Post by rberman on Mar 8, 2019 21:28:11 GMT -5
Dragon’s Claws by Simon Furman and Geoff Senior
Story Setting: 82nd century Britain is a mix of gleaming cities and Mad Max countryside. The masses have been distracted from their plight by televised squad-based combat games, recently cancelled for being too violent. Now these unemployed squads roam the countryside as mercenaries or bandits. Who can bring order to a troubled land?
Issue #1: Hardbitten policeman Deller is assigned by the para-governmental corporation N.U.R.S.E. to reactivate Dragon’s Claws, the consistent winning squad of the combat games, now disbanded and retired. Their former leader Dragon spends all his time watching footage of his glory days. When Dragon’s family is attacked by the Wildcats squad during a grocery trip, he returns to action against his wife’s wishes.
Issue #2: Deller prematurely leads the Claws into battle without Dragon. They are ambushed and nearly killed by marauding gang The Evil Dead, but Dragon shows up to turn the tide. Deller is insanely jealous.
Issue #3: The Claws are sent to pacify a town in secession. After battling a squad of invisible women, they find the town is doing a great job with husbanding its resources and feeding its people, so the Claws ignore their orders and leave the town alone.
Issue #4: The Claws go to France on a hostage exchange mission. Most of the squad gets caught up in a battle between two feuding barons who are eventually captured and forced to duel each other rather than ravage the countryside. Meanwhile, Dragon completes the hostage exchange and discovers that the French rebels should be considered noble freedom fighters.
Issue #5: Death’s Head, an android bounty hunter from the (even farther) future, materializes into a Jones Gang raid against The Evil Dead’s storehouses. Dragon’s Claws are assigned to take out everyone involved, but Dragon is just on the verge of an alliance with Death’s Head until Deller spoils it.
Issue #6: Matron, the head of N.U.R.S.E., orders Deller to murder Dragon’s family. He’s on the verse of carrying out the job when he begins to have misgivings and is interrupted by the Shrine gang. Their leader Kerron was the brother of the leader of the Wildcats whom Dragon killed back in issue #1, and he learned that Deller put the Wildcats up to it in order to draw Dragon back into the fighting life. They drive off Deller and, assuming that Dragon’s family is Deller’s family, kidnap them for revenge. In a side plot, the Dragon’s Claws are busy in Montreal investigating a string of serial killings of recently exonerated criminals.
Issue #7: It’s a focus issue for Mercy, the female member of the Dragon’s Claws. She was once a Punisher-style vigilante who repented of her violent tactics. Now a new vigilante named Scourge is copying Mercy’s old ways, and over the course of several encounters, Mercy kills Scourge before she can strike her next victim. Also, the government is investigating N.U.R.S.E. for criminal activites, sending Golding, the hostage politician whom the Dragon’s Claws rescued from French revolutionaries back in issue #4.
Death’s Head #2: (Story: Simon Furman; Art: Bryan Hitch and Dave Hine) The Chain Gang hires Death’s Head to kidnap Scavenger (a former member of their society, now one of the Dragon’s Claws) and bring him home so they can beat him up for abandoning his job as errand boy between their underground society and the surface world. When the Dragon’s Claws come looking for him, Death’s Head fights them to a standstill, right up to the minute that his contract with the Chain Gang expires. Scavenger prevails in his mano-a-mano battle with the Chain Gang leader, and the rest of the Chain Gang agree it’s high time they leave their underground lair and rejoin the broader world.
Issue #8: Golding clues Dragon that N.U.R.S.E. ordered Deller to murder his family, and that Deller balked at carrying out the order. When they arrive at N.U.R.S.E. headquarters to confront the chief executive Matron, a reconstituted Evil Dead squad is already there, fighting their way toward Matron against resistance from the rest of the Dragon’s Claws. Matron captures Dragon and Slaughterhouse, the leaders of their respective squads.
Issue #9: Matron tortures Dragon and Slaughterhouse with hallucinations of their failures and insecurities. They manage to suck her into their fugue state and kill her in dreamland, and the Evil Dead and Dragon’s Claws squads battle their way into Matron’s control room. Is this the end of N.U.R.S.E.?
Issue #10: Golding convinces the world government to hire the Dragon’s Claws rather than blame them for the crimes of their bosses at N.U.R.S.E. The Claws break their house arrest to follow the trail of Dragon’s missing family to Havana. Dragon’s son Michael is rescued; his father in law dies in a fire; his wife Tanya disappears with the survivors of the Shrine squad. Deller kills two members of the Shrine so they don’t tell anyone about his complicity in the attack back in issue #1, and then he reunites with the Dragon’s Claws, a traitor in their midst.
My Two Cents: That’s not the end of the story, but it is the end of the publication of the story. Here’s where it came from. Marvel UK wanted to produce their own monthly series, not just reprint American superhero comics. Their writers favored sci-fi military tales in the spirit of 2000AD, and this series in particular was inspired by the sports gladiators of the 1975 James Caan film “Rollerball.” The closest U.S. comics analogue which comes to mind is Peter B. Gillis’ Strikeforce: Morituri, which also featured a team of rebellious sci-fi soldiers with code names and costumes, but Gillis gave his characters super-powers as well and pitted them against aliens, whereas Simon Furman placed his story in a humans-only dystopia of constantly shifting alliances.
The series was going to be called “Dragon’s Teeth,” a reference to the myth of Cadmus growing soldiers from the ground, but that trademark was already claimed. The “Teeth” notion still survived in the series vertically zigzagging logo, an insignia also seen on the squad’s belt buckles. The squad itself is a classic “five-man band” with “leader, muscle, lancer, techie, and girl” slots. Two squaddies, Steel and Digit, never got focus stories before cancellation. In a 2008 foreword for the trade paperback, Furman blamed the series’ cancellation on the smaller size of the UK market and the physically smaller size of the individual issues, in comparison with its larger magazine-size competition. He expressed a hope for the story to continue in our new millennium, but that hasn’t come to fruition yet.
It’s a decent enough action/adventure yarn with some intrigue to liven it up. More banter among the Claws would have helped give them clearer personalities early on. The central drama is supposed to involve Dragon’s relationship with his disapproving wife, but she’s painted so unsympathetically. She berates him for being a fighter even when he’s in the middle of battle to save her life, and at one point she rejects an escape opportunity just so she can barge into a firefight to yell at him some more. Dunno, maybe she was going to be revealed as a robot or something, but she’s so unrelentingly unpleasant that it’s hard to root for him to rescue her, let alone live with her. At least she didn’t get fridged, I guess; she really seemed headed for that about halfway through.
Geoff Senior’s art (he provides both pencils and inks) is surprisingly conservative, hewing close to the Marvel style, trapezoidal mouths and all, as well as some tinyhead syndrome.
Furman created Death’s Head for use in Transformers (UK) #113 (1987, art by Senior) but published him elsewhere first to prevent Hasbro from claiming ownership. He crossed paths with the Eighth Doctor in Doctor Who Magazine #135 (1988, again by Furman and Senior) before his own 1988-9 series lasted ten issues, plus his single crossover appearance in Dragon’s Claws as described above. He also showed up once in Walt Simonson’s Fantastic Four #338 (1990) during an arc set in the far future. A second Death’s Head series by Dan Abnett and Liam Sharp in 1992 lasted only four issues. Marvel republished Furman’s Death’s Head material in 1993 as The Incomplete Death’s Head, and that was about it for the droll bounty hunter robot, except for rare cameos in other Marvel comics. He’s not graced a trade paperback as far as I know.
Story Setting: 82nd century Britain is a mix of gleaming cities and Mad Max countryside. The masses have been distracted from their plight by televised squad-based combat games, recently cancelled for being too violent. Now these unemployed squads roam the countryside as mercenaries or bandits. Who can bring order to a troubled land?
Issue #1: Hardbitten policeman Deller is assigned by the para-governmental corporation N.U.R.S.E. to reactivate Dragon’s Claws, the consistent winning squad of the combat games, now disbanded and retired. Their former leader Dragon spends all his time watching footage of his glory days. When Dragon’s family is attacked by the Wildcats squad during a grocery trip, he returns to action against his wife’s wishes.
Issue #2: Deller prematurely leads the Claws into battle without Dragon. They are ambushed and nearly killed by marauding gang The Evil Dead, but Dragon shows up to turn the tide. Deller is insanely jealous.
Issue #3: The Claws are sent to pacify a town in secession. After battling a squad of invisible women, they find the town is doing a great job with husbanding its resources and feeding its people, so the Claws ignore their orders and leave the town alone.
Issue #4: The Claws go to France on a hostage exchange mission. Most of the squad gets caught up in a battle between two feuding barons who are eventually captured and forced to duel each other rather than ravage the countryside. Meanwhile, Dragon completes the hostage exchange and discovers that the French rebels should be considered noble freedom fighters.
Issue #5: Death’s Head, an android bounty hunter from the (even farther) future, materializes into a Jones Gang raid against The Evil Dead’s storehouses. Dragon’s Claws are assigned to take out everyone involved, but Dragon is just on the verge of an alliance with Death’s Head until Deller spoils it.
Issue #6: Matron, the head of N.U.R.S.E., orders Deller to murder Dragon’s family. He’s on the verse of carrying out the job when he begins to have misgivings and is interrupted by the Shrine gang. Their leader Kerron was the brother of the leader of the Wildcats whom Dragon killed back in issue #1, and he learned that Deller put the Wildcats up to it in order to draw Dragon back into the fighting life. They drive off Deller and, assuming that Dragon’s family is Deller’s family, kidnap them for revenge. In a side plot, the Dragon’s Claws are busy in Montreal investigating a string of serial killings of recently exonerated criminals.
Issue #7: It’s a focus issue for Mercy, the female member of the Dragon’s Claws. She was once a Punisher-style vigilante who repented of her violent tactics. Now a new vigilante named Scourge is copying Mercy’s old ways, and over the course of several encounters, Mercy kills Scourge before she can strike her next victim. Also, the government is investigating N.U.R.S.E. for criminal activites, sending Golding, the hostage politician whom the Dragon’s Claws rescued from French revolutionaries back in issue #4.
Death’s Head #2: (Story: Simon Furman; Art: Bryan Hitch and Dave Hine) The Chain Gang hires Death’s Head to kidnap Scavenger (a former member of their society, now one of the Dragon’s Claws) and bring him home so they can beat him up for abandoning his job as errand boy between their underground society and the surface world. When the Dragon’s Claws come looking for him, Death’s Head fights them to a standstill, right up to the minute that his contract with the Chain Gang expires. Scavenger prevails in his mano-a-mano battle with the Chain Gang leader, and the rest of the Chain Gang agree it’s high time they leave their underground lair and rejoin the broader world.
Issue #8: Golding clues Dragon that N.U.R.S.E. ordered Deller to murder his family, and that Deller balked at carrying out the order. When they arrive at N.U.R.S.E. headquarters to confront the chief executive Matron, a reconstituted Evil Dead squad is already there, fighting their way toward Matron against resistance from the rest of the Dragon’s Claws. Matron captures Dragon and Slaughterhouse, the leaders of their respective squads.
Issue #9: Matron tortures Dragon and Slaughterhouse with hallucinations of their failures and insecurities. They manage to suck her into their fugue state and kill her in dreamland, and the Evil Dead and Dragon’s Claws squads battle their way into Matron’s control room. Is this the end of N.U.R.S.E.?
Issue #10: Golding convinces the world government to hire the Dragon’s Claws rather than blame them for the crimes of their bosses at N.U.R.S.E. The Claws break their house arrest to follow the trail of Dragon’s missing family to Havana. Dragon’s son Michael is rescued; his father in law dies in a fire; his wife Tanya disappears with the survivors of the Shrine squad. Deller kills two members of the Shrine so they don’t tell anyone about his complicity in the attack back in issue #1, and then he reunites with the Dragon’s Claws, a traitor in their midst.
My Two Cents: That’s not the end of the story, but it is the end of the publication of the story. Here’s where it came from. Marvel UK wanted to produce their own monthly series, not just reprint American superhero comics. Their writers favored sci-fi military tales in the spirit of 2000AD, and this series in particular was inspired by the sports gladiators of the 1975 James Caan film “Rollerball.” The closest U.S. comics analogue which comes to mind is Peter B. Gillis’ Strikeforce: Morituri, which also featured a team of rebellious sci-fi soldiers with code names and costumes, but Gillis gave his characters super-powers as well and pitted them against aliens, whereas Simon Furman placed his story in a humans-only dystopia of constantly shifting alliances.
The series was going to be called “Dragon’s Teeth,” a reference to the myth of Cadmus growing soldiers from the ground, but that trademark was already claimed. The “Teeth” notion still survived in the series vertically zigzagging logo, an insignia also seen on the squad’s belt buckles. The squad itself is a classic “five-man band” with “leader, muscle, lancer, techie, and girl” slots. Two squaddies, Steel and Digit, never got focus stories before cancellation. In a 2008 foreword for the trade paperback, Furman blamed the series’ cancellation on the smaller size of the UK market and the physically smaller size of the individual issues, in comparison with its larger magazine-size competition. He expressed a hope for the story to continue in our new millennium, but that hasn’t come to fruition yet.
It’s a decent enough action/adventure yarn with some intrigue to liven it up. More banter among the Claws would have helped give them clearer personalities early on. The central drama is supposed to involve Dragon’s relationship with his disapproving wife, but she’s painted so unsympathetically. She berates him for being a fighter even when he’s in the middle of battle to save her life, and at one point she rejects an escape opportunity just so she can barge into a firefight to yell at him some more. Dunno, maybe she was going to be revealed as a robot or something, but she’s so unrelentingly unpleasant that it’s hard to root for him to rescue her, let alone live with her. At least she didn’t get fridged, I guess; she really seemed headed for that about halfway through.
Geoff Senior’s art (he provides both pencils and inks) is surprisingly conservative, hewing close to the Marvel style, trapezoidal mouths and all, as well as some tinyhead syndrome.
Furman created Death’s Head for use in Transformers (UK) #113 (1987, art by Senior) but published him elsewhere first to prevent Hasbro from claiming ownership. He crossed paths with the Eighth Doctor in Doctor Who Magazine #135 (1988, again by Furman and Senior) before his own 1988-9 series lasted ten issues, plus his single crossover appearance in Dragon’s Claws as described above. He also showed up once in Walt Simonson’s Fantastic Four #338 (1990) during an arc set in the far future. A second Death’s Head series by Dan Abnett and Liam Sharp in 1992 lasted only four issues. Marvel republished Furman’s Death’s Head material in 1993 as The Incomplete Death’s Head, and that was about it for the droll bounty hunter robot, except for rare cameos in other Marvel comics. He’s not graced a trade paperback as far as I know.
