It Came from the Long Box: The Champions, #3

“Assault on Olympus” Feb. 1976

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When last we left the nascent superteam the Champions, the oddball collection of West Coast-based superheroes were at a low-point.  Despite their efforts, demigods Hercules and Venus had been spirited away to Mt. Olympus to take part in a pair of unwanted arranged marriages.   Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, appears to have won, as the mortal superheroes have no way to hie themselves to that mystical realm.

Worse, the nebbishy but supposedly powerful Huntsman tricked demonically-possessed stuntrider Johnny Blaze, the Ghost Rider, into attacking his comrades.  (How he avoided killing them or scalding their souls with his hellfire blast, even back in the days when he was markedly less powerful than he would become, is entirely a matter of It’s In the Script.)  This didn’t exactly help group morale.  Last seen, the remaining heroes dejectedly went their different ways.

We open with a splash panel that announces an immediate improvement for the book.  Gone are the scratchy, substandard pencils of Don Heck, and in are the slightly above average pencils of George Tuska.  Tuska’s artwork had a weird way of seeming stiff yet simultaneously dynamic, and if his art is seldom more than serviceable, that still puts him far ahead of Heck.

Meanwhile, presumably in an effort to pimp sales, the splash panel features what at the time was pretty racy cheese and beefcake, with a lovingly delineated Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow, lounging in a bikini in the foreground of the ‘shot,’ with an equally idealized Warren Worthington, the Angel, in a similarly revealing Speedo.  (Warren is the heir to a family fortune, and the present locale is apparently his lush beach house.)  Meanwhile, Bobby Drake, the Iceman, is apparently cavorting in the background, although he’s in fact obsessing about their recent failure.

Suddenly a jocular Johnny Blaze comes flying over a dune on his motorcycle.  Blaze is still in bad repair with the others following his attack of them.  “Our out of favor stuntrider has pulled the bad penny act,” Angel sniffs.  However, he’s here to redeem himself, by having figured out a way to get them all to Mt. Olympus.

Since Johnny Blaze’s presence was what drew me (and others, presumably) to The Champions, I’ll take a moment to talk about him here.  At this stage in his career Johnny spoke like a Texan of the, well, comic book variety.  He called everyone ‘pardner’ and so on.   Blaze’s book had recently been shifting from a purely supernatural focus and bringing Ghost Rider more into the standard Marvel superhero universe.  Hence his inclusion in the Champions roster.

Blaze’s back story was pretty tragic, and although he was more or less in control of his demonic alter ego that this juncture—this being before we learned that he was, in fact, yoked to a powerful demon with his own identity and agenda—his eagerness to establish some normalcy in his life is pretty interesting.

This is Blaze’s most stable and probably happiest period, when he had a regular gig (Hollywood stuntman), a group of friends at the studio, and moreover was trying to deal with his strange, hell-borne powers by putting them to use as a bona-fide superhero.  Given the relative normalcy of superpowers in this universe, this is like someone with a severe violent streak trying to positively channel it by becoming a cop or soldier.

Sadly, this period of Blaze’s life proved short-lived, and partly because of his fellow superheroes.  The Champions never really accepted him, an idea which was made manifest later in the series, and which was pretty sophisticated at the time.  There’s some meat here that was never explored, as Blaze found himself rejected by even his fellow outcasts—Warren and Bobby were constantly bitching, as X-Men new and old are wont to do, about how mankind unfairly fears and hates them—all while assiduously trying to fit in with them.  In this respect, Blaze’s seemingly too eager references to folks he has just met as his “friends” and “buddies” seems a bit pathetic, but entirely understandable.

Fittingly, Warren would later find himself accosted by a much more demonic Ghost Rider—ironically, after himself assuring a companion that the skeletal figure was a friend—in a much later issue of The Avengers.  Ghost Rider, at this point an all but separate entity outside of Blaze’s control, nearly kills Warren, and then manages to hand the Avengers (including Thor!) their overconfident asses before Blaze manages to temporarily reassert control and takes off.  Before he does, Warren offers his help, but it’s far too little and far too late.  If they had stuck by Blaze in the first place, things might have ended up differently.  It’s too bad that this stuff was never tied together better, because there was an interesting narrative here.

In the end (until the Marvel company decided to bring Ghost Rider back), Blaze was pleasingly freed of his literal demon in the final issue of his long-running comic, and finally found happiness with his childhood sweetheart.  It was such a satisfying conclusion that it’s a shame they messed around with it to bring Blaze back as a character.  Still, there was a nice coda, sadly missing in the two Champions reprint books, when the liberated Blaze again meets up with Warren and Bobby (in the pages of The Defenders 145-146, said team being where the two mutants eventually relocated) and they all clear the air.

In any case, Blaze would have left the team about the time it disbanded anyway, as another hero named Dr. Druid—a minor league Dr. Strange—completely screwed Johnny over by revealing his demonic nature to this friends, as Druid was under the impression that his demon half was in control.  Druid’s belated realization after completely destroying Blaze’s life that Johnny was, oops, a good guy, was one of the high points of the Ghost Rider’s own ( and all too often entirely lame) series.  Denied a home, Blaze took to the road, and lived the unhappy live of a drifter for several years to come.

That’s all way in the future, though, so let’s return to our present story.

When everyone else left, apparently to hang out at Warren’s place (in retrospect, it’s again notable that Johnny apparently wasn’t invited), Blaze hung around the UCLA campus where the action of the previous two issues took place.  He heard some students talking about a mountain of ice, which Bobby had formed to seal off one of the mystical wormhole tunnels that various Olympian menaces were using to reach earth.  (As I mentioned in an earlier review, at the time this was indeed referred to in text as an ice mountain, but due to the poor pencils of Don Heck was drawn as merely boulder sized.  Here Tuska’s art indeed portrays it as an actual mountain of ice.)

In any case, although Bobby is too dense to figure this out, it means that his ice not only blocking the wormhole tunnel, but has at the same time kept it from closing.  Meanwhile, this having been established, we cut to Olympus, where an angry Hercules (the main difference between he and Thor was that Herc was much more of a hothead) calls his father Zeus “a coward and a cur!” for agreeing to the previously alluded to arranged marriages, his to Hippolyta, and Venus’ to Ares, the god of war.  Boy, you never saw Thor telling off Odin like that.

Meanwhile, the Huntsman is examining their side of the ice mountain when he notices it’s heating up.  Sure enough, Ghost Rider has melted a passage the through ice and he and his comrades come bursting through.  (It’s a neat group shot of them as they smash through the ice, but when you think about it, the logistics of a flying guy, a fellow on a motorcycle and two people on foot staying together in these circumstances just doesn’t make sense.)

Anyway, after a few pages of fight stuff, the imminent weddings are halted by the group donnybrook that ensues when Angel and Ghost Rider appear.  (Black Widow and Iceman are left to cover their backs, as here they do in fact acknowledge that they are on foot and can’t travel as fast.)  Huntsman again does out like a punk, Venus KO’s Hippolyta by literally turning the latter’s sword into a plow, which then falls and bonks the Amazon queen on the noggin.  (“Such is the power of Love, Hippolyta,” Venus gloats.  Uhm, I’m not sure that’s what the message of “turning swords into plows” is meant to convey.)  Herc again takes out Ares in entirely too easy of a fashion.

Meanwhile, Widow and Iceman arrive, in time for a pissed off Pluto to enter the fray.  With Herc unable to fight Pluto—established earlier—they are pretty much screwed.   Until, that is, Ghost Rider gets all in Zeus’ face and finally makes clear to Zeus (who is almost as dim as his son) that Pluto is basically running a big con on him.  An enraged Zeus turns on Pluto and thus things pretty much come to a conclusion.

I have to say, at first glance, the idea of Blaze getting all huffy with friggin’ Zeus seems a little unlikely.  However, when you think about it, this is a guy who literally defied Satan, face to face.  So actually it kind of makes sense.  As to being to only one to see the truth behind Pluto’s bluff, again, he has some personal experience on how underworld gods manipulate the truth.

And so things end, as the (so for unacknowledged) team returns to Earth.So ends the teams initial adventure, and I have to say, the seeds of the book’s cancellation are already visible.  First, the comic was bimonthly.  This means that it was four months before a customer would have read the first issue, and the story reached its run of the mill ending.  Given that the general overall tone of the series so far is, to be blunt, pretty lame, chances are they screwed the pooch already.  The fact that the remaining three issues that constituted the rest of the series’ first year would also prove mediocre at best no doubt sealed the book’s fate.

The biggest problem is that the various heroes just do not fit together in any meaningful way, at least not yet.  By the end of the book’s run, writer Bill Mantlo (taking over for Tony Isabella) would actually start writing some interesting stories, and doing interesting things with the characters, including the previously alluded to Ghost Rider stuff.   At this point, though, the book suffered from radical bland-itis.  The team seems like it was designed by Marvel’s marketing department, and on a bad day at that.

Presumably the Olympian nature of the initial storyline was to make the first story an ‘epic’ one, but if so, they failed.  (And, no doubt, it was a reference to Loki being the villain who brought the Avengers together in their first adventure.)  The fact is, that as richly drawn as Thor and the Asgardian gods are in the Marvel universe, their Greek counterparts are basically just thin, inferior copies.  Had this story featured Thor rather than Hercules, Loki instead of Pluto, and the Enchantress and the Executioner in lieu of Hippolyta and Ares, it would have been far more interesting.

There are some decent moments in the first three books, but the overall result is run of the mill, uninspired stuff.  Certainly Don Heck’s subpar pencils in the first two issues didn’t help.  Things would get better with this series—in fact, they’d get much better—but not for a while yet, and by the time they did, the die unfortunately would be cast.

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