"CALLING... THE CRUSADERS!"
Writer/Editor: Roy Thomas | Illustrators: Frank Robbins & Frank Springer
Colorist: Marie Severin | Letterer: Joe Rosen
Writer/Editor: Roy Thomas | Illustrators: Frank Robbins & Frank Springer
Colorist: Marie Severin | Letterer: Joe Rosen
The Invaders return to Falsworth Manor and then set out the next morning aboard Namor's flagship for a secret mission. But their task is interrupted when a car below explodes. The Invaders land to investigate, and are directed by a cabbie to search for the culprit in nearby St. James Park. But at the same time, a limousine carrying King George is attacked by an assassin. Dyna-Mite appears to thwart the villain, and the rest of the Crusaders arrive just behind him.
The Invaders soon arrive as well, realizing that the car that exploded was a decoy meant to pull them from the attack on the king. The Crusaders announce that they, as mostly British-born heroes, want to replace the mostly American Invaders as King George's honor guard at the christening of a new warship the next day. The king and the Invaders agree. When the announcement of this switch is made over a radio broadcast, the cabbie, Alfie, laughs maniacally.
Continuity Notes: The heroes comprising the Crusaders are: the Spirt of '76, an American with a bulletproof cloak, Ghost Girl, who can control light to create illusions, Dyna-Mite, a shrinking man with incredible strength, Captain Wings, who can glide via large wings on his back, Tommy Lightning, who controls electricity, and Thunderfist, a super-strong powerhouse.
But unfortunately, that leaves little more to discuss in this one. I've noticed that Thomas seems to really have trouble with the seventeen-page format that was Marvel's standard length at this point. He often pads out the first chapter of his two-parters, I suspect because he has too much story for one seventeen-pager, but too little to fill thirty-four pages. The result, for the most part to date, has been a series of uneven two-part stories, where the first installment is all set-up with extraneous action scenes to pad things out and fill the issue's battle quota, followed by a tightly-paced second half, jam-packed with fights. And again, this hasn't been the case all the way through -- the Baron Blood story, perhaps by virtuate of running more than two issues, avoided it. It's simply the two-parters -- which most of the stories to this point have been -- that fall prey to this issue.
Anyway -- I will make more more note before we wrap up for the week: early in the issue, two times, Thomas has a British character's dialogue balloon spell "meter" as "metre" (with a footnote helpfully explaining to we yanks just how long a meter is). I actually like this a lot, but he's inconsistent with it. In the issue's final scene, everyone, American and British alike, spells "honor" the American way. I'd love to see Thomas keep up the varied spellings depending on the nationality of the speaker, but only if he can maintain it!
The British didn't use the metre that much during the war. The drive to metrication didn't begin until the 1960s. This issue would have come out at the height of the switchover before it started stalling amidst retailer reluctance and then later government hesitancy to use compulsion.
ReplyDeleteThere's also a bit too much stereotypical Cockney being presented as the dialect of the ordinary Briton in the street and some phrases sound more Australian to my mind (but isn't it a running gag that many Americans can't tell the difference between the British and Australian accents?).
Well, the U.S. still hasn't converted to the metric system, so you guys are way ahead of us!
DeleteIn any case, I suppose this must be Thomas assuming that the metric system usage in the U.K. had existed longer than it really did.
ReplyDeleteI’ll save most of my commentary on these two issues for the next post, but a couple of bits on #14 specifically:
Dyna-Mite refers to Spirit of ’76 as “fighting Yank” — a wink as he’s visually based on the Golden Age character named Fighting Yank from the publisher variously known as Standard, Nedor, Better, and Pines. That company’s superheroes, having mostly lapsed into the public domain, were later resurrected by AC / Americomics and the America’s Best Comics imprint devised by Alan Moore.
The lettercol has a missive from Greg Gallant of Ontario, Canada, who is almost certainly the same fellow of that name who became the cartoonist known as Seth — author of It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken and publication designer of Fantagraphics’ The Complete Peanuts library.
It astounds me how many patriotic heroes there were that I've literally never heard of. Until just now, I had no idea a character named Fighting Yank ever existed!
DeleteThe few books on comics that I pored over like holy texts repeatedly in my first decade (written about here) often described and sometimes just listed vast swaths of characters I’d held little hope of ever actually seeing outside of tiny grayscale images at best. Only DC and Marvel offered reprints of that vintage — Dynapubs existed around then, actually, but I wasn’t aware of it — and even the Overstreet guides that came my way later prompted as much curiosity as they helped sate. I remember seeing the oversized Steranko History of Comics mags for the first time and being thrilled merely by the color images of characters I couldn’t identify on their covers.
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