Essential Defenders: More Seventies Silliness

As Ed pointed out in his last post, he's not much of a superhero guy, so here I come to raise the spandex quotient of the blog once again. I've recently been reading Essential Defenders and it's a lot of goofy fun. I remember reading a handful of Defenders comics when I was younger, but I never actively followed the series the way I followed Amazing Spider-Man (or Spectacular or Marvel Team-Up or any of the other Spidey spin-offs). So I hadn't read most of the stories collected in this volume before, which was a nice surprise: Usually when I pick up one of Marvel's Essentials I've already read all of the comics collected in one format or another. Anyway, I can now see why this series is so fondly remembered by its fervent fanbase. Where else could you get fun scenes like these? (Click any of the images for larger versions.)


"Hulk may be slow, but he knows when he's being insulted!"


Oh, sure, Hulk is all sensitive when he's the one being insulted, but give him a fancy cape and suddenly he's the one flinging the offensive terms around.


Those have got to be some of the worst sound effects in comic book history. "Clam!"? That's not a sound effect; that's something you eat. "Wop!" is an ethnic slur. "Dam!"* is something beavers build. Only "Crump!"comes close to being appropriate as a sound effect, since it can mean "to explode heavily or with a loud dull noise," but it still sounds lame. Apparently it would be several years before Marvel made real inroads establishing its sound effects supremacy over its Distinguished Competition.

* [That may actually be "Tdam!": Even in the original panel it's difficult to tell if that's a 't' that got cut off or if it's some debris flying from the Japanese shop sign Cap bashed Subby over the head with.]