Panel from Avengers #112 (Jun., 1973). Text by Steve Englehart; art by Don Heck and Frank Bolle.
As we covered in last month’s blog post about Avengers #113, writer Steve Englehart had introduced a mystery in the previous issue, #112, by briefly bringing onstage a brand-new character, Mantis, and her unnamed, only-seen-in-shadow companion. About all we were told about the latter character, in either his first or his second blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance (in #113) was that he had a prior association with the series’ titular super-team, and that he had strong, less-than-positive opinions about a recently departed Avenger, Hawkeye. Not a whole lot to go on, at least in the opinion of my fifteen-year-old self… though, to be honest, I probably didn’t give the matter a whole lot of thought at the time. After all, there were plenty of other comic books to be read back in the spring of 1973, and a caption in #113 had promised us that the next issue would bring a solution to the puzzle of this mystery man’s identity. So, I was content to wait to see what May would bring us.
As it turned out, when Avengers #114 was released, I wouldn’t even have to pull the issue all the way up out of the spinner rack to discover the answer to the two-month-old mystery, as the cover (probably by John Romita) prominently featured both Mantis and her shadowy beau — so much so, in fact, that the tops of the couple’s heads obscured some of the lower real estate of the book’s logo. And if I had had a moment’s confusion in trying to place the purple-costumed, mustachioed gent dominating the cover’s left half (which I’m pretty sure I didn’t), the story title blurb at the bottom would have clued me in by the time I got the comic all the way out of the aforementioned spinner rack, by letting me know that Mantis’ mysterious amour was none other than… the Swordsman!
The Swordsman? Really?
Huh.
Naturally, having been a Marvel Comics reader since the late Sixties, I was already fairly familiar with the Swordsman. I even knew that in his very first storyline, way back in Avengers #19-20 (Aug. and Sep., 1965), he’d been an official member of the team for about five minutes or so, prior to being outed as not only an opportunistic criminal, but a mole in the employ of the Mandarin. If I’d actually read those stories as of May, 1973, I would have also known that the character’s creators, writer-editor Stan Lee and artist 
Don Heck, had given the character an unusual amount of nuance in his initial outing, painting him a mutable shade of gray rather than an irredeemable, pitch-dark black. As it happened, however, my own first exposure to the Swordsman (who, like his number-one foil Hawkeye, didn’t receive his real name — Jacques Duquesne — until years after his introduction) had been in Captain America #105 (Sep., 1968), in which he’d teamed up with another couple of villainous types — Batroc and the Living Laser — and had come off as a standard-issue bad guy. And while I’d gotten to know more of his background — especially his history with Hawkeye, aka Clint Barton — 
when he’d made a solo foray against the Avengers, including Clint (then using the identity of Goliath) a little less than a year later, in Avengers #65 (Jun., 1969), nothing about his ruthless behavior in that issue’s story suggested he’d be turning over a new leaf anytime soon.
Yes, your humble blogger had bought and read Avengers #100 (Jun., 1972), in which the Swordsman — along with every other Marvel character who’d ever been a member in good standing of the team, however briefly — had joined Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in a battle to save Earth from an invasion of mythical creatures under the command of Ares and the Enchantress. But that had seemed very much a one-off, where the Avengers had only grudgingly accepted the Swordsman’s help in a moment of extreme crisis, and where the villain himself didn’t seem to be all that seriously interested in becoming a full-time good guy.
So, yeah… my younger self was rather nonplussed by the big reveal here. Still, I’d enjoyed Steve Englehart’s work on Avengers so far, and I had no reason to believe that he didn’t know what he was doing by making this particular move; besides which, this new Mantis character looked intriguing. So, sure, bring ’em on. Why not?
The Scarlet Witch, aka Wanda Maximoff, and her teammates are, not surprisingly, still recovering from the events of Avengers #113, in which a small but determined cadre of anti-android extremists turned themselves into living bombs to destroy her lover, the Vision… and almost succeeded…
As she walks through Avengers Mansion, Wanda comes upon a “mock battle” between the Vision on one side, and Captain America and Iron Man on the other. It’s an exercise staged to help determine whether the Vision has recovered enough to return to active duty, and he passes with flying colors. But while Wanda can’t help but be pleased by Vizh’s improvement, she’s privately irked by an offhand comment Cap makes afterwards to her boyfriend: “You can thank your lucky stars that you’re an android! A human injured as badly as you were, would still be flat on his back!”
“Even our friends keep reminding us that we’re not the same!” Wanda seethes to herself, before deciding that she needs to get out of the house for a while…
As Mantis makes her first on-panel appearance in this story, I think it’s worth noting that her visual has already been subtly but significantly altered since her introduction just two issues ago. In Avengers #112, Don Heck (who gets a co-creator credit with Steve Englehart whenever the character shows up in Marvel movies) drew her with two thick curls over her temples (see left). In Avengers #113, new regular penciller Bob Brown followed that same model; but as we see here, he’s now given her bangs, as well as those two antennae-like strands that arguably represent one of the most distinctive aspects of the character’s classic design. Since she sports that same basic look on #114’s cover, I’m inclined to speculate that John Romita may have tweaked Heck’s original visual to give Mantis what many of us older fans likely consider her definitive look… though I doubt we’ll ever know for sure, one way or the other. (UPDATE, 5/27/03, 12:45 p.m.: Per a comment below, Ben Herman reports that Steve Englehart confirmed to him in a 2015 email that Romita was indeed responsible for Mantis’ redesign. So I guess we do know for sure, after all.)
Speaking of the character’s definitive look, I’d be remiss not to also note here that, in addition to a modified hairstyle, Mantis is now rocking a somewhat different outfit than the one Heck had her wearing in #112 (see illo shared at the beginning of this post) — one which, it must be said, covers substantially less of her flesh. I’m sure that Marvel’s thinking on this must have been that as a martial artist, Mantis’ costume should allow for optimal freedom of movement, and that such was the only concern driving this alteration to Heck’s initial design… yeah, that’s the ticket.
Cap has certainly got a point about Swordy being a security risk, since in addition to all the times he’s attacked the Avengers with intent to kill (or at least incapacitate), he’s almost certainly a wanted fugitive from justice. (It was strongly implied in Avengers #100 that he’d busted out of prison prior to that issue’s events.) Seriously, the only logical and responsible thing for the Avengers to do here is to take the Swordsman into custody and notify the proper authorities — but, of course, this being a Bronze Age superhero comic book, they don’t. Instead, the Swordsman stands in stoic silence as Cap quickly recaps the sordid history of his previous exploits (kind of like we did earlier in this post). When the Star-Spangled Avenger is done, the object of his ire replies: “All you’ve said is true… but a life of crime wears exceedingly thin exceedingly fast. Today I’m persona non grata across most of the world!”
Later issues would fill in further details regarding this period, such as that the Swordsman met Mantis in Vietnam, and that she was a sex worker at the time (although, this being a Comics Code-approved title, no word as definite as “prostitute” ever saw print, of course).
Huge props here to both penciller Bob Brown and inker Mike Esposito for the priceless expressions on Captain America and Thor’s faces in the next-to-last panel above, as well as for the subtle suggestion of a smile on Iron Man’s mask in the panel before that… it’s just wonderful graphic characterization, all around.
Over the next couple of pages, we see the Swordsman accompanying Thor on the latter’s solo adventures, impressing the Thunder God with his courage and skill. After several days of such doings, Thor is convinced that Swordy is on the up-and-up, and recommends him “for full privilege and membership” in the Avengers. But the Black Panther and the Vision both remain somewhat skeptical; they challenge the Swordsman to another one of those “mock combats” the Assemblers are so fond of (at least in this issue), and he accepts.
Early on in the bout, the Swordsman zaps Vizh with an energy blast from the sword “gimmicked” by the Mandarin years ago, leading the Panther to voice his suspicions out loud:
As we’ve touched on in previous posts, Englehart had effectively written Hawkeye out of Avengers some five months back, with issue #109; since then, the Battling Bowman had turned up in Daredevil #99, and as of this month, had wandered into the pages of Hulk (a book also being written by Englehart at the time). Interestingly, Hawkeye’s guest-star turn in issue #166 of that title didn’t rate an appearance (or even a blurb) on the cover; on the other hand, it would lead directly into a several-issue stand in Defenders (yet another Englehart-scripted title) that would prove to be highly significant both for that team and for the Avengers, as well as for Hawkeye, himself.
Seeing as how I didn’t write a post about Avengers #112 back in March, a brief introduction to the Lion God is probably in order here. Described by Steve Englehart in his 2012 introduction to Marvel Masterworks — The Avengers, Vol. 12 as “one of the most forgettable villains I’ve ever seen (and, yes, I created him)”, the whole idea behind the character seems to have been that if some residents of the fictional African nation of Wakanda worshiped a made-up Panther God, then others might worship an equally made-up Lion God. (Later writers would identify Marvel’s Panther and Lion Gods with the authentic Egyptian deities Bast and Sekhmet, but such tinkering was still many years away in 1973.) In his debut, the Lion God had only narrowly met defeat thanks to the efforts of his fellow divine personage, Thor; but although the Avengers believed him to have been destroyed by a lightning bolt called down by the Thunder God, the story’s last panel revealed that he’d only been displaced back to his own supernatural realm, from which he vowed to return.
Hmmm… I’m pretty sure that it’s been established that Thor’s hide is tough enough that no one not possessing a similar level of super-strength should be able to take him down with a single blow, “nerve passages” notwithstanding. But, whatever.
Yes, Mantis has the power to put a whammy on an actual living deity by means of a sexy dance. (All right, she gets a little help from the Swordsman’s psychedelic light show, but still.) If that seems silly, it’s because it is. But it also follows naturally from how Steve Englehart originally conceived the character and her role in the Avengers series — which, by his own admission, was to spice things up by introducing an element of sexual intrigue to the interpersonal dynamics of its titular super-team.
In his Marvel Masterworks intro, Englehart relates how, after doing his very best impression of the series’ previous writer, Roy Thomas, for about half a year, he was eager to make his own way — and he thought that sex might be the way to do it, “so long as I didn’t cause Marvel any trouble”. As he explains:
…I thought, let’s do a full-fledged sexy woman, in among the men. Of course she had to have powers, a name, and a costume, but this woman’s goal in the future of Avengers was simply to inject sex… her sexuality, the reason I introduced her, would sow sexual discord among the male Avengers.
In Englehart’s account, the Asian aspect of his new female character came after the “sexuality” component, and was separate from it:
With the headlines of the day still emphasizing Vietnam, I decided to make her Asian… I tossed in my delight with kung fu… and kung fu has a Mantis form.
I have no reason to doubt that Englehart came up with Mantis’ racial identity — and with her culturally-associated martial arts expertise — in just the manner he’s described, so far as his conscious creative process was concerned. But it seems highly unlikely that he wasn’t at least subconsciously influenced by the pervasive, racially stereotyped trope of the “dragon lady” (named for a character who debuted in Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates newspaper comic strip in 1934, though the trope’s roots are several decades older than that) — an exoticized figure who uses her sexuality to deceive and dominate men.
If Englehart had never developed the character of Mantis beyond his original conception, it’s quite probable that we’d remember his run on Avengers rather differently than we do. Fortunately, another idea he had for Avengers (and Defenders) at about the same time ended up transforming his approach to his new creation…
Along with ending on a note of ambivalence regarding the true, ultimate intentions of both Mantis and the Swordsman, the conclusion of Avengers #114 promises, via the last panel’s “Next” blurb, the beginning of a new storyline. Of course, readers of this issue who were also following Englehart’s other team book knew exactly where Earth’s Mightiest Heroes could find their sometime teammate, the Black Knight — the poor guy was currently serving as part of the interior decor of Doctor Stephen Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum, having been turned into a stone statue by the Enchantress in the climax of Defenders #4, back in November of the previous year. As with Hawkeye’s guest appearance in this month’s issue of Hulk, Englehart was here laying the groundwork for the biggest crossover event Marvel Comics had attempted to date — a clash between two superteams that would run through both Avengers and Defenders all summer long.
In May, 2017, on the eve of Mantis’ big-screen debut in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, Englehart explained to Uproxx how that event ultimately altered the trajectory of her long-term character arc:
…I had this idea of bringing in a sort of femme fatale character who would seduce all the male Avengers and cause dissension and so forth, and that was Mantis. So I set her up over the course of three issues just kind of three-panel appearances and then she came into the Avengers with all of that in mind.
But that was right at the point where I did the Avengers/Defenders clash… and so Mantis, who had just joined the group to be a femme fatale, ended up fighting alongside the Black Panther against Dr. Strange in a professional manner. We got to see that she was a good teammate, that she had skills, that she looked good doing them. All of a sudden, the idea that she was a femme fatale kind of became hard to do…
It intrigued me because I had an idea and she just went off and did something else and I mean she had to because of the other idea that I had. But I got interested in the idea of a character who just sort of invented herself as she went along. And I was a young writer and I was I was sort of learning my craft and one thing that I learned right at that point is you can say “I’m going to do such and such a thing.” But then when you do it you find that there are details involved that you hadn’t looked at, once those details are real then it’s not exactly the same concept that you had. I sort of ran with that and tried to make her story as complex and as unfolding and as many layers as possible… So she went from being a prostitute on the streets of Saigon to an Avenger, to a Celestial Madonna.
Over the next couple of years, the unfolding of Mantis’ full story — to her primary creator, as well as to his audience — would make for some of the most memorable superhero comics of their era. It’s a creative journey whose steps I look forward to retracing in this blog in the months to come; I hope you’ll join me.
Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books 
This issue was the first I got to feature the Swordsman, not counting his shadowy figure in the previous issues. I loved Mantis’ introductory sequence, taking down the sexist hard-hatted loutish bully. Given the Swordsman’s background, I could fully understand Cap’s serious reservations about admitting Swordsman “back” to the ranks of Mighty Assemblers — he’d certainly had much longer criminal career than Hawkeye, Pietro or Wanda. And later thorn in the Avengers’ collective side, Peter Gyrich, most positively would not have approved! Still, didn’t much bother my still 10 year old self that the other Avengers were willing to give Swordsman a chance to redeem himself and he did turn out to be serious about doing so. Funny that in a few months, Cap himself would be framed for murder and forced to go on the run to try to clear his name and uncover a vast criminal conspiracy.
Englehart was already doing a great job on CA&TF but still evolving on the Avengers, steadily improving IMO and setting up the pieces for what would become his first classic extended storyline on this and the Defenders, although readers wouldn’t really have a clue as to what was coming up until the next month. He did do much better writing in his own style rather than aping Thomas’.
One thing of note to me of the previous couple of years of Avengers’ stories is how the Big Three — Cap, Iron Man and Thor — are shown as hanging out at the mansion regularly since they rejoined as regular members in issue #93, which doesn’t really jive with their adventures in their own mags. Back in ye olde days when Lee was writing all four series, he tried to make everything fit as much as possible, even writing Thor and Iron Man out of the Avengers to avoid conflicts as the stories in their own series were getting ever longer and more complex. But at this point, although Englelhart gives some effort in keeping things lined up at least within the titles he’s writing, it otherwise appears to be no way to explain how the three of them seem to be regularly appearing in two places at once, or maybe even three if they happened to appear in Marvel Team-Up as well. But then, over at the Distinguished Competition, Superman and Batman, among others, had been appearing in multiple places at once for decades. Successful characters have the magical powers to do that sort of thing!
More fun reminiscing about our old comics, Alan!
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I never had a problem with it. Obviously a lot of big, multi-issue events only took a few days or even less to happen in-universe so it’s much easier for everything to fit together than it looks.
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The introduction of Mantis, who would eventually become my favorite Avenger, was a big deal for my young, eleven-year old mind. At the time I completely missed the “dragon lady” references, nor did I put together the sex worker angle — but I did see a competent, powerful, mysterious super-heroine, which was what, by and large, intrigued me about comic books. It was also some of the early work that spotlighted Englehart as a young writer who was moving female character beyond the “damsel-in-distress” trope so prevalent in 60’s comics.
As Mantis’ story unfolded, I was disappointed that it put her in opposition to Wanda, but I sure made for some dramatic, fun storytelling, and also I loved that the two women on the team were driving so much of that drama. It was very disappointing that no one save for Englehart really seemed to want to do anything with Mantis after her major storyline wrapped in the Avengers. I remember being so thrilled to see her featured in the Star-Lord mini-series written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning decades later, but not so sure about the way she was being portrayed. Eventually I appreciated how they turned her into a comedic character that was also warm, and still competent, between her combat skills and her mental abilities. Her special relationship with Groot was great fun given her Cotati affiliations. Sadly, her transition to the cinematic world has been far less interesting, although I have to say, of all the Marvel characters to choose from, Mantis was never someone I expected to see on the big screen.
Looking forward to your analyses of both the Avengers/Defenders war and the Celestial Madonna epic!
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Mantis’ costume by Heck comes off as lounge wear compared to the Romita version so that’s what my mind always interpreted it as.
Wanda came off her best under Englehart. No one to this point had really showed an aggressive side at all to the character. She pointed and fainted and crushed on Cap then fell in love with Vision. His long run with her laid the groundwork for pretty much everything else that’s happened with her.
You really can’t blame Cap for having the worst attitude about the Swordsman though. He was the one the guy kicked off a building after all!
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Well, technically, Cap jumped so that his teammates wouldn’t have to surrender to the Swordsman’s terms, and he counted on the team to be able to save him. Still, very good reason for Cap in particular to not trust Swordsy. And if Hawkeye had still been around, he wouldn’t have had any use either for the “spare-tire Avenger” who had attempted to kill him as well. But later, Hawkeye would team up with his old boss & nemesis to save the other Avengers from Kang, but that’s a much later tale. Fifty years ago, we still couldn’t guess at what a wild ride Englehart was about to take us on. I also loved how Englehart made Wanda a much more interesting and powerful character.
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Mantis one of my all-time favorite comic book characters, due to the initial two year-long “Celestial Madonna” storyline being so unique & intriguing. I’m certainly glad Steve Englehart quickly took the character in a very different direction from his original plans to have her be a femme fatale.
Back in 2015 I emailed Englehart to ask him who had designed Mantis’ appearance, and this was his reply:
“Don Heck designed her originally, but her recognized costume was done by Johnny Romita.”
So, yes, the redesign that made its debut in this issue is the work of Romita.
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Thanks for sharing that information, Ben! I’m adding it to the post.
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To me, the most hilarious, most “Seventies Comic-Book thing” about this story is the idea that the Swordsman, at the lowest point in his life becomes a drunk…in costume! The flashback panel of Mantis discovering him lying in that alley, bottle in one hand, completely swathed in purple spandex…still wearing his mask…was so outlandish, I actually laughed out loud. Please tell me he at least pawned his sword in order to have the money for his next bottle of hooch. Jeez…I love seventies comics for this very thing. I know we didn’t learn Swordsman’s true identity until much later, but the idea that we were all seven years old and wouldn’t have understood what we were looking at–even with Mantis narrating it–unless Swordsman was in costume, is just priceless. I’d forgotten all about it (it undoubtedly didn’t strike me as funny in ’73), so thanks for the moment of unintentional humor.
As for the rest, now that Englehart is finding his own way of story-telling, he’s really starting to come into his own. Only a few years earlier, the Avengers would have accepted an apologetic Swordsman back into their ranks with nary the batting of an eye. The fact that, not only Cap, but Panther and Vision as well, doubt his sincerity is a story-telling shift of seismic proportions. I really liked the fact that the Avengers had real personalities and disagreements over things. This made for a cool twist with the way it looked as though Mantis and Swordsman betrayed the team, only to reveal that they hadn’t really, was fun, even if their reason for not clueing the Avengers in really didn’t hold water.
Finally, though I’m sure I hardly noticed it at the time, I liked the scene in which Wanda came up against sexism and bigotry (damn those construction workers!) and another woman stepped in to help her out. Of course, Wanda could have obliterated those chuckleheads if she’d wanted and didn’t need the assist, but it was nice to see the sisterhood represent. Great read, Alan. I look forward to the Avengers-Defenders War, since I missed much of it when it first came out.
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Yes, that scene of Swordsman at his low point still wearing his costume struck me as incredibly amusing this time around too. The things you accept as a kid that seem ridiculous as an adult. Or even the fact that Mantis’ outfit was what she would be wearing — even as a prostitute — was pretty laughable.
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Yep, there was a lot of silliness about costumes back in the day. Among the silliest was when Clint Barton played at being the Golden Archer in CA&TF to prod Steve Rogers back into the superhero biz — wearing a rubber mask over his Hawkeye mask! Apparently no one at Marvel thought most readers would recognize Clint without his mask, although just a couple of years earlier he had gone nearly a year without the mask and had worn an entirely different one for a about two & a half years before that.
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Since out of costume, especially back then, Clint, Don Blake, Cap, and Hank Pym were virtually identical without their costumes identifying each that way probably was a valid concern. That doesn’t make it less silly but at least you can imagine the pointy bits being forced flat. Batman’s pointy ears being under a rubber mask baffled me even as a kid.
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When I picked up the Space Phantom story and saw Hawkeye in his maskless, skin-baring costume, I didn’t connect it at all with the Silver Age Hawkeye (bear in mind, it had several years since I’d read an Avengers story). It was quite a shock three issues later when he put his old outfit back on.
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In my mind, even back then, I didn’t think Clint was wearing a mask over his mask, I assumed it was artistic shorthand to immediately show the reader who it was, without having to read the dialog.
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I didn’t know any of that backstory about Mantis. Thanks.
After I started buying Marvel’s Doc Savage series, I decided to pick up the Avengers as well as that had been my favorite Marvel series as a kid. I got the first part of the Space Phantom story, and Englehart’s run remains a favorite.
While I get your point about Thor, I’m not sure there was any definite statement about him being too tough until the Official Handbook asserted Asgardian flesh is way tougher than normal humans. It’s true, he can take punches from the Hulk, which implies some level of invulnerability, but most super-strong characters have “take impossible impacts and get up again” as part of their power set.
I think Englehart’s Lion God story was the first to establish the Panther God was real. The Lee/Kirby T’Challa origin presented the panther simply as a sacred animal — like the cow in Hinduism — rather than a deity.
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I was not much impressed by Englehart’s Avengers until The Avenbgers/Defenders Clash. The Space Phantom thing was very good, but I liked Cockrum’s inks best, After Cockrum left it got much less interesting.
I always though The Avenges/Defenders Clash was a way to raise the stakes on Len Wein’s JLA/JSA/7 Soldiers story from a year before. I figured Marvle would do it next year (and they did with the FF/Avengers Quicksilver/Crystal Marriage,
I never thought Engelhart topped the Kang/Celesstial Madona story, His best group comics story was the JLA, probably since it was his intennional “Swan Song” in comics,
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Why was writer Steve Englehart “off the radar” for me after the 1970s? I looked at his comics credits on Wikipedia, and he has had a very prolific career right into the 21st century, besides some novel and TV work as well.
Was anyone else here keeping track of his work in the ’80s and onwards?
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I was, though I didn’t get his Coyote until years later — it was a while before we had an indie comic shop where I lived.
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I was as well, though I can’t claim to have read all of it, by any means. In general I found it less satisfying than the work he’d done before “leaving” the field the first time, but I’m not sure if that’s because the quality actually dropped or if it’s simply that my tastes changed. Maybe I’ll figure that out as I continue to re-read his oeuvre over the next couple of decades. 😉
That said, I probably liked his Green Lantern run the best — among other things, he (with artist Joe Staton) basically invented Guy Gardner as we know him.
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I realize the primary discussion here is about his work after the 70’s, but if you’re going to talk favorites, the work he did with Marshall Rogers on Detective is my favorite of all time.
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I enjoyed that, too, though I felt at the time that Rogers’ work was a brittle “cousin” to Walt Simonson’s. Seemed he didn’t care for lush brushwork at all, but used very precise, crisp blacks and sparse linework.
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Yes, if we’re talking *all-time* favorites, that’s probably tops for me as well. (Though the run with Brunner on Dr. Strange comes a close second.)
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Don’t forget that amazing issue where he had Staton recreate panels from past issues to present the origin of the Predator as if it had been the ongoing plan for years.
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I loved Coyote and his JLA as well as making me love GL like never before but his non-comic writing never intrigued me.
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Steve Englehart was the reason I picked up The Avengers with regularity in those days. That said, i liked his JLA run better.
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I commented on the more recent Marvel Premiere blog post first, but I’ll reiterate here that to me the best part of comics for me between 1973 and 1975 was Steve Engelhart. Oddly enough, when I was trying to get my younger brother into comic books in 1977, I had him read the entire Mantis story starting from Avengers # 113. I re-read the whole thing when I got Marvel Unlimited in 2014 (filling in missing issues at the time with my hard copies) and was a little less impressed than I had been (and I read in Sean Howe’s book how many of the Marvel staff were less than enamored with Mantis’ “this one” way of speaking). However, I still find it a masterpiece of long term storytelling in contrast to, say the Shuma Gorath story that went in a lot of different directions before Engelhart masterfully tied up the work of his predecessors (and we won’t talk about the Conway’s Mr. Kline storyline from the early 1970s right? Oops! Too late).
Still as was pointed out in this blog post and in the comments, there were still some changes–all good ones–from what had apparently been intended from the first. I’m very glad that Englehart decided not to have Mantis solely as a romantic lighting rod for the male Avengers to fight over. I did have the same major problems with this story that others did, namely how quickly the Avengers (except for Cap) were willing to accept the Swordsman and a stranger after he had betrayed them once and been a villain afterwards. Also, the whole idea of Mantis and the Swordsman having to call in the Lion God surreptitiously without telling the Avengers so that they could destroy him (not to mention attacking the Avengers) seems like a rather contrived plot and if I were the Avengers, I wouldn’t have been so forgiving and happy even with the eventual results. Well, in any event, such thoughts will be pushed to the background with the upcoming Avengers/Defenders crossover clash.
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