(I had a couple of these handy from helping The Incredible Hulk Library; I'll dig out #21 when we get to the Headmen Saga, as it was a preview, two story arcs early!)

Defenders (1972) #20 (from the Mile High Comics site)
"The Woman She Was...!" is written by Steve Gerber and drawn by Sal Buscema and Vince Colletta. Cover by Gil Kane. Guest-starring the Thing. Continued from Marvel Two-in-One #7. viewtopic.php?f=1&t=60835&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=330

The Enchantress created the Valkyrie by trapping the spirit of one of Odin's shield-maidens in the body of an Earth woman named Barbara Denton Norris from a small New England town. Despite her Norman Rockwell upbringing, Barbara had fled the little hamlet for a drug-fueled life in New York City, leaving behind her confused husband Jack. But now that the woman called Barbara is gone, wiped out by the Enchantress' spell, the Valkyrie finds herself picking up the scattered pieces of her tragic life.

The mundane thing that brings the Valkyrie back to Cobbler's Roost is a harmonica with the enigmatic name "Celestia" written on it. The musical instrument ended up in the hands of Alvin Denton, Barbara's widower father, who believed playing the harmonica would restore his daughter's fractured mind. Instead, it destroyed the world and only the quick actions of the Thing, Valkyrie and Doctor Strange were able to reverse the effect. But the trauma killed Alvin and Val feels its her job to return his body to Cobbler's Roost. But once there, she falls into a plot launched by a cult that worships the Nameless Ones; a sacrifice offered up by none other than Barbara's dead mother and accentuated by that very same harmonica!
[Caption=]In #20: Gerber takes over, concluding Englehart's story guest-starring the Thing, in which the team thwarts the Nameless Ones (see Bob's review of THE INCREDIBLE HULK #126 for details) and the Valkyrie begins her discovery of her life as Barbara Norriss. In #21, she continues her search for her body's husband, Jack (remember, Val is a Valkyrior spirit fused to the body of insane Barbara Norriss by the Enchantress, as seen in #3; her mind dominates the pairing. [/Caption]

#21: Val looks at her scrap books from her Barbara life, and she and Steven go looking for Jack. Hulk wrecks a home after playtime with the kids is rudely interrupted, which makes the little girl cry and then makes Hulk cry. Kyle sees hippie model Trish Starr (which I read long after creating my own hippie model, who you'll meet in Not Another Comic Book #1) and Chondu, Morgan, and Nagan, the Headmen
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headmen ) create their maddening Black Rain (not to be confused with Chocolate Rain, which is also maddening) and commit robberies while the Defenders go nuts. Kyle saves Trish from committing suicide but no dice on catching any Headmen.

Love the Gerber Defenders! Actually, I love the pre-Gerber Defenders, too

I should really lay hands on Essentials 2, shouldn't I? Especially as a bona fide Englehart fan. I only had #5 (promptly given away to Sri Lanka over the holidays---for that matter, that's what I did with my Essentials 3!). I'd still gladly read that thread!

I love Gerber's run! I've been picking up all the issues lately.

Re: Trish Starr- didn't she get involved with Hank Pym becuase she's related to Egghead somehow and lost and arm?

I have the whole Defenders run.

Most of the "Defenders" comics I've read are from a bit later.

I thought this was gonna be a thread about baby food.

In the issue where that happens, J.L., Giant Size Defenders #4, Hank mentions they have some previous history (he asks the Wasp not to come along, go figure) that passionately motivates him to confront Uncle Egghead (who's just been tossed out of a homeless shelter for ranting!). She does return & talk to Hank during that Masters of Evil III run in Avengers #'s 228-231.

Marcus, did you buy these along with your HULKs? One of the fun things about the FF thread was everyone coming out to comment on their earliest comics experiences. I think that's also when a lot of people tipped their ages in relation to buying them.

TMK, I know when your issues start coming up: after Hellcat joins the team! (#44).

Jim, don't you know? Hulk likes Beans!!! But Wundarr might've gone for a jar of baby food. I'm sure Gerber's Baby Food does have its defenders.

(And the year---and post---is 1975!)

I had a subscription to the Defenders when I was young. My interest started because the Hulk was in it, but it became a cool title to read in its own right.

Cool! I wish I'd written Marvel sooner, they sent me like three issues of Fantastic Four and then...just stopped. That was 1987. Glad your experience went better, Jay! It would've been exciting to have one of these coming in every month!!

In #22, Val begins exploring the world outside of the Defenders...where we find her here.
DEFENDERS #22

Writer: Steve Gerber Art: Sal Buscema & Mike Esposito
The Valkyrie---as Barbara Norriss---walks lost in thought about her recently discovered human identity, through the filthy lower Manhattan streets. Her reverie ends when she finds two men in a knife fight, which she disrupts. When they remain violent, she draws Dragonfang, hung invisibly at her side, triggering the appearance of her costume through a spell. Her speech to the fleeing men is interrupted by a scream, leading Valkyrie to charge into a tenement to investigate.

There, a poor woman named Elena desperately tries to remove a huge rat from her baby's crib, which Val does with ease, swiftly. However, Elena's plight and bitterness trouble her, and compassionately, she takes the woman and child to Dr. Strange's Sanctorum.

The upper East Side of Manhattan finds Kyle Richmond, a.k.a. Nighthawk, brooding at a fashionable party, still upset over his missing and badly injured former love Trish Starr, to the consternation of well-meaning Ginny. They are interrupted by sleazy developer Harold Holliman, whose offers are rejected upfront by the disinterested Richmond. "Take it up with Pennyworth," he says, referring to his trustee. He kisses Ginny goodbye cordially and takes a taxi to Strange's Sanctorum in the Village, where he soon arrives upon Wong serving Ms. Elena tea, and Clea playing with her baby in the presence of a placid Hulk. Valkyrie and Stephen discuss exploring Elena's plight and legal recourse in the morning, while a mysterious figure stares into the window. Richmond's arrival frightens him away. Val then begins to fill Kyle in on her slum experience.

Flash to the aforementioned slum, where the Sons of the Serpent firebomb the same tenement, at the cost of an elderly blind man's life inside.

The assembled Defenders arrive too late. Harold Holliman turns out to be the slumlord of the burning building; his accusation to the black tenants, of arson, starts a riot, nearly at the expense of his own life!

Strange and Nighthawk intervene, at the moment the Serpents return to finish their terrorism. Their racially tinged screed upsets the Hulk, who is not white, but green, therefore prompting him to smash the street and hurtle the terrorists off their feet. All the Defenders join the fray, save for Strange, attempting in vain to be the voice of reason. Animating a hose with a spell, he breaks up the fight. The Serpents flee, promising retribution.

I guess white supremacists would make Hulk mad in ANY of his incarnations. And you don't want to make Hulk mad!

Gerber really had a handle on how to write the Hulk. His encounter with the white supremacists was well done, and I loved the scene in the previous issue where he has a tantrum and smashes the little girl's house after her father yells at him. Gerber's Defenders is hands-down the best superhero comic of the 70's.

Same here. I think I started reading the book around #63 or 64.

I have heard a lot about the Gerber Defenders run. It sounds like a pretty trippy era of the book's history!

IAWTP, Jason! It's even, and inspired, all the way through.
Best yet: Gerber didn't forget the little girl & her dad, as we'll see.

So Bob: "Defender For a Day"?

The Defenders have Nighthawk. He has the coolest costume ever, ergo, the Defenders are the coolest team ever.

Having Nighthawk AND Hellcat made them the coolest team ever! And Hulk and Sword-Girl didn't hurt.

I didn't remember the title, but I think that's it. In the story, every third tier Marvel hero suddenly wanted to be a Defender, because somebody made a tv movie about the group. At the end, the Valkyrie goes berserk, and then, all the non-regulars finally leave.

I only had the last part of the story. I never saw the first part. I checked Mile High Comics, and it was DEFENDERS #64.



That's the first issue of the regular DEFENDERS series that I bought right off the stand. It wasn't my first exposure to the team, though. That was in a treasury edition that I got a few months earlier. Here's the cover to that:



That reprinted the first Defenders story (from MARVEL FEATURE #1) and also the stories where Valkyrie and Nighthawk first joined the team. Honestly, I must have read that treasury edition until the cover fell off! (Even my little sister liked it, IIRC. She usually didn't care about super heroes, but she read my copy of that book, and I think that she liked the Valkyrie.)

I loved this run but only when Buscema did the art. I also still like Nighthawk's costume, minus the red cape

Defenders #23.
Kyle reveals to Stephen that he'd met Holliman earlier that night:
“He wanted to talk real estate with Kyle Richmond. I wasn't in the mood.”
“Perhaps you should have listened more closely, Nighthawk. The forces of karma work in puzzling ways.”

How very puzzling---as we’ll see! Whatever reasons drive Kyle to express his exceptionalism through his costumed identity, rather than his millionaire self with its connections, have as much to do with the limitations of a superhero story of the 70’s as the character trying to fit into one. The Defenders are much further from the answers for it. They head back to the Sanctum for tea and pondering---unaware of the remaining three Serpents spying on them.

The Serpents, however, find a violent sting awaiting them through Yellowjacket, last seen in GS Defenders #4. Surreptitiously he’s skulked after them over the rooftops, and in a splash page smash he begins to take them down. The first two of them fall to wisecracks and jaw cracks, but a third that had been hiding in the shadows clips him. Yellowjacket confidently renders him unconscious, as the other two escape.

YJ takes his new prisoner to the Sanctum, where everyone there greets him happily to see him – underscoring the “friends” tone that’s come in under Gerber. The Hulk playfully makes goo-goo noises at Elena's baby, unconcerned with “bug man’s” prisoner, but Nighthawk rips the Sepent's mask off and tough talks him with a steadied fist. The Serpent (impervious to interrogation by hypnosis, as we find they all are) reveals his leader will be appearing on television at midnight. (Why so late? Though in today’s news cycles, it would still get its 24 hour treatment.)

Nighthawk eyes a lurker outside Doc's window, but as he prepares to go catch him, YJ says:
“Hold it! Kyle...no need to go smashing thru the glass! Let me handle this!” Using his scientifically precise approach, “(a) narrow, sharply focused beam of light issues forth from Yellowjacket's cellular-disruptor gun...passing harmlessly thru the window pane...and causing the fleeting figure outside to drop in his tracks!” This lurker, however, is discovered seconds later to be someone very shocking to Valkyrie (she drops her sword!): it’s her human persona’s missing husband, Jack Norriss, who’s much more shocked! He doesn't know what's happened, why “Barbara” doesn't recognize him...

With this left unsettled, Valkyrie excuses herself a few minutes, and Wong warms up Doc's TV, so they can watch the Serpent Leader's broadcast. (I don’t really remember seeing a TV any other time; Wong’s soaps, maybe? It was the source of instant news in 1974, though.) Serpent Leader plans to reach everybody at once, to start his all-white rebellion, and this is the medium by which to disseminate his ideas. It's been fairly called a great Gerberesque page, where he gives his speech; Nighthawk identifies the “spin” and also the imitation of legitimate political figures, a kind of State of the Disunion stating the correct response to the Great Society plans propagated by the Federal government: a purging of the stereotyped ethnicities, whose poverty increases the difficulty of employment, housing, and safety for white citizens.

Doc: “...the question becomes: what are we to do.”
Hulk: “Dumb Magician doesn't know?! Even Hulk knows –snake-men must be smashed!!”

But then, an explosion shakes Doc's house, and all rush outside, to see:
“The midnight sky to the south pulses with a brilliant – and eerie– glow of red-orange.” “A fire-bomb!” Y.J. shouts. “If it was dropped by plane – half of Lower Manhattan could be in flames! Looks like we shelve the questions for now...and move! Hulk! Come with me!” The two take quickly to the skies.
Nighthawk: “Wow! Talk about the voice of authority...! That's the first time I've ever seen Greenie take an order from anybody without so much as a grumble!”

Economically, we’ve been given YJ, the voice of intellect, of necessity, of precision, providing leadership to the Hulk, an emotional force of nature. As was his immediately formed plan, Hank directs his strength to forming a firebreak out of (strategically!) abandoned buildings. But because he IS what he is, Hulk sees this firebreak action as too slow, and decides to clap his hands together, creating a gale force that simply blows out the flames all at once. But this is costly to Yellowjacket: the force catches him as he flies two kids to safety, and down he comes to earth. The kids are safe; but his ankle’s twisted; two Serpents sneak up and cudgel that fine brain, the seat of his real powers. He tries to activate the “cybernetic circuitry” contained in his cowl– but the pain from his ankle is too great; he goes down.


The Defenders arrive, but the Serpents are better-prepared for a second encounter. One ray-gun blast each is sufficient to neutralize Doc, Val, and Kyle. The Hulk still stands after three, then he takes six. Then he's attacked by an electricity-weapon. Then he takes another eight blasts. Because it’s necessary for the next plot, Hulk falls down. Now, the Serpents make their mistake: they don't take him along with their other captives, because they realize they'd never be able to hold him once he woke up...maybe the stupid monster will wake shortly with no clue what to do, anyway! But as they walk away, the Hulk is changing back to Bruce Banner, lying on the pavement---and ironically, he may now be smart enough to save the day!


Comments: The stories of each speaking character in this arc tie together; the non-powered people and scenes fit in credible, realistic ways by the backstories and life paths that bring them here. Human beings seem to function with their own purposes, rather than appear as cogs in a plot machine. Except for the Serpents---and even there, their organizational reasoning is personal, giving you a bit of additional information than usually comes with costumed goons.

Yellowjacket as a science-hero has a cool design and different approach than any of his fellow non-team mates. It’s a distinguishing approach; I think he just needed a writer who loved him, rather than...but here, I believe, you can open the debate yourselves!

Defenders #24 "Jaws of the Serpent!"

Defeated! Lower Manhattan, fire bombed, and its Defenders, fallen!

Doctor Strange, The Master of the Mystic Arts---unconscious! The high-flying Nighthawk---brought low and wingless! The vibrant Valkyrie---yet to revive!

Suspended, enthralled by four double headed, coiling steel-cast serpents, even the Yellowjacket stings no more. All of these Defenders are captives hidden away in a location completely unknown, surrounded by enemies. The greatest of their powers avails them nothing, and remains undisplayed, for they have been rendered unconscious at the human level (as was the Hulk, too fearsome to take captive even while unconscious...and so, left to change to Bruce Banner, unseen by his foes).

So do we learn of the unfeeling, hateful plan of racial nightmares planned by the masked Sons of the Serpent, now infecting American media with their divisive, racially coded rhetoric. "As Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden," their violence in the ghettos will displace the less fortunate into the suburbs, where, in fear of the refugees and looting, the white gun owners will inflict race war upon the displaced.

Just for being born a different SKIN color? Can you believe it was ever normal in America to even think like that? But it was, and it hasn't been so long ago at the moment in time Valkyrie and Nighthawk respond. (Blast! If only Doc weren't still unconscious from that ray-burst! We'd be out of our bonds in two seconds! thinks Nighthawk.) Who would cause such anguish, who would use such resources, for such a vile end? Yellowjacket replies to the incredible pettiness, but Nighthawk is right, they are beyond reason.

They're departing to do these heinous things to their fellow human beings, but they're hooting about winning the war too much in the earshot of Valkyrie. Despite her confiscated sword, the metal coils will not stop her from taking issue with these men in a most physically uncomfortable manner.

"No woman could've done that!" they think, not unlike many people at the time of this story in the world outside of this twenty five cent diversion. But as women did, Valkyrie begins making believers of them...until she discovers one is a woman! She who hesitates is lost to a second ray blast. Interestingly, the woman asserts: "aren't you glad Serpent rules were amended to include women?" So equal opportunity ironically balances the scale, and now Valkyrie, unconscious, is the first chosen to die.

Fuzzy, Doctor Bruce Banner haggardly recounts the attack that felled himself as the Hulk and his captured fellow Defenders before Clea, the enchanted apprentice of Strange, his loyal man-servant Wong and Jack Norriss, the husband of the body(his wife Barbara) possessing the mind and spirit of the Valkyrie. Not only does he not believe Banner is the Hulk, logic refuses him peace as he hears his newly-rediscovered, amnesiac wife is a hostage. That grave danger moves Bruce to ask her aid in summoning, for the first time, more Defenders from their previous allies. Her love and courage outstrips her uncertainty, and so Clea calls from its dark cask the Crystal of Agamotto.

By thought projection she reaches out with no previous knowledge of finding this help. To the Son of Satan, Daimon Hellstrom, and Daredevil, Matt Murdock, she sends her terse visionary S.O.S.: "Defenders in peril of their lives...come at once...New York...Sanctum of Dr. Strange..."

Hellstorm is certain of her sincerity; his intuition guides him to choose to help, and so, his demon steeds arisen from beneath Fire Lake in Massachuesetts, trident in hand, he takes the night sky.

Searching for clues in the blocks-wide devastation, Daredevil's search for the serpents leads to his first encounter with seeing a thought projection, something he always wondered if a blind man could also do. No one there, a voice twelve stories above the ground---how is a man dependent upon his heightened senses to believe this in any way? With no other way to detect from a heartbeat if she is truthful, his instinct leans him towards trusting her. He realizes his affiliation with the Defenders, themselves unknown to the world at large, is unlikely knowledge for a trap, so he answers the plea.

Pressing on to thoughts of Atlantis for Namor, her submerged kingdom destination is lost amidst a multi-hued disruption in her brain. Her drop to the floor brings the other three present, where she recovers from her faintness to apologize for only summoning Daredevil and Daimon Hellstrom.

These two pages are strongly made of yellow, red and shadows; appropriate, for the gathering of Luke Cage, Power Man, with these heroes, costumed devil without and shirtless, caped devil within.

Banner suggests Clea relax without apology and takes over, listing the Defenders only reachable by the Crystal, clearly, cleverly, and humbly decides to try a simple phone call to the one whose number is known...a hero for hire who recently worked with the Defenders as if by accident against the massive threat of Thor villain the Wrecker and the newly formed Wrecking Crew, Asgardian powered mortal thugs.

Luke Cage doesn't know a Bruce Banner, and if he's the Hulk, Luke's George Wallace; he's in no move for jive. Banner earnestly persuades him, for reals, yo, and so Power Man scribbles down an address and departs his shabby office in the sleazy center of 42nd st., takes the I.R.T. to put his life on the line, on account of the names of Nighthawk and Doc Strange alone. Besides, if this is about breaking the Serpents, how can one resist?