Invaders #2
Bucky apparently had a rough night drinking, before the fight!
Donar, God of Storms, as opposed to Donner, God of Superman movies.....
Creative Team: Roy Thomas-writer & editor, Frank Robbins-pencils, Vince Colletta-inks, John Costanza-letters, Petra Goldberg-colors
Synopsis: When we last left the newly christened Invaders, they had just met up with the touring company of What's Opera Doc?
This being a marvel comic, they fight, with Sub-Mariner squaring off with Donar, Human Torch and Loga (Fire God, as opposed to Loggia, T.H.E. FIRE GOD), and Toro and Froh. Bucky was left back in London, so the cover is a lie. meanwhile, Cap is making time with Hilda, until the goosesteppers turn up...
Chicks dig the abs!
Hilda seems to recognize the tunnel they are in and the Krauts lead them in deeper, to their secret base, complete with atomic pile, right out of Dr No....
They also meet the mysterious Brain Drain....
Cap dives in, swinging and Nazi-smashing and unmasks Brain Drain....
...who is the proverbial brain in a jar!
He zaps Cap with his robot arms, then demands to know where the ring is (Frodo has it!) and then we get the whole back story. A meteor crashed nearby, flash-frying Brain Drain's human body. his brain was put in a jar by the Teutonic deities that are fighting the Invaders, who are actually space travelers, with advanced science. there energy source is the weird glowing atomic ring we saw in the previous issue. It boosted BD's brainwaves and he took over the space gods' minds, making them believe they were the mythic Teutonic gods, including Hilda, or Brunnhilde, as she is known. Oh, and Brain Drain's former name is Werner Schmidt. The ring didn't totally whammy her and he got all handsy and she smacked him and left to report him to HR.....
#IchAuch
Hilda remembers and says her name is MCM-XLI (1941...cute!), navigator of the starship Tekili-Li
BD plans to turn the 3 dudes over to Herr Schikelgruber and curry favor, as well as execute Cap for being good looking, so Hilda will suck up to him.
Yeah, I don't think so!
BD gets all jealous and uses the ring to suck away the power of the 3 males, who Hilda called her mates....wait, a 4-way? What are they, reverse-Mormons or something?
They get weak and the Invaders start kicking Asgard, then Hilda lunges for the ring and knocks it into the atomic pile and that is never good....
Cap tells Hilda to run for it, but gets grabbed by BD's robot arm and lifted over his head, like a Road Warrior press slamming a Mulkey Brother...
Hilda interrupts and takes a swan dive into the atomic pile, after calling the others, and Brain Drain leaps after him, because he just wants to be loved...is that so wrong?
Der Brain Drain ist kaput! The other three space gods dive in and we get Gotterdamerung and the Invaders hop into the flagship and zip out of there, as a mushroom cloud rises in the distance.
Thoughts: Roy concludes his Ring of the Notbelung, with the Teutonic gods of Wagner's epic replaced by Star Trek guest stars, which might be the origin of the concept of the Asgardians as space beings, rather than the actual Norse gods, in the Marvel Universe. Or, maybe not, I don't know when they first floated that idea to keep from getting religious heat.
Brain Drain turns out to be a sci-fi brain in a jar, stuck on a robot body, which is always cool (and if you can add a French speaking Gorilla, with a submachine gun, it is even cooler!) Roy has to make him a tragic figure who was unlucky at love (you come on too strong, dude!), rather than just an insane Nazi science villain.
The villain's lair is pretty much swiped from ken Adams' design for Dr No's lab and this kind of sets the scene for The Red Skull, in the MCU, using the Tesseract (the Cosmic Cube has more zip) to power all of the HYDRA wonder-weapons.
Seems a shame to off a cool villain, so finally, at the end. First Master Man, now Brain Drain. At this rate, Roy is going to exhaust the team's enemies, in the first year.
Cap kind of steals the show, here, as we only get a few panels of the others battling the space gods. Robbins was always one of my favorite Cap artists, wonky faces and rubbery legs and all, because he was so dynamic with the action, with Cap diving into hordes of goons, in his best attempts at Kirby. he really staged those things well, though, his early attempt here, doesn't quite come off...
In later issues, Cap will have three guys hanging off of him, as he punches out another three, while lunging for the villain. That was what made Cap so cool, and I'm glad we got some of that, in the films, though his fight with Batroc shows that their fight coordinator really didn't think logically, about how Cap would have been trained, for hand-to-hand combat. Most likely, he would have been trained in Defendu, by someone like William Fairbairn, much like the Commandos, which mixed boxing, wrestling, savate, jiu jitsu, judo and street fighting techniques. Of course, Batroc wasn't fighting savate-style, either, just kickboxing, with some acrobatics; no
fouette, no
chasse bas, and no
pointe au foie/direct visage. Well, maybe a kick or two in the main fight. Lethal Weapon 2's finale had a better demonstration of savate kickboxing, with the combinations and chambered kicks.
Anyway, this was a pretty darn good story, somewhat altered from its original form, when it was split across two issues, instead of another giant Size. Roy parallels Wagner, so of course we have to have an epic and tragic ending....
Roy was about the only writer who could do "opera" and epic myth. Kirby and P Craig Russell, as writer/artists could do it (Kirby in a more pure/poetic form, Russell with more of the beauty, as well as the power); but you really don't find others who could, as writers only. Alan Moore, perhaps, or Neil Gaiman, though Moore was better at the grandeur, while Gaiman was more in line with Russell, in the character studies, rather than the grandeur.
Robbins isn't exactly well-suited to this kind of stuff; but, the additions of pulp science and such give him an in to it all, as he handled that stuff quite well. Plus, he gets the darkness of it all, as his work always handled such things beautifully (see his Batman work, in detective, with Man-Bat).
Next up, the Invaders meet the
Unterseemensch!
