BHOC: MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #54

The Project: P.E.G.A.S.U.S. is rightly remembered as a high-water mark in the 100-issue run of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE. And yet, it wasn’t a perfect story. There was a choice or two made that is perhaps a bit regrettable. And for one of those story decisions, this issue tells the tale. That said, it was still the best extended thing done in the series, illustrated by top-flight artists all the way through and remembered fondly by those who read it at the time, myself included. So let’s see if we can’t square that circle a little bit as we look over this issue.

MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE was being written at the time by the team of Ralph Macchio and Mark Gruenwald, both of whom were on staff editorially at the time. Assistant Editor Jim Salicrup gave them the nickname the “Two-In-One Twins” as they did their work together. Of the pair, Mark was the one more interested in pursuing writing. But Ralph was a good idea man and sounding board, and helped to keep some of Mark’s excesses in check. One of Mark’s driving considerations story-wise was always continuity and maintaining a consistent Marvel Universe. He’d made a name for himself as a fan publishing OMNIVERSE, a magazine dedicated to studying and documenting the consistency of fictional universes. Mark would also occasionally get bothered by elements of assorted series being left at loose ends; years later, this led him to do a QUASAR storyline in which dozens of half-remembered characters from the past are seen as having been captured by the extraterrestrial Stranger and exiled to his laboratory planet. On the one hand, this provided a little bit of closure for those characters. On the other hand, it intrinsically meant that nothing interesting could have happened with any of them in the interim. Mark similarly did the Scourge storyline in CAPTAIN AMERICA that eliminated a score of obscure super-villains that Gruenwald felt were surplus to requirement.

What does this have to d with this issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE? Well, within the first few pages, it is revealed that Luther Manning, the character who had been reanimated as a killer cyborg in the dystopian future had been scraped out of co-star Deathlok, leaving the character as a computer-run drone. For any reader who’d followed the Deathlok series, this had to come as a bit of a kick in the teeth to them. While it’s true that the character had been stranded in the present at the close of his series in ASTONISHING TALES and didn’t really have a place or a purpose here, this smacks of fixing a problem that really isn’t a problem. That said, Marvel was pretty good–sometimes too good–in wrapping up the storylines of cancelled series in other still-running titles in the 1970s and 1980s, so this was likely thought of as more of the same. It’s just an ignominious finale for a character who had once been a headliner (and a final fate that would eventually be undone years later.)

Anyway, here’s what’s going on in the story. The Thing had come to Project: P.E.G.A.S.U.S., a government alternate energy research center, to check in on his ward Wundarr, another cast-off of a cancelled series, who had been left there for study. He was welcomed by Quasar, the head of security who had previously gone by the code-name Marvel Man as a Super Agent of SHIELD. But there were clearly sinister goings-on happening in Project: PEGASUS, and while wandering around in the dead of night hoping to get to the root of the problem, the Thing finds himself attacked by Deathlok. There’s a big “first” moment here that’s in its way kind of cool: Deathlok’s laser pistol is able to penetrate the Thing’s rocky hide, causing him to bleed for the first time in comic book history.

A brief pause here for the above house ad illustrated by the great Marie Severin that ran in only the Roger Stern-edited series this month. There were a couple of ads such as this one done–Fred Hembeck did one for the editorial office of Al Milgrom, for example–though I’m not sure what the specific goal of them was. Perhaps it was an attempt to make the individual Marvel editors more known and recognized by the readership. Either way, this one, which was a take-off on the American Express credit card ads that were then airing on television, is pretty fun.

When Quasar and the PEGASUS guards come to the Thing’s aid, Deathlok retreats, making his way deeper into the complex in an attempt to carry out his mission objective in the most extreme way possible: by destroying the entire facility. However, Quasar catches up with him, and while the one-day-Cosmic Avenger isn’t able to defeat the killer cyborg on his own, he is able to hold him off long enough for the recovered Thing and the rest of his security detail to make their way to the fight. Outnumbered and outgunned, Deathlok attempts to execute his self-destruct protocol to take out as many of his targets as he can, but even that is stymied by Quasar’s powers. Consequently, he’s trashed and utterly destroyed–an ignominious end for a character who had begun with such potential.

Elsewhere, another character who’s been hanging on around the periphery of the Marvel Universe, Thundra, has been recruited as a fighter in a lady wrestling league. Her opponents, the Grapplers, all of whom are super-powered themselves, were actually based upon four women who worked in the Marvel offices of the time. Decades later, of course, Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley would reinvent one of them, Screaming Mimi, as Songbird of the Thunderbolts. Here, though, in their first appearance, Thundra puts paid to the entire quartet with her voluminous strength.

And as the issue draws to a close, back at Project: PEGASUS, Dr. Felix Lightner, who was previously the MTIO-villain Black Sun and who is now working for the same shadowy figures who sent Deathlok, continues his efforts to put together an Nth Projector. In order to conceal his work, now that Deathlok has been destroyed before he could accomplish his goal of eliminating the Thing, Lightner releases yet another character from the Marvel Universe’s past. This is Nuklo, the radioactive mutant son of Golden Age super heroes the Whizzer and Miss America, and who like Wundarr is being incarcerated at the facility in the hopes of finding a way to use his powers beneficially. Nuklo has the mind of a child, and Lightner releases him from confinement, hoping that he’ll cause chaos within Project: PEGASUS. And that’s where this issue is To Be Continued!