More Essential Defenders

Hey, it's Wednesday, and that means. . . well, that means I have to keep coming up with different stuff to talk about. Bugger.

I think it was roughly a month ago, I managed to purchase Essential Defenders Volumes 1 and 2. Volume 1 caught my attention, if only because it details the roundabout way the Defenders got together. Dr. Strange needs some help, so he tricks Namor into lending a hand. Sometime later, Namor has a team-up with the Silver Surfer to stop some device the U.S. military was going to test, which would have devastating consequences for the world. And heck, they even roped the Hulk into it, for about five minutes, before he got mad about not getting to smash and bounded off, as they Hulk was wont to do back in the day. I don't have it in front of me, but the Defenders really seemed like a team that was just Roy Thomas screwing around, taking adavantage of all the books he was writing, and then someone said, "Hey, let's make an actual book with these characters!". And someone else said, "That's brilliant!", and here we are.

I'm a bit confused by the Giant-Size Defenders that are sprinkled in there amongst the regular Defenders issues. They seem to have their own numbering, and they're too frequent to be Annuals, but at least sometimes, plots carried over, so they were connected, and I'm not sure what to make of it.

Some other things that stood out to me:

1) The story of the Defenders and Luke Cage trying to stop the Sons of the Serpent. There's a scene, as the white supremacists prattle on about liberating the oppressed white minority, and the leader says something about how they hate everyone who isn't white. The Hulk, of course, is green, and aware of that. So he comes to the conclusion the Snake-Men hate him too, and proceeds to destroy a street with the old "pound the ground with both fists" move. That scene always makes me laugh, possibly because this bad guy is blathering on, spewing all this hatred, and the Hulk cuts right to the quick of it, and responds how he pretty much always does - by smashing.

2) On a couple of occasions, both written by Steve Gerber, I believe, the comics went with an odd tactic of going with a single image on a page, then placing the text below it. Prose, I guess. They used it twice in the issue where the Defenders + Daredevil are used by the Gamesmaster to protect the universe from a highly advanced computer Dr. Doom constructed, then grew bored with, as best I can tell. One page is when Daredevil and Nighthawk arrive at the battlefield, and the writing switches to 2nd tense so that we are Daredevil, using our hyper-senses to detect our teammates. There's another page later, but I forget what it entailed. Then, it was used again during that Sons of the Serpent story, as their leader broadcasts an ultimamtum (or a manifesto) worldwide. We see him standing before a projection screen, which details various states of society that the Serpents find objectionable, as well as scenes of what's going to happen when their scheme succeeds. Then his speech is in a single large chunk at the bottom of the page. Just one page, in the entire story arc.

I can't really figure why Gerber (I'm assuming it was Gerber's idea, since Starlin was the artist for Giant Size Defenders #3, and Sal Buscema and Mike Esposito handled the art for Defenders #22-25) wanted to do that in those specific points. Just playing around? I guess he felt it worked better, presentation wise, and I'm generally inclined toa gree with him on Giant-Size Defenders, though I think it might have worked better if Starlin had done at least part of the page from the perspective of Daredevil's radar sense.

3) At thimes, the book really feels like Marvel Team-Up, with characters shuttling in for an issue, then shuttling out, but their appearance somehow got a different character involved, then perhaps a group of past characters arrive all at once. It's neat really, because you can't be sure who might pop up next issue.