Live the Rest of Your Life as a Champion

There are almost four weeks left of the summer holidays. We're very lucky this year to have an extra week. The Saharan plume has arrived today. It's very hot; it's been muggy but overcast for the last couple of days. I think my holiday week next week in Gallloway will be showery.

This week, thirty-seven years ago, I went much further afield: I had my first trip to London. I used to go back and forth when I was chasing acting work but I haven't been down in almost two decades- not even with school. Anyway, my mum took my brother and I on holiday by bus from Glasgow, when I had just turned nineteen and just finished my first year at Uni.

 We visited Windsor Castle and went to see Evita, which left me cold and The Wrath of Khan ( I preferred the novelization.).  "Come on Eileen", with its faux-Irish waifs, was on the radio everywhere and there was a terrorist attack by the IRA which cast an anxious pall over the week. I dragged my family round the original Forbidden Planet on Denmark Street and Comics Showcase in Covent Garden, looking for Sixties DC comics. I think that's where I got these two JLA issues:

My brother was also buying RPG modules and handbooks for the Champions game:

The contemporary comics I bought were super-team books too and included the X-Men, the Legion and the Titans. (Alpha Flight and New Mutants were still months in the future). The only group books I didn't get regularly were Micronauts, Defenders and Avengers because I read the copies my school friend Graham was buying.

The Sixties retro phase that Marvel was going through- Byrne's FF being the most high-profile example, but also Ditko's work on Machine Man -really didn't speak to me in the early 80s. After being a fan of Byrne and Perez on Avengers, I was most disappointed by the art, especially Bob Hall. I also didn't appreciate Colan the way I do today. Reading Gene the Dean's issues 209 and 211, from 1981, last week reminded me of something I'd forgotten. Twice.

In 2013. the Supermegamonkey site posted a comment that talked about the roster Bill Mantlo had planned, when he became the writer of the Avengers in 1981. Essentially, the team was a merger of the Champions and the classic Stan and Jack Avengers: Cap, Thor, Iron man, Hulk, Hercules, Angel, Iceman and Black Widow.

Of course, Mantlo's plans never came to fruition; Shooter, who never rated him anyway, took over the book, initially with a stated intention of featuring heroes who had their own comic. In 211, however, we see some of the Champions characters appear- the Angel contemplates "(thinking) about becoming an Avenger-maybe I ought to!". Iceman is adamant he has retired, however.

I can't really see what the Angel would add that the Wasp couldn't already do. There was no mention of the Wasp on Mantlo's roster, however, although he wrote in the letters page about her character " developing in some interesting ways, eventually initiating a change so surprising that it catches her totally unaware". What could this have been? Pregnancy?

Mantlo also spoke of a storyline with a pivotal role for Quicksilver and Crystal- could that have been the confrontation with Magneto that was depicted in the first Vizh-Witch miniseries?

Most interestingly, there was a reference to a new New Champions, due to "encounter the mighty Avengers in such a way that leaves both teams reeling". Mantlo actually wrote out the Wolfman/ Infantino Champions of Xandar in the pages of ROM. Would that clear the way for his own New Champions?

Now, last summer I'd forgotten that I'd read a Back Issue article that referenced a late-70s fanzine interview:

Mantlo told BEM in July 1979 that he wanted to create a new super-group, featuring Jack of Hearts, White Tiger, Hawkeye, Black Widow "and another female, perhaps a new character." So, might these have been Mantlo's New New Champions?

In Avengers 211, Hawkeye ruefully soliloquises "You'd think I could forget what the Widow and me had once" while the Widow muses that "I wish we'd had a chance to talk". Although this is Shooter's script, could the romance between Natasha and Clint have been rekindled in a new team?

A finis to the White Tiger's career had been written in '81 in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man but could Mantlo have planned to reverse it?  Perhaps he already had plans to reveal the extra-terrestrial origins of Jack of Hearts, as seen in the '83-84 miniseries.

If so, who might the fifth female hero have been? In terms of the traditional RPG structure, this line up lacks a "Brick" or a psionic character. Could it have been Holly Gillis, the Afro-American girlfriend of White Tiger? And might her super-hero identity have been Mantlo's own cosmically powered Captain Universe?

What do you think of this What If... scenario?

I might fit in another post before I go to Glasgow at the weekend and that might be about Ditko or Gil Kane.

Coming soon: The Legacy of Time

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