BHOC: INVADERS #36

This week brought a new issue of INVADERS to the spinner rack in my local 7-11, a series that I was still quite a fan of, even though its quality had been dipping in recent months. Artist Frank Robbins had departed the title, and despite the fact that many fans of the era would cheer that fact, the bevy of artists who replaced him didn’t have his facility with storytelling or in capturing the feel of the period. This coincided with a point where Roy Thomas, who had come up with INVADERS as a wish-fulfillment project for himself starring his childhood heroes, had relocated to the West Coast, and so was forced to hand over responsibilities for the stories to other hands for a while. The book wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t as enthralling as it had been when both Roy and Robbins had been in the driver’s seat full time.

I don’t want to spend too much time repeating the complaints about Alan Kupperberg’s artwork that I’ve voiced in other, earlier pieces. Leave us simply say that I didn’t like it, and that it was often filled with spongy figures and lousy drawing. In this particular issue, I don’t know that the open inking style of Chic Stone really helps matters much. Stone was a much more polished artist than Kupperberg, but he tended to ink with bold outlines and few spotted blacks, which left the pages perhaps too open to color in an era when the coloring was often at the mercy of the separations houses. The point being, while it was a solidly enough crafted comic book, it also felt a bit amateurish and “not ready for Prime Time.” I don’t know that I could have articulated these concerns as a young buyer, but they impacted on the reading experience nonetheless.

This storyline was conceived to get some use out of pages penciled for a proposed spin-off of INVADERS, THE LIBERY LEGION. Work had begun on the title some many months earlier, but Roy had overestimated the public’s hunger for stories with super heroes battling Nazis several decades earlier. So this issue picks up from the cliffhanger in those repurposed pages with a new villain, the Iron Cross, having captured all of the Liberty Legionnaires save the Whizzer, who has sought out the Invaders to help in the fight. By the time the Invaders make it back to where the battle had taken place, the Iron Cross and his guys are all gone. But the heroes are able to take a couple of minutes to help with the rescue efforts of the train that was derailed in the initial attack.

The Iron Cross has retreated back to a concealed German submarine with the captive Liberty Legion as well as Professor Franz Schneider, who was the creator of the Iron Cross’s suit of armor. We learn that the Cross is really Helmut Gruler, and that despite the seeming age difference between them, he and Schneider were childhood friends growing up in Germany. Gruler, though, is so patriotic about his homeland that he’ll follow Hitler even though he isn’t himself a Nazi, whereas Schneider made his way to the United States when Naziism came in. Schneider had intended for he Iron Cross armor to be used to oppose Hitler’s forces and to help liberate his homeland–but Gruker had found it after Schneider had left it behind while fleeing to America, and he’s instead chosen to use its power in the service of Germany, It’s a nice attempt on Roy’s part to introduce some ambiguity into what had largely been presented as a black-and-white, good guys vs bad guys conflict. Unfortunately, he writes Gruler as cruelly and villainously as any Nazi, so the point is somewhat blunted. He’s in no way a sympathetic character, even though he hasn’t officially signed on to the Nazi line of thinking.

The Invaders, though, are in pursuit of the Cross, following a secret signal beacon that Miss America has within her uniform that the Whizzer was able to pick up a signal from. In the Sub-Mariner’s flagship, they follow the signal out to sea, realizing that it’s coming from a submarine. Despite the fact that they’re flying in Namor’s Atlantean cruiser which can cut through the water as easily as the sky, most of the Invaders stay topside in the ship while the Sub-Mariner dives into the briny deep to seek out the submarine close up. Seeing his approach, the Iron Cross launches himself out into the ocean, his armor watertight and containing a built-in oxygen supply. And so we get the issue’s obligatory battle sequence, as the Iron Cross and the Sub-Mariner clash beneath the waves.

It seems like a fight that shouldn’t go the distance, as it stands to reason that the Iron Cross’s 1940s-made armor can’t be the equal of Tony Stark’s in the present, whom Namor went toe-to-toe with on several occasions. But for the sake of the story, the Cross is able to give as good as he gets, and while neither battler really takes the win, neither do either of them get the upper hand. At one point, Namor and the Iron Cross collide with the submarine, damaging the flow of the gas that keeps the Liberty Legion contained in tubes. And so those other heroes awaken and burst out of their prisons ready to lay the smack-down on the submarine crew (and not really realizing immediately that they are on a submarine. And in fact, that massive room that they seem to be in would have a hard time fitting onto a conventional sub.)

The story is now crazily overstuffed with costumed super heroes, most of whom don’t get to do anything meaningful within its pages. Better, I would think, to have left the Legion unconscious and allow the Invaders to carry the ball. But, hey, what do I know? In any event, we’re getting to the end of the issue now, so it’s climax time. The submarine has been critically damaged by the battle, and is beginning to flood and sink. The Iron Cross breaks off the fight, races into it to gather up Professor Schneider and race away with him–he needs the Professor to make improvements to his armor, you see–and the Liberty Legion are now trapped within the sinking sub. To Be Continued! Nobody seems to much care about any of the other people on board the sub, given that they’re evil Nazis they no doubt deserve their fate. And even as a kid, I figured that at the very least Jack Frost could stop the flooding by freezing the gap in the hull solid, so the Legion wasn’t in all that much danger. But this would all play out a month later.