Brand Echh: SPITFIRE AND THE TROUBLESHOOTERS #1

The second of the New Universe titles to make its debut (at the same time as STAR BRAND #1) was ultimately one of the line’s more troubled outings, right from the get-go. It only lasted a little bit over a year, a casualty of the line being contracted and re-envisioned following Editor in Chief Jim Shooter’s departure from Marvel. Even before that, the title of the series would change twice, once eliminating the name of the secondary characters and then in an unsuccessful attempt to re-brand a reconfigured version of the series before it reached cancellation. This was SPITFIRE AND THE TROUBLESHOOTERS.

When Jim Shooter had first conceived of his New Universe initiative, he had high hopes for the sorts of creators that Marvel would be able to recruit to populate the line. Legends tell of one early meeting where names such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other similar science fiction authors were considered–never mind that by the time of the meeting, some of them were deceased. But as the clock ticked down and it became more and more difficult to attract even established comic book talent to come up with material for the new line, Shooter was forced to consider the efforts being put forward by more journeyman creators. One such creator was Eliot Brown, who was then an assistant editor and production man at Marvel and who today is probably best remembered for his technical designs featured in the OFFICIAL HANDBOOK OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE, and online for his many photographs of the period when he was working in comics. Eliot was on the front lines of the struggle to come up with new titles that fit Shooter’s somewhat-restrictive and somewhat fluid parameters, and he had a concept that he thought might fit the bill.

Brown’s idea concerned a professor at M.I.T. whose father was developing an experimental robotics prototype. When Karl Swensen is killed, Jennifer, whom he nicknamed Spitfire due to her red hair and fiery take-no-prisoners attitude, teams up with a quintet of brilliant-but-inexperienced engineering students to liberate his invention before the black-hearted people who killed her father for it can get their hands on it. Brown bounced around his ideas with letterer and fellow production person Jack Morelli, and sold the idea to Shooter for the new line. Unfortunately for both Brown and Morelli, while they were permitted to write up the overview of the series as well as a plot for the first issue, they weren’t seen as having the necessary experience to script the finished comic. That job was farmed out to veteran writer Gerry Conway, who would wind up writing the next bunch of issues solo. (Brown apparently found out about this replacement when he went to drop of the first portion of his and Morelli’s dialogue with editor Bob Harras only to learn that Conway had been hired in their stead. Whether that decision was made by Harras or by Shooter is difficult to say with certainty.)

Karl Swensen’s big invention is M.A.X, short for Man Amplified X-Periment. It’s a large armored suit, along the lines of Iron Man’s armor, but bulkier and much less fanciful. The idea here was for it to be a more plausible take on that kind of concept, but in practice, this made it look like a clunky antique when on the stands next to the armored Avenger’s comic. The artwork was provided by Herb Trimpe, who had found a niche for himself working on assorted licensed properties and toy tie-in titles. Consequently, SPITFIRE AND THE TROUBLESHOOTERS looked a bit like one of those, as though the M.A.X. design was a toy that Trimpe was attempting to breathe life into. For this first issue, which was pretty obviously running behind schedule, slick inking was provided by the dependable Joe Sinnott tag-teaming with Romita’s Raider correction man Tom Morgan. Moving ahead, a variety of inkers would be called into service to finish Trimpe’s penciled pages.

Not only do Spitfire and her five helpers, called collectively the troubleshooters, make off with M.A.X, but also with Karl Swensen’s entire laboratory as well. In a plot contrivance that utterly belies the attempt to make this series a more plausible alternative to Iron Man, Karl Swenson has constructed his lab so that it collapses into a trio of long-haul diesel trucks–Brown and Morelli were no doubt thinking about the toy applications. So the set-up once this first issue is concluded is that Spitfire and the Troubleshooters are on the move in their three big rigs, attempting to remain one step ahead of their government contract pursuers who want to use M.A.X. for military and black ops purposes. The bad guys are able to reverse-engineer their own flying exo-skeletons from Swensen’s designs (which makes one wonder what they truly need M.A.X. for) which gives the team a series of recurring challenges to have to face down.

It’s pretty clear that, for writer Gerry Conway, taking over SPITFIRE AND THR TROUBLESHOOTERS was a hired gun job, nothing more. He’d continue to write the series through issue #6, in a few cases with his friend Roy Thomas co-writing and co-plotting. As with pretty much all of the New Universe titles, a fill-in art job was needed quickly given how late production on the new line got under way, and Trimpe’s last issue at the helm was #5. In #6, changes were clearly in the offing, as that issue was co-written by Conway and not Thomas but rather DC expat Cary Bates. With issue #7, Bates took over the title, and with Alan Kupperberg on the artwork, he began to immediately retool it. Conway had already killed off the main series villain, Fritz Kroetze, and Bates wrote out the Troubleshooters and destroyed M.A.X., transitioning the premise into a more espionage-based book under the new title CODENAME: SPITFIRE. But almost immediately after making that change, Bates was gone, and the series limed to a conclusion in issue #13 with Jenny Swensen getting a new armored suit under a couple of different fill-in writers including Fabian Nicieza, Len Kaminski and Sandy Plunkett.

As a reader, this first issue was competent but dull. As was the case with virtually all of the New Universe books, there wasn’t a lot of color or excitement to be found here. It all plays like a tie-in series to a toy line that doesn’t exist–Marvel did a lot of these to great success during this time period, so it wasn’t necessarily a bad instinct to try to build a similar home-grown property. But it was all much less interesting or impressive than the similar fare being put forward in the main Marvel line. And the artwork resolutely reflects EIC Shooter’s preference for mid-shots, grid-based storytelling and almost diagrammatical action sequences. The cast is equally bland, with nobody especially evidencing much in the way of an individual personality. In other words, it’s all a bit lifeless. The two people who might have had some passion for what they were doing, Brown and Morelli, regardless of how green they might have been at that moment, had been left by the wayside. Throughout this short run, one never gets the sense that anybody is trying for anything more interesting or challenging than a piece of competent product.