cyrus Black attacked, and is as rapidly repulsed.

For a brief while The Defenders would be one of the best and weirdest superhero comics, but to get there you really need to observe this unruly, uncomfortable selection of misfit heroes in their salad days here.