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The MISFIT CHARACTERS of Marvel

This was something Marvel was to attempt on more than one occasion: the banding together of two or twelve career second-stringers (sometimes quite arbitrarily) into one unit, the better to possibly make some profitable usage of them. One of the shorter-lived of such efforts -- although still quite an interesting one, overall -- was a book entitled THE CHAMPIONS. [see cover, below]

The team's membership, initially, consisted of: The Angel and the Iceman (two ex- members of the X-Men); Hercules (a cast-off Olympian demi-god, possessed of a fine, rollicking hail-fellows-well-met sort of outlook on life); the Black Widow (an ex-KGB agent, now a costumed adventuress; logical, coolly dispassionate, and their nominal leader); and the Ghost Rider (a demon-possessed stunt motorcyclist).

... oh, now... be fair: if I can type the words "demon-possessed stunt motorcyclist" without laughing

As unlikely a hem-stitched assortment of characters as the above-referenced may seem -- and, in truth, the book's procession of writers often found their powers of rationale taxed to the utmost, in order to keep this lunatic assembly all within the confines of the same title, issue to issue -- the books had some quite nice moments, throughout its abbreviated run.

Of course, there was a much simpler means by which an enterprising writer could link up two wholly disparate characters, in service of (one hoped and prayed) a crackling good yarn: that venerable comics institution -- the "team-up" title.

Such things followed a fairly rigid (if no less satisfying, often as not) formula: Character "A" stumbles across Character "B," at some point early on in the story; due to some miscommunication or plot contrivance, "A" and "B" proceed to beat the holy stuffing out of one another; eventually, the "A"/"B" combo realize (isn't it always the way, though...?) that their earlier crossed-wire attempts at communication were -- in reality-- part of a Master Plan cobbled up by This Issue's Surprise Super-Villain.

The new super-duo -- call them "A/B" -- mumble embarrassed apologies to one another... shake hands... and then take sportsman-like turns jumping up and down, repeatedly, upon an unfailingly stunned and unhappy super-baddie.

MARVEL TEAM-UP and MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE (pictured, respectively, above and below) were representative of this particular comics sub-genre. DC, for its own part, made do with a pair of similar offerings (THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD and DC COMICS PRESENTS).

While this particularly ritualized sort of ongoing monthly title has fallen into disfavor with the readership, of late... the titles were always a good deal of fun, nonetheless. If for no other reason than this: they were handy "courts of last resort" during the seemingly interminable squabbles that readers would engage in, re: "who's really stronger: 'A' or 'B'?" As "A" and "B" had -- in all likelihood -- already duked it out between the covers of just such one of these titles, said disputes were usually a matter of simply looking up the appropriate back issue(s)... pointing out the relevant pages of same... and looking suitably smug and superior without getting your teeth knocked out in the process.

Of course, not all slugfests between super-types were the end result of a super-villain's dire cunning. Sometimes, one of the "heroes" in question had a pronounced "dark" side of his own, and was just as likely to dislocate your jaw as he might be to shake your hand. In the early-to-mid-70's, Marvel seemed to churn out entire battalions of this sort on a nearly monthly basis.

One of the more interesting of these was Jesuit priest "Daimon Hellstrom" -- i.e., the Son of Satan.

Born with a pentagram-shaped birthmark on his chest (which -- as one letter-writer of the day remarked -- must have raised an eyebrow or two in the shower room, over at the seminary), Father Hellstrom was the inevitable end-result of Satan's claiming a mortal woman as his one-time Saturday Night Thing.

Forthrightly renouncing both his father and his birthright (as Scion of Hell), the Son of Satan spent the greater portion of his free time taking on the sorts of menaces other super-heroes either didn't or couldn't: demonic possession... various Lords of Hell attempting to curry Satan's favor by luring the unwise, the unwary and/or the just plain old unlucky into Eternal Damnation... "fun" stuff like that.

The character was an offbeat and engaging one, overall, and I was heartily sorry to see his short-lived series end almost as soon as it had begun.

An even more difficult-to-get-along-with gent was the hapless Jack Russell... better known to the Marvel readership of the day as WEREWOLF BY NIGHT.
No super-hero he, the Werewolf was a feral and uncomprehending creature, whose incessant search for "... the forest... where I can hunt... where I can KILL..." was the storytelling petrol on which this popular series ran for a good many years. In the meantime, his thrice-monthly transformation into a big, furry buzzsaw with an attitude seeded Jack Russell's life with the necessary complications for the requisite portion of breast-beating and pathos, as well.

... and to close out this treatise with a personal "favorite": there was a marvelously whacked-out character who appeared in an entire one issue of MARVEL PREMIERE, by the unlikely name of WoodGod.

If my memory of the decidedly hallucinatory plot still serves: the title character was a human-animal hybrid, created by a young man's doting Mad Scientist- type father who feared that the planet was -- in the immortal words of the Grateful Dead -- "going to Hell in a bucket."

Despairing of his being able to stave off the inevitable Collapse of World Civilization As We Know It, said scientist spliced his son's own genes with those of various sturdy- seeming fauna... and, Hey Presto! One super-strong (if thoroughly bewildered... as who wouldn't be, really...?) radiation- and biological warfare-proof mutant-thing, ready to take his rightful place amongst the ever-expanding galaxy of Marvel Comics superstars...

... or not, as the case (in this particular instance) may be.

Okay, okay... it's easy enough, I suppose, to snigger at some of these characters, with the peculiar clarity afforded us by twenty- or thirty-year hindsight. And, Lord knows, it's not as if I'm advancing the argument that any of the foregoing series' were, y'know, the Second Coming of Fedor Dostoevsky (or the Second Coming of Gardner Fox, even...).

Still: they -- and several good-sized hordes of characters just like 'em -- helped to make the Marvel Universe of the 60's and 70's one heck of a fun place to visit, during their respective heydays.

And -- as the final cover reproduced, below, clearly illustrates -- Marvel certainly never lays a character or concept decently to rest until every last possible attempt has been made to keep its EEG from flatlining altogether.

Can you say "full circle," boys and girls...?

"MISFIT" MARVEL CHARACTERS of the Silver Age
PAGE ONE (Giant-Man and Nick Fury)
PAGE TWO (Black Widow, Black Panther, Prowler, Captain
Mar-Vell, Luke Cage and Iron Fist)

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