When we last left the Defenders, back in September, the Defenders themselves were, well, leaving.  Most of them, anyway.  As was the writer who’d been chronicling their adventures since they’d graduated from Marvel Feature into their own title some sixteen months earlier: Steve Englehart.

Just in case you missed it, Englehart had concluded his double-title, multi-issue crossover epic, the Avengers/Defenders War (or, if you prefer, the Quest for the Black Knight’s Soul) in Defenders #11 with a scene that saw four of the six heroes who’d carried the banner of the junior team in that classic match-up — the Hulk, the Sub-Mariner, the Silver Surfer, and even raw recruit Hawkeye — departing to pursue other interests.  That left only de facto team leader Doctor Strange, as well as the Valkyrie (who had nowhere else to go, really) on hand to say farewell from the window of the Sorcerer Supreme’s Sanctum Sanctorum — and also left incoming new regular writer Len Wein with the challenge either of contriving a way to bring some or all of the wayward members back, or of quickly  introducing new members to the mix.  (Or of having Doc and Val face down the menace of Xemnu the Titan all on their own, which I don’t think anyone expected — or especially wanted, for that matter — to see happen.)  As we’ll soon discover, he ended up employing a combination of those first two strategies… although it would take several issues for that process to be complete.  Read More