One of the immediate benefits of having switched my shopping for new comics to the recently-opened Stationery store was that I once again had access to Marvel’s upsized titles and Annuals. The 7-11 that I had been getting most of my comics from had long since stopped carrying any non-regulation formatted comic books, and so I missed a ton of Annuals as well as entire titles such as WHAT IF. Now that problem had been eliminated. And here’s an example; MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE ANNUAL #4, which showed up the next week. I was still a huge Fantastic Four fan, so buying this unexpected book was a simple decision.
Based on the credits, where this story had been plotted by Allyn Brodsky and laid out by Jim Craig and thereafter finished up by David Michelinie and Bob Budiansky, as well as the fact that the story is broken into two equal chapters of 17 pages each, my guess is that it started life as a two-part fill-in story that laid in inventory for a while. combining it into a single release got the story off the books. By this point, neither Brodsky nor Craig was doing much of anything for Marvel, so it makes sense that editor Roger Stern would turn to other hands to carry this Annual across the finish line. That said, the story couldn’t have been too old, considering that the villain, graviton, had only been introduced in AVENGERS a short time before.
The story opens with Black Bold, Medusa and Lockjaw arriving unexpectedly at the Baxter Building headquarters of the Fantastic Four, only to find it deserted. They’ve come seeking help to figure out the source of some air quakes that threaten to devastate their home city of Attilan. Black Bolt sends Medusa and Lockjaw back home so as to not overcrowd the story while he ventures out into Manhattan in search of the Thing at Alicia Masters’ sculpting studio. For his part, Ben is getting into some shenanigans down at the D.M V. as he needs to renew his driver’s license. Also in the area are the Avengers’ butler Jarvis and Judy Parks, a former co-worker of Graviton’s whom Jarvis had helped to rescue in the aforementioned AVENGERS storyline. There’s a quick scuffle between the Thing and Black Bolt as Ben misunderstands why and how the King of Attilan is pulling Alicia along, during which a figure in a hat and overcoat spirits Judy away, leaving Jarvis’ feet pinned to the pavement.
This figure, of course, is graviton himself, somehow returned to Earth after his defeat by the Avengers. But Graviton isn’t well, he’s suffering from partial amnesia and he can’t quite control his gravitic powers. He was drawn to Judy instinctively knowing he shared a connection to her. The Thing and Black Bolt follow graviton’s trail to an alleyway and rescue Judy, but Graviton’s powers continue to run wild, and he begins to draw the entire mass of the island that he was on when both were shot into a black hole into himself, turning him into a huge stonelike monster. This transformation brings back a bit of Graviton’s sanity, and realizing that he has no place in society in his current monstrous state, he petitions Black Bolt for asylum in Attilan. When the monarch refuses, graviton spitefully uses his powers to channel a massive solar flare aimed directly at Attilan.
The middle of the book carried the latest edition of the monthly Bullpen Bulletins column. This was the one in which, having promoted it for several months, publisher Stan Lee had to pivot and reveal that the company had run into a legal snafu with the name ODYSSEY. So instead, their new slick fantasy magazine would be titled EPIC. The page also promoted the Alice Cooper issue of MARVEL PREMIERE, an odd choice perhaps inspired by the success of the company’s two KISS magazines.
We segue into the next chapter with the Thing and Black Bolt dividing their forces. While Ben continues to attempt to corral Graviton, Black Bolt soars spaceward and uses his powers to set up a counter-explosion that prevents the solar flare from reaching the Earth or Attilan. With his attempt to destroy Attilan defeated, Graviton grows frustrated, and decides to vent his wrath on Manhattan instead. Despite their best efforts, neither the Thing nor Black Bolt can really slow Graviton down, and the giant marches away from them. The suddenly, a convenient scientist in the crowd comes forward and shares with the two heroes the theory that forcing Graviton back into the dimension where he came from would likely undo him. And the way to do that would be to hit him with a large enough chunk of anti-matter. Sounds dangerous to me, but hey, this random pedestrian is a scientist, right?
So Black Bolt gets to work, first transforming a massive chunk of rubble into anti-matter and sealing with within a magnetic “bottle” to prevent it from coming into contact with anything from our positive-matter universe until it strikes Graviton. Benjy hefts up the massive bit of anti-matter stone and the heroes continue their pursuit of Graviton. Graviton, for his part, has decided that he’s going to trash the United Nations building, so our heroes find him in the area of that structure. At the key moment, Ben hurls the anti-matter at Graviton, who just stands there and doesn’t attempt to dodge or deflect it. Seeing this, though, Black Bolt steps in to knock the anti-matter away, having doped out that what Graviton is really looking to do is kill himself.
It turns out that in a lucid moment, Graviton became disgusted with all of the carnage he’d been causing and wished to die. And so, saved by Black Bolt, he chooses to let go and allow himself to be drawn back into the dimension that he’d broken free from. And that’s how the story ends. There isn’t another word about those fierce Air Quakes that brought Black Bolt to the area in the first place. But I’m sure that the FF took care of them eventually, right? This is kind of a mess of a story, with characters passing into and out of it haphazardly, the characterizations and the stakes shaky, and the eventual wrap-up perfunctory. This may have been another reason why it lingered in an unfinished condition for a while–that it just wasn’t all that good.
There’s another clue that this story may have been hanging around for a while in inventory, and that’s this letters page on which editor Roger Stern attempts to untangle the continuity given that the last time we saw Medusa she was the captive of the evil Enclave. Roger promises that the Enclave story will be wrapped up in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR, but it kind of never is–John Byrne eventually hand-waves the entire thing away in a few panels once he gets onto the series. Roger also makes a comment about those lingering Air Quakes without directly addressing them–he knows how shoddy that bit of plotting is, so he at least hangs a lantern on it.
I just read the Epic Collection this was in. Not a good story at all. MTIO has some great little runs – like Marv’s and then Project Pegasus. But there is an awful lot of horrors in it too.
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Marvel.fandom.com for this issue says that the Air-Quakes that are plaguing Attilan are revealed to be the work of Maelstrom as revealed in Marvel Two-in-One#71-72( January-February 1981 )— good thing I checked cause I was going suggest the Enclave were behind it. I know it gives credit to Maelstrom but I can’t help but think it was caused by his minion Helio ( Who is surrounded by anti-gravitons making him lighter than air. He can fly at supersonic speeds and create turbulent winds ). Also Graviton returns in his normal form in Thor#324( October 1982 ). I noticed on the page with the UN building the Canadian Flag is seen as the Canadian villain threatens to destroy it.
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When will Tom write about Marvel Premiere Alice Cooper issue?
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I think it’s unanimous that this comic falls comfortably within the “Not Good – Not Good At All” category. Actually kudos for the the guys who drew the short sticks to attempt to put lipstick on this sorry species of swine.
Particularly baffling to me is how does Graviton – a schmuck of a villain who I recall stumbling over his own feet – somehow become a really weird monster? Who would’ve thought that a guy powerful enough to utilize a fundamental universal force need to become a Deviate reject.
Small wonder this one collected dust in a drawer for some time.
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I have to wonder about just how old this plot was.
Allyn Brodsky’s last previous Marvel credit was from 1972. And even that was over a year after the previous one. So what happened? Did he try to make a comeback, and despite his earlier stories being also pretty bad, someone gave him a shot?
I wondered, for a few minutes, if this plot might even have dated back to his earlier time at Marvel, and Roger had reworked the plot to make the monster Graviton before it was drawn. But that doesn’t make sense — Marvel might rescue a story that had been partially drawn, but just a plot? And a bad one at that? They’d have just scrapped it.
And he did plot a MARVEL TEAM-UP, out later that year, so I guess Jim Shooter decided to let him have another try, and it didn’t work out.
Jim Craig, Canada’s answer to Rich Buckler, also had another Marvel book out later that year — Steven Grant’s Marvel debut, in TWO-IN-ONE 52 — for which he also only did layouts/breakdowns. I’ve heard he was slow — he did 10 1/2 issues of MASTER OF KUNG FU, but they’re spread across 16 issues of the book — so maybe that’s why this story was finished by Bob & Bruce Patterson. Once they decided to use it there wasn’t time for Craig to finish it. Or maybe he’d been doing breakdowns on MOKF as his best way to try to meet the deadlines, and so that was all he was being hired for.
Anyway. As much as I like Graviton, this was not his finest moment. Maybe not his worst, though, either.
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That’s the Allyn Brodsky who wrote those awful Iron Man stories back in books early 30’s? I’m surprised after that brief, dismal run that he’d get another opportunity. It doesn’t appear that he had anything remarkable to offer.
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>>That’s the Allyn Brodsky who wrote those awful Iron Man stories back in books early 30’s?>>
That’s the one.
>>Brodsky also created … the Spymaster.>>
His greatest achievement at Marvel, as far as I’m concerned. I really liked the Spymaster, and even brought back the Espionage Elite, when I had my stint on IRON MAN.
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Damn. I’d forgotten that you’d brought back his Espionage Elite. I recently reread those issues and truly enjoyed them.
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I had no idea you’d brought back the IMF — er, Espionage Elite (I largely checked out of Iron Man before that). I’ll look for it.
In full agreement Brodsky’s Iron Man run was sub-par.
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An interesting aspect to Allyn Brodsky is that according to Iron Man Masterworks, he wanted to bring a more conservative voice to comics. That certainly came across in Iron Man #30 with his depictions of “Red China” and a dismissive view of environmentalists in the next issue. Brodsky also created Kevin O’Brien – brother to Michael O’Brien – and the Spymaster.
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The Inhumans need to ask the Fantastic Four for help. So what do they do? They leave behind the one guy who can’t safely talk!
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Given my own experience around the time, I’d guess this story was in fact done specifically for the annual, not as a fill-in. As I made much of my living doing Marvel fill-ins around that time, I can state with relative surety 2-issue fill-ins weren’t really a thing. I did manage to wheedle a second issue out of an editor a couple times but this story wouldn’t seem to fit the criteria.
Roger had just become editor on the book around that time, and he desperate for scripts at that time. He phrased it to me as being “18 months behind schedule” when he took over, & while that was almost certainly hyperbole, his recruiting me to write one – my first Marvel work – indicates the situation was at least somewhat dire. I’m also evidence that the schedule was tight enough that he didn’t have the time to wait for great, and good enough (like: competent) would at least briefly have to do. (This isn’t a diss on Roger, who was a very good editor, excellent at critical, in the best sense, assessment of stories, and oversaw a lot of good comments, but this was also right after Jim Shooter was made editor-in-chief with the mandate that reprints in running titles come to a quick halt and the trains be made to run on time, and I can’t imagine that was also the mandate passed on to Roger at the time.) Jim Craig also drew my issue, so he was at hand at the time. Presumably, the annual was already on the schedule and Allyn, who’d done a few stories for Marvel at the beginning of the decade, walked in at the right moment to become the guy to get it done on time.
If the story isn’t all that good, I’d guess it was not because it was lingering around but because it was created under very compressed circumstances. That it references contemporaneous Graviton continuity also suggests, as you indicate, that it wasn’t fill-in, &, given how Marvel offices worked at the time, it seems very possible the “air quakes” references may have been added by Marvel staffer Mark Gruenwald, who was regular co-writer on 2-In-1 at the time, would’ve been on location and easily able to put his two cents into the scripting, and who was already prepping his super-supervillain Maelstrom and may have used the opportunity to plant those seeds.
PS to Kurt: Jim Shooter probably didn’t take any part in allowing or disallowing any of Allyn’s plots at that time. If it was around when I came in, he was pretty much leaving the two editors, Roger & Al Milgrom, to their own devices, & as far as I know he only critiqued the comics after the make-readies came in & didn’t read the stories before that, at least in most cases
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I know that Jim was instrumental in David Michelinie getting IRON MAN and AVENGERS, when he came to Marvel looking for work.
So I’m surmising that he could have done something similar — albeit on a smaller scale — with Brodsky, even if it was just, “Here, give this guy a shot at something you’re late on.”
But certainly, Roger could have made that choice on his own, too.
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I only recently started reading Tom’s blog, and so far his posts have been mostly about Marvel titles. So, with my limited knowledge of Marvel titles, I read the issue before posting my thoughts (hence why I’m usually so late posting), and I also usually read the previous titles/issues referenced in the story at hand.
As a first-time reader of this issue I found it to be of poor quality in writing/plotting, although the artwork was OK. I know little about the Inhumans, and what I do know is pretty much what little I recall from the Inhumans TV series. So, I have no connection to the start of the story or Black Bolt. The Thing at the DMV was a fun little scene, but the rest of the story didn’t do much for me as I also had no connection to Graviton or Judy Parks*.
As for the flags, I believe the one between the Japanese and Czech flags is meant to be the Cuban flag, but I’m not sure. I’d like to know what country the mostly obsured flag between the UK and Canadian flags represents.
In my opinion the best part of this post is the in depth comment by Steven Grant and the, as always, interesting thoughts by Kurt Busiek (as an aside I bought the two Busiek/Perez Avengers omnibuses 2 years ago but still have not read them).
*After reading this issue I read The Avengers #158-159 to get Graviton’s full origin story. I found it to be much better than this story.
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Honestly, every story with Graviton (who I sometimes conflate in my head with Count Nefaria post power up) is better than this one. I’m sure if I checked what I bought this month, all of them would be better too.
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They do have similar beards.
The only time I’ve liked Graviton was Kurt Busiek’s Thunderbolts story. Making him at all interesting is a heavy lift.
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I thought that the Project Pegasus saga in MTIO was a benchmark at the time. The amazing Thundra and Deathlok! Superlative art by Perez and Sinnott. Great story. Fantasy at it’s best!
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