Fifty years ago this month, the Gil Kane-Klaus Janson cover of Defenders #21 heralded the beginning of a new storyline.  But as soon as we readers of the time turned to the comic’s opening splash page — not to mention the double-page spread that followed immediately thereafter — it was clear that although the “A”-plot of the recent three-parter that had wound through two issues of Marvel Two-in-One before concluding in Defenders #20 might indeed have reached its end, the series’ new regular writer, Steve Gerber, was in no way ready to drop the plot element that had driven much of the action of that arc — the mystery behind the past life of the superheroine we knew as Valkyrie… 

Nighthawk’s feathers are more than a little ruffled by the news that, in his own uncharitable words, “it slipped her [Val’s] mind she was married!”  Confused by his reaction, Val tells him that he shouldn’t worry, that this is no concern of his — and is further flummoxed when he replies, “Yeah, I just now figured that out.  Give Hubby my fondest regards,” before telling his fellow Defenders he’ll see them back in New York, and stalking out.

Yeah, Doc, I’d say she was “unaware“, and not without good reason, in my own humble opinion.  After all, Valkyrie and Nighthawk had shared all of three adventures together (four, if you count the Squadron Sinister two-parter that first introduced Kyle Richmond to the series, and that ended with him being offered Defenders membership) prior to her leaving the team to investigate her past (or, more accurately, the past of her “host body”, Barbara Denton Norris).  OK, sure, there was Kyle’s propensity for constantly calling Val “pretty lady”, not to mention the highly inappropriate kiss Kyle planted on her lips when she was saying her goodbyes to her teammates, back in issue #17 (see flanking panels above; text by Len Wein, art by Sal Buscema and Dan Green).  But even given Val’s supposed naivete, she has little reason to think that Nighthawk doesn’t typically act that way with women in general.  Nor, really, does Dr. Strange — or, for that matter, we readers.  But, y’know, whatever.  Moving on…

OK, so the preceding three-page scene doesn’t do a whole lot to advance the overall storyline, other than to introduce the setting of Westbury, Connecticut, and to bring on stage the mysterious fellow whose rather rude thoughts we’re made privy to in the next to last panel, above — a couple of tasks that surely could have been handled with a more efficient use of space.  Nevertheless, your humble blogger has opted to reproduce the scene in full, rather than merely offer you a pithy recap, simply because it strikes me as an especially telling expression of Steve Gerber’s unique sensibility — poignant, funny, and a little unsettling, all at the same time.

I’ll also note here that though the inker who’s joined regular series penciller Sal Buscema for this issue, Sal Trapani, is hardly one of my personal favorites, his no-frills style is probably quite appropriate for the mundane scenes that take up a good bit of “Enter: The Headmen!”‘s page count.  You don’t really need the texture of a Klaus Janson, or the verve of a Joe Staton, for this kind of stuff; indeed, it might even be distracting.

Back in December, 1974, my younger self didn’t recognize either of the two gentlemen we get our first good looks at on this page — nor would I be familiar with their confederate, the “he” that’s waiting in New York, upon his first on-panel appearance, a few short pages from now.  And there were no editorial footnotes to suggest that maybe I, as well as other fans, should recognize them.  Nevertheless, all three of this story’s titular “Headmen” had in fact appeared in other Marvel comics prior to this one… as we’ll discuss in more detail towards the end of the post…

Val has had enough, and Dr. Strange obliges her, casting a spell to transport them back to New York.  Meanwhile, Nighthawk’s wings have already carried him to his penthouse apartment there, where we’ll rejoin him as he bemoans his romantic lot…

OK, Kyle’s given at least one other woman a key to his apartment, and he’s grousing because Val’s not hot for him?  Cry me a river, dude.

It’s hard to believe that it would never have crossed Nighthawk’s mind that someone with access to his residence might walk on him while he was (mostly) in costume, but that seems to have been the case.  Give the man credit, though; he doesn’t try to weasel out of the situation by inventing some absurd yarn about being dressed for a costume party, but rather, comes completely clean with Trish…

“An evil old uncle.”  That phrase likely set off some bells in ’74 among fans who recalled reading Marvel Feature #5 a couple of years back; in that issue, Ant-Man (Hank Pym) had allied himself with a brilliant and free-spirited young woman named Trixie against Hank’s old enemy — who, yes, just so happened to be Trixie’s uncle — the criminal genius known as Egghead.  Alas, your humble blogger was not one of those fans, having passed on Hank’s entire Marvel Feature run –so I’d have to wait until the following month, and the release of Giant-Size Defenders #4, to become privy to that soon-to-be-vital information.

As evening comes on, the scene shifts to elsewhere in Manhattan, as we see the Hulk’s alter ego, Bruce Banner, stumble out of an alley in Greenwich Village.  The dazed Bruce has no idea how he got there (beyond a very much on-the-nose guess that his other self has recently “gone through some mammoth emotional crisis“), but he’s nevertheless grateful that the Hulk, whatever else he might have been up to lately, eventually had the sense to head for the home of one of the Hulk’s few friends… a journey whose final steps are taken by the absolutely worn-out Bruce, himself…

One of those “sleeping minds” belongs to Trish Starr, who’s fallen out on Kyle Richmond’s sofa “in the middle of a sentence” after hours of conversation.  Suddenly, Trish snaps awake (or what at least passes for awake at first glance), screams, and rushes to the penthouse balcony, intent on taking a fifty-story dive.  Luckily, Kyle is standing at the parapet at the time; he seizes her before she goes over, and then, when she continues to struggle frantically in his grasp, he knocks her unconscious…

Is the “static” that prevents Dr. Strange’s spells from having any effect on the present situation a narrative contrivance?  Sure it is.  But, in my view, it sort of comes with the territory of having Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme participate as a member of a superhero group whose other members’ powers are primarily physical.  I don’t remember Steve Gerber being any more obvious or blatant with his “workarounds” regarding this problem than the Defenders writers before or after him (though other fans may recall things differently).  In any case, I liked having Dr. Strange as the Defenders’ de facto leader, and if that meant the storytelling sometimes strained credulity in finding ways for the good Doctor to not resolve the crisis in any given month’s issue with a few waves of his hands, I was willing to put up with it.

And with that very inconclusive ending (which lets our heroes off the hook for a 100% loss only because the bad guys, having gotten just what they wanted in their initial outing, have simply turned around and gone home), the Headmen exit the series just as abruptly as they entered… not to return for a whole ten issues.  By his own account, Steve Gerber generally didn’t know exactly what he was going to be doing in Defenders from month-to-month; still, it seems fair to assume that he expected to be around for a while.

But whence came the Headmen in the first place?  Despite the lack of any footnotes in the story itself tagging Nagan, Morgan, and Chondu as having made appearances in earlier comics, Marvel did come clean on Defenders #21’s letters page — to a certain extent, anyway:

The results of the contest were announced a few months later in the letters column of Defenders #24.  A full forty-nine readers had written in with the correct answer, all of whose names were duly listed; though, of course, only the guy whose letter was received first — one Bob Domoski, of Chicago, IL — was awarded both a no-prize (“one of our famous nothings”) as well as the promised real prize (“a page of the original artwork from DEFENDERS #21, culled from Steve’s own private collection”).

So what was the correct answer?  As it turned out, the “Marvel mag published during 1974” in which all three proto-Headmen had appeared was a reprint anthology book, Weird Wonder Tales #7.  That issue — which had been published in September, just three months prior to Defenders #21 —  had featured five stories culled from Marvel’s archives, three of which had (separately) boasted the first (and, until Defenders #21, only) appearances of Dr. Nagan, Jerry Morgan, and Chondu the Mystic.

My younger self was not a reader of Marvel’s reprint anthologies, and so, there was never any chance of my being one of those forty-nine fans who solved the puzzle.  And here’s an interesting thing; although I enjoyed reading about the Headmen in Defenders, both in issue #21 and in their later appearances, I never felt particularly compelled to go back and look up their “origin stories”, either in WWT #7 or in the old Atlas comics in which those tales had initially appeared.  And so, I assumed that Steve Gerber had taken these three characters just as he’d found them:  Dr. Arthur Nagan, a surgeon whose head has been transplanted onto a gorilla’s body; Jerold Morgan, a scientist whose researches into shrinking living tissue have resulted in his grotesque disfigurement; and Chondu the Mystic, a seer and sorcerer who, tired of having been deemed a charlatan for years, is eager to accumulate earthly wealth by any means necessary.  The way I figured it, all Gerber had done was come up with the conceit that these one-off, yet fully-formed characters, existed in the main continuity of the Marvel Universe, then tossed them all together in one story.

Your humble blogger has retained that reasonable — but largely erroneous — assumption for most of the last five decades.  It wasn’t until quite recently — when I began doing my research for this very post, in fact — that I learned that Gerber had done more imaginative work than I’d realized to bridge the gap between the Headmen’s Atlas anthology roots and their rebirth as modern Marvel supervillains, especially where Morgan and Chondu were concerned.

In the end, Dr. Nagan was the only one of the three who needed little to no updating to be suitable for his new role in the MU.  In the 5-page “It Walks Erect!” (which, for the record, was originally published in Mystery Tales #21 [Sep., 1954]), writer Paul S. Newman and artist Bob Powell had chronicled how Nagan performed pioneering surgeries to extend the lives of his wealthy American patients by replacing healthy human organs with “superior” ones harvested from apes — until his unwilling simian donors turned the tables on him, that is, using his own techniques to graft his head onto an ape’s body.  Granted, there was clearly a story to be told as to how Dr. Nagan ever managed to get out of Africa (which is where the story’s last panel, shown at right, leaves him), let alone how he reestablished himself in Westbury, CT — but, more or less, Gerber did indeed take the character as he found him.

That’s not at all the case with Jerold Morgan.  Yes, “Prisoners of the Fantastic Fog” does establish Jerry as a scientist whose success in achieving cellular shrinkage appears to have predated the similar work of Dr. Henry Pym, if only by virtue of its four anonymously-written, Angelo Torres-drawn pages first appearing in World of Fantasy #11 (Apr., 1958), more than three years before Hank became “The Man in the Ant Hill” in Tales to Astonish #27 (Jan., 1962).  But not only is the apparently well-meaning Jerry Morgan not even the main character in this yarn — that would be his racketeer stepbrother, Sam, who’s unwittingly exposed to Jerry’s shrinking gas — he never even learns that his invention is a success.  Giving Jerry criminal tendencies of his own?  Having him accidentally shrink the bones of his own head?  That’s all on Gerber.

And then there’s Chondu the Mystic, whose four-color life prior to Defenders #21 was contained within a mere three pages, as originally published in Tales of Suspense #9 (May, 1960).  In “The Wrath of Chondu”, writers Stan Lee (plot) and Larry Lieber (script), with artist Doug Wildey, portray the titular character as a famous lecturer on yoga who, though weary of the fact that his audiences regularly include “many doubters and sceptics” in addition to “a few believers”, is nevertheless dedicated to using his genuine mystical powers for the greater good, as when he puts a mental whammy on a dangerous escaped convict in the climax of this brief tale.  This version of Chondu seems to be cut from much the same cloth as the slightly later Doctor Droom (who debuted in Amazing Adventures #1 in 1961) and even the earliest iteration of Doctor Strange (whose first appearance came in 1963’s Strange Tales #110), with all three mystical adventurers owing a debt to Chondu’s almost-namesake, the 1930s-’50s radio hero Chandu the Magician.  What experiences soured the once-benevolent Chondu to ultimately turn his back on “decent society”?  Perhaps Steve Gerber knew the answer to that question; but if he did, I don’t think he ever got around to telling the rest of us.

In any event, it’s been entertaining, as well as enlightening, to learn something new about the genesis of the Headmen, fifty years after first encountering them.  I already admired Gerber for being able to generate such a weirdly effective team of supervillains from a motley trio of old Atlas stories that had been randomly reprinted together at or around the time he needed a new plot for the latest issue of Defenders; realizing at this late date just how much his own imagination brought to that venture makes me appreciate the writer’s accomplishment even more.  I’m really looking forward to revisiting the group’s next moves in its unlikely quest for world domination, which I’ll be sharing with you some ten months from now.