18: Out With The Old Defenders

Ever since Steve Gerber's classic 70's run, The Defenders have been known as the oddball team of the Marvel U; the gang you hang out with when you don't fit in anywhere else. J.M. DeMatteis played up the supernatural aspect in his lengthy early 80's spell on the title. Towards the end of his run he wrote out the big hitters and turned this 'non-team' into a more conventional outfit. The lineup was anything but conventional though: three of the original X-Men, Defenders stalwarts Valkyrie and Gargoyle, former Avenger and villain Moondragon, and a teenager who turns into a Cloud.

Peter Gillis' series for First were attracting attention over at Marvel, in a "why is our guy working for someone else? Let's give him more work" way. Around the end of '83, Gillis heard DeMatteis was leaving after only half a dozen issues of the re-christened New Defenders, so threw his hat in the writing ring. As PBG put it:

"I was pleased that they asked me to write the book. But frustrated that they took the Hulk, Dr Strange, the Silver Surfer and the Sub-Mariner, four of my all time favourite characters, out of the Defenders. However, they've given me a bunch of really interesting characters."

So rather than his beloved Dr Strange led non-team, Gillis inherited a freshly minted, bizarre lineup and setup, for his imagination to run wild with. Which it certainly did.

Before we go any further, it's worth discussing the underrated regular art team. Penciler Don Perlin was a veteran artist who got his start in comics in the late 1940's. Perlin's first work for Marvel came in the mid 70's, drawing horror comics like Werewolf by Night. He took over on The Defenders in #82, and stayed until the end, barring the occasional fill in. His work was often considered old fashioned, yet storytelling wise always clear and effective. There may have been some initial resistance from both DeMatteis and Gillis at being paired with Perlin, however this faded quickly once they got to work with him. Not only a real craftsman and a gentleman, Perlin was incredibly passionate and enthusiastic about comics and always looking to grow and challenge himself as an artist. For the majority of the New Defenders, Perlin was paired with inker Kim DeMulder, who had just joined Marvel from DC. DeMulder's inks added depth, detail and a graphic style. The final issues they produced together are some of their finest work, with wildly effective layouts, composition and intense blacks.

I normally gloss over covers, yet the New Defenders was also blessed with possibly the best lineup of cover artists ever, including Kevin Nowlan, Frank Cirocco, Sandy Plunkett, Bill Sienkiewicz, Chris Warner, Mike Mignola, Art Adams and Brent Anderson. Editor Carl Potts certainly pulled out the stops to combat ailing sales. Here's just a few of these fine covers. 

In Amazing Heroes 1984 Preview, Peter Gillis provided an in depth analysis of his newly inherited team to Peter Sanderson. It's quite illuminating, so in a break from scheduled programming, I thought it would be of interest to share here.

"The Beast, as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby portrayed him, was a young intellectual, the typical pulp writer's portrayal of an overeducated person constantly using sixteen pound words in sentences. It was a sort of crude exposition of someone who was really intelligent and widely read. He was defensive about his education, and wanted to show off because he tended to look like an ape and he wanted to make sure that no one mistook him for one As he grew up, especially the way that Steve Englehart portrayed him in his own series and The Avengers, he became a mature person, still widely read, still very intelligent, but with a much more balanced view of himself. The outgrowth of that was he had a wit in the old sense of the word: he had a sharp, observant eye, he had a keen sense of the absurd, and he was constantly making playful comments about the situations he was in. Unfortunately, superficially that kind of person can be mistaken for someone who is just a joker, the guy who jumps up and down and wears a lampshade on his head. He will make jokes, but I want to move away from this schlocky anything for-a-laugh humor that the Beast has been indulging in. I want to bring him back to being an intellectual, to really having a deep love for the life of the mind, for all of the heritage of the Westem culture that he's deeply steeped in. The Beast will meet a professor for whom he has a tremendous amount of respect intellectually, and they will strike up a relationship. The Beast had allowed his intellectual qualities to atrophy by running around with a bunch of superhero jocks. From now on he will start finding more and more pleasure in high culture.

The Angel has no personality. He's a nice guy, a hero, a ladies man and a sort of hedonist, but beyond that we know very, very little about him. The Angel's depths haven't really been plumbed; we haven't seen that he has any.

In the past, we have learned nearly nothing about Candy Southern. She has a personality, it's quite a forceful one, and that's all I'm going to say about it. It'll be a chance to do a character whom people thought they knew, but they'll realize they didn't know anything about her at all.

(Iceman is) "going to play the keyboards. I think he will be the first Marvel superhero who plays a musical instrument. I want to make him a college student who has been put through some changes by being in college, because one tends to form new opinions there.

The Gargoyle is an old man. He's seen a lot. He'd been going around with a feeling that his life is over, or, at least, complete. An older person spends a lot of time coming to conclusions about the way things are. All of a sudden he is given a new lease on life. He's potentially immortal, as far as I know. By being changed into Gargoyle, he has entered into a whole new life. But for an old person, new possibilities, at least in this life, don't seem to be in the offing. I don't think Isaac Christians is very prepared for it. So he's an old man, but at the same time, he's a very childlike superhero, thrust unwillingly into a new world again. As a brand new superhero, he's the new kid on the block. As an old man, he can pass judgment, but as a superhero, I think he looks up to all the other Defenders. Outside of the Valkyrie, he's the most powerful member of the Defenders, which wasn't true before, and people are going to start depending on him a whole lot as a result. So this old man is going to have to become an adult in the role of superhero.

(writing Valkyrie) is really writing a new character. They haven't exploited the Valhalla connection at all recently. I'm going to do that, not to tie her in with Thor, but to emphasize the fact that the Valkyrie is a very scary character. She is a 'chooser of the slain', whatever that means now. In Norse mythology, when a hero died in battle. the Valkyries came and took him to his reward Valhalla. So the Valkyrie is intimately tied to death, and the transition from this life to the next. As a consequence, she is a figure with immense amount of perspective on life and death. Her perspective is not just going to be the Northern barbarian's 'What this strange thing called Instant Breakfast?' sort of thing, or 'What fools these mortals be'. Her view point and actions are not those of a human being. They are are of of a god in a very real sense in that she has do with life and death. When the Valkyrie looks at somebody, she looks at a mortal: she looks at somebody who's going to die. She constantly sees that. She looks at her fellow Defenders and she can almost visualize one of them with a bullet through his heart. The Defenders are going to start looking at her and realizing she's more than just a blonde, pink-skinned She Hulk.

Moondragon is going to be the focus of the storyline. It's going to lead up to a very catastrophic conclusion. There's going to be a lot of blood and thunder in it.

I'm doing something extremely perverse and extremely unusual with Cloud. She is not who or what she seems to be and she'll stay that way.

I want to make The Defenders read differently from the other books at Marvel. I want to give them a different feel, a different style. I'm trying to to come up with as many different types of stories as possible because I feel that a single direction will not do to grab readers for a book that has been in the doldrums as long as The Defenders."

Next, time to crack open the issues. One spoiler though: Iceman never found time to play keyboards.