50 Years Ago, an Iconic Marvel Write Began a Classic Comic Run

In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we head to October 1974 to see the start of Steve Gerber’s classic run on the Defenders.

An important thing to remember about Marvel in the early 1970s is just how chaotic and disorganized it was, which is why Editor-in-Chief was such a strange job where everyone ostensibly wanted the job, but only because it just sort of sounded like something that you SHOULD want, and then whenever someone would get it, they would then try to get out of it, because it was really a miserable gig, especially when everyone in the role was expected to continue writing their scripts, on TOP of their editorial duties.

So there was constant reshuffling around the books to find someone who could cover each book, but it was often a matter of, “Hey, can you cover this issue? Great. Okay, can you also cover the NEXT issue?” And suddenly the first guy is gone and the other guy is now the “regular” writer of the title. That is basically how, in October 1974, Steve Gerber began his classic run on Defenders with a “jam issue” of Giant-Size Defenders #3 that he plotted with Len Wein and Jim Starlin, then Starlin laid out the whole issue, and a few different artists finished and inked the story. This was around the first time that stuff like “plotting” started to become a regular credit. Of course, everyone was hanging out with each other together in New York City, so people were CONSTANTLY bouncing plot ideas off of each other, but it was around this point in time that people started to actually get credited for this sort of thing. Len Wein was the writer on The Defenders, and presumably he wanted off of the book, and so he plotted an issue for the Giant-Size issue with Gerber and Starlin (who had been just recently working together on Iron Man), and then Gerber scripted it, and Wein left the book, and Gerber took over the main book with Defenders #20.

Who did the Defenders fight in this giant-sized adventure?

One of the things you would see with creators during this era is that they would often just do riffs on comics that they were into, and EVERYBODY was into Jim Steranko’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., so very often, guys of Gerber, Wein and Starlin’s generation would write in references to Steranko’s S.H.I.E.L.D, and the Prime Mover was a perfect example of that. He was part of a cool storyline in Steranko’s run, and he would pop up in a few different Marvel books of the 1970s (Doug Moench would use him in Master of Kung-Fu, for instance)…

And the Prime Mover was paired up against the Gamesmaster, making just his second appearance period, and in his first appearance, Nighthawk made his debut, so this was a big thing for Nighthawk!

Notice Gerber’s trademark “Fill the page with text like it is an illustrated story” deal. This wasn’t the first time that he did it, but this was ONE of the earliest examples of this sort of thing…

Speaking of book shuffling, the guest-star in this issue was Daredevil, and Gerber had JUST finished a run on Daredevil, so it makes sense that he would bring ol’ Hornhead into this series, as well.

How did the superheroes win the day?

So the challenge involved the Defenders facing off against the Prime Mover’s champions, and amusingly, one of them would go on to become a major character, and Gerber did not think about him any more than just a passing thought in this issue just for a cannon fodder character, but Michael Korvac would soon become one of Marvel’s most notable super-villains of the 1970s…

You definitely wouldn’t know it to look at him from here. The finishers on the issue, by the way, were Don Newton, Dan Adkins, and Jim Mooney.

After the Defenders won, Gamesmaster planned on adopting them as sort of his slaves, but Daredevil challenged him to a simple game of chance to decide whether they would go free. Of course, as Daredevil later thinks to himself, his Radar Sense allowed him to cheat on the coin flip!

This would later be used in an Avengers Annual, as well, with Hawkeye cheating to win.

The interesting thing about this story is that, while it was good, it really had more of a Starlin flavor to it than a Gerber one. Once he was totally in charge of the plots, though, his run would go off in delightfully bizarre directions. It was a wonderful run.

If you folks have any suggestions for November (or any other later months) 2014, 1999, 1974 and 1949 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.