Essential Defenders volume two

Len Wein, Steve Gerber, Sal Buscema & others
Essential Defenders volume two (1976)
The material in the previous massive volume finished before the Defenders' first sense shattering encounter with the Wrecking Crew, a team of demolition themed supervillains led by a guy who brains people with a crowbar. This was a story I was able to remember reading during childhood which must therefore be deemed classic - just like all those five star Terrance Dicks masterpieces - and thusly did I make purchase of this second volume, oh stout yeoman of the bar, collecting material dating to no later than 1976. The Defenders, as my fellow Dennis Nordens will fondly remember, were a bunch of superheroes who just happened to hang out together rather than a formal team - Doctor Strange, the Hulk, Prince Namor, the Silver Surfer, Valkyrie - who used to make me feel a bit funny in the trousers when I were a lad - Nighthawk, Luke Cage, and others.

Although the gang are settling into a bit of a crime-fighting, foe-bashing routine in this one, it's not without a certain sparkle of inspiration even if the shine has come off the sheer weirdness of earlier issues to some extent. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be that most of these issues are written by Steve Gerber, and while he's undoubtedly inventive, he tends to bog the strip down with an exhausting quota of exposition, mostly in chatty Marvel Shakespearean to the point of it becoming a chore. It may have worked in monthly instalments, but issue after issue in quick succession begins to feel like homework, and there's so fucking much of it that a couple of issues apparently needed actual pages of just prose text set in two columns as they would be in a digest. The problem becomes rudely obvious when three significantly lighter issues of Marvel Team Up written by Gerry Conway punctuate the main sequence of the title comic.

All the same, this was still well worth a look, and the punch up with the Wrecking Crew was at least as much fun as I remember it being. Luke Cage seems a bit of a blaxploitation cliché with hindsight, but Marvel redeemed itself by at least featuring black characters, even setting the Defenders against an overtly racist white nationalist organisation at one point, while class and privilege are criticised by agency of Nighthawk - actually one of those eccentric millionaire turned nocturnal crime fighter types; not that you would read this for the sake of social justice issues unless you're a fucking idiot. As with much of what Marvel produced in the seventies, this stuff was actually pretty weird on close inspection, and so retains most of its charm.