A birthday present from Jeff, this volume features the founding of the 70's Marvel super-team: the Defenders, originally an "un-team" consisting of Dr. Strange, The Silver Surfer, The Hulk, and The Sub-Mariner, who would briefly band together to fight some world-threatening menace before once again going their lonely separate ways. The first stories are scattered among the various titles the heroes appeared in, plus Marvel Feature, before they were actually given a book of their own.
What's truly remarkable about this is just what a god-awful writer Roy Thomas was. My rose-colored nostalgia glasses don't kick in until well into the series, so it was something of a shock to me to find it nearly unreadable--a wince-inducing mix of bombastic dialog, narration that seems to assume that the art will be indecipherable, and stunningly incoherent plot. The plotting nadir, though, was was probably reached in Marvel Feature Presents: The Defenders #1 (the sixth tale in the book), which really does make me wonder whether Thomas was drunk or stoned when he penned it. Let me try to convey the truly mind-boggling stupidity of this tale...
There's this mad scientist enemy of Dr. Strange, see, and he's dying. He summons Strange's astral form to his bedside in the hospital and informs him that he's built a doomsday machine that will start to count down once the mad scientist dies and destroy the world five hours later (why? because he's mad). Dr. Strange uses his mystic powers to mind control the doctors to give him the best medical care possible--to no avail! The mad scientist dies, and the count-down begins. Dr. Strange summons the Hulk and Sub-Mariner to aid him and the go to the mad scientist's last mailing address: a light-house in Maine, there to find the Omegatron, the doomsday machine (which, incidentally, the mad scientist warned Strange can cause hallucinations to protect itself, a fact which Strange dutifully passed on to his companions). Strange scouts ahead in his astral form while the others break in, but the machine gloats to Strange that this is all part of the plan, and as soon as the Hulk and Submariner try to smash it, the vibrations will give it the power to initiate the destruction. Or some such blather. So Strange tries to warn the Hulk and Subby, but they are having none of it, reasoning that it's a hallucination sent by the machine.
So far, it's a bit over-the-top, but pretty much par for the course for this sort of comic. Here's where it all goes kerflooey, though. Unable to stop the two with force, Strange decides to create an illusion so they will see each other as their hated enemies...and despite the fact that not two panels before, they refused to listen to him because they were suspicious of hallucinations, they fall for it! So they commence pounding on each other, but the chatty machine tells Strange that just the vibrations from their battle will be enough to set it off. So what does Dr. Strange do? Why, he casts a spell slowing time for the machine so that the remaining 5 seconds 'til detonation will take "countless years." And Strange couldn't do this to stop the mad scientist dying in the first place, because...? A lesser writer might have cobbled together some sort of half-assed explanation, but not Roy Thomas. After all, if you're not expected to remember what happened two panels before, it's foolishness to quibble about something that happened in page 5 of the story.
Fortunately, from there, there's nowhere to go but up, and starting with the ninth story, Defenders #1, Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema take over. It's still hokum, but it's the good kind of hokum that you expect from a 70's comic. And with the introduction of the Valkyrie with Defenders #4, it starts to become the comic that I remember from my youth. Though I've got to say, Nighthawk's original costume? Stupidest looking mask ever; he would have looked more dignified in a set of "Groucho glasses".
I'm pretty sure this is a "you had to be there" kind of thing. Unlike early Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four, I don't think these hold up at all without the nostalgia factor. But maybe all you really need is to be ten years old when you first encounter them.
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