Highway 62

That, however, was last week. This week, the crown clearly belongs to ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS, though it’s a split decision between volumes two and three. Writer Steve Gerber’s title-defining run actually begins in MARVEL TWO IN ONE, but that’s par for the course where the Defenders are concerned. At best, they were an ad-hoc group of heroes who really didn’t belong in any other group (the aloof Dr. Strange, the even aloofer Silver Surfer and the antisocial Hulk). In fact, they weren’t a superhero group as much as they were an encounter group, working out their own issues (and boy did they ever have ‘em) in between bouts of mystical threats and bizarre villainy.

In the first five pages of “Death-Song Destiny”, we’re introduced to a host of characters (aside from the ones we already know, that being Dr. Strange and his sometimes paramour Clea): an unshaven drunk who may or may not be fated to destroy the universe, twin faces of burnt-out humanity who callously destroy a figure of cosmic innocence, and a couple of yuppies (some ten years before the term would be coined), and the harmonica-playing woman who explodes into a shower of sparks as she’s run over by a 2nd Avenue subway train (she being the figure of cosmic innocence). All that remains is the harmonica, “Celestia” engraved on its face. Five pages, ladies and gents, and already we’re treated to absurdity that superhero comics have forgotten to even dream of. And it only gets better.

This being MARVEL TWO IN ONE, we get a big helping of Ben Grimm, who shows his more human side, coming to the aid of a figure from his past (the grandmother of one of the twin faces of burnt-out humanity mentioned above). Turns out that the matronly figure was a surrogate mother for Grimm during his days on Yancy Street, and she’s concerned for her grandson. Why? Because he’s being consumed by his own perceived destiny, that of being a rat in the rat-trap tenements of the city. And he’s not the only one. The yuppie couple end up facing their own anonymity in the success machine. Luckily the Thing and Dr. Strange are able to help both parties get Their Heads Straight, but only after they overcome their own feelings of powerlessness. Yeah, there’s plenty of melodrama to go around, but this is superhero comics. More interestingly, it’s superhero comics where the superheroes are mere facilitators. They can’t do a thing until the ordinary people make the first move. I guess there’s only so much that costumes and omnipotence are good for, eh?

The second part of the story involves the Thing and the Valkyrie (one of the few constant members of The Defenders) tracking down the cosmic harmonica and keeping it out of the clutches of the Enchantress and her crony, the Executioner. You’d think that this would be a more straight-up long underwear punchfest, but you’d be wrong. Because it’s really the story of Alvin Denton, onetime lawyer and now a professional drunk. As it turns out, he’s the father of Barbara Norriss, who is the mortal vessel for The Valkyrie (and thus is just the merest surface of a tortured backstory that could only exist in comics). When Denton, who’s lost it all and thinks he’s recovered a piece of it in his daughter, is rejected, he becomes despondent, shattered. And in that moment, he blows on the harmonica. The harmonica that is somehow tied to all destiny. The world, all of it, is destroyed, leaving a handful of beings in limbo. One of them is the Thing, who gets his hands on the harmonica and blows upon it, playing a tune to bring Everything back. And this exchange from the last two panels really says it all, as Valkyrie mourns the passing of Barbara Norriss’ father.

Valkyrie:
He is…dead. The one man who could have told me all about Barbara…her childhood…her likes and dislikes. Her bonds with outher humans…All the factors which made her a person and without which – I am but an empty façade, a fiction.

Thing:
Uh-uh. Whatever ya are, kid – it ain’t that. Or my shoulder wouldn’t be getting’ drenched. Paper dolls don’t cry. Only us real people got that problem.

Only in comics.

Shortly thereafter, we’re introduced to the Headmen, who become the arch-nemeses of the Defenders (though working from the shadows for the most part) for the entire length of Gerber’s run on the book: Dr. Nagan, organ transplant specialist whose human head was grafted onto a gorilla’s body, grafted by the very gorillas he operated on (wrap your noggin around that); Jerold Morgan, who tried to beat Henry Pym in the shrinking sweepstakes, but only did so in a half-measure, shrinking his bones but not his flesh and skin; Chondu the Mystic, a third rate mystic who ended up having his brain transplanted into the body of the Defender Nighthawk, before being transformed into a hideous refugee from a Ray Harryhausen movie; and Ruby, a computer scientist who replaced her own cranium with organic circuitry, able to take a multitude of shapes and forms.

This being the 70s for Marvel, the storylines are all epic. The Defenders/Headmen plot ran from issue #20 of the DEFENDERS to #40. So much for being constructed in tidy six-issue arcs. It was understood that the writing had to drive a monthly comic book, that people had to be paradoxically satisfied and yet left wanting enough to come pick up the next issue once the month turned over. And it wasn’t enough to point at character motivation, it had to be made explicit and in quantity. So certainly by today’s standards for superhero books, these stories are over-written. But in comparison to these, today’s are under-written and un-ambitious. Instead of Kyle Richmond, the Nighthawk, silently anguishing about his personal pain and his inability to take advantage of what’s been given to him (as would be a subplot in NIGHTHAWK GETS REAL SAD COMICS), we get Kyle Richmond reliving his life as a brain in a jar (after being removed by the Headmen) and using that experience to integrate his character.

It’s crazy. It’s demented. It’s deranged. It only works in comics, but it works. And that’s only part of the Headmen story. There’s the baby deer who’s saved by the hulk, only to become the receptacle for the disembodied mind of Chondu the mystic, whose brain resides in Nighthawk’s body, but is exorcised by Dr. Strange in an effort to find Kyle Richmond’s ex-craniated brain. And as a diversion, there’s a story featuring the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Defenders joining forces to overthrow the Badoon who’ve taken over the earth a thousand years from now, rampaging through the most memorable of a long line of Grim Futures envisioned for Marvel Earth.

Satire goes belly-up to farce when Nebulon (who wants to save humanity by enslaving it) opens up a new school of self-help where people embrace their inner Bozo (as in the scarlet-maned clown) and admit the absurdity of their own lives. It’s a three-way battle for the fate of humanity between the twin forces of Order Gone Amok of the Headmen and Nebulon and Benign Chaos in the form of the barely-holding-it-together Defenders. And they’re barely holding it together because they’re just humans. In the end, that’s enough.

And in Gerber’s world, that’s enough. It’s enough that humans strive to live with themselves in their world. He’s not interested in titanic gods who shrug their shoulders and make mountains fall. Gerber, above all, writes these people as characters with their own failings, but ultimately, these characters never forget that they are heroes. More interestingly, he can do this while working within the 70s Marvel house style, which is as bombastic as any you’d care to name. But I never got the sense that THE DEFENDERS was out to break the mold of the regular superhero book. There were moments where Gerber was questioning some of the goings-on in these books, to be sure. However, he embraced the form as much as he asked questions of it, daring it to do more than it had perhaps been asked at the time.

And that’s not a feeling I get from superhero books much these days. I see a lot of outright rejection of what makes the genre so durable, and at times, admirable. I see a lot of effort going into jettisoning the “ridiculous” aspects of these books, in an effort to keep things real, often making things more ridiculous than they would be otherwise. Gerber, like Grant Morrison, understands that there’s a certain level of simplicity, even dare I say it, goofiness, that is required for superhero books to work. It’s not a taste for everyone, I’ll grant you. At their best, superhero comics are literature of imagination. While that’s largely forgotten today, in this age of franchise maintenance and grim reality, superheroes as imagination given form was something that Steve Gerber understood intimately.