One of my New Year's Resolutions for this year was to read more older comics. I've been modestly successful at that thus far. You can read about my Silver Age reading here if you're interested. On top of my Marvel Silver Age reading, I've also delved into the Defenders and West Coast Avengers as titles that I've been reading.
A comic shop in my area marked all their Marvel Essentials down to $5 to clear out the stock. Needless to say, I bought a ton of these and the first 4 volumes of the Defenders came into my possession. If you've never seen the Essentials collections, they are awesome for reading old material. They're black and white reprints and you get 24 or so issues of content in a book for $20. It's a really affordable way to check out old comics.
These had been sitting on my shelf until my wife and I went on vacation in February. I took the first volume of the Defenders and started to read those issues. The concept of the Defenders is interesting. It's a team that isn't a team, they often call it a non-team. What that means is you usually have a core cast and anyone and everyone can show up for an adventure and then just fade off into the sunset again. Currently, the team consists of Doctor Strange, Hulk, Namor, Silver Surfer and Valkyrie. The members come and go as they please so you never quite know who's going to be in a given issue. The Black Knight, Namorita and Hawkeye have also shown up for adventures.
The first volume contains a lot of the issues that lead to the eventual setup of the team so while I've only read 9 issues of the actual Defenders title, I'm about 20 issues into reading about this particular group. It's been a really fun and enjoyable ride. It's a cast of characters that I haven't read a ton about and most of the plots revolve around magic which isn't in my usual titles. So it feels like I've found this new little corner of the Marvel Universe to wander around in. I'm eager to read all 7 volumes that are out and to get the eventual 8th volume that will finish the series up.
I would highly recommend this book if you want an odd ball cast of characters and you like stories that revolve around magic.
The other title is the West Coast Avengers. I'm only a few issues into this series as I just dove into these issues about a week ago. This series sees the Avengers open up a West Coast branch to make the team more effective. The original team becomes Hawkeye, Wonder Man, Mockingbird, Iron Man (James Rhodes) and Tigra. Kind of a mishmash of former Avengers characters here but there's some really strong character work going on in the early issues. Tigra doubts her place, Rhodey has to deal with the fact that most people assume he's Tony and Hawkeye us Hawkeye.
I have fond memories of this book. When I was just getting into comics the regular Avengers were in their leather jacket phase of operations. Needless to say, to an 11 year old brain, the regular Avengers were boring. But right next to it, you had Hawkeye, Iron Man and the Human Torch on the covers. Needless to say, the more colorful West Coast team always captured my imagination more than the boring looking Avengers.
While, I'm excited for this book, I know it has it's problems. After the first 20-30 issues it does become more of a second rate book. My plan is to read it all the way through but I'm not expecting a lot out of the second half of this series.
That's what I'm reading old comics wise right now, I'll probably write another update on this in the fall.
I saw bits and pieces of the first Iron Man movie. I thought there was a second Iron Man of sorts that was played by Don Cheadle. Was he James Rhodes?
ReplyDeleteYes, he eventually becomes War Machine. In the comics, Tony hands over the Iron Man armor to Rhodey after he starts hitting the booze too hard. He becomes War Machine a few years after that run as Iron Man.
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