Cover Date: 1977
On Sale Date: May 1977
Writer: Bill Mantlo
Artist: George Tuska
Inker: Don Perlin
Letterer: John Costanza
Colorist: Phil Rache
Editor: Archie Goodwin
Cover Artist: Al Milgrom
Iron Man crashes into an AIM installation looking for MODOK, who has caused a blackout across the West Coast by siphoning away energy for an unknown purpose. After disabling the defenses Iron Man finds the base empty, so he goes to Los Angeles to recruit the new superteam, the Champions, to help in his search. When he arrives he gets into a mistaken fight with the Ghost Rider which is broken up by the Black Widow, who had served with Iron Man in the Avengers. Iron Man suspects MODOK is operating out of one of three AIM testing sites in California, so the heroes split into groups to investigate.
Black Widow, Hercules, and the Angel travel to Redwood National Forest and encounter an AIM strike team. Iceman, Ghost Rider, and Darkstar discover a base full of AIM soldiers beneath San Francisco Bay where sea-creatures are being mutated into monsters. During that battle, Darkstar is injured and knocked unconscious. In a small church in the Mojave Desert, Iron Man encounters Stryke, one of MODOK’s minions. Realizing he’s walked into a trap, Iron Man escapes and contacts the Champions, telling them to join him in Nevada at the first base he investigated. Iron Man arrives and finds MODOK, who had been there the whole time, invisible and still siphoning energy. The Champions arrive, but MODOK escapes in his Doomsday Chair, which triggers a cave-in as he escapes, burying the heroes. Iron Man uses the power from MODOK’s energy batteries to charge up his armor, allowing him to blow a hole through the debris. Iron Man chases after MODOK and fires his repulsor ray at him, causing MODOK to crash into the ground, destroying him.
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| Put Johnny with the two members he can't stand, good plan! |
THE ROADMAP
Ghost Rider last appeared in The Human Fly (1977) # 2. He appears next in a cameo with the rest of the Champions in Super-Villain Team-Up # 14 and then in The Champions (1975) # 16.
CHAIN REACTION
The Champions make a guest-appearance in the 1977 Iron Man Annual and come out looking less than impressive.
A staple of Bill Manto’s run on The Champions is that he constantly had the team members arguing with each other in particularly nasty ways. Ghost Rider usually got dealt this bit the worst, as he had a fiercely antagonistic relationship with Iceman (who would rather spit on him than look at him) and Darkstar (who took Blaze’s verbal abuse with far more patience than he deserved). I’m not sure if Mantlo was the regular writer on Iron Man at the time of this Annual, but he’s able to carry over all of his Champions characterizations to here as well. It makes for an odd fit in the issue, though, because it’s an Iron Man story that suddenly stops for 10 pages to feature the Champions. If it was a spotlight issue for the team in hopes of boosting sales on their own title, sure, I can see the logic behind letting Mantlo run wild with Champions escapades for a few pages. For an Iron Man story, though, it really detracts from what I’m sure most readers were wanting.
The comic starts in the middle of the story, seemingly anyway, but doesn’t give any indication as to where the story originally began. I assume in Iron Man’s own title, but the footnotes and recaps are less than helpful in that regard. It feels like the Champions are plopped into the end of a longer Iron Man/MODOK epic. Even worse is the end, which wraps up the story in about two panels with MODOK’s “death” happening in such a rushed, haphazard way that it reads like Mantlo suddenly just realized he was out of pages and couldn’t continue into another issue. It’s a messy story that deviates too much into random elements for it to be very satisfying as a whole, either as and Iron Man or Champions showcase.
The artwork isn’t much better, coming from two artists who were generally much better than this. Tuska and Perlin are both Ghost Rider veterans (though Perlin’s work would come much later than this) and neither one seem to mesh well in this issue. The work seems sloppy and the action hard to follow from panel to panel, as if the characters move through space without any regard for where they were in the panel before. It’s decidedly Silver Age in an era that was trying to distance itself from that style (such as having John Byrne on the Champions title).
This is an ultimately skippable, irrelevant comic if you’re a Ghost Rider reader, even if you’re one of those that really dig his time in the Champions. Not worth your time.
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