As we’ve discussed in this space previously, Marvel Comics seems to have been in an almighty rush to get as many “Giant-Size” comics to market as possible in the first half of 1974. Along with a multitude of title, frequency, price, and format changes, most seemingly made on the fly, one likely result of this haste was the release of Giant-Size Defenders #1 in April, 1974 as a mostly-reprint package, its only new content (not counting the Gil Kane-John Romita-Frank Giacoia cover) being a 9-page framing sequence. Written by Tony Isabella and illustrated by Jim Starlin and Al Milgrom, that strip unquestionably looked great, and it read just fine; there simply wasn’t enough of it.
Things looked up considerably with the title’s second quarterly issue, where another cover primarily by Kane (with inks by Klaus Janson) fronted an all-new 30-page lead story, also illustrated by Kane and Janson, with a script by Len Wein. As had been his recent practice in the “regular” Defenders title, Wein brought in a guest star to bolster the titular supergroup’s roster — the Son of Satan, in this instance. (Well, Marvel called them “guest stars”; in the mind of my younger self, however, they were merely “new Defenders”. Hey, if the Defenders really were a “non-team”, as everyone kept saying, then any hero who showed up to play even once was as much a “non-member” as the ones who appeared in every issue, as far as I was concerned.) I doubt there were many fans in July, 1974 who considered their 50 cents ill-spent on this puppy — even those who might have already owned one or more of the reprinted tales that filled the book’s remaining 22 non-ad, non-text pages.
Arriving in October, 1974, Giant-Size Defenders #3 looked to offer more of the same sort of goodness, with Daredevil filling the guest-star rotation slot this time around. Turning past the comic’s cover by Ron Wilson and Joe Sinnott, however, the opening splash page’s extensive list of credits gave readers their first inkling of a major shake-up on the writing end of the feature’s regular creative team…
As the credits indicate, “Games Godlings Play!” had three different plotters: Steve Gerber, Jim Starlin, and Len Wein. For the middle man in that trio, Starlin, this was basically a one-off; but for the other two, it represented a changing of the guard. Len Wein, who’d served as the feature’s third regular writer (following Steve Englehart and, before him, Roy Thomas) since issue #12, was relinquishing the assignment, which now passed to Steve Gerber (though readers would have to turn to the issue’s letters pages to have that confirmed).
As for the story’s art, while the whole thing was laid out by Starlin — and his strong sense of design and storytelling chops is certainly in evidence throughout — the tag-team of inkers made for something of an inconsistent look over its 32 pages… though with such talents as Dan Adkins, Don Newton, and Jim Mooney in the mix, it’s never a bad look.
Daredevil was a logical choice of guest star for Steve Gerber’s first Defenders story, given that the author had written the Scarlet Swashbuckler in his own book for the past two years; in fact, his last issue of that title — Daredevil #117, which was scripted by Chris Claremont from Gerber’s plot — was released the very same day as Giant-Size Defenders #3, October 3rd.
As for Nighthawk — who had indeed indeed a bad guy the one time DD encountered him before this — it’s no wonder that his jet-pack might have momentarily obscured his identity from the super-sensed hero, since he’d only been using it (and wearing his present costume) since Defenders #15 (his first appearance following his “joining” the non-team at the end of the preceding issue).
Is that a great close-up of the Hulk in the last panel above, or what? For the record, Jim Starlin shares credit for its delineation with Dan Adkins, who provided the finished art for most of the pages in our story’s first chapter. (For the record, I’m basing the page-by-page credits for the various parts of the story handled by Adkins, Jim Mooney, and Don Newton on those given by the Grand Comics Database, as well as on what my own eyeballs are telling me.)
Yep, it’s the Grandmaster, whose only outing before this was the three-parter that ran from the 69th through the 71st issues of Avengers; a story which, among other things, featured the debut of Nighthawk (whose first full appearance was in #70).
While this isn’t the very first Steve Gerber comic-book script to include a large block of non-comics-formatted text (I believe that honor goes to “Child of Darkness!” in Tales of the Zombie #7, though I may be mistaken), it’s a prominent early example of what would be a frequent feature of his writing in the months and years to come. Here it’s used (quite effectively, in my opinion) to help us get inside the head of the sightless Daredevil, so that we can perceive the Defenders the way that he does. Yes, it does require you to slow down and spend considerably more time on this page than its peers… but is that such a bad thing?
Before we move on from this page, I feel obliged to note a minor continuity error made here by Gerber, in stating that DD has never met the Hulk “face-to-face”; as was pointed out on the letters pages of Giant-Size Defenders #4 three months later, the two had encountered each other a couple of years back, in Hulk #152, when the Man Without Fear’s alter ego of Matt Murdock defended ol’ Greenskin in court. (According to an editorial response, when the writer learned of the mistake late in GSD #3’s production process — too late to make a correction, naturally — “You could hear Steve’s ‘arrgh’ halfway to his native St. Louis.”)
I said earlier that Dan Adkins handled most of the finished artwork over Starlin’s layouts in this first chapter, but Jim Mooney appears to have handled this one, as well as the next, which is mostly given over to the response the Grandmaster makes to Daredevil’s query just before he vanishes (i.e., if they don’t play, he’ll simply destroy the Earth) — and to Nighthawk’s subsequent explanation to his fellow Defenders as to how the cosmic gamer had come looking for the Squadron Supreme but had found only him, and then learned about the Defenders while probing his mind; as for Daredevil, the Grandmaster required six playing pieces for his latest match, so Nighthawk recommended his old antagonist to fill the quota. (Gee, thanks.)
As to who the Grandmaster is playing this time around — we get our first look at them via Starlin and Mooney…
…just before the latter passes the baton back to Adkins…
As indicated by the editorial footnote above, the Prime Mover’s one previous appearance had been in Strange Tales #167 (Apr., 1968); but that terse footnote hardly conveys the impact of that Jim Steranko classic’s stunning end-of-story reveal that the epic conflict between Nick Fury and the Yellow Claw that had run through the past eight issues of ST had been nothing but a game between Doctor Doom and his specially-built robot, and that the Claw and his minions were themselves automatons all along.
Here, the use of block text serves to get the rules across with an economy of page space — and I doubt there are many who’d rather have had three or four pages taken up by the Grandmaster’s monologue, with the panel art depicting him speaking, and the Defenders reacting, from different camera angles and so forth. (Although if anyone could make such a sequence visually interesting, it’d be Jim Starlin.) Especially if that required cutting back on the space available for the action sequences about to follow…
Don Newton takes over the art-finishing for this chapter; and since I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve featured any of his work on this blog, a brief introduction is probably in order. At the time this story was published, Newton was just shy of forty years old, and was working as a school art teacher. A prolific fanzine artist, he’d been trying for a while to break in at either Marvel or DC with little success, due at least in part to his unwillingness to leave Arizona (where his family had moved for his health when he was a child); he had, however, found Charlton Comics more accommodating, and had begun picking up assignments from that publisher starting in early 1974.
In a retrospective of Newton’s life and career published in as reported in Back Issue #19 (Nov., 2006), writer Barry Keller reported how Newton landed the Giant-Size Defenders #3 gig:
Don’s friend Dan Adkins had been given the 32-page story to pencil and ink over Jim Starlin’s layouts, but was way behind schedule. With about ten days left to complete the strip, Adkins had only completed four pages and was panicking. He asked for Newton’s help (Adkins also enlisted the help of Jim Mooney). Newton said he would only do the work if Marvel gave him a credit line. Adkins immediately contacted Marvel and they readily agreed to Don’s terms. Newton penciled and inked 12 full pages and did contributing work on two other pages. Although told to follow Starlin’s layouts, Newton once said he “wound up erasing 90% of [Starlin’s] stuff.”
If the idea of Dan Adkins needing to wrangle a couple of artist friends in to help him finish a job by deadline sounds familiar, you may be thinking about Conan the Barbarian #21 (Dec., 1972), where P. Craig Russell, Val Mayerik, and others performed a similar service in helping Adkins finish the art of Barry Windsor-Smith. As to whether Don Newton did in fact erase most of Jim Starlin’s pencil lines, that may well be true — although I doubt he deviated too much from the poses, camera angles, and other compositional choices Starlin had made, if only because he would have been working with a panel grid that had already been set (not to mention what was likely a detailed written plot). But, whatever the process, there’s no doubt that the artwork finished by Newton is the least “Starlin-like” in the story — though that doesn’t make it any less attractive than the other sections of the story (at least, not to me).
While I don’t recall my seventeen-year-old self having any particular qualms about the nonchalance with which Valkyrie decapitates what she, and we, must at this point presume to be a sentient being, from the perspective of fifty years later, it’s pretty startling. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that the Grandmaster and Prime Mover have given Val and her comrades and other choice but to use lethal force, if they want to save the Earth; just that I’m used to thinking of the trope of a code against superheroes killing as being so baked into the genre in the 1970s that I’d expect there to at least be some discussion over our protagonists’ breaking said code, either in their dialogue or in the narrative captions. All of which just goes to show, I suppose, that the way we remember things being isn’t always the way things actually were, back in the day…
Valkyrie has guessed right; the horse has been calling the shots, and when she kills it, her battle is won. As the enemy tumbles into the murk below, Val realizes she hasn’t even had a chance to wonder what’s happened to Nighthawk since he took a similar plunge. And then…
Again, not too many tears being shed by our heroes over the regrettable but necessary taking of lives, here…
Dan Adkins returns for this chapter; I think it’s fair to say that his finished art comes closest to looking like what Jim Starlin might have delivered, had he been able (or inclined) to handle the whole job.
The one-eyed “glop” changes form so rapidly that Daredevil can’t get a fix on it with his radar sense; nor does it seem to have a heartbeat, or unusual odor, or anything else he can tune into via his other enhanced senses. Meanwhile…
Namor’s will and valor are undeniable, but they can’t prevent the lizard-being’s next blow from slicing into his costume, damaging the moisture-recycling system that Reed Richards set him up with back in Sub-Mariner #67 (Nov., 1973) — “without which… he cannot live!!”
This was a shocking moment thee first time I read this story, back in ‘74. Not that I thought for a moment that Daredevil would remain deceased at the end of the story; this was, nevertheless, a graphically violent death for a superhero in an era where the Great Beyond didn’t have quite the same sort of speedily revolving door that would become commonplace in “cape” comics in later years.
Subby had indeed met DD twice before (yes, Gerber got it right this time): first in the classic Daredevil #7 (Apr., 1965), by Stan Lee and Wally Wood; and then again in DD #77 (Jun., 1971), by Gerry Conway and Gene Colan (which also guest-starred Spider-Man, and wasn’t nearly as classic as its predecessor by any means — though your humble blogger remains quite fond of it, fifty-three years down the line).
Subby’s death doesn’t hit quite as hard as DD’s, if only because that earlier heroic demise has led us to at least half-expect this one; still, it’s a brutal, memorable moment.
Jim Mooney steps back in at the beginning of Chapter 4 to draw a single page before handing things back to Don Newton (the fact that Mooney’s pages only appear one or two at a time, scattered throughout the story, makes me suspect that he might have been the last finisher brought in on this job, though that’s pure speculation on my part).
In addition to owning up to Steve Gerber’s error re: Daredevil and Hulk’s previous encounter, the letters column of Giant-Size Defenders #4 also provided the following tidbit regarding the creative genesis of Grott, the Man-Slayer: after noting that several correspondents had hypothesized that the little fella was solely the product of Steve Gerber’s imagination, the anonymous editorial assistant declared that all three of the story’s plotters were involved in dreaming him up…
Trying to dream up a foe big enough and powerful enough to face the Hulk, the inspiration hit them all at the same instant. “Greenskin always fights something huge and monstrous. This time, why not something little and cute?” And thus was born one of the dumbest menaces of all time. Great minds are warped along the same curve… or something like that.
And here we have the introduction of Korvac, the one new character introduced in this storyline who’d go on to have a significant later career (although, according to later comments attributed to Gerber, he was never intended to be more than a throwaway, one-shot villain).
Both Dr. Strange and Hulk find themselves rocked back on their heels by their opponents; in fact, Hulk find himself buried under a heap of literal rocks, hurled down upon him by the telekinetic Grott…
It’s interesting that, unlike Valkyrie and Nighthawk, Dr. Strange and Hulk conclusively defeat their foes, but don’t outright kill them; was this a conscious decision made because Korvac and Grott have been depicted as having a slightly more humanoid aspect than the demonic-looking combatants of Chapter 2? Your guess is as good as mine.
Meanwhile, after having come back for another single page (above), Mooney again yields the floor to Newton as we draw near our tale’s finale:
Gerber’s caption in the last panel above is as close as the story ever gets to exploring how Daredevil and Sub-Mariner feel in the wake of being violently killed and then suddenly resurrected. Do they recall the experience of dying? Did they experience anything in the period between their dying and being restored to life? Again, your guess is as good as mine. Hmm… maybe we could have used one more solid block of text in this story… (Also worth noting — given that we’re told nothing to the contrary, I think it’s safe to assume that the Prime Mover’s slain playing pieces from Chapter 2 remain most sincerely dead.)
(UPDATE, 10/2/24, 1:15 p.m.: The original version of this post neglected to include either the two panels shown directly above, or a synopsis of same, making for some choppy reading. My apologies.)
Newton passes the baton back to Mooney at this point…
… and now Mooney hands off to Adkins one last time…
Finally, Adkins yields to Mooney to bring our story home…
Umm… I hate to say this, DD, but based on what Jims Starlin and Mooney have drawn, the disc has come up tails.
Naturally, as with other errors in the story, this bobble got called out on the letters page of Giant-Size Defenders #4. To which the editorial response was:
We were wrong. DD lost. And the Grandmaster is coming back next Tuesday to take the earth. Enjoy yourselves till then, people. The end is coming.
Howzat?
OK, so maybe “Games Godlings Play!” isn’t about much of anything. But as a genre exercise, it’s a well-written, well-drawn story that still holds plenty of entertainment value, half a century on. And as a satisfyingly complete and extra-long yarn, it exemplifies what the lead feature in a “Giant-Size” (or “Annual”) Marvel comic could and should be.
Of course, like all of Marvel’s Giant-Size releases of this era, Giant-Size Defenders #3 includes reprint material. First up is a seven-pager from Sub-Mariner (1954 series) #38 (Feb., 1955), featuring both art and story by Bill Everett…
.. which was followed by a nine-page Doctor Strange tale by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko that had originally appeared in Strange Tales #120 (May, 1964)…
As I’ve mentioned in several previous posts, I’ve always been inclined to prefer my new comics material and my reprinted comics material not to be included in the same package, regardless of how good the latter might be. That said, I suspect that my seventeen-year-old self back in October, 1974 was at least cognizant that if one had to have reprints in his Giant-Size Marvels, one could do a heckuva lot worse than this classic work from Everett, Lee, and Ditko.
Art by Jim Starlin and (maybe) John Romita.
Art by John Romita and (maybe) Tony Mortellaro.
“Games Godlings Play!” represents the official beginning of Steve Gerber’s run on the “Defenders” feature. But, in a way, the writer’s stint had begun two months earlier, in Marvel Two-in-One #6. There, the Thing had teamed up with Dr. Strange in the first chapter of a three-part storyline which would continue into the following issue of MTiO — adding a second Defender, the Valkyrie, into the superheroic mix in the process — before reaching its conclusion in November’s Defenders #20, Steve Gerber’s first solo flight writing for the team.
Obviously, we’ve already passed MTiO #6’s post-by date (aka its 50th anniversary month). But, don’t worry — we’ll be offering a substantial recap as part of our upcoming post on MTiO #7, coming your way on October 19th.
As regular readers of this blog are aware, we always publish at least one post a week, almost always on Saturdays. A Wednesday post, such as the one you’re currently reading, generally counts as an “extra”, meaning that you can usually expect another post showing up just three days later.
That’s not what’ll be happening this week, however. Rather, the present entry will count as the regular weekly post, as I’m taking this Saturday off. The next installment of this blog, covering Captain America #181, will be published next Wednesday, after which we’ll pick back up with our regular every-Saturday schedule.
Why the change, you ask? Well, my younger daughter is getting married this Saturday; and while that CA #181 post is already pretty much finished and set to launch, I’m expecting that my bandwidth for reading and responding to your comments will be rather limited all weekend. I figure we’ll all have a better time if my attention isn’t unduly divided (I know I will, at any rate). So, thanks in advance for your understanding, and I’ll see you all on the 9th.
I don’t recall being bothered by the killings, possibly because that sequence felt more like a pulp fantasy adventure than a superhero fight. I was quite shaken to more recently reread Iron Man’s battle with the Black Knight and realize he wins by dropping Nathan Garrett to his death (https://atomicjunkshop.com/surprisingly-grim-for-1965/?fbclid=IwAR3l4P3_FCN-Top9Af6fvexG8C602k8sPah0lC6jpfcp8QcR7byz2rqo_rE)
I wasn’t as enthused with the ending of that SHIELD story, which felt rather like a cheat to me than a clever twist.
GSD3 was a fun story, my first encounter with the Grandmaster. Not having read it in a long while, I didn’t think of it as the Changing of the Guard story you’ve pointed out it was.
Wise decision on skipping the wedding weekend. You might be a little distraction. Congrats to your daughter.
Enjoy the celebrations.
Back then in the UK, with normal distribution, Giant Size editions were rarer than unicorns. You could only get then at specialist comic shops and they were quite pricey. I think I only ever bought one, the Kirby Capt America with the space vampires.
I am slightly disappointed to see that they were often filled out with reprint material.
I am not sure I see why the coin toss was so controversial. It says the coin was spinning mid air so surely could have landed any side. If you take the arc shown in the panels literally, it wouldn’t be as wide for a start, so why take the visual flight of the coin literally (ie that it lands on the opposite side from where it started)?
All the best for your daughter’s wedding. Hopefully it won’t be gate-crashed by a horde of the Fantastic Four’s villains though that would make quite a photo opportunity.
patr100, I think that the perception that our storytellers made a mistake with the coin toss stems from the fact that the disc we see resting on DD’s wrist on the story’s last page is clearly unmarked — which, by the terms established in the previous page’s dialogue, is “tails”, not “heads”, as DD calls it.
And thanks to you (and everyone else, of course) for the wedding well-wishes. I think we’ll pass on the FF Annual #3’s heroes vs. villains brouhaha, but if the shades of Lee and Kirby want to show up at the end, I’m sure we can find a place for them. 😉
Ah I get what people are saying now. Thanks. The lack of a visible cross in that panel . We can’t really blame the inker either.
Allow me to add my congratulations on the wedding. I hope that you were also wise enough not to choose Circus of Crime Catering for the reception.
Thanks, Stuart — and I’m happy to report that we dodged the CoC Catering bullet. No pythons-bursting-out-of-cakes at our shindig!
Ah, my first defenders tale!
And it holds up pretty well, 50 years later–thanks to the star-studded creative team! Certainly, Gerber was one of the best writers around these parts in the mid-70s.
The two errors you mention show signs of the haste with which the story was put together (missing a deadline was out of the question). Incidentally, the letter writers called out one seeming error that was actually correct: Korvac (born in 2977, talking about the “science of the 31st century. Ye Editor remarked that Korvac was presumably at least 23 years old when this tale took place.
Comic book writers were certainly influenced a lot by the 1957 movie, “The Seventh Seal,” weren’t they? The one where a medieval soldier plays chess with the Devil for eternal stakes? There were a number of stories based on this idea of “cosmic gamesmanship,” in the 70’s, usually coming from either Starlin or Englehart, and characters like Thanos and the Grandmaster sometimes seemed expressly created for these kinds of stories, even though they may have been better utilized elsewhere.
What I didn’t get here, and maybe that had to do with which pages you chose to show us, Alan, is why the Grandmaster changed his mind about leaving the Earth alone once he’d won the game. From what we were shown, his change of heart seemed rather abrupt.
As for the blocks of typed narrative, I remember hating those as a kid. I bought comics for the pictures; the dramatic illustrations that showed god-like heroes in exciting poses, not blocks of boring text! Now, as an adult, I can appreciate the textual asides better, but I still think they’re an excuse not to do the work it would take to illustrate the action, something, as you pointed out, Starlin was more than capable of. Or, it could be that Gerber was trying to prove he was capable of more “literary” writing? Who knows? My inner 17-year old still thinks it’s a cheat.
Considering how many artists actually plowed this field, I think the pictures turned out very well. The “two Dons and two Jims” complimented one another’s work very well, I thought, and if you hadn’t told me there were four different artists working on it, I wouldn’t have known, except for those panels that are so typically, obviously Starlin.
One kinda corny thing this story did that other Daredevil stories have also done is include the moment where DD makes some pithy observation at the very end of the story that only really lands for us readers who know he’s blind, leaving the assembled heroes to scratch their heads in confusion. This happened in an Avengers story I recall, when DD closed the story out by actually saying, “It’s ironic that I should be the one to think of this…” and then going on to tell the old story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. Of course, the irony went right over the Avengers heads just like it did the Defenders here, b/c they don’t know about DD’s vision issues, but we know, and for some reason, writers liked to remind us that they knew it too.
Lastly, since you included a bit of that reprinted Submariner story, I find it interesting from the perspective of fifty years worth of twenty-twenty hindsight and how the world has changed in the interim, that Betty Dean certainly pulled the racist card awfully quick on ol’ Namor when she realized he was going to help Atlantis attack the surface world, despite their friendship. I know she’s upset, but calling him a “sniveling slave” and “Mr. Fish Face,” seems like a bit much, given what they meant to each other.
Thanks for the middle-of-the-week bump, Alan. Have fun with the wedding and all the best to the newlyweds.
Whereas I loved those text pages when I first read them. As continued stories became more common, filling space with recaps had become increasingly annoying.
You have a point about the Grandmaster though. There’s been no other story I can think of where “I like that planet, I’ll take it” was a thing. More likely he’d have challenged the Defenders to some sort of game for Earth. But this was what, his second appearance? Quite possibly Gerber saw someone willing to erase Earth from existence if Kang lost (back in the original Grandmaster story) as being ruthless enough.
I wouldn’t have like the way the long formal text appears back then in that issue. Even if deliberate in this case, it reminds me too much of a deadline cock up whereby someone didn’t get the extra panels done or some kind of plot cock up that had to be rescued at the last minute.
“Show dont tell” in comics. But if you have to tell, then get the letterer to do it with some appropriate imagery to punctuate it then it’s more readable and integrates with the rest of the story.
I don’t know about The Seventh Seal as an inspiration. It’s possible but cosmic games go back at least to Fritz Leiber’s “Dreams of Albert Moreland” from 1945. For living-people-as-pieces there’s Chessmen of Mars.
I’m not familiar with the Leiber story, Fraser, but I remember the Chessmen of Mars very well. Possibly/probably all three stories and others inspired this comic, but Seventh Seal, if I remember correctly, all the way back to the year I was born (LOL), was a very popular film. If not so much at the time it came out, then certainly by the time these stories were written. I remember watching Seventh Seal on TV somewhere in this general time-frame, and for me to have watched a black and white Swedish movie from the year I was born when I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 17, I had to have heard some VERY good things about it. I guess we’ll never know for sure.
True.
Listening to Chess right now reminded me the Fischer/Spassky chess match inspired a few stories, such as Prez #2. Doubt it was an influence on the issue under discussion though.
Yeah, the Chess soundtrack won’t get you to Mars, but it will get you “One Night in Bangkok.” Could be worse.
The world’s your oyster. And an angel might sit next to you.
I was quoting that song recently. My retinologist shares her office with a Dr. Chess, who has a poster for the musical on the wall.
On Barsoom, they call it jetan.
Rykors at the ready!
Kaldanes in for the kill!
“What I didn’t get here, and maybe that had to do with which pages you chose to show us, Alan, is why the Grandmaster changed his mind about leaving the Earth alone once he’d won the game. From what we were shown, his change of heart seemed rather abrupt.”
You got me, Don — I did indeed neglect to cover the transition from the Grandmaster’s restoration/reunion of the Defenders to his “Allow?!” outburst, which made an already rather abrupt turnabout seem to come out of nowhere. I’ve since updated the post to fill in the gap.
NOW, I get it! Thanks, Alan.
God, I loved Gerber’s Marvel work and this was no exception. Daredevil even felt like a more natural addition in how it was handled than most others to this date.
Adkins and Mooney were not favorite artists but they both did great work here but Newton and Starlin get the biggest praise. I honestly can’t remember art by the latter two that I didn’t enjoy and this is a fine example of why.
Only those killed by Nighthawk and Val never came back, right? And I don’t presume to guess at what a mind like Gerber’s was thinking but maybe those two were chosen as killers as the reformed villains on the nonteam? Sure, the military treated Hulk as one but readers knew he wasn’t and Namor was used as a F4 antagonist when first revived but he’d been established as a hero with his own feature for years by this point.
Back in the day, when I read this, the opening scene with Nighthawk and DD seemed a bit off. It seemed to me more like DD is thinking “he’s wearing a jet-pack so it must be Nighthawk” and not “it’s Nighthawk and he now has a jet-pack” (which he didn’t when they first met). Then, when he meets the other Defenders, DD “forgets” that he has met the Hulk and Dr. Strange (at Hank and Jan’s wedding where the heroes spent some time socializing) so I just wrote it off as the Gerber not knowing or checking.
First came across Don Newton’s work in a random issue of The Phantom, which was not a regular purchase for me. Really liked his work from then on and was sorry to read about his passing.
Congratulations to your daughter, Alan! G-S Defenders #3 was another one I had to wait until I was well into adulthood to obtain. Not a particularly deep story but entertaining enough, even with those touches of violence, with Val & Kyle forced to become killers and DD & Namor being temporarily killed off — just as Iron Man and Vizh would be seemingly killed in the upcoming next installment of the Kang Wars in Avengers 132 & G-S Avengers #3 (hmm, was that just a coincidence?). Starlin clearly had a lot of fun with the Grott character, especially when Hulk finally defeats him with just a snap of his finger! We also get more examples of the infamous “Gerber Curse”, of which Gerber used up a portion of a Let’s Level with Daredevil page to expound upon and it wound up inadvertently published backwards so a mirror was needed to read it! In regards to Gerber’s text pieces, my younger self didn’t mind them at all — I was a voracious reader of lots of things as a youth — I even read the articles in my dad’s copies of Playboy once it was my turn to check it out and after I’d already checked out the nudies and the cartoons. I found Gerber’s text pieces rather fascinating, and also enjoyed those of Alan Moore in Watchmen. The basic plot of the story strikes me as something Wein likely came up, and was then fleshed out by Starlin & Gerber, adding their uniquely odd touches. Gotta say, however, I don’t buy for a second that even someone with Daredevil’s abilities could genuinely toss a coin in such a way as to be certain that it would land on heads. Good thing for him that the Grandmaster must’ve also been blind and couldn’t tell that he’d really won the bet. But maybe Gerber left out the dialogue wherein DD convinced him that by the rules of the game, “heads I win, tails you lose” as in the old Abbott & Costello routine. Looking forward to discussions on Gerber’s run on the regular series.
Further musings …. By the time G-S Defenders #3 saw print, Namor had been off the team several months, leaving in a bit of a huff, as usual, stating he did not wish to be called upon again. Yet, here he is again, apparently yanked back into Defenders duty against his will. The other two former semi-regular Defenders were Hawkeye & the Silver Surfer. By this point, however, Hawkeye was back with the Avengers, but ol’ Norrin doesn’t appear to have been particularly busy doing anything, his next appearance anywhere being in the upcoming next go-round between the FF & Doc Doom. So by what force of logic was it decided to bring in Daredevil, especially given this was a rather cosmic story well outside the norm for DD, aside from the Terrax storyline of the year before. Was it simply because Gerber had been writing DD for the last couple of years, and, hey, why not? As it was, DD suffered the experience of being briefly snuffed out, maybe just to show how much out of his element he was in this cosmic chess game.
Also, it was rather amusing to see Nighthawk, the Batman takeoff, taking on a variation of the Man-Bat! On reflection, just for that reason alone it’s not surprising that baddie would be permanently snuffed out, lest DC’s lawyers send cease & desist letters to the Marvel offices.
Gamesmaster rants about ” selective breeding” . Valkyrie only female member in that panel.
No wonder she is at the head of the queue to strangle him.
The pages of text – where they typed in or did the letterer have to letter them?
I would assume that they were typeset like the other text pages in the comic (Bullpen Bulletins, letters pages, etc.).
Congratulations, Alan, on your daughter’s nuptials.
Steve Gerber would use the text format again in Defenders #23, with the Sons of the Serpent’s television broadcast.
I think it’s more effective in “Games Godlings Play,” but I may still be bitter about Elena and her baby disappearing after #23. I hope she opened the wrong door in the Sanctum Sanctorum and went on to become the Lady of the Heliotrope Dimension.
If I remember correctly, Korvac was held out as a “nifty” opponent for the Guardians of the Galaxy one day in the letter column for Giant-Size Defenders #4. Takkor, however, remained a one-shot, like Eelar in Giant-Size #5.
I’d forgotten about Daredevil’s meeting with Dr. Strange in Avengers #60. It must be because the splash page in which they’re schmoozing before the wedding of Yellowjacket and the Wasp is silent, save for some captions, one of which assures us that everybody is drinking non-alcoholic punch!
(That you’ll be covering Captain America #181 next — which features the Sub-Mariner! — makes me wonder whether someone connected with “Games Godlings Play” initially considered having Nighthawk try to recruit Cap, as Nighthawk fought him as part of the Grandmaster/Kang competition in Avengers #70. Most likely not, given what Steve Englehart was doing in Cap’s own title with the Nomad.)
The splash page is gorgeous but it’s an illogical moment in a nonsensical story. Jan has no reason to invite DD or Dr. Strange and doesn’t even like Spider-Man (the Black Knight and the Avengers weren’t very chummy either). The explanation in Earth’s Mightiest Heroes that the team knew Hank had gone loonie and so were going through with the wedding as a charade made more sense.
You raise some good points about the wedding guests, although I can see Daredevil being invited, based on Spider-Man Annual #3, where the Avengers contacted the Man Without Fear to vet Spider-Man as a possible team member. The Wasp was quite taken with Daredevil, and there was a brief discussion about why he hadn’t been considered for membership.
While the Wasp doesn’t like spiders, the events of that story left her strangely disappointed (“I’ll never understand women,” says Goliath), so perhaps someone persuaded her to let Spider-Man attend.
I think you’re a little hard on the Black Knight: he had helped them against Ultron-5 and the Masters of Evil in Avengers #54-55, and that may have changed their perception of him from #48. Dr. Strange could have come as his plus one (after the events of Dr. Strange #178)
I should look for that Earth’s Mightiest Heroes story you mention. It does sound more logical, but I wonder whether decades later I’ll remember it as I do this one, with Crystal admitting that she usually cries at weddings (since they’re not hers) and the Circus of Crime grousing in defeat that they came looking for revenge on Thor and that he never showed up (due to the events of Silver Surfer #4)
The Circus of Crime are another problem. Planning to blow up the wedding party makes sense but it requires stealth; sticking the python in the cake wrecks their plan (in the words of DD many years later “You shouldn’t have signed it.”).
A minor puzzle is why, having given the Black Knight his magic sword in Marvel Super-Heroes, Thomas doesn’t draw attention to it. Not having seen Dane’s earlier appearance, it was years before I learned it was something new.
Thank you so much for the “you shouldn’t have signed it” mention.
It marked my introduction to Frank Miller, and though I’ve seen much from him that I haven’t liked since 1985, the Armageddon septet still wows me.
My favorite moment, I think:
“Jameson is so happy he springs for two colors.
“It’s a good story. Makes all the right people look terrible.”
Bravo, Ben Urich!
I never really was able to get into The Defenders, due in part to the distribution in my little neck of the woods, which made keeping up with most Marvels a challenge. I was able to pick up an occasional copy, but really had no idea what was happening. I need to try a revisit it sometime.
I first saw Don Newton’s art in an issue of The Phantom and loved it. I was so excited when I saw him working on Aquaman and thrilled when Batman appeared in one issue after which Newton began drawing his adventures. He’s definitely among my favorite Batman and Captain Marvel artists. Such a shame he passed away so young.
I had access to Marvel as a kid but not the money, as buying one chapter in a continued story meant committing to others which meant not buying other stuff … It wasn’t until the early 1970s that I had enough pocket money I felt confident I wouldn’t miss a key chapter.
Mazel Tov, Cent Anni and Slàinte Mhath to your daughter, son in- law and family and friends.
It just seems crazy to me that Defenders got a Giant-Size book that early in its run, and that this was Gerber’s first issue. I was a regular reader of Defenders from about issue 11 – (just missed the Avengers/Defender War) and my memory of those long ago years always forgets Wein’s run and remembers it as all being Gerber.
In the recent Jim Starlin Biographical Interview Part 2 by Alex Grand on YouTube, Starlin *very* briefly discusses this Defenders annual. You can hear his thoughts on it at around the 30-minute mark. In short, as far as Starlin was concerned, Korvac was meant to be a throw-away character.
But really, it’s worth watching the entire thing (as well as Part 1) as Starlin is interviewed at length about his decades-long career.