Customer Reviews

Defenders (Marvel Essentials, Vol. 4) (v. 4)

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Among the great Marvel superhero teams, I've always had a particular affection for the Defenders. The Fantastic Four were bonded by family, the X-Men were united first as students, then as part of a cause and the Avengers were the all-stars. The Defenders were different, a "non-team" of loners like Dr. Strange, the Sub-Mariner and the Hulk who could barely stand to be together. A few dozen issues into the run, the Defenders would eventually be more of a regular team with the characters who would truly define them: Nighthawk, Valkyrie and Hellcat.

Even then, however, the Defenders had an off-beat quality that the other teams lacked. This is evident from the beginning of Essential Defenders Volume 4, which covers issues 61 to 91. As this volume begins, the Defenders must contend with the crazed Lunatik, and then things get crazy themselves. The Valkyrie's college friend, Dollar Bill, has made a film about the team, defining them as a non-team anyone can join. This results in a bunch of heroes trying to join, including Hercules who believes his Avengers status makes him the automatic leader. What's worse, a band of supervillains has also started calling themselves Defenders, leading to a mess that will take a few issues to clean up.

After that, it's a visit to the Valkyrie's home, Asgard, to contend with a wannabe god, followed by another battle with Lunatik, whose origin is explained and leads to the strange realm called Tunnelworld. While Dr. Strange reunites with original Defenders Hulk and Sub-Mariner to battle an evil wizard, Nighthawk, Hellcat and Valkyrie must deal with, among others, the Mandrill, a mutant who can mind-control any woman. All this and legal troubles for Nighthawk, family problems for Hellcat and the Hulk saves the whales and goes grocery shopping.

Unlike the other Marvel superteams, the Defenders never had much permanence, although they did outdo other teams like the Champions. This volume (along with Volume 3) really shows the comic at its creative peak. If you like old-fashioned, seventies-style superheroics, the Defenders will not disappoint.

I feel I have to offer a counter-review here.

Let me start out by saying I thought David Kraft's work on Defenders before these issues was excellent...and if you're expecting to see more arcs like the Scorpio, Presence, and Xenogenesis ones here, you will most likely end up disappointed.

Kraft only puts in two arcs here. One is the "membership mess" arc that suddenly changes the theme to an awful slapstick comedy, the kind of story that usually gets confined to a single filler issue, but drags on for much much too long here. Second is a very forgettable Valkyrie in Asgard story.

At this point, about 1/3 into this collection, Kraft leaves the book in Ed Hannigan's hands and things get much worse. I could go on for quite a while about all the things I hate about Hannigan's run on this book, but I'll just mention the top 2...

1.) Hannigan quickly resorts to preachy personal politics, which I know Gerber as previous writer was also guilty of, but Gerber was a much better writer and was able to make his rants flow into his entertaining stories. Hannigan just beats you over the head with his beliefs without bothering to entertain while doing so and we're just left with things like multiple "save the whales" stories that drag on for uncomfortably long times.

2.) Lunatik. My god do I hate Lunatik. He was easily one of the worst characters of all time as it was, after his brief appearance in Kraft's earlier run, but Hannigan picks that thread up again and beats it to death in a horribly awkward and overcomplicated cosmic origin story. (that may not sound so bad if you've never seen Lunatik, but the guy is just a bad Joker-lite in a green tracksuit who runs around hitting people with a stick and speaking only in pop culture catchphrases and lyrics...)

I enjoyed the Defenders before this chunk, but I honestly couldn't even finish Hannigan's run completely. After putting it down in boredom or disgust multiple times, I finally just gave up and moved on to DeMatteis' run...and amazingly it starts right up again almost exactly where Essential Defenders v3 left off. It's like nothing happened at all in between and personally I'm now going to pretend that's exactly what happened. I understand you may feel obligated to read this anyway for completion's sake, I do the same thing, but just be warned you really may come to regret it in this case.

Volume 4 of this Essentials title definitely goes better places than Volume 3 did. For one thing, Nighthawk fares better as a leader in this book. Rather than being captured in over a dozen issues like he was in Volume 3, he's stepped up as a leader here. He's painted as quite a bit of a jerk, but is still interesting to see in action.

The infamous "Defender for a Day" storyline is here, which pours in every "B" list character Marvel could scrape up at the time. Heroes like Havok, Quasar, Hercules, Paladin, White Tiger, Black Goliath, and others you loved in the 70's show up for 3 issues where everyone gets the chance to be a Defender for a while. To be honest, even though this was only a gimmick story (none of the new recruits stick around), it breathed life into the series for a little while. It was nice to see those background heroes get center stage for a few minutes (White Tiger versus Batroc the Leaper was great).

From there, it slows down considerably during the "Valkyrie in Valhalla" storyline, and even though the Lunatik storyline is finally finished from Volume 3 here, it's not very satisfying. Doctor Strange shows up again, along with Namor and Hulk to recreate the original team of Defenders to stop a colossal threat. Valkyrie finally faces Barbara Norris (the woman whose body she has been inhabiting since the first few issues of the series). All this and Millie the Model returns (yeah, it didn't matter to me either).

There were a lot of positive things in this book that makes it better than Volume 3, but you can tell many of the stories are filler. They are a team, they aren't a team, they are a team again, they break up again...this gets old after a while. I know Marvel was trying to promote them as the "Superteam that isn't a team at all", but it starts to wear thin.

Thirty issues are covered here, so it's definitely worth the money. And this sets the stage for the next volume of 30 issues (hopefully), which has some of the best stories of the Defenders' series. Some of it is good, and some isn't, but taken as a whole it's worth reading.