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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 22, 2019 10:00:34 GMT -5
Champions is what you get when you create a comic by committee. Isabella proposed an Angel and Iceman series, and was told they couldn't carry a book by themselves (which was likely true in those pre-Xmania days). He reluctantly added the former Avengers Black Widow and Hercules. Then editorial insisted he add Ghost Rider because the team needed a character with his own book. It's kind of a miracle they got that odd and awkward combination to work at all (though I might argue they never did). I suspect the book only held on as long as it did because readers like me were buying it for the Byrne art.At least we got two halfway decent characters (Darkstar and Swarm) out of it. Of course, none of this criticism stopped me from buying the two TPBs reprinting the run.  Cei-U! What can I say? Sometimes I love bad comics! Ha, you caught me. I have most of the run and still haven’t parted with it. |
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Post by Cei-U! on Feb 22, 2019 10:01:53 GMT -5
Anyone remember the name of the letters page? What was the reaction at the time? The letters page was titled "Cables of Champions," which I *think* was a pun based on an advertising campaign of the time that referred to healthy foods one would find on the tables of champions, but it was so long ago I can't swear to it. Anecdotally, I can tell you that most of the guys I knew were like me: Marvel zombies who were buying it in hopes it might get better, not because they genuinely liked it. And you can't judge audience reaction by the letters page, anyway, as there was a tendency at the time to misrepresent the response by printing only positive or constructively critical letters.
Cei-U! I summon the slanted reporting!
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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2019 10:05:12 GMT -5
Thanks!
Good point. The reason I asked, though, is because, after picking up some Super-Villain Team-Up issues, the letters page did feature some critical viewpoints, quite robust. But I guess it depends on the editorial policies of each title.
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Post by brutalis on Feb 22, 2019 10:19:21 GMT -5
You can count me in as one of the guilty buyers. Jumped on because it was a brand new team with each one a member that I liked. Had hopes of it becoming something grand and it just kept getting worse as it went along. Art being the sole redemption while wishing and hoping and praying it would get better. Proof that your prayers aren't always answered. Champions could have should have been a better comic but it desperately needed a creative writer capable of delivering something more for the characters.
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Post by Cei-U! on Feb 22, 2019 10:19:39 GMT -5
Yup. In the pre-Shooter days, the letters pages were sometimes put together by the book's writer (who had a vested interest in the book's being perceived as popular) or by "armadillos" (assistant editors). The latter were occasionally known to skew the letters negative in hopes the current creative team would get axed, giving them a chance to yake over. The most notorious case of this were the AEs who deliberately set out to sabotage Jack Kirby's books by printing mostly critical letters.
Cei-U!
I summon the bad behavior!
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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2019 10:29:35 GMT -5
Yikes! Sounds like the way certain officers would undermine Commandant Eric Lassard in the Police Academy movies ("If Lassard fails, I'll become commandant."). Wow!
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Post by badwolf on Feb 22, 2019 10:53:49 GMT -5
It was just bad. The first arc with the Greek gods was awful. The Swarm arc at least had nice art but was silly even by Mantlo standards.
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Crimebuster
CCF Podcast Guru
Making comics!
Posts: 3,959 
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Post by Crimebuster on Feb 22, 2019 10:58:24 GMT -5
For me, there are two big problems with Champions that doomed it.
First, as has already been discussed, there was literally no point to the series. it's not what the writer wanted to do. It was just a random group of characters thrown together for marketing purposes. "Hey, add this guy, and that guy, maybe i will sell better." There's literally no concept behind the book, it just exists because they wanted another book to exist. That simply is never going to work.
The other, related problem, is that for me there's no center to the book on a character level. I believe that team books need to have a central, anchor character (or characters) for the other characters to work off of and around. In Avengers, it's usually Captain America. In X-Men, it's variously been Cyclops, Wolverine, or Storm. For the Justice League, it's Superman and Batman. Champions has nobody - there's no one character that's central to the book, that's strong enough on a character level to anchor the series. Hercules, Black Widow, Iceman, and Angel are all characters we've seen work well in team books before and after, but always as second fiddles. In Champions, there's no first fiddle. Ghost Rider can't fill that spot because it makes zero sense for him to be in a team to begin with, so when you're writing a character as always reluctantly showing up, or the others being wary of him, he can't really be the center of anything. He would have been a fine Defender I think. Made no sense for the Champions.
My pitch to make Champions succeed: if we start with the basic premise of Iceman and Angel off together at college (which is where the series begins, and where Isabella began with his original pitch), I would have the center of the book be... Spider-man. I think by 1975 he had dropped out of college. But he later returned to school to finish his degree. Let's start there. He already knows Iceman and Angel from previous team-ups, and we've seen Angel and Iceman succeed in a team book set at a school. Let's make the book into a sort of Twentysomething Titans, with those three at college. We can also add Tigra, who in her early appearances as The Cat had recently dropped out of college to get married - so she's back in school now.
Not sure just who to add to the group in 1975, but a year later, we've got Nova coming along at school as well, and since many consider him a Peter Parker ripoff to begin with, why not add him to the team.
So by issue 8, we have a group of college heroes working together - Spider-man, Iceman, Angel, Tigra, and Nova. And maybe they have some kind of mentor/teacher trying to guide them? If Black Panther wasn't busy in his own title at the time, he might be a good choice, as he was a teacher in his secret identity in Avengers. Or maybe we borrow Iron Man occasionally from Avengers - similar to his role in the current Spidey MCU movies, he's keeping an eye on these younger heroes, trying to guide them with an eye towards them being the next generation of possible Avengers.
Anyway, just spitballing, but there's a central premise (college heroes) and a bankable central character to work around (Spider-man). You're welcome, Marvel. Just get me the time machine and I will fix this for you!
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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2019 11:07:56 GMT -5
Crimebuster, I love you!
Like it all, particularly the Nova idea and Iron Man overseeing things. I can visualise everything you've posted.
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 22, 2019 11:11:03 GMT -5
You hit the nail on the head CB. I doubt that Spider-man would have been available because they were jealousy guarding him from any other books but his own.
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Post by beccabear67 on Feb 22, 2019 11:13:35 GMT -5
I thought there was an idea behind Champions, to have a bunch of super heroes based on the west coast.
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Post by Mister Spaceman on Feb 22, 2019 11:20:34 GMT -5
I also picked up this title off the rack back in the day mostly because of the Byrne art. Otherwise I wasn't particularly invested in the stories or characters.
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Post by beccabear67 on Feb 22, 2019 11:34:33 GMT -5
It was too early for Spider-Woman to have been included I guess but she was west coast based... A Spider-Woman and Black Widow on the same team? That could've been more interesting. I thought Angel was sort of the financial rock like Tony Stark was with the Avengers? They did do some cross-overs with the Hulk and other characters entering their west coast locale too, I think that could've been interesting with a west coast based writer and perhaps artist making the most of LA, SF, Nevada settings, maybe even Seattle or Denver... but then other super characters had stories set in the west at times too without it being their home base. The tie-in with the also failing Super-Villain Team-Up didn't seem to help in the least.
Ghost Rider is not someone I would've included. I don't think Son Of Satan, Dracula, Brother Voodoo, Gargoyle worked outside of a Doctor Strange crossover with the Marvel universe. Why not The Mummy, It and Scarecrow? The supernatural characters and the superheroes are chalk and cheese for me. Doctor Strange in The Defenders was ill-fitting enough. Hercules who is actually the Greek god and was in The Avengers in the '60s works okay, and personality-wise he fills a role like The Beast has in other titles, an extrovert catalyst and visual focus for adventures.
Champions towers as a west coast Baxter building could've been interesting in it's own right also, more could've been made of it. Once they came up with West Coast Avengers there was the real answer to selling a west coast group.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2019 12:26:34 GMT -5
Marvel need to really up their game and give us the following:
The Avengers & The Avengers
Cap, Iron Man, Ant-Man and Wasp head over to London, England. There, they team up with Steed and Peel to battle Loki and the Cybernauts
The Defenders VS Defenders of the Earth
Dr. Strange VS Mandrake the Magician! Hulk VS Lothar! Namor VS Phantom! Silver Surfer VS Flash Gordon. Can the teams put aside their differences when Dormammu and Ming the Merciless form an alliance?
The Champions VS The Champions
The Champions of Marvel head to Geneva to meet the Nemesis organisation. There, they band together with Craig Stirling, Sharron Macready and Richard Barrett to take on Pluto
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Post by berkley on Feb 22, 2019 15:40:18 GMT -5
I don't have much to add, but yeah, from memory, no real rationale for the team as a whole or for those particular characters getting together. I liked it for the Byrne artwork (though slightly marred by unsympathetic inking, to my eyes) and because I always liked seeing the Black Widow and Hercules, two characters not appearing anywhere else regularly at the time.
I didn't like Ghost Rider being on the team: didn't like the character much in the first place and always preferred the supernatural characters kept to their own world and didn't mix with superheroes too much.
It strikes me that the "created by committee" problem makes the Champions resemble today's Marvel and DC comics more than most 70s series I can think of. In a slightly different way, She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, and Ms. Marvel as well remind me of the kind of thing that happens commonly today and contributed significantly to my growing disappointment and disinterest in Marvel's product in the late 70s to early 80s.
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