INVADERS #41

"BEWARE THE SUPER-AXIS!"
Editor: Roy Thomas | Writer: Don Glut
Artists/Illustrators: Alan Kupperberg & Chic Stone
Letterer: Diana Albers | Colorist: Carl Gafford | Consulting Editor: Jim Shooter

The Plot: As the Invaders recuperate following their battle with Baron Blood at Idlewild Airfield, the Human Torch spots a rapidly-vanishing trail of mist in the air and takes off to follow it. The trail leads him to Chinatown, where he spots a shop called the House of Lotus. Recalling Golden Girl's mention of a Japanese spy named Lady Lotus, the Torch enters the building. Inside, Lady Lotus brings Master Man and Warrior Woman under her sway, then goes to the front of the shop to greet the Torch. She uses her mental powers on him as well.

Later, Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, Miss America, and the Whizzer are hanging out in a hotel room when a news bulletin announces costumed beings wreaking havoc at the Chicago rail yards. The heroes fly there in Namor's ship, and leap into battle against Master Man, Warrior Woman, U-Man, and Baron Blood -- collectively calling themselves the Super-Axis. The Invaders get the villains on the ropes, but the Human Torch arrives, attacking his friends. The Torch nearly kills Whizzer and Miss America before Namor douses his flame and Cap talks sense into him. The Invaders then move along to Chicago's Riverview amusement park, where the Super-Axis members continue to terrorize the populace.

As most of the Invaders rejoin the battle, the Human Torch flies Namor's ship back to New York and breaks into Lady Lotus's shop. Her henchmen hold him off as Lotus escapes into the night. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the Invaders defeat the Super-Axis and turn them over to the police. Following the fight, Cap, Namor, and the Torch leave the United States, returning to England to reunite with Spitfire, Union Jack, and Lord Falsworth.

Continuity Notes: This is the final, double-sized issue of INVADERS. It was published a few months after the previous installment.

In the opening scene, we learn that Captain America donated blood to Miss America following her brief encounter with Baron Blood last issue. The Human Torch is miffed that he was passed over as a doner, but Cap reminds him of what happened last time he gave blood. This weird conflict is what leads the Torch to abandon his teammates to follow Blood's mist trail (why fellow flyers Namor and/or Miss America don't follow is a mystery), and what gives Lady Lotus her "in" to hypnotically seduce him.

Footnotes abound in the early pages. References to last issue and issue 11 accompany talk of the fight against Baron Blood and Spitfire's transfusion described above. Later, we're told that U-Man and Master Man teamed up to to fight the Liberty Legion in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #20. Soon after, Baron Blood remarks that the Nazis' surgeons gave him the ability to operate briefly during daylight, with a note pointint to issue 9. A page later, we get another footnote to issue 11 as Lady Lotus suggests that Cap "stole" Spitfire from the Human Torch. Later, there's another note to TWO-IN-ONE #20, as well as TWO-IN-ONE ANNUAL #1, when Master Man recognizes the Whizzer and Miss America.

I think this is a cameo by Diana "Wonder Woman" Prince and Major Steve Trevor, but I'm not certain:

During the battle, Namor impales Baron Blood with a 2-by-4, rendering him "inactive" once again. That's fine. But the fact that Invaders simply hand the super-duper-strong Master Man, Warrior Woman, and U-Man over to the Chicago P.D. to be hauled away in a paddy wagon feels like very... poor judgment on the part of our heroes, to say the least. They aren't even wearing handcuffs! (Not that it would make a difference.) And shouldn't Namor at least take U-Man back to Atlantis? The whole scene is just bizarre.

Lady Lotus has had a couple of samurai warriors in her shop, and has been attended by geishas, in most of her appearances. The Human Torch discovers here that they are actually Chinese-Americans who she hypnotized off the streets of Chinatown and rechristened with Japanese names. Later, the final scene of the issue features a random scene in which Lotus, her organization smashed by the Invaders, bumps into Marvel's original Fu Manchu pastiche, Yellow Claw, on the streets of Chinatown. This seems to be retroactive foreshadowing of Yellow Claw's eponymous and short-lived comic series from the fifties.

My Thoughts: Well, that's it! The Invaders' saga is wrapped up in a double-sized finale which does its best to deal with all the loose ends it can handle. Fortunately, there aren't that many. Since taking over the title as regular writer, Don Glut has basically been telling one story: the saga of Lady Lotus, as she recruited, issue by issue, various members of her Super-Axis team. I assume Glut had to accelerate his plans a bit to accommodate a finale here, but nothing has felt overly rushed about these final installments, so he's covered pretty well for any unexpected difficulties presented by the book's cancellation.

That said, this issue itself feels somewhat poorly plotted in places. Early on, it's fine -- the Torch breaks away from the team (though, as mentioned above, it's odd that nobody tried to go with him to follow Baron Blood), we see Lady Lotus mind-zap Master Man and Warrior Woman and then the Torch, and after that, a big fight breaks out. And even from there it's fine, as the Torch comes to his senses and goes off to finish Lady Lotus. But this is where I begin to have issues with this... issue. Did we really need a bunch more pages of the Invaders fighting the Super-Axis? It seems to me, the story would've worked better if the Invaders had simply finished them off and then gone with the Torch to find Lady Lotus.

Look at it this way: this is a double-sized issue, and the conclusion still feels terribly rushed, with resolutions to everything crammed into the final two pages. Why not wrap up the Super-Axis a few pages earlier, and give the epilogue more time to breathe? Come up with a better way for the bad guys to be incarcerated. Give us a bit more of a goodbye between the Invaders and Whizzer and Miss America. And more of a reunion between the Invaders and Union Jack and Spitfire.

So, yeah -- while the issue is fine for the most part, the conclusion feels unnecessarily cramped, given the number of pages Glut and Kupperberg had to work with.

Anyway, we're not quite finished yet! It seems that in 1977, a couple years before INVADERS was cancelled, Roy Thomas and then-regular series artists Frank Robbins and Frank Springer teamed up for an issue of WHAT IF which is considered to be in continuity, and which shows what became of the Invaders after World War II. So next week, to wrap things up, we'll check that one out!