BHOC: DEFENDERS #75

Brevoort History of Comics

My family were big fans of the Muppet Show every since it first premiered in 1976. We watched it with alarming regularity every Sunday evening at 7:30. So when Jim Henson and company brought their chaotic creations to the big screen, we were sure to be there. And so we were when The Muppet Movie opened at around the time I bought this issue of DEFENDERS. There are those who prefer one or another of the later Muppet films, but in my opinion, none of them ever captured the characters better nor showcased their individualistic and anarchic value more spectacularly than this first Muppet Movie. It remains a great piece of entertainment.

Which, sadly, is more than I can say for DEFENDERS #75. As a series, DEFENDERS had been predicated on a shaky premise to start with: the idea that its leads formed a “non-team” that would still routinely come together every month to join forces against some threat or another. But ever since the departure of writer Steve Gerber, like air slowly being let out of a tire, the entertainment value of DEFENDERS was slowly leaking away. This wasn’t entirely rock bottom, but it was at least circling the drain. And yet, despite all of that, I still never wavered in buying it each and every month. It’s likely that I had drunk the Kool-Aid about the Marvel Universe being an interlocking tapestry, and feeling that a team series in particular was going to be important to keep up with. Comic book fans can make dumb choices sometimes.

We were at least beyond the dreary multi-part Tunnelworld saga, so that was a plus. But in the current story, writer Ed Hannigan was once again attempting to tap into Gerber’s particular strain of madness by bringing in one of Gerber’s other characters: the Foolkiller. The Foolkiller was something of a left-wing parody of the sort of two-fisted vigilante that populated men’s paperback book series and the like. He dispensed lethal punishment to all of those he felt didn’t live a poetic life, considering them fools. The whole thing was absurd, but here Hannigan tries to make the character a bit more plausible, fitting him into a super hero universe. It doesn’t work all that well. I liked the concept of the Foolkiller, but while i tried to enjoy most of this issue, it took some sustained effort from me.

As this story opens, the Foolkiller has wormed his way into the Richmond Riding Academy where the Defenders hang out and he’s taken Dollar Bill hostage. The situation is a complete mismatch, as almost any of the super heroes in attendance–Valkyrie, Clea, Hellcat–ought to be able to take Foolkiller down expediently without jeopardizing Dollar Bill’s life. But the plot calls for them not to do this, so they go along as Foolkiller pops in a tape of the recent broadcast of Dollar Bill’s documentary about the team, explaining how the footage reveals them all as fools. As Valkyrie makes a move against him, Foolkiller is able to momentarily stun her with his zap-pistol, then bring the entire ceiling of the building down atop them all, escaping in the chaos. Meanwhile, heading back from a meeting where he’s been legally ordered to give him his costumed life, Kyle Richmond gets a call about the battle being raged at his Riding Academy, and despite the court order against him suits up again as Nighthawk to enter the fray.

There’s a bit of a strange PSA here in the narrative as we cut to the Incredible Hulk, who has come across a beached whale. At first angry about the whale disturbing his solitude, once the Green Goliath realizes that the whale cannot re-enter the surf on its own, he uses his great strength to pull the whale back into the ocean. There’s an editorial note giving readers concerned about similar whales the address of Greanpeace. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Valkyrie is finally able to get her hands on Foolkiller, and that’s all she wrote for him. She clobbers him quickly and well, ending the ongoing conflict.

By the time Nighthawk is able to get to the Academy, the place is already swarming with EMTs, firefighters and cops, and the place is in an absolute wreck. Nighthawk flips out at the damage done to his property, right at a time when his fortune and good name are already being challenged. When a reporter hungry for a statement mistakenly calls him Hawkeye, Nighthawk loses his cool, declaring that the Defenders are disbanded before kicking them all off his property. It’s at this point that the Hulk shows up and starts smashing up cop cars, thinking the authorities are hassling his super hero friends.

Valkyrie steps in to calm the Hulk down, but upon hearing that the group is kaput, the upset behemoth leaps away. Val wasted no time in blaming herself, because Kyle left her in charge of the team while he was gone, and she let all of this happen. At this point, Richard Rory and Amber, who had accompanied Foolkiller, ask for Val and Hellcat’s help in locating their missing friend James-Michael Starling. J-M had been the headline character of another discontinued Gerber strip, OMEGA THE UNKNOWN. And indeed, in a final epilogue, we see Omega himself laid out on a slab in a Las Vegas morgue. At the cancellation of the OMEGA series, Marvel had promised that the story would be concluded in DEFENDERS, no doubt imagining that Gerber would handle it there. Instead, this chore fell to Ed Hannigan to complete–and not mincing any words, he utterly botched it. But we’ll find out more about that as we get to the point where I bought both of those issues. For the time being, this was another underwhelming issue in a string of underwhelming issues. But still I kept plugging along and buying it.

ADDITION: As any number of people have pointed out, it wasn’t Ed Hannigan who wrote the next two issues that wrap up the Omega the Unknown plotline, but rather Steven Grant.

Published

39 thoughts on “BHOC: DEFENDERS #75”

  2. There’s weird and quirky. Then there’s just plain bad. Unfortunately, it would seem that The Defenders at this point fall directly into that latter camp. While I’m not a fan of Herb Trimpe’s art, the bone I’ll pick with this issue is the story. Disregarding that the Foolkiller should not have lasted more than a panel against any of the team members, it’s seems that the writer is going overboard trying channel his inner Steve Gerber, while forgetting that not everything Gerber did on this series could be considered weird and quirky. Sure, Gerber’s humor and personalty founds its way into most of his work – which was definitely a good thing. But from my admittedly limited outside perspective, it seemed that those dozen issues with the Headman and Nebulon became the mandatory template for The Defenders. And that seemed to further limit a book that already struggled to define it’s existence.

    As for the Muppets, who doesn’t love them? Who hasn’t appreciated their movies? Who doesn’t have fond memories of that delightful TV show? And who ever thought they should be used for an episode of “Strange New Worlds”? (And no, I’m having a hard time letting that one go.)

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    1. What? You didn’t enjoy the puppet episode of Strange New Worlds? I’m just glad it was a dream ( Had it been me and not Spock, my brain would have kicked me out of the dream around 15 minutes into the episode ).

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      2. I hated the musical episode and when they had one I knew would bother me a few episodes later, I just never watched it again.

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      3. I didn’t mind the musical episode, considering a fun, very offbeat exception to the rule. Unfortunately, offbeat “theme” episodes seem to have become the norm. I watch little television as it is. SNW had been my favorite show. Now, I’m just hoping that they at least end the series with a couple decent episodes. BTW, if you don’t mind my asking, what was the episode that you said would bother you?

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      4. The one where the engineer was infected with an alien embryo. There was enough out there about it that I knew it would hit some bad buttons in me.

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  3. Yes, this was utter crap. Hannigan was not the right writer for this type of story. I’m gonna Google his publishing history to look for any evidence he was the right writer elsewhere out of curiosity. Completism kept me on through the this very dark and very long stretch of abysmal stories (the terrible thing they did to Omega is next and I may skip your entry because I still seethe over it) and the horrid way they got rid of Barbara Norris is on its way. The latter was necessary but wow, did they give us crap there too. I will go to my grave championing Trimpe but yeah, he was not a good choice for this book but at least he delivered better goods than every writer he was paired with that I can think of.

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  4. Way under the potential of the characters. I think Hannigan was better drawing the Defenders than he was writing them.

    I like the Green Peace reference, though. The Hulk has compassion.

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  5. Took me forever to see the Muppet Movie. Too young to go by myself and too old to ask anybody to take me. Anyways, we’re back again in the depths of Kyle’s Kooky Quartet. No idea what the sales were like, but I’m pretty sure Defenders survived solely to give the Hulk a second book, third if want to count the Hulk reprints in Marvel Super-Heroes, during the run of his TV series. That it survived another 77 issues is one of the wonders of the Marvel Age of Comics. That it was only cancelled to make room for the New Universe is yet another one.

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    1. The Defenders was cancelled because the sales were substandard. Marvel in the mid-1980s was publishing anything and everything that was thought might meet a certain profit level. The company was for sale, and doing everything it could to maximize revenue and its attractiveness to a buyer. The company’s production capacities were pushed to the breaking point. Nothing was cancelled to make way for the New Universe, or Classic X-Men, or The ‘Nam, or Elektra: Assassin, or any other titles that debuted in 1986. Where did you get that?

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      1. You’re quite wrong, although it is true Marvel cancelled its lowest sellers. See my reply to The Steve Who Is Always Right below.

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      3. I’m quite wrong?

        You seriously believe that Marvel, particularly given how prolific it was at the time, would cancel a book just to make room on its production schedule for a new title that wouldn’t be published for another eight months? Oo-kay.

        Truth be told, if The Defenders was only being cancelled to make room on Marvel’s schedule, that would have been for the benefit of X-Factor, which was what replaced it among Marvel’s Week 4 ongoing titles.

        However, as a rule, the only reason Marvel would cancel The Defenders or anything else is because the sales performance was sub-standard. Published sales reports indicate that The Defenders generally hovered near the bottom sales-wise among the newsstand titles, and quite close to Marvel’s publicly acknowledged cancellation threshold. Its being dropped should not be seen as a surprise.

        Beyond that, a few things. Wikipedia should never be taken at face value. Fanzine writers tend to be very bad historians. They’re often very rah-rah about their subjects, and very gullible when told what they want to hear. As for Peter B. Gillis, it’s a rare comic-book creator with the candor to admit an assignment was terminated, by cancellation or otherwise, because the sales sucked. When choosing between admitting that or deflecting, they invariably deflect. And they say bonkers stuff like Marvel cancelling a series because it needed to keep its production schedule open for a new title that wouldn’t debut for another eight months, and despite all the other new titles that debuted in the interim.

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      2. Didn’t RSMartin say that there were no New Universe related cancellations? He and John Holstein are pretty reliable with that kind of information.

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  7. Hannigan had nothing to do with the conclusion of the Omega the Unknown story, so I don’t know how he botched it. Hannigan didn’t write Defenders 76 & 77, Steven Grant did.

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  8. It was Steven Grant who wrapped up the Omega storyline, not Ed Hannigan. I believe Steven follows this blog. So, when Tom does cover those issues, perhaps Steven can share his side of the story, although I know he’s written about it elsewhere. All I can say is, it sort of sounds like he was handed a poisoned chalice when he was told to try to conclude an utterly bizarre proto-Vertigo type series that only writers Steve Gerber & Mary Skrenes knew where it was going, and which they refused to divulge to anyone else.

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    1. Oh, I don’t blame the creative team. Crap endings to cancelled book were line wide. Can you imagine if a crap creative team had done it?

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  9. To be fair, I don’t think there was anyone alive who could write a Gerberesque story better than Gerber himself. Maybe Grant Morrison could have come up with an interesting conclusion to the Omega the Unknown story, but, of course, he was still a decade or so from breaking into the business back then. I was still collecting the Defenders but by this point only out of habit than actual enjoyment. I hung until a bit past the 100th issue. Don’t recall that I got any of the X-Defenders issues, but then, my memory of most of the issues past the 50th is pretty spotty. Gerber’s stories stuck with me pretty well as does Kraft’s Scorpio epic, but afterwards, IMO, the quality of the stories took a nosedive. I really didn’t like what was done with Red Guardian II and I preferred Hellcat when Englehart was writing & Perez drawing her in the Avengers. In the Defenders, she didn’t seem to be the same character.

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    1. We’re on the same page. I drifted back to this series for the Scorpio stories – although I was too naive to fully “get” them – and quickly abandoned it afterwards, hating what happened to the Red Guardian and not being wild about Hellcat.

      As for Omega, no question whomever drew the short straw to craft that conclusion had been handed a Gordon’s knot to unravel. And for what it’s worth, I’d ditched Omega before its conclusion as well – meaning that not everything Gerber wrote worked for me.

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      2. Scorpio’s suicide bothered me enough to never forget that arc. I checked Wiki but Jake Fury’s history is confusing. Is he still alive, John?

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    2. Grant Morrison was already being published by 1979, albeit in British comics like Near Myths and Starblazer. Realistically, of course, he wasn’t on the radar of American comic books.

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    3. The Steve Who Is Always Right, according to marvel.fandom.com Jake Fury got redeemed when the Scorpio ( Jake Fury ) in the Defenders was revealed to be a LMD. The real Jake Fury helped Nick in a secret war against Hydra and Leviathan. It says he disappeared after that mission.

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  10. I bought Defenders sporadically during the Gerber years, but was a pretty steady reader from issue #47 on. Walked away after issue #77 and maybe read one or two issues after that before it was cancelled years later. I had a subscription that ran from #66-#77 which might be one of the worst decisions of my long life.

    Trimpe was capable of much better work than this and Esposito is doing him no favors. That double page splash shows some spark, but the figures throughout the book are stiff and don’t seem to be looking at each other.

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  11. esposito was maybe not great over herb here? maybe it was trimpe’s style loosening up a bit, the layouts, the angles all have that familiar herb feel, i dunno…when trimpe inked himself on those incredible hulk issues (in the 120’s ish) he had some stuff going on, exciting stuff. that was also several years earlier in his career, but with esposito here, kinda dullsville

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    1. I think Trimpe was ill-suited for a team book set in a riding academy. I think he was much better in books with settings that played to his strengths featuring outlandish tech and giant monsters. There’s a certain logic that he would be put on the Defenders since the Hulk is so prominent, but Trimpe was no Don Heck or Sal Buscema when it comes to instances where the characters are just chewing the fat… which is a significant chunk of any team book.

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  12. Wow, lots of comments on this post. As at this time I was buying silver age DC back issues as my primary comic reading material, so I didn’t read this when it was published. Since the issue begins on a cliffhanger, I read the previous issue first.

    I have to say that I like Herb Trimpe’s artwork on the 2 issues (other than the full-page panel of Kyle taking to the Defenders on page 7 in issue ##74. His whole body bothers me, especially his very large and very square jaw). The two-page spread of Nighthawk arriving at the stable looks gorgeous on Marvel Unlimited (far better looking than the scan Tom has here – and with no gutter). I also like the dialogue in the scene, which is quite humorous.

    As for the story, in my opinion it was pretty strange.

    I’m not a Hulk fan: I’ve never liked his character and from these issues it seems that the character was in one of the periods when he was able to think rationally but also still resorts to smashing first. In the previous issue he destroys a LIR train engine, a station and at least several yards of track and in this issue he destroys a police car, yet he also helps a beached whale (quite the non-sequitur) after he rationalizes that he has no reason to mad at the whale (and yet he’s unable to do the same when humans are involved!). Other than slowing down the pace of the story in the two issues I see no reason Hulk is even in either issue.

    We also have a villain who thinks himself a hero and goes around killing, or not, people based on his personal sensibilities. And yet he has friends who think he could be a hero (I presume), and come along with him to meet the Defenders. Then, just a little bit latter he’s willing to let them die so he can kill the Defenders. And why don’t the Defenders stop him before he destroys the main house?

    And in the two issues we don’t really see the Defenders in action, other than a few panels showing Wildcat running from Foolkiller and Valkyrie finally knocking him around. And all this leads to another non-sequitur, at least for someone who has never read or heard of Omega the Unknown. At least Tom’s post explains that Foolkiller’s friends are actually there to ask the Defenders for help to find another friend.

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  13. I was 8 years old when this came out, and I think this may have been the first issue of DEFENDERS that I bought new. I would have read some of the previous issues via the bagged packs found in grocery stores, however. Anyway, I loved the series from this point on, until around #112 or so. Being a new comics reader and a child at the time, I was less critical than most of the people commenting about it here. I’m 55 now, but I still can’t help but have fond memories of the series during this period even today when I see these pages again. In particular the friendship of Valkyrie and Hellcat — with the increasing presence of Clea in the series — was like a female counterpart to the male hero friendships that I enjoyed reading in other comics.

    The cover of this issue was a shocker to me when I first saw it. Me & the kids on my street thought at first that it meant the series might truly be ending, the team broken up and the book cancelled. I thought of the Defenders as just below the Avengers in terms of importance to me. And it seemed like Marvel at the time was making shocking moves like this for some reason, so we couldn’t know that the cover didn’t need to be taken seriously. The same month that DEFENDERS #75 came out, I also bought and read AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #196, where I (and Peter Parker) learned that Aunt May was dead, and CAPTAIN AMERICA #237, where I (and Steve Rogers) learned that Sharon Carter was dead. So, the cover of DEFENDERS #75 seemed to be part of this disturbing trend (to my mind, back when I was 8) of Marvel killing off characters or, in this case, breaking up a favorite superhero team.

    The Defenders would be revitalized only 3 issues later, however, with the reunion of the original three Defenders (Hulk, Dr. Strange & Sub-Mariner). It was like starting over fresh — “back to the basics,” before that became a trend elsewhere at Marvel. So, this era of Defenders means a lot to me, even if it don’t mean much to many others.

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  14. I was gone from the book by this point. Hannigan also mangled the wrap-up of Don McGregro’s second Black Panther arc. I’m quite sure, much as I didn’t like the Omega resolution, Hannigan would have come up with a worse one.

    I still like the idea of an informal, unstructured super-team of friends. But that didn’t help during this painful era.

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