Previous Posts: Introduction | Chapter 1: Lee/Kirby Part 1 | Chapter 2: Lee/Kirby Part 2 | Chapter 3: The Roy Thomas Era (1966-1968) | Chapter 4: The End of the Silver Age (1968-1970) | Chapter 5: Origins and Flashbacks Part 1 | Chapter 6: Silver Age Flashbacks Part 2 | Chapter 7: X-Men: First Class Vol 1 | Chapter 8: X-Men: First Class Vol 2 Part 1 | Chapter 9: X-Men: First Class Vol 2 Part 2 | Chapter 10: The Hidden Years | Chapter 11: X-Men on Hiatus (1970-75) | Chapter 12: The Champions Part 1 (1975-76) | Chapter 13: The Champions Part 2 (1977-78) | Chapter 14: The College Years (1978-83) | Chapter 15: The New Defenders Part 1 (1983-84) | Chapter 16: The New Defenders Part 2 (1984-85)

 

When last we left Bobby Drake, he was feeling very confused and conflicted about his feelings for his teammate Cloud, who was able to switch between being male and female and seemed to have no real preferences, or even understanding of their own gender.

New Defenders #141 (March 1985)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin

The green slime thing from New Defenders #132 attacks again, but this time Moondragon and Gargoyle are able to stop it for good.

The green slime’s first victim is Chris Larmouth, the Defenders’ mechanic. When we first meet Chris, he’s sitting alone reading a beefcake magazine, so, yup, another queer in the New Defenders’ support team. Iceman encases him in a block of ice to keep him stable until they can cure him – he stays in that state through the end of the series. Look, cryogenics was a very crude science in the 1980s.

Iceman and Gargoyle have a nice bonding moment as they hang out in their underwear together while under siege. Unfortunately, by the end of he issue, Gargoyle is hung up on Moondragon after they temporarily merge bodies.

 

New Defenders #142 (April 1985)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin

Beast is forced to become an advocate for mutant rights when his scheduled speech at Fontane College turns into a debate with Senator Kelly over the Mutant Registration Act.

Unusually, there are lots of reasonable, pro-mutant students on campus, and they protest Kelly’s appearance. The Student Council President congratulates Hank and Bobby: “I think it’s great what you’re doing, coming out of the closet, standing up to the big guys.” Bobby squirms and says he’s not comfortable having his personal life described in the group’s press kits, but it’s a little too late to have cold feet now. His identity has been low-level public for a while now.

Bobby and Cloud finally have a talk. Bobby confesses that he’s really into Cloud, but that “there’s no way I can let myself fall hard when I know that somewhere inside you is—is a guy.” Cloud is quick to shut down Bobby’s half-interest, but then he resolves to be a friend to her.

A mutant student, Adrian Castorp, with low level powers that give him a degenerative disorder accuses Hank of being an Uncle Tom with his jokey public persona. He decides that the world is going to hell and decides to commit suicide by cop by attacking Kelly at the debate. The Defenders stop him when Cloud shorts out the mechanical braces that allowed him to move. This is treated like a tragic ending and no one considers that the Defenders could fix or replace them.

In the end, Beast announces he’s forming the advocacy group MONSTER – Mutants Only Need Support, Tolerance, and Equal Rights. I kind of wish we’d seen more of this, to be honest.

 

ROM #65-66 (April-May 1985)
Writer: Bill Mantlo
Artists: Steve Ditko and P. Craig Russell

The New Defenders are among the heroes who show up to the final battle against the Dire Wraiths on Earth.

Iceman doesn’t do anything notable in this story, but it is marginally notable as inker P. Craig Russell is the first openly gay comic book creator to work on Iceman. Still, this is quite far from the best art produced by either Russell or Steve Ditko. Russell is better known for his work on Sandman, Elric, Dr. Strange, and Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde.

 

New Defenders #143-144 (May-June 1985)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin

Moondragon gives in to the Dragon of the Moon and attacks her teammates, but they fight back and win. Angel is struck blind and Valkyrie and Moondragon disappear in the fight.

Issue #143 has a subplot page of a woman getting out of a submarine and meeting a jogger – this is eventually revealed in issue #146 to be the Atlantean Andromeda. Her actions in this subplot are thoroughly obscure but are meant to be her trying to figure out how to pass on the surface world.

Iceman tries to comfort Cloud, who feels guilty over crippling Castorp back in #142, and it’s a little telling. When Cloud says she doesn’t want to be “twisted and weird,” Bobby responds, “I know how that feels.”

New Defenders #145 (July 1985)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin

The New Defenders recover from their battle with Moondragon. Johnny Blaze visits, having undergone a complete personality transplant since losing his powers. Valkyrie returns, asserting Moondragon is still out there. And the mystery of what Cloud is deepens. Meanwhile, that submarine woman is now hooking up with the jogger and cloning his credit cards.

Johnny and Bobby are suddenly great friends, even though they couldn’t stand each other in The Champions. Bobby is positively gushing to see him.

As Johnny leaves to hit the open road, the narrator tells us Bobby is jealous of his freedom (and possibly his ability to grow a beard). What’s trapping you, Bobby?

 

New Defenders #146-147 (August-September 1985)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin

The Defenders head to New York to see if a doctor there can cure Angel’s blindness. There, they’re joined by Andromeda and fight the demon Hotspur. Finally, the team’s Defense Liaison Nancy Turpin is revealed to have been Cloud’s sister Seraph in disguise.

Issue #146 opens with Angel flying through the Rockies, guided by Cloud. When they get back home Angel asks Cloud to present as male so as not to raise suspicions with his girlfriend. Candy Southern apparently has no problem with Angel playing around with naked dudes, but ladies are off limits.

Bobby has another charged moment with the now clean-shaven Johnny Blaze before he takes off.

And when the Defenders spend the night at Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum, Iceman and Beast naturally share a room.

 

 

 

 

 

New Defenders #148 is a fill-in issue that Iceman doesn’t appear in. It’s a sequel to the Cutlass and Typhoon story in issue #133.

 

New Defenders #149 (November 1985)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin

Seraph takes Cloud and the New Defenders back to where the Secret Empire originally found her, in an attempt to help Cloud figure out who she really is.

Bobby is annoyed that Andromeda joins the team.

Hank checks in with Vera to half-apologize for constantly running out on her. Nevertheless, he immediately runs out on her.

Um, this happens:

Seraph tells Cloud that there’s a woman who looks just like her, comatose in a hospital. Cloud is initially terrified to confront her, but Iceman gives her a pep talk. Interestingly, when Cloud begs Iceman to take her away, she pledges that she’ll stay a girl forever just for him. Iceman immediately refuses.

Cloud eventually remembers that she was originally just a cloud and that she took the form of two lovers who were caught in a car crash when she tried to warn them of an impending danger. As she begins to remember her origin, the two lovers who’ve been comatose this whole time die.

 

New Defenders #150 (December 1985)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin

Cloud remembers that she was actually a sentient nebula and that she was sent to Earth to find heroes who could stop a force that was extinguishing stars across the galaxy. The New Defenders team up with an unnamed alien species and a sentient Cosmic Cube to identify the cause of the problem: an alien princess who’d been stricken blind and then somehow attained the power of the Cosmic Cube, and used it to take vengeance on the stars. They heal the girl and return the stars – no word on the billions who died when their suns disappeared, mind you. Cloud leaves the team to become a star again.

And in Cloud’s farewell, we get a very bizarre end to Iceman’s latest unrequited love story. Cloud spontaneously decides that they do indeed love Iceman after all. Yes, they. When Cloud tells Bobby this, it is as both her male and female forms. In fact, the key lines are reserved for Cloud’s male form. “Because of what I thought I was, I couldn’t care enough for you back. Now I know differently… I’ll keep you in my heart Bobby.” Cloud is telepathic, so perhaps now they have a better understanding of why Bobby was so reticent around them. Before they go, they show Bobby an image of the three of them that looks to me like a gay couple with a bored woman standing next to them.

New Defenders #151 (January 1986)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin

Manslaughter returns and it turns out he’s an agent of the Interloper, an Eternal who wants the Defenders’ help subduing the Dragon of the Moon. They arrive just in time, because Moondragon arrives to kill them all.

Hank tries to comfort Bobby about losing Cloud, and am I reading too much into the way Hank’s finger is caressing Bobby’s cheek here?

Manslaughter surprises all of the Defenders by disguising himself as Candy Southern and planting a big kiss on Warren.

 

New Defenders #152 (February 1986)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin

After Moondragon gets a power-up from the Beyonder (who’s on Earth as part of the “Secret Wars II” crossover), she steals Gargoyle’s soul, turning him into a Demon. Valkyrie, Andromeda, Interloper, and Manslaughter sacrifice themselves to kill Moondragon, Demon, and the Dragon of the Moon. Angel, Iceman, and Beast avoid death because they’re needed in X-Factor because they’re busy rescuing Moondragon’s hostages: the original couple Cloud patterned herself after, Candy Southern, and Chris Larmouth, who’s been in cryo-storage since issue #141. As an upshot, Chris and the Cloud couple are healed and Angel gets his vision back, ending those dangling plot threads.

While listing the Defenders’ supposed crimes against her, Moondragon complains that Iceman was cold to her advances, which is the opposite of how their story was written. Bobby rightly tells her she’s crazy, and since she’s possessed by an alien demon, maybe she just doesn’t remember her own story.

Later, when she’s taunting Bobby by threatening the Cloud couple, she notes, “you’ve even developed a fondness for the girl, haven’t you?” I assume she’s being as ironic as she is arch here.

There’s a baffling one-panel subplot of Reed Richards trying to contact the New Defenders. It’s not explained or even footnoted, but it’s part of the story from Avengers #263 and Fantastic Four #286 where Jean Grey was found at the bottom of Jamaica Bay and revived. The Fantastic Four do not trust the X-Men at this point in continuity, so they’re trying to reach Jean’s other former teammates. They finally get through in X-Factor #1.

The survivors don’t actually disband the Defenders in this issue, but given that they’re the only three members standing, it’s not surprising they give up. The wrap-up appears in X-Factor #1, which came out in the same month, but it really should have appeared here.

Elsewhere in the Mutant World (I didn’t do this for the last two chapters, so deep breath as we catch up here):

• Uncanny X-Men #168-175: The X-Men team up with Alpha Flight to fight HYDRA (X-Men and Alpha Flight Vol 2 #1-2); fight Dracula (Annual #6); team up with Thing to fight the Champion (Marvel Two-In-One Annual #7, Marvel Two-In-One #96); Kitty’s has a 14^th birthday party (X-Men Special Edition) and “adopts” Lockheed the dragon, who’s actually a spy for SWORD while Scott meets Madelyne Pryor, who looks a lot like Jean (because she’s actually a clone) (#168); the X-Men go to the Texas State Fair (X-Men at the State Fair of Texas); Wolverine makes Colossus fight the Hulk (X-Men vs the Hulk); Kitty teams up with Spider-Man (Marvel Team-Up #135); the Morlocks debut and Storm becomes their leader (#169-170); Rogue joins and Binary leaves (#171, Marvel Fanfare #24); Wolverine helps Mariko assume leadership of the Clan Yashida and plans to marry her (Wolverine Vol 1 miniseries) but the wedding is called off when Mastermind intervenes and instead Scott marries Madelyne (#172-175)
• Uncanny X-Men #176: Nothing much happens in this downtime issue, but Val Cooper gives a presentation on the mutant threat to the government, that includes this slide of the X-Men with Bobby in this pose:

• Uncanny X-Men #177-180: the X-Men fight nano Sentinels in China (X-Men Gold Vol 1 #1) and fight the Impossible Man (Annual #7); Lilandra joins the Starjammers and the Brotherhood and Morlocks attack the X-Men to get Rogue and Kitty back respectively (#177-178); Caliban tries to force Kitty to marry him, but lets her go (#179); and kicking off a period where writer Chris Claremont effectively treats Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants as one title with story elements and casts flowing directly from one to the other, Kitty escorts Doug Ramsey to the Massachusetts Academy (#180) as the X-Men are kidnapped to appear in:
• Secret Wars #1-12: All of Earth’s major heroes and a group of villains are sent to fight on Battleworld, where Colossus falls in love with another woman and the X-Men begin to work more closely with Magneto
• New Mutants Graphic Novel: While the X-Men were fighting the Brood in Uncanny X-Men 162-167, Xavier recruited a new class of students: Cannonball, Sunspot, the lesbian Karma and the very queer coded Psyche and Wolfsbane (who’ll go on to be a lesbian couple in The New Mutants movie that we all forgot came out in 2020), who fight Donald Pierce in their first adventure.
• New Mutants #1-21: The New Mutants acclimate to the school (#1); fight the Sentinels (#2); find out the Professor’s infested with the Brood (#3 and Uncanny #167); save Stevie Hunter from a stalker (#4); team up with Team America to stop Viper and Silver Samurai, but Karma goes missing (#5-6); join Sunspot’s mother on an archaeological expedition to Nova Roma, where they fight Selene and Magma joins the team (#7-12); Doug Ramsey debuts and the New Mutants have beef with Kitty (#13); Magik joins the team (#14); they rescue Kitty from the Massachusetts Academy, where they fight the Hellions and completely forget about Doug (#15-17) but eventually go to a dance at the Academy (Firestar #2); Rachel Summers debuts, and the New Mutants fight Psyche’s Demon Bear (#18-20); Warlock and Doug join the New Mutants (#21)
• X-Men & The Micronauts #1-4: The X-Men team up with the Micronauts to stop Xavier’s genocidal dark side, in a story that rivals the Power Pack issue above for most inappropriate crossover with a children’s property (aside from genocide, Dark Xavier molests two teenage girl heroes)
• Uncanny X-Men #181-200: The X-Men fight a dragon (#181); Rogue attacks SHIELD thinking that she’s actually Carol (#182); Wolverine scolds Colossus for dumping Kitty and lets Juggernaut beat him up (#183); Selene attacks the newly arrived time-traveler Rachel Summers, who everyone thinks is a lesbian; and Forge debuts (#184); Mystique has Storm meet her in a queer fetish bar to tell her where to find the runaway Rogue, and we see the most direct evidence of Mystique and Destiny’s lesbian relationship for this era (Marvel Fanfare #40); Storm loses her powers while trying to save Rogue (#185); Forge tries to nurse Storm back to health and they fight Dire Wraiths (#186-188); Magma and Rachel fight Selene (#189); Kulan Gath warps Manhattan into the Bronze Age and Magik saves everyone but no one remembers, although her time warp brings Nimrod to the present (#190-191); Kitty Pryde learns ninja stuff in Japan (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #1-6) and Logan helps out a noodle shop (Wolverine: Exit Wounds); The X-Men team up with Alpha Flight to fight Loki and learn that Madelyne is pregnant (X-Men and Alpha Flight Vol 1 #1-2); The X-Men fight Magus (#192); X-Men and New Mutants tell campfire stories (X-Men Annual #8); The X-Men fight Thunderbird’s little brother James (#193); Nimrod has his first fight in the present (#194); the X-Men and Spider-Man fight Juggernaut and Black Tom (Marvel Team-Up #150); the X-Men help Power Pack (#195); Professor X asks Magneto to lead the X-Men (Secret Wars II #1); Storm fights Fenris in Africa (#196); they fight Arcade (#197); Storm has an adventure in Kenya (#198); The X-Men and New Mutants have an adventure in Asgard (Annual #9 and New Mutants Special); the Brotherhood becomes Freedom Force and arrest Magneto (#199) in order to put him on trial (#200).
• New Mutants #22-34: Cannonball loses his virginity to Lila Cheney, who dresses him up in fetish gear (Annual #1); Cannonball and Spider-Man fight the Incandescent Man (Marvel Team-Up #149); The New Mutants team up with Cloak and Dagger to fight some drug dealers (#22-25, Marvel Team-Up Annual #6); they fight Legion (#26-28); team up with Dazzler to fight the Gladiators (#29-31); and Karma returns possessed by the Shadow King (#32-34)
• Dazzler #25-42: Dazzler learns she has a half-sister, they go on the run when she accidentally kills someone, and they get into a fight with Rogue and the Brotherhood (#25-28); Dazzler starts getting more success and works on movies (#29-31); fights the Inhumans (#32); investigates mysterious accidents on film and modelling sets (#33-34); comes out publicly as a mutant in her debut movie and suffers backlash (Dazzler: The Movie Graphic Novel); gets a job at a lesbian bar (sorry, an “all-women” club called “Femmes,” where the house band is called “Steel Tuna”) (#35) and a couple other middling jobs (#36-37); teams up with Beast to fight the Gladiators (Beauty and the Beast #1-4) gets some training from the X-Men (#38); has an affair with the Beyonder (Secret Wars II #4); is caught by the bounty hunter OZ Chase, who’s working for the villain Dust, who killed her father, and when she escapes and defeats Dust, she decides to fake her death and go underground (#39-42). The book ends with Beast inviting her to join X-Factor, because that was the original idea before editorial decided to bring back Jean Grey.

 

Where to find these stories: Everything but the ROM issues is on Marvel Unlimited. The New Defenders issues were recently collected in The Defenders Epic Collection Vol 9: The End of All Songs.

Next Week: Bobby Returns to the X-books as X-Factor begins, and the mutant world starts to get dark.