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Monday, September 20, 2021

INVADERS #1

"THE RING OF THE NEBULAS!"
A weltanschauung of Wagnerian wonderment by:
Writer/Editor: Roy Thomas | Artist: Frank Robbins | Inker: Vince Colletta
Colorist: Petra Goldberg | Letterer: John Costanza

The Plot: Aboared an Atlantean aircraft, the Invaders arrive in London to find the city under assault by Nazi bombers. While Namor, the Human Torch, and Toro join the Royal Air Force to repel the attack, Captain America and Bucky land. Bucky spots a beautiful blonde girl wandering through a nearby fire, and Cap races out to rescue her.

Namor and the Torches return to the ground to meet the amnesiac girl, Hilda. When the Invaders take her along with their local British liaison, she tells them that she remembers coming from somewhere deep inside Nazi territory. Leaving Bucky behind to represent them in Britain, the Invaders board Namor's flagship and follow Hilda's directions, but come under attack after crossing the Siegfried Line -- the border between Germany and occupied Europe. The group abandons the flagship to find their attackers are a trio of gods identifying themselves as Froh, Donar, and Loga.

Continuity Notes: Roy Thomas seems to have moved the Battle of Britain here. We're explicitly told in narration that the Invaders have stumbled into its closing act, but in real life the entire thing happened in the summer/fall of 1940 -- while this issue's opening narration states that it's currently December of 1941!

The Invaders are in England in search of a Nazi agent named "Brain Drain", who Master Man mentioned in GIANT-SIZE #1 as being partially responsible for his creation.

Captain America observes that Hilda has a vaguely Germanic accent, but that it seems to be "layered" on top of another accent.
This issue and the next were originally intended to run as a single story in GIANT-SIZE INVADERS #2, but in 1975, Marvel canceled their line of quartely Giant-Size books, turning them into monthly or bi-monthly series instead. (This is what happened to GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #2 as well, which was split in half to become X-MEN issues 94 and 95).

My Thoughts: I mean... I dunno. It's the first half of a story that was intended to run in a single issue, so the pacing feels a little weird, but it's not too bad. You have an aerial battle at the start, followed by learning a bit about Hilda, and then a sequence at the end where the Invaders are shot down. (Weirdly, X-MEN #94 also featured the heroes being shot down and bailing out of their airplane.)

While Namor and the Torches are able to fly to safety, Cap and Hilda jump with parachutes -- and Hilda's malfunctions, leading to a pretty nifty Cap Moment, as he must accelerate his fall to catch and grab her, then deploy his own chute. But by that point they're very close to the ground and while Cap knows he will survive the landing, he's not certain whether Hilda will. (But she does, thanks to a handy updraft created by the Human Torch.)
I bring this all up because I'm trying to figure out who was the first writer to present Captain America using his shield alone when jumping or falling from a tremendous height. I know the first time I remember seeing it was in a Mark Gruenwald issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA circa the late eighties, though that was when he was in his persona as "The Captain", using a pure Vibranium shield supplied by Black Panther, rather than the traditional vibranium/steel alloy shield. (Which brings up another question: is the shield still considered an alloy these days? The Marvel movies -- which borrowed that trick of Cap using it to break a very long fall -- have depicted it as pure vibranium, I believe.)

Anyway, that about covers it for this week!

Huh? I didn't actually talk about the story? Well, let's save that for next week so I can examine it all at once, as it was originally intended to be presented. See you then!

9 comments:

  1. I’m surprised Roy Thomas would make such a historical goof on the Battle of Britain, considering his attempts at (historical) accuracy in ALL-STAR SQUADRON.
    And wasn’t the shield a combo of Adamantium and Vibranium?

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    1. My recollection is that at some point, the shield was stated to be an adamantium/vibranium combo, but later on -- possibly during Kurt Busiek's AVENGERS run? -- this was changed so that it was simply vibranium and steel (which I think was actually done because, per Marvel's established history, adamantium hadn't been invented yet in the 40s).

      I could be misremembering some of that, but I think it's mostly correct.

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  2. The Giant-Size line ended oddly with several titles having a final all-reprint issue (there actually was a Giant-Size X-Men #2) but a new series like the Invaders lacked material to reprint.

    Ongoing war comics often have a very odd relationship with historical chronology - Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos almost jumped across years and the globe. The Invaders was further complicated by the US not entering the war until the end of 1941 and thus after some of the most prominent events - I think this issue inadvertantly starts to show the clash between the British myth of "we stood alone" against the US myth "nothing really happened until we came in and saved everyone".

    The shield has caused a lot of confusion over the years. According to a back-up feature in Avengers Annual 2001 the shield is a bond of steel alloy and vibranium that a scientist achieved in a one-off and could never duplicate. Adamantium is an alloy created decades later in an attempt to reproduce the shield's metal.
    (The feature is by Kurt Busiek and is a mixture of finally tidying up some of the Crossing changes and answering a few incessant questions from online caused by sloppy research by writers and guide compilers over the years - the way Jarvis reacts in frustration to the question about whether the Falcon is a mutant or not is very telling.)

    Looking over this one again I find the man who meets Cap when he lands amusing. He's speaking with a mixture of upper class and working class and for some reason he's wearing what looks like an Air Raid Precautions Warden uniform (although the helmet lacks the lettering) but is called a soldier and has access to the operations room.

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    1. Tim, I'm happy to have you here to point out inconsistencies in how Thomas handles the British stuff. These sorts of things always fascinate me.

      Also happy to see I remembered correctly that it was during Busiek's run where the shield inconsistency was corrected! And I agree -- unlike with most of Busiek's work, you can really detect the irritation seeping through, in a John Byrne-like manner, into Jarvis's dialogue and commentary in that story.

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  3. Excellent artwork! Robbins and Colletta! Very cool team!

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  4. I’m hoping to join in here by next week…

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  5. Roy Thomas had a thing for the whole Wagnerian mythos, given that it also cropped up hugely in his run on Thor that led up to Thor #300. I am not in the least shocked that he worked it into Invaders, especially in light of how the Nazis were fond of Wagner's work, but I strongly suspect that was more a case of it being Roy's thing.

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  6. So I was off by four months. 8^[

    Roy definitely has a thing for Ring of the Nibelung homages — and, if more understandably in context, leaning into Hitler’s interest in Norse and Germanic myth. He pulled it not just into Thor but All-Star Squadron and retired the Justice Society post-Crisis by having them fight Ragnarok endlessly in a limbo realm. Roy explains its presence in this series in a text page mentioning he’d seen a recent production of the opera that fellow aficionado Gil Kane missed; Kane would later collaborate with him on a straight, or at least divorced-from-superhero-universe-continuities, adaptation of it for DC.

    One byproduct of the format switch was editorial captions sloppily referring to “issue #1” and of course not specifying Giant-Size #1 since this was meant for Giant-Size #2.

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