Both my friend David Steckel and I were fans of THE INVADERS, the World War II-era comic book that writer/editor Roy Thomas had launched a short while earlier. Part of this was simply that the book included the original Human Torch–as we both loved FANTASTIC FOUR, this affection kind of transitioned over. Additionally, though, it somehow felt like INVADERS was important, like it was illuminating a key part of Marvel’s history. I don’t know that this was felt by everybody in fandom, but it sure seems like, when INVADERS launched, it must have performed well, because Roy almost immediately began setting up a second series set in that same timeframe, the Liberty Legion. They were the featured headliner in this issue of MARVEL PREMIERE which I borrowed from Steck in order to read it for myself.
Roy had originated the name Liberty Legion back when he was just a comic book crazy kid drawing up his own homemade comic books, and here he used it to describe a team comprised of lesser-known golden age Marvel heroes of the early 1940s. I had actually heard of a bunch of these guys before reading this issue, having pored over Jim Steranko’s HISTORY OF COMICS volume that covered the also-ran Timely characters. The Liberty Legion had a large membership, but some of these characters had only appeared a handful of times in books that were thirty years old (in a few cases, only one). Still, this gave Roy the license to rework them a bit to make them more to his liking. He rolled out the concept in two issues of MARVEL PREMIERE that crossed over with two early issues of INVADERS, making the team’s debut a massive four-part epic. The group was brought together by Bucky after the other Invaders had been captured and brainwashed by the Red Skull. And that’s about where this issue open.
I liked this Liberty Legion well enough, mainly due to the fact that it featured so many assorted super heroes. In that way, it felt akin to the annual Justice League/Justice Society team-ups. But sadly, the story itself is a bit of a dopey mess. We open with Bucky and the ductile Thin Man being attacked by a brainwashed Human Torch. The torch is able to easily get the better of the both of them, but his hypnotic conditioning isn’t strong enough to get him to kill them. One the fiery crusader returns to the Red Skull’s hidden headquarters, the Skull puts him under the will-bending Nullatron to get him and the other Invaders to the point where they’ll unleash chaos and catastrophe upon the Allied forces. The Skull himself has been posing as businessman Bettman P. Lyles, and it’s in that guise that he’s able to walk among the Liberty Legionnaires and learn their plans and progress.
In his Lyles guise, the Skull is horrified to learn that Toro, the Human Torch’s flaming companion, has been restored to himself after he was taken down by the Liberty Legion. But the Skull figures that Toro is the least of the Invaders, and so he chooses to step up his campaign of terror by broadcasting a challenge to the Legion to face his ensorcelled Invaders at Yankee Stadium. Rather than cordoning off the battleground, the next day the stand of Yankee Stadium are filled with a capacity crowd hoping to watch the Legion take down the Invaders (or, alternately, see the Legion get ground into the dust by Cap, Namor and the Torch.) The crowd treats this whole thing not as a deadly conflict that will determine the fate of nations, but rather like a sporting contest, where assorted bystanders talk about putting wagers on either team. It’s all sorta dopey.
Anyway, this is hardly a fair fight given that the Invaders number a mere three, whereas there are seven Legionnaires (plus Bucky and Toro, but they don’t take the field.) At the appointed time, the Invaders drop from the sky and the battle is joined. What follows is a typical Marvel punch-em-up of the era. At this time, it was typical for almost any Marvel story to devolve into several pages wherein a bunch of costumed heroes and villains traded blows and barbs with one another. Plotless? Sure. But the action-craving young readers of the period didn’t really know any better, myself included. There’s not an awful lot of specific business in this fight either, as the Invaders aren’t themselves, and the Liberty Legion is so large that each member only gets a panel or two of spotlight–hardly enough space to give them real personalities.
But as we get to the back pages of the book, after four issues we need to resolve the story in some fashion. So it turns out that Bucky has been dressed up as a stand-in for Toro out on the field, while the Yankees’ batboy has stood in for Bucky. (Why they didn’t just let the batboy be Toro and save Bucky the impersonation is a question too fundamental for small minds such as ours. Anyway, this was all in the service of making the Red Skull and his men think that Toro had been liberated from his Nullatron control, when really he’s just as mesmerized as ever. They had worked out that the Skull was posing as Lyles earlier, but rather than capturing him then, which would seem like the sane and sensible thing to do, they instead put on this pantomime about toro so that they could lure the Skull to the area. At this point, they wake up the real Toro, who is drawn by a homing instinct towards the Skull’s current headquarters in a zeppelin positioned high above Yankee Stadium. As Toro approaches, flame meets hydrogen and the entire ship explodes in a fiery ball, killing the Red Skull (not really–the Skull was adept at somehow surviving such catastrophes, though I don’t think we ever found out how he made it out of this one) and destroying the Nullatron.
From there, all that’s left is the clean-up. The Invaders snap back to themselves with the Skull’s equipment destroyed, and the Human Torch is able to catch Toro before he plummets to his death. The Liberty Legion themselves seem almost a bit surplus-to-requirements in this finale, apart from trading blows with the Invaders. But the more popular heroes give the Homefront newcomers their thumbs up, a sentiment that’s shared by the crowds of civilians in Yankee Stadium, so the Liberty Legion will be a going concern. Except that it wouldn’t. Roy was hoping to spin off a series, one was greenlit at one point but then cancelled before it could appear, with the pages produced for it being integrated into the INVADERS comic later on. The Legion would make a follow-up appearance in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE in a crossover designed to help integrate INVADERS into the wider Marvel Universe, but that was it for them as a separate feature. And looking at this issue, I can understand why. Apart from their costumes, there isn’t anything much to any of these guys, certainly nothing that was going to hook a readership to want to see more. Roy liked them, though, so he’d continue to come back to a number of them in the months ahead.
Finding out that people in the 1940s had their own comic book superheroes to read about was like finding out about dinosaurs, and like with dinosaurs ( which they are still discovering new species to this day ) I wanted to know more( The other heroes and the villains. I knew in my bones the Red Skull was not the only one ). To bad Roy Thomas didn’t use the JSA as a template and NOT DEPOWER MISS AMERICA or SLOWED DOWN the WHIZZER. That he didn’t look at the MAN WITH DIAMOND HARD SKIN and see a SUPERMAN or HUGO DANNER. Maybe had he gone with his Nick and Nora Charles ( The Thin Man movies and novel(s) ) with the THIN MAN and OLALLA and treated them as Science Detectives and the DC COMICS Hawkman & Hawkgirl team or Ant-Man/Giant-Man/Goliath/Yellowjacket and the Wasp team — the Thin Man & Olalla had that cool advanced plane. RED RAVEN more powerful than his Timely Comics version, thanks to the energy beams from his wing tips.
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