The Invaders is one of those groups where, at least for me, the legend is greater than any actual knowledge. I know the basics: a team of World War II era characters, banded together for a team book in the seventies to tell retroactive stories set during "the Big One". I've seen many Invaders flashbacks and reunions over the decades, but I've never read so much as a single issue of the original series.*
But I've always had an interest in it. Though I tend to be a little trepidatious about jumping into any series written by Roy Thomas, who I love as an idea guy/plotter but whose overblown purple prose I often can't handle as a scripter, I still want to give this series a try. The fact that it's drawn by Frank Robbins doesn't hurt, either -- as I mentioned when I looked at Batman in the Seventies a couple years ago, I really like Robbins' quirky, cartoony style.
So, armed with INVADERS CLASSIC: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION Volume 1 and Volume 2 (which I unboxed here years ago, in July and December of 2014 (!), I'm about to go through the saga of the Invaders on issue at a time, beginning right here next Monday.
*Okay, that's not entirely true. I owned one single, solitary issue of INVADERS as a child -- but I never read it! I think I got it before I could read, and just didn't pay it any mind in my collection over the subsequent years. Honestly, I have no idea how, at that age, I wound up with a comic that had been published a few years before I was born. It couldn't have been a hand-me-down, because there was no one to hand it down to me! Anyway, at some point, I lost it. I do remember which issue it was though, so I'll call it out when we get to it.
I assume there was a lot of Second World War nostalgia in the States at the time? Certainly over here there was a lot from sitcoms to toys to adventure comics.
ReplyDeleteI looked at the contents of the first volume several years back. Watch out for how the series handles the books actually published in the 1940s and also historic detail. The former is a rejoinder to the idea that Marvel always had one single continuity:
https://essentialexploitsspiderman.blogspot.com/2015/10/essential-invaders-volume-1.html
While the idea of being nostalgic for wartime feels odd, I do think there must've been a bit of that going on around here. Plus, of course, Roy Thomas was a massive fan of Golden Age comics, having grown up on them, and Stan had worked on some of those very books, so I imagine it wasn't too hard for Roy to get this series off the ground!
DeleteI just read your post, and I was surprised to learn the "origins" of the Crusaders! I just figured they were entirely original creations, and never knew they were based on Golden Age DC characters -- but of course, knowing Roy (and recalling his creation of the Squadron Sinister), this makes perfect sense. Still, I'll let the already-written posts on those issues stand when we get to them.
The idea that Roy considers the original Golden Age stories apocryphal unless he states otherwise -- and even then, that the Golden Age adventures are presented with the conceit that they were actual in-universe comics and didn't necessarily reflect what "really happened" -- fascinates me. And, again, it's exactly what I would expect from Thomas, for good or ill.
As noted above, I'm using the INVADERS CLASSIC COMPLETE COLLECTION books for this project. I own both the physical editions and their digital counterparts, which I picked up in a Comixology sale years ago, and they're slightly different. As you noted in your post, the MARVEL PREMIERE issues are presented at the very end of vol. 1's digital version. In the trade, they're inserted where they should be after the corresponding INVADERS issues.
Further, the physical trades do not reprint the Golden Age stories, opting instead to print the framing sequences (where there were any) along with a little text snippet stating that the rest of the issue was a reprint. But the digital edition includes the Golden Age issues!
Anyway -- glad to have you along! I'm up to issue 19 in my reading, and so far, for the most part, I'm really enjoying the series.
I do sometimes wonder just when Thomas got into comics - he was born in late 1940 and so would have missed out on a good chunk of the height of the Golden Age. Who was it who said that in many things (well beyond just comics or even entertainment as a whole) most people often wind up thinking the best years were the ones just before they came along?
DeleteThe individual Freedom Fighters were actually created at Quality Comics with DC later buying out the assets in the mid 1950s and then in the 1960s created the team and Earth S for them to reside on for one of the many JLA/JSA team-ups.
I am...not ashamed to admit this, but I do find it odd that Invaders was, in fact, one of my favorite comics the first couple years I was spending my allowance as a kid on comics at a local grocery store. Perhaps it was merely simple availability: I lived in very rural West Virginia at the time, and I was at the mercy of whatever I found at grocery and drug stores. And among the comics I could get was always Invaders. (My favorite comic in my early days of reading was Steve Gerber's Defenders. I suspect that explains a LOT about me.) And while it was basically a mid list title that likely came into being because it was the run up to the Bicentennial in 1976 and anything WWII related came across as patriotic, I could actually FIND the book and read it!
ReplyDeleteWorth noting that I suspect a lot of WWII nostalgia in the 1970s period comes due to the Vietnam War. Vietnam was an ugly quagmire that the US lost, but WWII was, of course, the great war of the century that Americans told themselves they won single handedly and was an era of unquestionable American power. Marvel was still putting out Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos in this time period, after all. It was simply in the air at the time.
Obviously as the resident 70s fanboy I'm along for this ride.
Pleased to have you along, Jack! And yeah, your theory about the WWII nostalgia makes a lot of sense when you put it in the contest of Vietnam. I hadn't considered that.
DeleteI also don't think I realized SGT. FURY was still being published in the 70s!!
I'm pretty sure by then it was a reprint book, but yeah, Sgt. Fury was around for a LONG time.
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